by Rod Hughes
Is drug trafficking in Costa Rica getting worse? Or are the police getting smarter?
Or are both factors at play?
Whatever, police, both judicial (like the FBI in the United States) and regular cops, have bagged a record 20.3 metric tons of cocaine and 178 suspects so far this year. And 57 of the suspected narcotics traffickers are foreigners, including—if you can believe it—three Lithuanians.
The haul was accomplished in 71 operations against international smuggling and 137 local, resulting in the dismemberment of 20 organized drug-running gangs, reports the daily paper Al Dia today.
Ministry of Public Security reports 40 cases of arrests at Juan Santamaria International Airport, the country’s principal air terminal, where narcotics were found either on travelor’s persons or in their luggage.

by Rod Hughes
Schools, the Lion’s Club, senior citizen’s homes—all have been inadvertantly acting illegally since 1998 by organizing raffles even for charity.
This was the legal ruling this week of the Procuria General de la Republica, acting as the government’s attorney.
It all stems from a slight glitch in the law that makes the National Lottery surpreme. That code specifies that the only exception are charities given approval to hold lotteries by the provincial governor.
The only problem is that governor post, which had been largely ceremonial for decades, was eliminated by the 1998 municipal reform act. This leaves a legal black hole that was filled by permission given by the JPS, Junta de Proteccion Social, the body that runs the National Lottery, disbursing the proceeds to hospitals and other needy social benefit organizations. But the JPS has no legal power to grant exceptions, the Procuria chief Fernando Castillo says.
Public schools oftimes use lotteries to obtain specual funds when the budgets cannot cover paint or new desks. The Lion’s Club funds a number of charitable projects by using lottery proceeds. The legal vacuum puts them in a bind, relegating them to the status of a “numbers racket,” the clandestine raffles that once were a mainstay of the Mafia in the United States.

by Rod Hughes
The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court has prevented the Arias Administration from reassigning Javier Sanchez, ambassador to the Organization of American States, to other duties.
After being notified that he would be relieved of the post July 15, Sanchez filed a recurso de amparo, a writ seeking prevention of the government executing a decision based upon caprice or arbitrary abuse of power.
Sanchez, a career diplomat, has served two years in the post but a curious Foreign Service Code specifies that a career diplomat spend a minimum of three years in a position and four if it is abroad.
Foreign Minister Bruno Stagno told the daily La Nacion that he would defer to the court decree but admitted he could not see how a transfer or rotation of posts could effect a career diplomat, reminding the court that the Constiitution gives the Cabinet the right and duty to remove or appoint ambassadors.

by Rod Hughes
As in much of Latin America, the past decades in Costa Rica has shown a steady rush from rural areas to the cities. Now, a recent survey says, 63& of residents live in urban areas.
The study, conducted by the United Nations Population Fund, indicates that this country is only following a worldwide trend. By 2008, more than half the world’s population (3.3 billion) will live in urban areas and by 2030, the number will be 5 billion.
The mass migration places fierce pressure on cities’ public services–education, health and infastructure such as water and sewage. Housing is a problem in many developing countries, a problem that successive Costa Rican administrations have been attacking since the mid-1980s after the government faced a growing housing shortage, especially in towns and cities.
The government attacked the situation with a massive building campaign linked with soft loans from a special housing bank, BANVI. In the low-cost housing shortage, the government has managed to make some headway, although the influx from rural areas continues, due to the higher birthrate in farming areas and the increased mechanization of cultivations.
A more recent factor has been the influx of poverty-stricken Nicaraguans who tend to have a higher birthrate than Costa Ricans. The majority have been unskilled farm workers who have been temporarily absorbed into rural areas of the country.
The UN study turned up one bright spot: Urban families have fewer children because they do not need tham for farm labor and because urban women demand that those fewer children receive a better education and quality of life.

by Rod Hughes
Here’s a scary figure:
A recent study of 500 Costa Rican adolescents showed that 65% of them do not know how the HIV virus is transmitted. Even more chilling is that the survey showed that, of those who admitted having sexual contact, 50% began relations between the ages of 12 and 15.
Naturally, the overwhelming majority of those sexual relations were without condoms. The study also uncovered a vast ignorance and number of sexual myths.
Financed by the Social Security Administration (Caja), the Costa Rican Child Welfare Foundation (PANIAMOR) and the International Childhood Defense Foundation, the survey results coincide with those turned up by the Adolescent Clinic of the National Children’s Hospital. The Caja is now preparing a special prevention manual aimed at adolescents.
Although high schools in the country have sex education classes, frank analysis of the problem in class is rare and efforts for venereal disease prevention are hampered by the Catholic Church, the official religion in the country and one of the most conservative in the world. The hierarchy is vehemently opposed to condom use. Moreover, these classes are often conducted to older students who have already had unprotected sexual relations.
The final piece of chilling data is that the majority of those survey who had had sexual relations had older persons as partners, a further risk for the youngsters.

