Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) confiscated roughly 400-kilos of cocaine and $1.5 million at a private airstrip on the Hilton family-owned Rancho Horizonte in the country's northern Ca?as region. Three Nicaraguans were among the arrested, (realistically) because of leftover Iran-Contra bullshit.
Turns out, Costa Rica is the country just below Nicaragua in that skinny Central American land-bridge between our two continents. During the Reagan administration's secret, frequently illegal, war in Nicaragua, northern Costa Rica was the staging area for the CIA and the Contras in their cocaine-and-Iranian-arms-deal-funded guerrilla war against the Left-ish Sandinista government. One of the most wealthy and prolific drug traffickers in Central America at that time, Norwin Meneses, moved over 50,000-kilos of cocaine through Costa Rica, by his own accounting, while simultaneously being an off-the-books DEA informant?and allegedly a fence for the CIA's illicit Contra monies.
"They used Meneses in Costa Rica basically for money laundering operations," the former chief of criminal investigations for the Nicaraguan National Policetold investigative reporter Garry Webb back in the 1990s. "He was really in the background."
Anyway: None of this got solved really.
Conductors changed, but the train moves along just the same.
A trusted employee of the Hilton's 6000-acre ranch property is said to be responsible for the illegal use of their runway, according to the Costa Rican newspaper (and vacation real estate guide) The Tico Times. Manuel Estrada reporting for Diario Extra says that both of Paris Hilton's parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, were frequent visitors at the property. Paris, herself, the aughts-era celebutante or la diva estadounidense, was off in Ibiza where she is conducting a "DJ residency" at "superclub" Amnesia:
