Trouble signs unnoticed

    Eric Miller, director of the overseas portion of Antioch’s co-op department, knew that viewing the world as a Disney theme park was common — and dangerous — for American students studying abroad. Miller is a soft-spoken man with wire-rim glasses who had worked for several years on safety guidelines for the school’s overseas co-op program. Key to that safety plan was up-to-date information on political and social upheaval across the globe.

Max Ortiz/The Detroit News Police stand watch outside Johnny’s disco, where Emily Eagen and Emily Howell were kidnapped. Their deaths spawned a new police force, called policia tourista, or tourist police.

    Miller searched the Internet for crumbs of news about crime and coups. Some Web sites rated danger around the globe, but only for a fee, and Antioch didn’t subscribe to the services. Other sites boasting of nation-by-nation crime and safety reports offered only paragraph-length newspaper accounts pulled from U.S. newspapers. None included media reports from foreign newspapers. If they had, Miller might have seen an article in La Nacion reporting that Costa Rica’s murder rate was exploding. More people were killed in the nation in the first three months of 2000 than in all of 1999.

    The U.S. State Department consular reports, widely used by travel professionals and individual tourists to gauge safety, warned that crime was rising rapidly in Costa Rica. Miller wasn’t overly concerned.

    “The State Department gives warnings for lots of places that statistically are as safe as Chicago or New York,” Miller said. While Panama to the south and Nicaragua to the north had messy histories of dictators and violence, Costa Rica doesn’t even have a military. The country, the size of West Virginia, has the most stable and democratic government in Latin America.

    About 2,400 miles south of Antioch, the three women saw nothing that would lead them to believe they were in danger. Sellers and Howell made plans to take a year off school to stay in Costa Rica, and Eagen wrote her mother to say she was staying there indefinitely.

    “Please don’t freak out Mom (and) don’t tell Dad yet,” Eagen wrote her mother. “We are going down this weekend to start digging ditches.

    “Just think, you could come visit me in Shaun’s house in Paradise.”