By María Gabriela Díaz, Tico Times Staff

At San José’s Esquina Vaquera (Cowboy Corner), you won’t have to walk far to sample a kickin’ clutter of designs that have outfitted urban and rural cowboys and girls of multiple nationalities for the past 20 years.

Eight boot and leather goods stores and workshops are clustered on a street parallel to Paseo Colón, near the Mercedes-Benz Tower, offering a selection of Costa Rican-made boots, hats, belts, vests, saddles and accessories hung from racks and displayed on shelves in picturesque disarray.

Storeowners at the Esquina Vaquera agree clients, particularly foreign ones, are drawn to their affordable prices, starting at ¢19,500 (approximately $40) for a simple pair of boots.

While saddles start at ¢35,000 ($70), the ever-popular leather jackets go for ¢75,000 ($150) and bargaining is acceptable at some stores.

According to Jaime Rosales, owner of Calzado JR, these are relatively comfortable prices compared to the United States, for example, where a pair of imitation leather boots can cost $200, and real leather boots can cost $500.

Nearby, storeowner Walter Cárdenas claims to have inaugurated the area’s first boot store, Calzado Cárdenas, 20 years ago.

Cárdenas, who learned to make shoes at age 18 from his uncle, runs the store with his ex-wife Celenia Cortés, who said she stayed in the business after the divorce for the sake of their children Helen, 14, Michael, 9, and María José, 3.

“At first it was very hard; we had to (practically) beg people to buy our boots. This type of commerce had not yet been exploited,” said Cortés, who started working alongside Cárdenas 16 years ago.

Now, the store, located in an old wooden home, attracts a steady stream of national and international clients, who return to the store every time they visit Costa Rica, and has drawn Latin American and U.S. stars such as Phillip Michael Thomas, co-star of the popular U.S. TV series Miami Vice, staff from the Peruvian children’s show “NubeLuz,” and the Mexican telenovela (soap opera) “Dos mujeres, un camino,” (Two Women, One Road), Cortés told The Tico Times.

Rosales said cowboy boots are experiencing a boom right now, particularly with the rise of cowboy movies and soap operas, such as the Colombian Pasión de Gavilanes (Passion of Sparrow Hawks), which aired in Costa Rica last year. He estimates that within the past year, his sales have increased by 30-40%.

Shoemaker Jesús López, who has been with Calzado Cárdenas for 15 years, works his magic at the workshop next to the store, where he stitches and nails material together to produce approximately a pair of boots each day.

“Hardly any shoemakers are left; we are facing extinction,” López said, as he explained how to attach a boot top to a sole either by stitching it together with a giant needle or a sewing machine, or by nailing it together. López, who learned his trade in his youth from a man called “Masayita,” from Masaya, Nicaragua, fashions boots in several different styles, in addition to those he custom-makes.

Although the storeowners at Esquina Vaquera purchase their leather from wholesalers in downtown San José, clients are welcome to bring in their own material for their custom designs.

The available styles differ in the fact that some boots are nailed to the soles while others are stitched, and in the latter the seams vary in location and appearance, Cortés explained. For example, the Czech has exposed seams, and the empalmilladas have hand-stitched seams tucked out of sight.

Boots also vary in their general shape, with pointy and square fronts claiming the most purchases in his store, said Rosales, originally from the northwestern province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica’s cowboy country.

With a similar boot variety available in most of the stores, the fact that they coexist in such close quarters does not pose a problem, according to Gerardo Aguilera, owner of Calzado Aguilera, which has been on the Esquina for almost 20 years and expanded across the street from its original site.

“The competition is good. If someone doesn’t find something in one store, they can go to the next,” said Aguilera, a first-generation Costa Rican of Nicaraguan ancestry who inherited the boot-making tradition from his father and grandfather.

Aguilera and Rosales said they do not fear greater competition under the proposed free-trade agreement with the United States.

“(Leather) products from (the United States) would be more expensive, and boots have different shapes there, people (here) are used to these,” Rosales said.

Cortés, on the other hand, said she worries cheaper products might flood the Costa Rican market – though she admitted she knows little about the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA).

In the meantime, the Cowboy Corner storeowners will continue to rely on word-of-mouth advertising, as they are confident the quality of their products speaks for itself.

For more information, call Calzado Aguilera at 256-5390, Calzado Cárdenas at 233-5261, or Calzado JR at 258-6342. Cowboy Corner is located on Calle 26 and Avenida 3, 200 meters north and 10 meters west of the Mercedes-Benz Tower on Paseo Colón.

By Katherine Stanley, Tico Times Staff

LIBERIA, Guanacaste – In what was probably the first ribbon-cutting ceremony in Costa Rica with potential to spark change not just locally, nationally and internationally, but also galaxy-wide, U.S.-Costa Rican astronaut Franklin Chang inaugurated his new Ad Astra Rocket Lab here Saturday.

