As key officers from the Directorate of Intelligence Services (Spanish initials: DIS) in Costa Rica continue to testify before the Legislative Assembly about the shadowy agency’s questionable budget allocation and spending, lawmakers are beginning to lose their patience. Although the focus of the panel assembled to look into the murky DIS affairs is on major spending that appears to have spiraled out of control for years, some incredible tidbits about this mysterious outfit are beginning to surface, and the legislators are not sure what to believe anymore.

 

One of the most mocked and ridiculed topics handled by the investigative panel has been the cagey testimony from Director Mariano Figueres, who recently assured legislators that his agency may or may not have detected the presence of operatives from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Costa Rica. As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star:

 

Director Figueres was quite vague about (details on the) purported visits, and thus declined to give specifics as to the number of ISIS operatives who may or may not have been in Costa Rica.

Other details that Director Figueres declined to comment on include: when the terrorists visited, or their possible motives. He did mention that some entered Costa Rica legally and others didn’t, that some of them were of nationalities that require a visa to enter our country while others were from countries that don’t. Director Figueres also explained that these shadowy ISIS visitors were sometimes monitored by DIS, an agency under the purview of the Executive Branch that not many people know about.

 

After Director Figueres was widely mocked on national media about his cloak-and-dagger approach to reporting on DIS matters that are supposed to be of a budgetary nature, he issued a retraction about his ISIS comments. As reported by Manuel Sancho of online news daily CRHoy.com, Director Figueres went on national radio to state:

 

We don’t really have such clear information on ISIS, but we should remain vigilant about members of any terrorist or criminal organization visiting our country.

 

Assistant Director Jorge Torres further explained that terrorism is something above his pay grade, which means that monitoring ISIS would be under the sole purview of Director Figueres. He also brought up the guerilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Spanish acronym: FARC) to bring some clarity to his statements:

 

We don’t study specific organizations, we study phenomena. As Assistant Director I don’t focus on ISIS because that is a group that operates tightly within itself… It’s like saying that we are going to find a FARC guerilla fighter here; that’s never going to happen because no guerilla structures come out of this country

 

When Director Figueres was questioned about the statement by his Assistant Director, he declined to answer and stated that he would have to sit down and carefully review what his officers mentioned before the legislative panel.