by Rod Hughes

Communications between land lines and cellular phones will be broken for a phone company (ICE) test from midnight Saturday night (March 1) to 6 a.m Sunday morning for a phone company (ICE) test, reported The Tico Times Online. The temporary interruption of service is due to a test ICE is conducting preliminary to converting all telephone numbers to eight digits March 20.

Although part of the system will be out of service, cell phones can still access each other during the six hours of testing. Emergency 911 service will still be available. The changeover will add an “8″ to the beginning of cell phone numbers and a “2″ to land line prefixes.

by Rod Hughes

Despite the economic woes of Costa Rica’s biggest export market and main source of tourism (the United States), 400 local business owners overwhelmingly predicted this country’s economic growth will continue or even improve this year. The poll was conducted by the Union of Private Sector Chambers and Associations (UCCAEP)

The poll was conducted in January, before a report was released that Costa Rican exports to the United States had fallen that month by 6% from January of last year and before the Central Bank predicted growth would slow this year to 4.8% from last year’s 6.8%. Still, economic observers have long held that perception has a large influence on the economy so the businessmen may turn out to be correct.

The UCCAEP survey showed 94% of the businessmen had high hopes for economic performance. Tourism and export sectors showed only a slightly less positive view. Indeed, preliminary tourism figures this year are surprisingly good.

Jaime Molina, UCCAEP vice president, noted that an acute labor shortage continues to act as a brake on the economy. He called for better government training programs to bring job skills up to fill openings that go begging, reported the English-language weekly, The Tico Times.

Meanwhile, representatives of six Trinidad and Tobago companies are scheduled to be in San Jose next Monday in search of partners, distributors and potential customers This country signed a free trade pact with 12 nations in the Caribbean community in September, 2005. The representatives will be at Hotel Barcelo San Jose Palacio.

By Rod Hughes

Mavis Biesanz, non-fiction author and a longtime resident of Costa Rica, died last week at CIMA Hospital in Escazú last week of an acute lung infection at the age of 88. She is best known for the definitive book on Costa Rican culture, ¨The Ticos: Culture and Social Change in Costa Rica,” co-authored with son Richard and daughter Karen.

She was the widow of sociology professor John Biesanz who died here in 1995 and ghost wrote several textbooks for McGraw Hill in New York in his name. This writer had the privilege of browsing through several of her works, now out of print. Unlike all too many dull, pedestrian texts inflicted on college students, the ones she wrote sparkled with intelligence and clear, concise writing.

She lived long enough to see her final book, a bilingual tome of stories and poems titled “A Year with Carmen,” hit the bookstores under the UNED imprint. Her memoires about her childhood in Minnesota in the Finnish-American community of immigrants was published more than a decade ago by the University of Minnesota Press.

by Rod Hughes

Alajuela showed its old form finally this season, confronting Heredia with its old brand of wonderful soccer, crisp attacks, well planned approaches and all the trimmings. And they came away Wednesday night with no points earned, thanks to Heredia goalie Ricardo González.

González may as well have built a brick wall in front of the goal mouth. What incoming missiles he didn’t catch, he batted away. As for his Heredia teammates, let us be charitable here. They were as poorly distributed on the pitch as chessmen after the board has been carelessly bumped. Worse, they seemed to be passing in slow motion, allowing Alajuela’s defense time to plot azimuth and trajectory on a pocket calculator.

If anything, Wednesday night showed that you can’t judge a side by its uniform. With its red and yellow striped jerseys, Heredia has always seemed to this reporter to look like some kind of vicious wasps. But they may be butterflies after all…

by Rod Hughes

Costa Rica’s future trade partners in the Central American Free Trade Agreement have granted Costa Rica a seven-month extension on the deadline for getting its house in order so the treaty can go into effect here. This country’s lawmakers still have to pass 10 bills designed to bring the country’s law into accord with the pact.

Opponents of the treaty in Congress, chiefly the Citizen Action Party (PAC) delegation of lawmakers, have waged a scorched earth retreat since a nationwide referendum last October approved the treaty. Their tactics were to stay away from the congressional floor every time one of the implementation laws came up for a vote, thus preventing a quorum. Moreover, they assaulted the laws with a blizzard of amendments that had to be discussed and voted on.

All this meant that needed legislation was blocked from consideration while PAC played its little games. But earlier this month, PAC head honcho, former twice-presidential-candidate Ottón Solís, announced that PAC congresspersons would no longer boycott the sessions. He did not mention the amendments, however, leaving observers to wonder if the “will of the majority” means anything to the party. CAFTA was, after all, ratified by a citizen vote, not congress.