by Rod Hughes
It’s noisy, a bit bumpy and certainly not up-to-date luxury service, but the inter-urban passenger service between the western San Jose suburb of Pavas and Montes de Oca (San Pedro) on the east side is a big hit.
Time was, not too many years ago, when the only trains running in the country were those carrying bananas in the Caribbean province of Limon. The rest of INCOFER (the Costa Rican railway system) had been shut down by presidential decree as a money-losing proposition. But that has turned around in a big way—in May INCOFER sold 70,000 tickets, up an incredible 1,166% over the last three months in 2005, when the service was initiated, tentatively and with some trepidation on the part of executives.
Today, 13 trains ply the route, eight of them all the way from Pavas and the other five between the old Pacific railway station the south of the capital to Universiad Latin in San Pedro. Many of the passengers are students on their way to universities, public and private, on the east side.
And the price is right for students’ pocketbooks—¢300, not even 50 U.S. cents.
At peak hours, passengers cram the cars to the steps and INCOFER is contemplating adding another train from Pavas at 5:05 (where 100 to 125 people have been observed awaiting the train) to the Pacific station, a 17-minute ride. (A bullet train, it isn’t.)
But this service is not the only route that is meeting success. Inspectors have recently given a clean bill of safety to the rail line between Montes de Oca and Atenas to the northwest of the capital. This is a favorite weekend excursion and, again, it is not a French or Japanese-style bullet train. In fact, it is certified as safe only up to 25 kilometers per hour, something like 20 mph.
Inspecting engineers warn that if INCOFER locomotive drivers want to go up to 40 kilometers per hour, railroad had better replace 3,093 deteriorated ties. And if they want to reach that speed between Pavas and Atenas, they must replace 5,151 ties. But Minister of Transport Karla González says work has already been started doing just that—although no increase in speed is contemplated.

by Rod Hughes
It appears that “Gato Felix” Araya, Costa Rica’s most famous jailbird, may have to go back to school to keep up with advances in state-of-the-art security systems.
In a country that does not particularly glorify its wrongdoers, Felix, whose nickname means Felix the Cat, is an exception because of his colorful personality and general good cheer, even when he is sentenced to yet another term in jail, which well might happen if police are right about his attempting to burglarize a cooperative in San Ramon.
He entered the building, police say, and like a true professional, disconnected the video cameras and what he thought were the alarm cables. When he heard no alarm, Gato Felix went to work, while his accomplice applied his actylene torch to the safe.
Unfortunately for poor Felix, he had actually disabled part of the air conditioning system!
And the reason he had not heard any bells or whistles is that the alarm was one of those new-fangled silent types that notify the authorities, in this case a private monitoring service that notified the cops in Grecia, but do not tip off the burglar.
Gato Felix is currently residing in the familiar San Sebastian holding cells with his accomplice under a six-month preventive prison term while his case wends its way through the court system.
Again.

by Rod Hughes
Internet service to more than a million users was interrupted for more than 72 hours this weekend, due to a break in the ARCOS undersea fiber optic cable serving the United States, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela and Colombia, reported the daily newspaper La Nacion.
Columbus Networks, the operator, managed to replace five kilometers of submarine cable off the Punto Fijo station in Venezuela.
A spokesman for the firm told the paper that since 2005, the company has been replacing the vulnerable original cable with one double-armored with steel. Instead of resting on the seabed as the original did, the new cable is laid in a trench three meters (10 ft.) deep. But not all of the old cable has been replaced in the Caribbean, the spokesman added.
Elberth Duran, spokesman for the Costa Rican Electrical Institute (ICE) and its Internet specialist subsidiary, RACSA, confirmed that the failure has been fully repaired in the ARCOS cable but that another cable serving Costa Rica, Maya, is still undergoing repairs in the Maria Chiquita sector of Panama. ICE (its acronym in Spanish) is the government monopoly supplier of Internet service and electricity in this country.
The NEC Corporation that owns Maya is obligated to guarantee Internet service to this country, continued Duran, even if NEC has to connect with other fiber optic cables to do so.

by Rod Hughes
One might say that police vigilance is not exactly fierce in the tiny rural village of Quebrada Ganado, near Tarcoles. The town, of slightly more than 2,000 population, has a station house, but no resident policeman to put in it.
But the last straw fell when drug addicts and alcoholics took over the rundown law enforcement post, residents complained to the daily newspaper La Nacion.
Local businessman Carlos Chaves described the level of cop’s attention to the paper this way, “Once in a while a policeman will come on a motorcycle, turn around and go off again. We need a permanent cop here.”
The director of the local school, Lisbeth Mora, complains that some of her 323 students are often bothered by alcoholics and drug-addled persons as the students go and come from school. “This concerns our teachers and parents,” she said.
Regional police chief Mario Calderon says he’s doing the best he can by sending a policeman to the village when he can. “Everybody knows our lack of personnel,” he said.

by Rod Hughes
NICOYA, GTE.—Good news came from the Ministry of Transport and Public Works (MOPT, its Spanish acronym) today, answering the dearest hopes and dreams of residents, farmers and tourists in the Northwestern province of Guanacaste: MOPT will send road repair equipment to be spotted in strategic locations around the province for ready repair of the–until now—wretched road system.
The state of Guanacaste roads is the most frequently-mentioned criticism in hotel guest book comments, but other benefits from more frequent road work will be felt by farmers whose trucks will need far fewer repairs and even in real estate values. Rampant real estate development is, indeed, one of the most important factors in the roads’ deterioration as trucks carrying construction supplies have increased traffic several fold.
Nor will the province have to wait long for the pilot plan to be put in play—the Comptroller General’s office, the government’s contracting watchdog agency, has cleared the way for direct contracting of repair work, cutting several miles of red tape by the decision.
Work could start as early as July, Minister Karla Gonzalez told the daily paper La Nacion last week. “With the purchase of new equipment, MOPT will have what it needs to give the roads continuous repair,” she said, “The roads will always have the presence of our equipment and we’ll save time in being able to resurface them.”
The new equipment will include trucks, backhoes, graders and loaders, Gonzalez said. MOPT will cut downtime (an Aquilles heel in Costa Rica where periodic maintenance in the past has not been a prime priority of MOPT) by contracting companies to journey to the province to provide repairs to the far-flung machinery.