"Pura Gate"? New Law Protects Political Secrets

Shades of Watergate! President Laura Chinchilla signed into law last week a prohibition to "procure or obtain illegally secret political information." Political espionage is punishable by four to eight years in prison.

But some jurists say the law may be in conflict with access and diffusion of public information. Former judge Ewald Acuña fears that the addition to the Penal Code might well restrict legitimate media access to information.

Illegal procurement of political information is open to interpretation. It might mean only wiretaps and such which are already illegal unless authorized by a court for official investigation.

On the other hand, how far do "political secrets" extend? Does the term mean leaks that are dear to the hearts of all media workers and are a pillar of the free press?

Acuña has the same doubts. La Nacion quoted him harkening back to the days when Costa Rica lost a brilliant vice president who incautiously wrote a memorandum having to do with the free trade treaty with the United States. When it was leaked to the press, the uproar caused him to resign.

For free press specialist Carlos Tiffer, the law's terminology is dangerous by its imprecision. He points out that the only time secret appears in the Constitution is a "state secret." Even that has not been clearly defined.

(The last time anyone remembers a president invoking a "state secret" was Luis Alberto Monge in the 1980s when he tried to clamp a lid on a report of his agricultural policy.)

But for Tiffer the penalty in the law for leaking information is "disproportionate, without justification." Again, the clash between the citizen's right to know and secrecy rings discordantly.

The Professional Association of Journalists (Colegio, or COLPER by its Spanish acronym)) is also worried. COLPER president Jose Rodolfo Ibarra termed the drafting of the wording as "suspicious" but begged more time to study the law.

Minister of the Presidency Carlos Ricardo Benavides said the government also would like clarification of the wording.

Strangely, before politicians got their hands on the proposal, the bill was to outlaw industrial espionage. But then a group of National Liberation Party deputies made the controversial changes. Social Christian Unity deputy Luis Fishman and two Libertarians also chimed in.

Discussion: We opened with a facetious reference to the Watergate scandal, which would have entailed two violations of the above law, had a similar code been in force in the United States in the 1970s.

The first was the burglary of Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate building by several henchmen of President Ricard Nixon's Republican national campaign, an act of espionage. It was treated by the U.S. courts as a simple burglary.

The second aspect, illegal should it happen today in Costa Rica, was the leakage of information to Washington Post reporters and, later, other members of the press. Under the above code, such a triumph of a free press would have been illegal, even to to protect democracy.

This code, like the refusal of lawmakers here to revise the restrictive model 1902 libel law, merely underscores the fact that politicians, once they get into office, would like to conduct their business in complete darkness.