Three bills are in their first debate and and seven others have passed this stage and are in their second, final debate. One is referred to the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. Still, chief Presidential advisor Rodrigo Arias says that with PAC’s new attitude, he sees no reason why all the bills are not going to become law in the next three months. Arias is well aware that the Administration has the bare 38 votes to pass the bills and that the absence from a simple cold suffered by one of the Pro-CAFTA congresspersons can result in the hasty withdrawal of a bill from vote lest it not pass.

Foreign Trade Minister Marco Vinicio Ruiz says it was not easy to convince the other countries to give Costa Rica the extra time and, indeed, the extension was granted only two days before the February 29 deadline ran out. “Honestly, nobody could understand why the Legislative Assembly took all those months they did.” Some of the countries in CAFTA actually ratified the treaty in one or two days after they were introduced into their congresses–from the Costa Rican point of view, almost before the ink was dry on the treaty. But, then, Ticos are famous throughout Latin America for always being late.

by Rod Hughes

As of January, Pedro Pablo Quiros, president of the government monopoly in telecommunications and electric generation, ICE, is making about a third more than President Oscar Arias, reported the newspaper Al Dia this morning. Worse for the electricity consumers, the board of directors voted salary hikes of 20% to 40% for the top tier of management.

Explained Quiros blandly to an Al Dia reporter, “Ït appeared to us that our (top executives) were being paid less than the marketplace…and we could lose people who work for ICE.” Of course, he did not mention that these steep hikes apply only to the head honchos, a dramatic lesson in what happens when you let people set their own salaries, whether they are congresspersons or executives.

But even Quiros’s salary is eclipsed by that of Hernan Medford, the head coach of the Costa Rican All Star soccer team. But, then, all ICE does is keep us on the Internet and generate electricity for the entire country while Medford guides a SOCCER team!

by Rod Hughes

A mother, 42 years old, and her 26-year-old daughter drew stiff sentences in one of the country’s most gruesome crimes in recent memory— the stabbing murder of a 22-year-old pregnant woman and the forcible extraction of her eight month fetus. Sandra Monge was sentenced to the maximum 35 year sentence for, according to penal judge Jose Enrique Desanti, for planning the murder in order to use the baby to aid her ailing marriage.

Emotions after the verdict ran so high, that the families of both the slain girl and of the defendants entered into a brawl and had to be separated by judicial guards.

Katerin Valerin, Monge’s daughter, was sentenced to 30 years in prison as her mother’s accomplice in Cinthya Berrios’s murder. Together, they allegedly forced the pregnant woman to the bank of the Rio Segundo where the murder took place near Heredia April 19, 2006. After performing the criminal abortion, the mother was thrown into a pool in the river.

Miraculously, the girl child lived. The two might have gotten away with the atrocity, according to the prosecution, if a witness had not seen Katerin Valerin leaving the site where the slain woman had been thrown into the river.

by Rod Hughes

Are any of our readers old enough to remember when, in order to give a musical concert, you just turned up the stage lights a bit and positioned a spotlight in front of a microphone? Oh, yes, and put on your best suit and tie to croon into the microphone?

For tonight’s Iron Maiden concert at Ricardo Saprissa Stadium in Tibas, the group will use 366 fixed lights, plus 90 mobile ones, some of them swiveling spotlights. Some 500 persons worked 24 hours to set up the scene, according to the newspaper Al Dia. Granted, people will be coming from all over Central America for the affair and flights have been booked for some time.

Meanwhile, last night four Iron Maiden fans were injured by a runaway car that had lost its brakes just north of the stadium where they hoped to hear the popular group tonight. Two were treated for minor injuries and release but one suffered a broken leg and another suffered head injuries.

Knowing pop music fans, even the patient under observation for a concussion cannot be kept from the event.¨”Unhook me from these tubes, nurse, I´ve got tickets.,.”

by Rod Hughes

Knowing governments, parliamentary bodies and politics in general, it should come as no great shock that sole members of their minuscule parties in the Legislative Assembly boast the biggest staffs. And who pays the salaries of those assistants? Guess, fellow taxpayers!

