by Rod Hughes

It can only be described as a rout. Costa Rica’s women’s All Star soccer team met a female team from Augustine College of Rock Island, Illinois, in an exhibition match as a precurser to the Pekin Olympics. The match in Alajuela might be best termed an appetizer, since the Ticas devoured their adversaries, 6-1.

Cristin Granados scored a senational three goals in 90 minutes while Yuliana Rodriguez, Wendy Acosta and Laura Sanchez each scored one. Keri Hess was the lone scorer for the North Americans.

But the euphoria of the Ticas is tempered somewhat by the announcement that former star Shirley Cruz, a professional in Europe, will not be playing with her ex-teammates in the runup to the Olympics because of contractual obligations with the French club, Olympique of Lyons. The San Jose resident was contracted by the French team last year.

by Rod Hughes

A judge in Heredia absolved a young veteranarian for euthanizing a beloved street dog, Camila, in a case that raised the ire of animal lovers throughout the country and within the town. The woman vet, Sujeily Retana, had been charged with the illegal practice of her profession since she had not yet been accepted by the professional veteranarian’s association.

The greatest amount of ire in the January, 2005, case was not directed against Retana, however, but was reserved for the Catholic priest who gave the execution order. Camila was a mostly white hound whom her defenders described as a gentle creature, greeting her human friends as she wandered about the streets of Tibas.

But she made a fatal error by her Sunday habit of curling up in a corner of the local church during services. The priest, Fr. Carlos Artavia, ordered that Camila be carted off to the young vet and executed. For this, the priest was given 30 days or its equivalent in fines in August on the charge of executing an animal of whom he was not the owner.

Luis Alberto Leon, an animal rights advocate who presented himself to the court this week as Camila’s owner, said that he had taken Camila in, fed her and had her spade. But this earned him no accolades from Judge Roy Badilla who proceeded to chastize Leon as “irresponsible” for having let the hapless Camila run loose. Badilla, obviously no bleeding heart when it comes to animals, sternly lectured Leon about the dangers to humans represented by roving dogs.

The judge added that Retana had been accepted by the vet’s association a month after she put Camila to death and obviously knew how to perform a euthanasia. Judge Badilla said he felt the case against Retana was Leon’s reprisal for Camila’s demise.

by Rod Hughes

Minister of Education Leonardo Garnier had a unique (for Costa Rica) message to universities this week: “Enough teachers, already.” In the past, Costa Rica has always had an insatiable appetite for every teacher the educational system could turn out, but the declining birthrate in the country has gradually changed that picture drastically.

As little as 15 years ago, the birthrate was 3.2 children per woman. Today it is .9. At the turn of this century there were 539,000 kids in primary school. This year only 509,000 are enrolled. This means a glut of teachers, being graduated at an insane clip of 1,600 yearly. This year the Ministry of Education employed 25,500 grade school teachers, the vast majority with tenure. Only 2,000 openings existed in the system but more than 30,000 applied.

The profession is something of a sacred cow in education-conscious Costa Rica, one of the first countries in Latin America with universal education for both sexes. In past times, being a teacher was the handhold by which many young adults pulled themselves up from poverty into the middle class. A poor family would sacrifice to send their child to be trained as a teacher at the “normal school” at Heredia, a college that has since become the National University.

But those were days in which the government could not build classrooms fast enough to keep up with the birthrate and were often hard-pressed to train teachers fast enough. For now, the pinch is being felt in grade school but as the lower birthrate continues, high schools will begin to see the pinch. And the need for new classrooms is more about replacing antiquated school buildings and shifting population centers than about growth.

But some teacher-training specialists see the situation as an opportunity to train teachers more dedicated to students’ needs than in the salaries and perks demanded by their politically powerful unions. They foresee a time to go for quality and forget quantity, focusing on creating a professional with imagination and creativity. Ironically, the current glut occurs at a time of low unemployment in other professions, especially business-related ones, and in skills ranging from engineering to carpentry.

by Rod Hughes

Referee Venicio Mena did a disservice to both Saprissa and Brujas last night when one of Saprissa’s goals was made by Alvaro Alpizar’s successful penalty kick resulting from an infraction that never occurred. It was a pity because both sides played well, especially Saprissa in the second half.

Daniel Jimenez of the Brujas opened scoring by a beautiful left footed blast at long distance. Midfielder Walter Centeno tied it for Saprissa on a penalty. Then came a phantom foul converted by Alpizar and the whole party cooled down. Alpizar’s second goal came as an anticlimax.

Saprissa has won eight of nine games and earned 22 out of a possible 24 points.

by Rod Hughes

The Organization of American States and the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry, in their traditional peace-keeping roles, scrambled this week to defuse the diplomatic crisis between Colombia and its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela. The tensions spilled over Saturday when Colombian troops crossed the Ecuadoran border Saturday and killed 20 FARC guerillas including FARC’s number two commander, Raul Reyes.

Update 6/3/08: The leftist government of Nicaragua severed relations with Colombia in a show of support for Chavez. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega sees in Chasvez a sort of political soulmate.