The ceremony marked the official start of a new phase in a research project that, according to Chang, has the potential to revolutionize space travel, providing new opportunities to Costa Rican business owners, students and scientists in the process. Among its goals: create a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR), a concept Chang invented, and send it to Mars.

The inauguration of the lab – built during the past six months on the Daniel Oduber campus of EARTH University, a tropical agriculture research center whose Guanacaste campus is 10 kilometers outside the provincial capital of Liberia – combined elements of a family reunion, a Who’s Who of Costa Rican politics, and an international rocket science think tank.

Chang, the CEO of U.S.-based Ad Astra Rocket Company Costa Rica, and his brother Ronald, an engineer and the general manager of subsidiary Ad Astra Costa Rica, shared the stage with President Oscar Arias and their mother, María Eugenia Díaz de Chang. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Samuel C.C. Ting and Roald Sagdeev, former director of the Soviet space program, were among the scientists in the audience, from a wide range of countries and specialties including rocket propulsion, plasma technology and superconductors.

Area schoolchildren rounded out the audience, rubbing shoulders with Cabinet ministers and rocket scientists in what Ronald Chang said is the beginning of continued access to the lab for Costa Rica’s young people. All of the country’s students are welcome to visit the lab, where “constant tours” will be offered, he told the crowd – though “obviously, not all at the same time.”

“We’re not going to build a marble tower,” said Franklin Chang, who in 1980 became the first Latin American astronaut of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and went on to spend 1,600 hours in space on seven missions during his 25-year career there. “The design of the plant is done in such a way that you can see everything we’re doing.”

The 700-square-meter facility, which required an initial investment of $1 million, includes a workshop, offices and meeting space for conferences. On Monday, more than 35 experts on plasma – a fourth state of matter composed of superheated gas with temperatures similar to those inside the Sun – from all over the world met at the lab for a workshop on high-power electric propulsion, according to the daily La Nación.

An International Effort

Touring the Facilities:President Oscar Arias, left, and Franklin Chang, head of Ad Astra Rocket Company, examine equipment at the Ad Astra lab in Liberia during its inauguration Saturday. Jeffrey Arguedas | EFE

The lab was built in only six months, but Chang’s efforts to build a plasma rocket have been under way since 1979, he told journalists after the inauguration ceremony. The Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas took on the project in 1993, and in 2005, Chang founded Ad Astra and began negotiating with NASA to transfer the project to his private enterprise. NASA granted Ad Astra a patent license for the technology in February.

Chang, 56, told The Tico Times last year he believes the private sector has “a fantastic role” to play in space exploration, and predicted “a virtual explosion of humanity into at least the space between the Earth and the moon” (TT, July 29, 2005).

The VASIMR rocket would make room for such an explosion by drastically reducing the cost and time of space voyages. It uses plasma produced and heated by radio waves, then contained by a magnetic field; plasma is too hot to be contained by conventional materials. According to Chang, because VASIMR uses much less fuel than chemical rockets used today, it would make travel millions of dollars cheaper, as well as faster. Today’s rockets, powered by liquid hydrogen or oxygen, take more than two years to travel to Mars and back, while a VASIMR rocket – in theory – could make the round-trip journey in eight months or less.

The technology also offers significant savings over other plasma rocket technologies, Chang said of his competition, such as the Hall effect thruster. Because the VASIMR model uses Argon gas ($42/kg) compared to the Hall model’s Xenon gas ($2,120/kg), it would cost VASIMR only $517,000 to deliver 21 metric tons of cargo to the moon, compared to the Hall’s $54 million.

Ad Astra’s goals include developing a plasma-propelled rocket by 2007; sending rockets to the International Space Station in 2010-2011; building an “Ad Astra Lunar Tug” for transport between the Earth and moon by 2015; and eventually constructing a rocket that can send humans to Mars.

Chang told reporters he is confident he’ll raise the funds necessary to complete the project. So far, the company has received investments from Costa Rican companies including brokerage house Aldesa, Grupo Pampa, Solid Rental Car, Mar Robalo, Saret and Chang Díaz y Asociados, of which Ronald Chang is a founding partner.

Local Implications

José Zaglul, rector of EARTH, based in the Caribbean-slope town of Guápiles, called the opening “a historic moment for the continent” and said Chang’s confidence in Costa Rica is a source of hope. Echoing Chang, he said the lab will serve “not only for space exploration, but also to resolve problems very close to us” through solar energy and agricultural research.

One example of an earthbound application of the lab’s plasma research, according to Chang, is the potential use of plasma to destroy toxic wastes. However, the lab’s impact on Costa Rica will go beyond scientific solutions, he said, explaining that because the lab will need contractors to perform a number of services, such as precision welding, it will stimulate small business growth in the area surrounding the EARTH University Liberia campus.