In all, Costa Rican resident pay for 306 aides for the 57 legislators. If all of them had 10 aides, as does Oscar Lopez, the number of aids would be 570. Fortunately, that is no the case. Lopez, the sole gadfly representative of his minuscule Restoration and Accessibility without Exclusion party, told the newspaper La Nacion that, after all, …”I’m the chief of my (party’s) delegation…”

He claims certain “prerogatives” as the chief of a party whose active participants could probably fit into the National Theater. Citizen Action party (PAC) floor leader, Elizabeth Fonseca, has another viewpoint, “I don´t know how the others do it with so many aides. It would complicate my life to have so many people, so I would´t know how to keep them busy. We have two advisers and an assistant¨”

But not all the large staffs are assigned to just one-person parties. Number four party in the last elections, Social Christian Unity, has five representatives with eight assistants each. Since Unity performed so poorly in the past elections and carries so little clout, we cannot avoid wondering, like Sra. Fonseca, what these 40 aides do.

Jose Manuel Echandi and Evita Arguedas, both independents, enjoy nine and seven aides. But the 17 members of PAC lawmakers make do with the fewest. according to the congressional administration’s Human Resources section, followed by the 25 of the biggest party, National Liberation.

by Rod Hughes

As La Nacion sportwriter Arnoldo Rivera described it, both Alajuela and Puntarenas rushed out on the pitch at Puntarenas’s Lito Perez stadium with far more spirit than science, both breathing fire. It was a see-saw battle for a 2-2 result. At least no spectator dozed off lest he miss part of the action.

Arthin Rooper opened scoring for Puntarenas at minute 18 on a pass from veteran Andy Herron. it was not before a few minutes before the half was over that Ignacio Aguilar tied it when Ignacio Quintanilla centered the ball. In the second half, Aguilar took Cristian Montero’s pass for his second goal of the day to put Alajuela ahead 2-1 At minute 59, Dario Delgado tied it with an assist from Dave Myrie. Then the game settled down to a battle of battering ram attacks on the defenses of both teams.

As the sportwriter put it, both Alajuela’s midfielder Quintanilla (despite his assist) and Puntarena´s Josimar Arias failed to set up their team´s attacks so more movement than plan prevented either team from dominating.

Carmelita, Liberia Tie 3-3

Much the same situation prevailed at Carlos Alavardo Stadium where an error by Felix Garcia resulted in a self-inflicted goal by Liberia at minute 18. It seemed that Carmelita might run away with the match when O. Gonzalez made it 2′0 at minute 27. Then William Sunsing made two goals for Luberia in nine minutes to close the half.

Santana put Carmelita up again in the second half but Liberia´s Gamboa tied it.While Liberia is tied for second place in Group B, carmelita has been plague with a lack of pooints putting the club at the bottom of Goup A, so even one point for the tie is appreciated.

Perez Zeledon 1, Cartago 0

The southern zone club has been surprisingly strong this year, leading Group B with 12 points, although Alajuela and Liberia are breathing down their necks with 11. But Sunday´s match showed why Perez Zeledon is such a power—they know how to win the close ones.

Wilmer Lopez did not enter the match until early in the second half but he made the winning goal, telling the newspaper Al Dia he made it to celebrate his newly-arrived baby..Hapless Cartago, right down there with University of Costa Rica in the standings, on the road that leads straight to the Secon Division, did not celebrate.

Standings as of Today

Saprissa is running away with the Frist Division with five wins, one tie and 16 points in Group A with Heredia and San Carlos way back with 11 points and Puntarenas, UCR and Carmelita trailing in that order, the latter with only a solitary point

Things are a bit more balanced in Group B with Perez Zeledon leading with 12, followed one point back by Alajuela and Libera and Brujas within whispering distance with 10. Santos and Cartago follow.

Saturday: Saprissa 2, Santos 1

If Santos had not slept so soundly in the first half, they might have frightened the rabid purple clad fans at Ricardo Saprissa Stadium. But they allowed Armando Alonso to score after only 15 minutes of play. In the second half, Cristian Carrilllo tied it up and Saprissa knew it was in a match. But Alejando Alpizar, Saprissa’s big gun this year with five big ones already, blasted in the winning goal.

Brujas Blank San Carlos, 2-0

Brujas, a club from Escazu that plays its games in Desamparados because its home town has no stadium (real estate is a bit too steep there to build one) showed that homelessness is not necessarily a curse. On the other hand, Saturday.s match showed it may make them a little rough, as is shown by the fact that they ended up two men short because of expulsions, Kraesher Mook and Daniel Jimenez.

Despite a numerical advantage, San Carlos was unable to stem the tide. First came a penalty goal by Alejandro Sequiera and Berny Wright put the finishing touches on the victory in the second half. (We’ll see how Brujas fares, playing the next game without two starting players. Gentlemen, control yourselves!)