Cuidado Con Ese Machete!

I found this article in the paper late last month, and since then I’ve been meaning to comment on it. As you all probably know, I am very interested in machetes, so this article caught my attention right away. When I see the word “machete,” the same thing happens as when most people see the words “sex” or “free”: it just grabs my attention.

In any case, the title of this article is “Killed With His Own Machete,” and the sub-title is “They thought it was a natural death, but an autopsy revealed that it was a homicide.” And if you think about it, how can a title like this not catch one’s attention? It seems like Costa Rican papers are always full of bizarre and violent crap like this. When I read the papers, I sometimes feel like I’m watching a cop show like Law and Order: Machete Victims Unit or CSI: Ticolandia because some of the stuff seems too overblown and made up to be true.

In fact, just a day or two before this particular story, I read another story about a guy who stole a cow in order to sell it to a slaughterhouse. That’s strange alright, but the weirdest thing is that he crammed the live cow into the backseat a Hyundai Elantra. Fortunately, the cops rose to the occasion that time and stopped the guy while he was driving. The police recognized that although both cows and Hyundai Elantras are a dime a docena in this country, they still don’t necessarily go together. So they stopped the guy and saved the cow, whose image was all over the news, with it’s big, dumb-ass head sticking out of the car’s back window. One particular news show even tried to re-create the scenario using another cow, but they were unable to get the poor beast into the car on that particular occasion.

Bueno, what it all boils down to is that here in Costa Rica, it’s like Open Mic Night at the Amateur Criminal Improv Theater. And the cops also seem like they don’t have much of a clue…that is, if you even see cops, which seem to be as endangered down here as the polar bear. I hope you realize that I’m not trying to make light of this poor man’s death/murder, but it’s just sad that they needed an autopsy to figure out that a dead body equipped with both an empty machete sheath and a “cranial depression” might be more suspicious than a natural death.

No wonder everyone puts bars on their windows here.

In any case, I’ve been saving articles about crime, and I’ll eventually get back with a larger, more comprehensive analysis of crime in Costa Rica. Stay tuned.

365: Picture a Day Project    365 Leftovers    All My Pictures    Sitzbook