When RIFF RAFF get out of CONTROL

La Fortuna Costa Rica probably has one of the BEST small town parks in the country.
The La Fortuna, Costa Rica park sits smack dab in the middle of town, so as you can imagine, it gets a lot of traffic from both tourists and locals alike. And since it's a beautiful park, it's a great place to people watch, CHILL, take photos, picnic or just enjoy each others company in the shadow of the Arenal Volcano
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Everyone loves to chill in the park with a nice cold Imperial.
Truth is, before they did what I'm about to tell you, on any given day, a few teenagers would roam the park and sell pot. To people who live here, they're known, to a visitor, not so much- very unassuming and it's not as if they carried a sign.

The cops knew these kids and would search them on a regular basis, but it was more of a game, we rarely saw someone actually get arrested.

Yeah, some sketchy behavior does happen from time to time in the park.
Another minor problem- guys would sometimes gather under a tree and drink. It was more of a minor annoyance than anything, harmless drunks and it's not like they were taking over the park or anything or harassing the tourists, just a few locals with a little too much time on their hands.

The powers that be in La Fortuna decided something needed to be done about these atrocities so they installed cameras on the church steeple so they could keep an eye in the sky as to the goings on in the park. All this to deter a few of the riff raff. But what's the use of cameras if you can't see anything. The park 'had' many beautiful, mature trees which obstructed the view of the cameras, so obviously they had to go. Don't want to lose sight of those pesky, drug dealing kids.

I wish it would take as much time to destroy something as to grow it.
So they decided to gut the park. This is our video. We chose not to hammer the issue, after all, we live here and although many Tico's don't like what happened to the trees, they would dislike us announcing the fact even more. Costa Rica markets 'perception' and it's practically a sin to air dirty laundry.

BOTTOM LINE- Our contention is their were better options than ripping about 25 trees out of the ground. The irony, the police are a presence in the park everyday, all day, they do have the manpower. What do you think?



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