The OAS has called a special emergency session as diplomatic protests fly. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe accused his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, of financing terrorism. Venezuela responded by closing the mutual border with Colombia and both Ecuardor and Venezuela are sending thousands of troops to the border. The Colombian Foreign Minister responded by accusing Venezuela of having ties with narcotics traffickers and rebels “responsible for horrendous war crimes.”

Meanwhile, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa made a whirlwind visit to Peru, Brazil, Panama and Venezuela to whip up support against Colombia. The OAS was caught by surprise at the speed the crisis developed. Costa Rica, following its inclination as a calming influence, began working behind the scenes.

The raid that killed Reyes also resulted in Colombian allegations that e-mails from laptops captured in the incursion show that Venezuelan president Chavez proposed to sell fuel to the FARC rebels.

by Rod Hughes

Costa Rica’s star swimmer Claudia Poll is not yet ready to hang up her swimming cap and dry off. She is eyeing competitions for, in the newspaper La Nacion’s delicate phrasing, swimmers of “a certain age.”

A determined competitor with a wall full of medals from regional and international meets including the Olympics, she appeared in the Holiday Classic at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, last December and in this country in January for the Millennium Master Tourney in January.

But, as La Nacion sportswriter Gustavo Jimenez notes, this does not mean that she is going to abandon going up against the elite. She is one of five aspirants signed up for the Peking 2008 Olympics with the national Olympic Committee. If selected to represent the country, (it is highly unlikely that she will be rejected) she will compete along with her countryman Kurt Niehaus whose specialty is in open water.

But her times in Ft. Lauderdale showed that she has a long way to go before she can be competitive. She had a baby in August and the nine months of down time told dearly. Still, trainer Francisco Rivas has no doubts she can return to her past form and she is famous for her dedication. She has until June 15 to trim her Olympic qualification times. Don’t usher her to a retirement rocking chair, yet…

by Rod Hughes

Next time you get a traffic ticket in Costa Rica, you might remember traffic officer Jesus Ruiz before you get too resentful. He maintains that he is paying dearly for giving a ticket—to his boss last December.

According to an exclusive story in the popular newspaper Diario Extra, Ruiz stopped a vehicle for lack of plates for going 84 kilometers in a 25 kilometer per hour school zone outside of Santa Cruz in Guanacaste province. The driver turned out to be the regional chief of the traffic cops, Walter Arguello. That part is undisputed and the Santa Cruz traffic court suspended Arguello’s license for six months.

It was after that incident when the trouble began, Ruiz told the newspaper. He was suddenly ordered on Christmas eve to report for work—in San Jose. He has lived in Nicoya and worked in Guanacaste since 1998. Moreover, he had to commute daily—by bus—paying his own way, because, Human Resources Dept. told him, he had been contracted originally in San Jose and, in pure bureaucratic logic, could not be paid transport because on paper he lived in San Jose. Catch 22. The assignment was to last three months.

The national Traffic Police chief German Marin says that the assignment was routine, that they needed Ruiz in San Jose, and there was no relation between the traffic citation and his temporary reassignment. Ruiz is having none of this explanation, noting that he was the only one in his divistion to get such an assignment.

The situation of a traffic cop ticketing his boss is not unheard of, noted the newspaper gleefully. In 2005, a traffic police chief was in an accident in his patrol car in the San Jose suburb of Zapote. An alcohol test showed 1.84, the equivalent, according to the paper, of 15 to 17 beers. Despite Article 74 of police regulations making drinking during duty hours a serious offense, the police Personnel Council recommended a 30-day suspension and payment of accident damage, taking into consideration the chief’s long service and clean previous record.

But, returning to Ruiz, if he is right about being punished for doing his duty as the newspaper maintains, one wonders what is in store for him for going over his superiors’ heads directly to the press?

by Rod Hughes

Two single-engine agricultural spray planes collided yesterday in Limon province. The pilot of one, Francis Chinchilla, 33, was killed instantly when he was ejected 20 meters from the craft on impact with the ground.

The other pilot, Carlos Madrigal, 41, was transported to Hospital Mexico in San Jose, suffering multiple injuries including to his head. He remains in critical condition. The wing-to-wing collision took place at barely 150 feet altitude and Chinchilla was unable to recover control. Madrigal somehow kept his plane aloft for a time before crash landing.

Early reports say that one aircraft belonged to Bandeco and the other to Standard Fruit Company and had been apparently engaged in spraying banana plantations. Preliminary inquiries blame the collision on the low afternoon sun which is thought to have blinder one or both pilots.

by Rod Hughes

A Russian company is aiming to build a giant casino here and some politicians, including Vice President Laura Chinchilla, are suspicious of it and all such projects. In an exclusive interview with the newspaper Al Dia, Chinchilla made no secret that she takes a dim view of casinos in general and is worried that the government has no idea who the partners in the project are.

