The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

22 JUNE 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL served that day in Costa Rica and Mexico. The case was tightly coordinated, involving more than 140 agents, analysts, prosecu- tors and judges from 13 agencies across three countries, includ- ing the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service. Our target was a transnational criminal organization producing child pornography in Costa Rica and distributing it via Mexico to an international market of buyers, including some in the United States, who paid between $50 and $5,000 for individual photos and videos. Operation RINO For the past three years I have been the assistant regional secu- rity officer investigator (ARSO-I) for Embassy San Jose in Costa Rica, working cases that include human trafficking and smug- gling, fraudulent documents, U.S. fugitives and American citizen deaths. The Rescate Inocente Niños Operación (RINO) case was first brought to my attention in April 2016 through contacts in Costa Rica’s national investigative agency, the Judicial Investiga- tion Organization, known locally as the OIJ. Walter Espinoza, the head of OIJ, was asked by two prosecutors in their Trafficking-In- Persons office if anyone could help with the case. “Talk to Kala,” he told them. “If anyone can help, she will figure it out.” Neither Espinoza nor prosecutors Mauricio Boraschi and Angie Trejos were strangers to me. We’d successfully worked together on several smuggling and human trafficking cases, so we already had a strong foundation of trust and cooperation critical to this type of investigation. My three Costa Rican counterparts are true professionals, amazing partners and some of the nicest people I know—as long as you are not a criminal. Angie Trejos worked tirelessly on this case for two years. One of Costa Rica’s best prosecutors, she is smart, funny, tough and no-nonsense. If she builds a case against you, the best you can do is to plead guilty with the hope of a lighter sentence. That day in June 2017, Angie and I, along with 20 Costa Rican agents and a judge, conducted the arrest of the main suspect and searched his house. The unkempt one-bedroom house in a tough neighborhood of San Jose didn’t look like the center of a trans- national crime syndicate, but it had been operating since 2009 as just that under the guise of a modeling agency. At the time of the takedown, 27 victims had already been identified, some as young as 10 years old. The agency recruited children from primarily poor areas of the country with promises of modeling opportunities. Our main suspect was a professional photographer whose pictures of Costa Rica have been published in renowned international mag- azines. During the illicit photo shoots, children were coerced into posing nude or engaging in sexual contact with adults. The shoots took place at offsite locations or in the suspect’s pho- tography studio, sometimes with the victims’ parents, who had After searching through every drawer, cabinet, loose floorboard and wall panel, we loaded up the evidence that definitively linked our suspects to the victims. Outside the suspect’s residence, Special Agent Bokelman oversees the process of loading the prime suspect into the car to be transported to the courthouse on June 8, 2017. COURTESYOFKALABOKELMAN