by Rod Hughes
Costa Ricans are well known for their adoration of children. But isn’t a law prohibiting parents to use any kind of physical punishment going too far?
The bill is out of committee with multi-partisan support. The current Family Code specifies that parents have “the rights and…duties to educate, care for, watch over and, in moderate ways, correct their children.”
But the proposed law would go much further, adding “excluding ANY form of physical punishment or mistreatment, as well as aggression or dengrating physical or emotional treatment.”
Physical punishment has long been banned in schools but the home has been left to the parents.
Unity Party congressman Jorge Eduardo Sánchez, for one, is troubled by the bill, fearing that parents will lose authority over their own children. “We could be sending a wrong signal here,” he warned, in robbing parents of their right to correct kids with punishment.
Three persons selected by the morning paper La Nación in a mini-poll did not think much of the bill, although they acknowledged that abuse is not the answer in guiding a child.

by Rod Hughes
We’ve heard it so many times that when Minister of Health Maria Luisa Avila seriously announced the definitive closure of the Rio Azul landfill near Cartago July 31, one is tempted to laugh.
The landfill, which opened in 1973, has faced a series of deadlines, some of which that passed almost unnoticed and always without action, victims of a lack of political will. The problem was that alternate sites were vehemently opposed by residents with the attitude, “Sure we need landfills. Just put them in someone else’s neighborhood.”
But Minister Avila is well aware of this, so she rejected the proposal of the landfill administrators to extend the life of the rubbish site another two years, pleading that they have only half the money necessary to do the proper final filling and needed more garbage to build up a stable drainage system to prevent landslides.
“For 12 years we’ve been closing this landfill,” she said, noting that the contract is up July 31. In 1994, the government closed the fill—for four days. Two years later, the Health Ministry closed it for all of three days. In 1996, disgruntled neighbors closed the fill and the government reopened it by force. In September of 2005, the fill was supposed to close but the Health Ministry extended the contract.
The minister added that the municipalities that use Rio Azul can use the newer La Carpio site and the brand new Aserrí landfill. Right now, Rio Azul currently receives 500 tons per day from eight municipalities as far away as Alajuela.
Wednesday, 80 “buzos” (literally, “divers”) who sift the refuse for recycleable and reuseable items mounted a partial shutdown of the facility to protest the impending closure.

by Rod Hughes
For the media, it was an irresistible photo opportunity. For the government, it was a prod to get congressmen off the dime to pass two anti-poverty bills.To some humorless Costa Ricans it was just a cheap publicity stunt.
President Oscar Arias’s point man in the government’s plans to alleviate poverty, Housing Minister Fernando spent Tuesday night sleeping over inside a dirt-floored hovel in a San Jose shantytown, after a humble dinner of noodles there. Zumbado noted that some small children are unable to crawl around the house because of unsantiary conditions.
“What do I care when they tell me I’m putting on a show, if a child can crawl a year earlier than if we didn’t do something?” asked the well-heeled minister. “We live separate lives and I don’t think people realize.”
It was not only for the public’s consumption that Zumbado made his gesture. Two bills the president considers important tools against poverty are stalled in the unicameral Legislative Assembly. An estimated 40,000 families live in 400 slums throughout the country, most crammed into nooks in the metropolitan area.
These are divided into two types: Precarios, where squatters invade an area and set up hovels, and tugurios, slums where the people own the land but cannot afford decent housing. They are indistinguishable, clusters of rusty tin and castoff wood shacks that would be uninhabitable were it not for the tropical climate. Still, they are damp and chilly during the rainy season, lacking decent sanitation and, sometimes, running water.
At that, Costa Rica has done more to provide liveable housing than most Latin American nations, administrations vying with each other to grant more land titles and build more publicly-funded homes. The drive began in the administration of President Luis Alberto Monge and continued uninterrupted thereafter. Before this, the country had a severe housing shortage and even middle class rentals were in short supply.
Another sign of growing awareness of the importance of decent housing was the creation of the Housing Ministry. Before this agency, public housing had been provided by INVU, an underfunded agency drowning in a sea of demands it could not hope to meet. Then came Banco de la Vivienda to provide soft loans on long term so the working class could erect humble but adequate concrete block homes on small lots.
(A complete story on Costa Rica’s housing situation will appear Friday, June 1, in The Tico Times, Central America’s leading English-language newspaper.)