He said he chose the site in part because of its proximity to Daniel Oduber International Airport, allowing easy transport for visiting scientists and staff from the Houston lab, located on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center.

Ad Astra Costa Rica also employs Costa Rican scientists, including Ronald Chang, physicist Jorge Andrés Díaz and mechanical engineer Jorge Oguilve, already at work in the lab. Students from Universidad Veritas in San José, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Florida round out the scientific team.

Chang announced that his wife Peggy and their youngest child, Miranda, may relocate from Houston to Guanacaste, though Chang will continue to travel between the two. Arias said this homecoming after more than 30 years living in the United States is an example of the kind of reverse “brain drain” Costa Rica should seek to encourage.

The President called Chang “one of Costa Rica’s favorite sons” and expressed gratitude for choosing Costa Rica as a lab site.

“At the pinnacle of his career, when thousands of doors were opening before him, he decided to return to his native land, to a Costa Rica that patiently awaits the return of so many who left to pursue their dreams,” he said. “It’s time that we, as a country, understand the vital importance of offering those who wish to return to their homeland an environment conducive to professional growth.”

He elicited some laughs from the crowd when he said he hopes the first passenger on Chang’s Mars rocket will be “the fear of change in Costa Rica. I hope the (rocket) takes it to Mars and leaves it there.”

Chang, born in San José, studied in Costa Rica and the United States and holds a doctorate in applied plasma physics from MIT. He retired from NASA in 2005 and took on various projects in Costa Rica, serving on President Abel Pacheco’s Council of Notables to evaluate the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA) in 2005, and leading the team that created the Half-Century Plan for science education and research support, presented earlier this year (TT, April 21). He also volunteered at a polling station during February’s elections.

For more information on Ad Astra or VASIMR, visit www.adastrarocket.com.

Two historic Costa Rican buildings are the winners of this year’s national heritage contest.

The first is the Black Star Line in Limón which figures deeply in the Afro-Caribbean culture there. Built in 1922, the building was and is the headquarters of the United Negro Improvement Association.

The second structure was the first school in San Pedro de Montes de Oca, east of San José. It is now the Restaurante La Mazorca. Constructed of brick at the beginning of the 20th century, it served as the school from 1908 to 1940.

In both cases, more than the buildings entered into the judges’ decision. Limón is about to undergo a major redevelopment promoted by the World Bank. The Black Star Line is the most historic structure there, sharing the history of the Caribbean workers who came to the country in the 1870s to work building the railroad and developing banana plantations. It also is strongly linked to Jamaican Marcus Garvey, a proponent of black nationalism and founder of the Black Star shipping line.

Vernon Sinclair Wade, president of the improvement association, and Charlotte Wright of the Black Star Line were present to accept the award.

The San Pedro structure is on the Calle de la Amagura, the recreational strip near the Universidad de Costa Rica and the location of many bars, an area that judges said were problemática. The structure was known as the Escuela del Mojòn.

Manuel Ivan Benites and Ruy Larragon, owners of the former school, said the restoration will include integrating a cultural space for the community.

The contest is an annual one, and the winners each get 50 million colons (about $97,000) that will go toward restoration of the buildings. The contest is run by the  Centro de Investigación y Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural of the Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes. There were 16 entries this year.

Thomas J. Kennedy, the new British ambassador, presented his credentials to President Óscar Arias Sánchez Thursday.

He comes from Bordeaux, France, where he was consul general. He has served in Buenos Aires, too.

His appointment had been announced, and the ceremony Thursday was the last step in taking over the post vacated by Georgina Butler, who received another assignment.

The ambassadors from Spain, Arturo Reig Tapia, and the ambassador of Honduras, Marco Antonio Hepburn Collier, also presented credentials.

About 300 Costa Ricans are in war-ravaged Lebanon, the foreign minister told lawmakers Thursday. However, only two citizens have sought help via the honorary consul, Riad Ab El Baki, he said.

The foreign minister, Bruno Stagno, was appearing before the Comisión de Asuntos Internacionales of the Asamblea Legislativa.

He said that a Costa Rican woman with a child sought help and was transported to a third country. A minor also sought help and was safely evacuated, he said.

The government of Panamá has offered to make available its embassy in Greece if the need arises, he said.

7/21/6

I had a nice surprise last night. The fellow who works at his father’s building supplies store came over and invited me to his brother’s birthday party. It makes me feel like I am a part of the community when these things happen. It was small, with lot’s of food, and no booze, but I had a wonderful time for a couple of hours. They all slow down when they talked to me, and a couple of them took the opportunity to flash some English. This was the second birthday party I have been to, the first was for Marvin’s mother. These things make me feel like I am part of the community, and it feels more like home every day.

