Manuel Garro Chacón, an evangelical pastor in Costa Rica, has received recognition for being the founder of the police department of San José, the country’s capital city.

The Costa Rican National Union of Local Governments and the National Network of Local Police praised the leadership of Garro Chacón in not only building the police structure of the Central American nation’s largest city but also pioneering a model that has been implanted in other municipalities.

“For his commitment to the strengthening the municipal system of the country and the improvement of the quality of life of all Costa Ricans”, was written on the plaque given to the Garro Chacón.

The event had been organised to commemorate the law that strengthens the police system in Costa Rica’s cities but also to present a newly published manual for municipal police officers and to recognise the work of both Manuel Garro and Ana Gial, the first woman to lead a police headquarters in Costa Rica.

Exemplary career

Manuel Garro Chacón worked for 25 years as head of security of the Municipal Police of San José de Costa Rica, a city of around 400,000 inhabitants. He started in this role at the age of 26 and was in charge of up to 600 workers: police officers, internal security officers and parking inspectors.

It was in 1989 that the Costa Rican parliament allowed its capital city to form its own police department. For that task, Garro Chacón was trained in other countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, Japan and Argentina. The aim of his work was to strengthen the premise that police officers need to be agents of change in society.

In 1999 he finished university studies and in 2003 he was awarded a Masters in Constitutional Law.

Pastoral calling

But Garro Chacón also had a vocational calling as an evangelical pastor. Since 1997, he served several churches of the Santidad Pentecostal (Pentecostal Holiness), becoming an ordained minister of this evangelical denomination.

In 2002, the US American Association of Chaplaincy granted him a credential as chaplain.

Nowadays, the former police officer continues to serve as a pastor of the Renacer church, in the Costa Rican city of Atenas.