"Marriage Machine" Gets 186 Years in Prison

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The three-judge panel that tried and convicted lawyer/notary Kattia Salas, 41, to 186 years in prison called her "a marriage machine." She was sentenced for performing at least 31 "paper marriages" so that foreigners could get residency.

Despite the severity of the sentence, Costa Rican law limits the length of prison time to only three of the convictions at the heaviest sentence the law allows. That means Salas will get 18 years at the maximum six years for falsifying information on each count.

As is customary, the case will be reviewed by an appellate court automatically for errors of legal procedure before it is finished. However, Salas faces damages and fines to be paid no later than two weeks after the sentence is confirmed.

The Tribunal panel added a payment of one million colones to be paid for the female victims in each of the 31 paper marriages named in the conviction, plus another 1.2 billion colones for the civil defense of the victims. (In four other cases, Salas was absolved due to lack of evidence.)

The Spanish-language newspaper La Nacion reported that on a single day, lawyer Salas presided over no fewer than seven of the "paper marriages." Some of the "marriages" took Salas less than 10 minutes to register.

For the judges, the testimony of the witnesses in the more than 30 cases was compelling, without malice toward the defendant. In the four cases in which Salas was exonerated, other lawyers outside the country made the arrangements for marriages to four Cubans and Sala merely repeated the falsifications in the Civil Registry.

Not all the cases where the victims suddenly found themselves "married" in the eyes of the law were women. In the case of Orlando Rios of Sarapiqui, his cedula (ID card) was stolen inside his brief case from his car. Six months later, he found himself married to an unknown person.

In almost all the cases the victims' cedulas were either stolen or lost. They found themselves married to one of 26 Cubans, four Chinese, a Nicaraguan, a Salvadoran and a British woman. One witness reported by La Nacion testified her daughter was found herself "married" to a man who was charged $5,000 by Salas's law firm.

Commentary: The paper marriage has been a thorn in the side of the Immigration department for years. Mario Zuñiga, chief of the department under President Oscar Arias, fought the good fight to prevent such deception to get around legal residence regulations.

Unfortunately, the courts did not back him in this reform since most of the "wives" were paid for the false marriage and were too poor to turn down the temptation. Unfortunately for Zuñiga's position, the marriage laws under those circumstances cannot be denied, even though the marriage is a sham.