by Rod Hughes

Classes are set to open next Monday but Minister of Education Leonardo Garnier is still struggling with messes left him by his predecessors including a serious shortfall of classrooms, equipment and a chronic bureaucratic snarl in payment of salaries.

The daily newspaper La Nacion revealed late last year that salary and personnel records are so antiquated that checks were still being issued to teachers who had moved on or passed on years ago. Now that same paper spotlights the strange situation where a teacher incapacitated by illness or injury may earn more than one working hard in the classroom.

But more urgent even than this expensive injustice is the shortfall of 13,000 students’ desks and 28,826 classrooms due to population growth. (Since the country’s birth rate has fallen to ,9 per mother, much of this growth must be laid to the influx of foreigners, principally Nicaraguans, many illegal immigrants.)

Garnier noted that the classroom shortfall can be remedied only gradually and construction includes not only additions to existing primary and secondary schools but whole new neighborhood schools. Only 34 billion colones is budgeted this year for this task. (The colon has been hovering at about 500 per dollar.)

So far, 45,500 teachers have been appointed with only some 2,811 to be named, most of the latter parttime with only 20 class hours per week. The teachers will be working in front of an estimated 962,500 pupils in this country which was a proud pioneer of universal education in Latin America. Unfortunately, the system has fallen woefully far behind in this efficient, computerized age.

Bureaucratic glitches do not help. A teacher who was absent because of illness or injury in February of 2006 inexplicably receives 13% higher salary than one who was not. Where the average monthly wage was 477,000 colones in 2006, a teacher who was incapacitated that month gets 550,000. But in any other month of that year, the absent teacher would receive 133,600 colones, four times less. Go figure.

by Rod Hughes

Saprissa fans may have worried that their team was exhausted after playing a soccer tournament last week in Uruguay, but they need not have bothered their little heads over it. Sunday, the Tibas side needed only a half an hour to ICE down a resounding 2-0 victory over Heredia. In fact, it appeared that the maroon-clad warriors of Saprissa only let Heredia control the ball for brief periods out of a feeling for showmanship. You know, to keep the fans aware that there were two sides on the field.

Both goals developed in the same way, a long service from midfield to a striker waiting alone near the goal. The first was from Michael Barrantes to Alejandro Alpizar, the second from Celso Borges to Alpizar. It took all too long for Heredia to figure out the strategy and then they found out that they could not break the Saprissa defense.

Liberia 2, Puntarenas 1

Liberia flaunted history Sunday and defeated Puntarenas for the first time in the port city’s Lito Perez Stadium. Why Puntarenas should be so tough for them on its own home pitch is hard to imagine, but this time the Guanacaste province’s club looked as if they had been doing it for years.

Puntarenas’s Athin Roper opened scoring (minute 18) on a penalty kick but from then on the port city could scarcely get a whiff of the goal. With a little over half an hour of play, Liberia forward Allan Aleman followed up on Puntarenas goalie Daniel Cambronero’s rejection of a shot on the goal. Then Max Sanchez hammered on in at minute 47 and history was writ.

Alajuela 2, San Carlos 0

Harold Wallace, returning to his Alajuela club after a long absence due to an injury, could not have celebrated better Sunday, making the first goal early in the second half of what was to prove a 2-0 win over San Carlos. Winston Parks, another red and black mainstay, made another with only two minutes of regular time left on the clock.

Wallace at first seemed hesitant, perhaps unsure that his aim had not lost its precision during his recuperation, passing up opportunities during the first half. But the whole side received praise for “playing with their heads” after a slow start in the “closing tournament” of the season.

Perez Zeledon 1, Universidad 1

For the second match in a row, Jewisson Bennett prevented Perez Zeledon from defeat, which would have been hard on morale for their fans on their own pitch at San Isidro de El General. Doubly damaging would have been a defeat against the University of Costa Rica, a club that is currently fighting going down into the second division at the end of the season, dead last, one point behind Cartago in the standings.