By Amanda Roberson, Tico Times Staff

Frequent visitors to the sports gambling Web site BetonSports… may have been surprised yesterday to discover that the site’s usual home page had been replaced with a message explaining that “in light of court papers filed in the United States, the company has temporarily suspended this facility pending its ability to assess its full position.”

This comes three days after BetonSports’ Chief Executive Officer (CEO) David Carruthers, a British citizen, was arrested by U.S. authorities at the Dallas airport. Carruthers, along with 10 other people, is being charged with racketeering, conspiracy and fraud by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a statement from the department.

BetonSports’ founder Gary Kaplan is also in custody and being charged with 20 felony violations of federal laws and failing to pay federal wagering excise taxes on more than $3.3 billion in wagers taken from the United States. The U.S. government is seeking forfeiture of $4.5 billion from Kaplan and his associates, the statement said.

BetonSports investor relations advisor Ginny Pulbrook told The Tico Times in a phone interview from London that Carruthers’ arrest came as “a complete and utter surprise” to the company, which is appealing his arrest.

Costa Rican Internet gambling insiders say they are also surprised by the U.S.’s action, considering that BetonSports is registered in England and operates a call center employing more than 1,500 people in Costa Rica.

Still, Eduardo Agami, president of the Costa Rican Call Centers and Electronic Data Association, said “ I’d be hard pressed to think it will be enough to shut them down.”

Despite the Web site not functioning, employees reported to work as normal yesterday at BetonSports’ offices, which occupy the top four floors of the San Pedro Mall, east of San José.

The Costa Rican office has not made any official statements or responded to questions about Carruthers’ arrest. 

An underwater expedition near the Isla del Coco has tagged 15 hammerhead sharks, according to the  Programa Restauración de Tortugas Marinas.

Some 16 divers from the United States and the United Kindom worked from July 3 to July 15 putting transmitters on the underwater predators.

Five fish were given tranmitters that can be tracked via satellite, said the organization. Some 10 more were fitted with acoustical trasnmitters that could be tracked in the area around the island.

This was the fourth of seven planned expeditions. The sharks fitted with satellite transmitters will be tracked to learn about migration routes, the group said. Some of the transmitters will operate for four months. Others will work for less time.

All the sharks fitted with transmitters were adult females encountered some 70 feet or so below the surface, the organization said.

The project was done in conjunction with the U.S. Shark Research Institute and the local diving firm  Undersea Hunter.

The Isla del Coco is a national park with extensive amounts of sea creatures about 330 miiles west of the mainland.

The idea seemed like a good one when the security minister outlined it last week.

The minister, Fernando Berrocal, was going to create strong links between the police and the 18,000 security guards who work in the country.

But the idea did not sit well with legislative deputies. They called Berrocal in to explain Wednesday. Lawmakers wanted to know if he was giving away any rights that belonged to the state.

The minister is about to sign an agreement on the topic with major security firms.

Berrocal said that at any time there are only about 2,500 officers of his 11,284 Fuerza Pública available to fight crime. Many police stations are in poor condition and many police vehicles are out of service awaiting repair, he said.

The agreement with the security firms would make guards auxiliaries to the police but without the power to arrest, pursue or do other activities reserved for police. But they will be expected to pass on information, he said.

Berrocal also said last week that some effort would be made to coordinate the radio frequencies of security guards so police could communicate with them.

By Amanda Roberson, Tico Times Staff  

With the rainy, mosquito-breeding season under way, dengue — a mosquito-borne illness Costa Rica suffered an outbreak of last year (TT, Aug. 26, 2005) – is on health authorities’ and Costa Ricans’ minds.

So far this year, there have been 52% fewer cases of dengue reported than during the same period in 2005, according to Teresita Solano, Public Health Ministry Director of Epidemic Vigilance.

This decrease can be attributed to a reduction in the number of “Aedes Aegypti” mosquitoes, which is partly a result of citizens taking action to eliminate spaces where mosquitoes breed, Solano said.

“The fewer mosquitos there are, the fewer cases of dengue. The population has responded, and we’ve seen a decrease, but it’s still not sufficient,” Solano said, adding that more citizens should listen to the ministry’s warnings to get rid of standing water, where mosquitoes lay eggs, near their homes.

Between January and June of this year, there were 4,595 cases of dengue registered, 52% less than the 9,590 cases registered during the same period last year, according to the wire service ACAN-EFE. About 20,000 cases of dengue were reported in Costa Rica last year.

Those who have had dengue once are at risk for contracting it again in its potentially fatal, hemorrhagic form, and should be extra cautious, Solano said, adding that the rainiest part of the year is still to come. One person died of hemorrhagic dengue last year (TT, Aug. 26, 2005).