An element of Costa Rican political structure here is opposed to gambling in general and the Legislative Assembly once passed a gambling law so convoluted that no one could decipher it, let alone follow it. A good example of this was the issue of roulette wheels. Some years ago, the casino at the Aurola Holiday Inn was raided by police and the internal axis of the wheels confiscated, disabling them. Within weeks, the court made authorities return the apparatus.

At that time, the Provincial Governor had jurisdiction about what constituted legal gaming.(The office of governor has since been eliminated and its duties taken over by the central government and municipalities.) This reporter remembers being astounded several decades ago when the legal counsel for the governor’s office cheerfully admitted that neither he nor anyone else could quite figure out what lawmakers had in mind. More recently, two sportsbooks in the center of San Jose were arbitrarily shut down by the municipality in what could only be an abuse of authority.

The law, as the vice president noted in her interview, states that casinos must be allied with a hotel. An exception to this was Casino Club Colonial, the oldest extant casino in the country, allowed to continue because its existence pre-dated passage of the legislation. The casino was established in the 1970s in a cozy little Spanish-style house on First Avenue and later a new building built across the avenue, still the most architecturally tasteful of the casinos in the country. But, undeterred, bureaucrats made the owner so uncomfortable that he later built a hotel to go with the casino and end all doubt about conforming with the regulations. (It had been obviously a “grandfather” situation and perfectly legal.)

The vice president, once the country’s chief of Public Security, as totally frank with the Al Dia interviewer. “The message is clear,” she said, “This kind of investment isn’t welcome. Casinos were installed here because there was a legal vacuum. We now want casinos to be part of the activity of hotels but the hotel should be fundamental and not an excuse (to install casinos).” When asked if the discouraging of a new business that already exists in Costa Rica was not a contradiction, Chinchilla was unrepentant. “At one time, we allowed them to come in and if we kicked them out we’d have to pay indemnities. We don’t want to continue with this policy and now I ask Costa Ricans if they’d like to fill their country with casinos.”

Representatives of the Russian company, Storm International BV, told the newspaper that they have all the permits needed to begin construction in July and the vice president admits nothing opponents of gambling can do about it. Meanwhile, she says President Oscar Arias will put into effect a decree with new ground rules after Easter.

To change the policy permanently would likely need legislation and how many congressmen share her hostility to this kind of activity is a question only time would tell. Certainly, Evangelicals in the country do share it and members of this church in the Legislative Assembly were instrumental in passage of the current restrictive gambling law. And the compromises they had to make with pro-gambling factions to get the law passed certainly helped create the confused, often contradictory, rules under which casinos now function.

This affected even the games. The law was based on permitting traditional Spanish games. Thus, blackjack is called “tute” here, that being an old game. So, in advertising in the English-language publications here, casinos have always used the Spanish name. Texas hold ‘em, on the other hand, often appears in advertising because no other name exists, being a sort of Las Vegas invention and because authorities either turn a blind eye or, more likely, are so confused by the law that they have given up. Slot machines are not permitted but the law has no clear clause about their modern, electronic equivalent.

As an ex-cop, Chinchilla worries about the kind of clientele some casinos attract. The reporter mentioned that some hotel-casinos seem to be more like houses of prostitution than casinos. Chinchilla agreed, mentioning one well-known San Jose hotel and added, “Something is going to have to be done to stop this. The hotel has a circle of vice and prostitution. It’s a disaster and shameful.”

This hotel, it might be pointed out, had that reputation even before it installed its casino. It may be that the crusading vice president can put a lid on such activities. But no one, except perhaps Chinchilla, is betting on it.

by Rod Hughes

An error in a law passed three years ago inadvertantly leaves open Costa Rican territorial waters, including wildlife perserve Cocos Island, to illegal fishing. The error was not discovered until the prosecution of the tuna fishing boat Tiuna Jan. 29.

The law was aimed at tightening up regulations. Instead, it replaced stiff 3- to 15-year sentences for illegal fishing in the Criminal Code with a slap on-the-wrist fine. The law’s Article 153, passed in March, 2005, tacitly nullified the previous Article 258 of the Criminal Code. Ironically, that new article was proposed by the current Touism Minister Carlos Ricardo Benevides when he was a congressional deputy. Benevides said that no one warned him of the disastrous gap the new article made.

At least, it revealed finally why Puntarenas judge Marvin Cerdas declined the prosecution plea to jail the captain of the Tiuna and her 21 crewmen. When Cerdas’s sentence was finally published, it contained the pained paragraph: “As a citizen, I can tell you that I worry a great deal about the condition that can occur at Cocos Island and what it means for Costa Rica and humanity…” (The island has been proposed for a patrimony of humanity status due to its isolation and condition as a wildlife refuge.)

“Nontheless,” continued Cerdas, “in this case, above the arguments of a common, ordinary citizen, my position is as judge and I must resolve this in accord with penal procedural legality.” The judge proceeded to cite a precedent in a similar case last December when a three-judge tribunal ruled that the new article and not the Penal Code applied. It was for this reason, said Cerdas, that he did not hold the crew in custody even though they were clearly flight risks. He could not deprive men of their liberty, he concluded, if the law did not allow it.