In fact, it appeared at the 30 minute mark that Universidad might be pulling out a desperately-needed win when Esteban Maitland hammered in the sphere from a pass by Lucas Carrera. It was not until minute 47 that Bennett saved Perez Zeledon from shame.

by Rod Hughes

The Costa Rican soccer All-Stars go up against Jamaica tomorrow in Kingston’s National Stadium and coach Hernan Medford is looking for the first victory to end a dismal streak that began June 17 of last year without a victory–nine matches. Although it is an exhibition game, fans will scrutinizing their play, seeking some sign that they may make it to the next World Cup.

The natives are restless. The newspaper Al Dia conducted a poll of 220 fans, the results of which were printed yesterday. The vast majority of fans, 174, categorized the All-Stars as “very bad.” When sportswriters conduct surveys, it is a bad sign, Either they lack stuff to fill their columns or they want the fans to say what they haven’t the heart to write. This is clearly the latter.

Almost as a footnote last week, the “Sele,” as the picked team of national soccer heros is known, journeyed all the way to Teheran, where they battled their opponents to a scoreless tie. Then, they lost the shootout of penalty goals, 4-3. That did not sit at all well with Al Dia sportwriter Ericka Rojas who criticized their lack of maneavering close to the goal. She seemed to feel that Costa Rica’s soccer team deserves their FIFA ranking of a dismal 69th in the world.

Sooo…We will see tomorrow how they do against the “Reggae Boyz” in Jamaica. The Caribbean islands traditionally do not do well in the regional Concacaf runups to the World Cup, fielding blazingly fast teams that often seem unable to aim their goal kicks. But this is an exhibition game and Medford is still experimenting like an alchemist, thrying to turn lead into gold.

by Rod Hughes

The discovery of five bodies last week in a garbage dump in Costa Rica’s southern zone underscored the preoccupation of Chief Prosecutor Francisco Dall’Anese and Judicial Police (OIJ) director Jorge Rojas about organized, drug-related crime in the country. All the victims were Panamanians, all with their hands tied, carefully shot in the back of the head.

While these mass murders would hardly raise cops’ eyebrows in Miami-Dade county in Florida, a massacre such as this is most un-Costa Rican. Granted, assassination-style murders are not unknown here in the narcotics underworld, they usually entail as single killing, often gunned down on the street by paid assassins riding motorcycles. But 61 gangland-style murders have occurred in the past two years, up from only five killer-for-hire murders in 2005.

In a report to the Supreme Court last year before his reappointment to a second term as Chief Prosecutor (the equivalent of Attorney General in the United States), Dall-Anese told the judges that he wanted to target organized crime. Many law-abiding citizens and tourists, untouched by the violent struggles for turf among drug-runners, wondered what he meant or thought he was referring to auto thieving gangs.

As for Rojas, the OIJ director complained bitterly to the Al Dia newspaper that new laws with more teeth in them to combat crime were still stalled as bills in the Legislative Assembly. He did, however, succeed this year in obtaining an increased budget for equipment and personnel, but only by threatening late last year to resign.

He told Al Dia that many hired killers are Latin foreigners who enter the country to kill a specific persons and then leave. This lethal tourism makes them hard to catch.

by Rod Hughes
A march was held Monday in San Jose to demonstrate opposition to the bloody-handed Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla group in that country responsible for thousands of deaths, corruption from their engagement in narcotics traffic, widespread kidnappings and a climate of fear in some regions. The demonstration, planned for at least 184 other cities in the world besides San Jose, departed from the Parque de Grarantias Sociales in eastern San Jose at about 11 a.m. today.

FARC began as a guerrilla group in the 1970s but soon turned into one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations, well-armed through financing by drug traffic.The “One Million Voices against FARC” movement is calling for the rebels to lay down their arms and release hostages. Its purpose is to “demonstrate our repudiation of the hostage-taking and pain caused by FARC and to call attention of the people of the world to its indifference,” according to Maria Fernanda Gualdron, the demonstration’s Costa Rican-based organizer.

Gualdron added that she expected at least 1,000 participants in the march, including Colombians and members of Costa Rica’s active peace movements. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the word spread through the Web-based Facebook, an on-line social-network site boasting some 230,000 members. The march organizers hope to raise public awareness of the more than 40 high-profile hostages, inluding three U.S. citizens and Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt.