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President Arias Holds Cabinet Meeting in Guanacaste
By Katherine Stanley
Tico Times Staff
kstanley@ticotimes.net
In honor of the 182nd anniversary of the Annexation of Guanacaste, President Oscar Arias and his ministers yesterday traveled to the northwestern province to hold a special Cabinet meeting in Nicoya's town park.
With citizens looking on during the meeting, which is normally a closed session held at Casa Presidencial in San José, Arias said the province's changing hands from Nicaragua to Costa Rica following a popular vote “reaffirmed respect for the majority decision and immutable faith in every human being's right to choose his or her own destiny.”
He added that Guanacaste is in need of support from the central government, given damaged road infrastructure, increasing lack of safety, “environmental risks” and unequal distribution of wealth in the region.
According to Arias, renovations to Daniel Oduber International Airport in the provincial capital of Liberia, along with an agreement between the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) and Public Security Ministry to launch its Tourism Police force, are among the plans that will help the region prosper.
Cabinet ministers told TV Channel 13, which broadcast the session, about Guanacaste-related plans within their ministries. Public Education Minister Leonardo Garnier said improving classroom maintenance and including Guanacaste's culture in school curricula are among his priorities.
Course to Strengthen Latin American Justice Systems
By Amanda Roberson
Tico Times Staff
aroberson@ticotimes.net
Judges and lawyers from 10 Latin American countries arrived to Costa Rica this week to participate in a course on how to create more effective and transparent judicial systems in the region, according to Elías Carranza, director of the U.N. Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD).
The 10-day course, also sponsored by the U.N. Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders (UNAFEI) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), began yesterday and runs through Aug. 3 at the Hotel Bougainvillea in Santo Domingo de Heredia, north of San José.
The course's objectives are to give officials the knowledge to establish a more effective, transparent criminal justice system that protects human rights, according to a statement from JICA.
Thirty representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are participating in the course, which will include presentations by legal experts including Costa Rican Chief Prosecutor Francisco Dall'Anese, Costa Rican Penal Branch of the Supreme Court (Sala III) president José Manuel Arroyo and experts from Japan, who were asked to participate because of their country's impressively low crime rates, Carranza said.
“Japan has one of the lowest murder rates in the world and one of the lowest prison populations,” Carranza said. “This shows an effective penal system.”
Before planning the course, ILANUD and JICA carried out studies of Latin America's penal systems and found “an inexistence of programs and free legal defense services to comply with due process,” according to the JICA statement.
As a result, an agreement was signed by the two institutes and the Costa Rican government to carry out this training program for three years, the statement said.
Organic Brown Sugar Sends Message about Child Labor
Consumers in Italy, France and Germany will soon be able to buy Costa Rican organic brown sugar guaranteed to be produced without child labor as part of a project under way by the Production Ministry (MIPRO), in coordination with the Labor Ministry, the Public Education Ministry, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Canadian Embassy, according to a statement from MIPRO.
The first containers of this product will be exported next month with the idea of creating consciousness about the negative effects of agricultural child labor, the statement said.
As part of the project, families in the sugar-producing community of Puriscal, a mountain town southwest of San José, and surrounding areas have received training on eradicating child labor, a new high school has been built by the Public Education Ministry and 80 children and adolescents who were working at sugar mills have returned to school.
In Costa Rica, an estimated 113,200 children work, mostly in agricultural jobs, according to the statement.
Child labor is a multi-faceted problem that often results from poor families and communities having “weak socioeconomic policies to prevent the problem … and a lack of knowledge about the risks and dangers,” such as children abandoning school or getting injured, the statement said.
-Tico Times
Treatment Being Researched to Treat Horses' Injuries with Stem Cells
The School of Veterinary Medicine at Universidad Nacional (UNA), in Heredia, north of San José, is researching an innovative treatment that uses stem cells to treat horses' injuries.
UNA veterinary student Roberto Estrada is carrying out a study using the animal's fat tissue stem cells to cure cases of tendonitis and tendon injuries. Estrada hopes to become the first veterinarian to offer this treatment in Latin America.
Tendon wounds are common in horses used for racing, jumping, polo and other equestrian events, Estrada explained. Their tendon tissue is prone to injury and has less of a capacity to heal than other tissues.
Studies carried out in England have shown that for every 100 horses who begin racing at two years old, only 10 are still able to gallop at four years old.
Estrada performed surgery on a mare two months ago, and so far it seems to have “very promising” clinical results, according to Estrada.
-ACAN-EFE
Save the Tico Humpbacks: A Whale of a Proposal
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The biggest being you are likely to see in Costa Rica is the humpback whale, and now is probably the best time of year to see one here. These massive creatures arrive from as far away as the Southern Ocean International Whale Sanctuary, the ring of ocean surrounding Antarctica. The whales are coming back home to court, mate, give birth to the next generation of Costa Rican whales, and generate a lot of money for Costa Ricans working in tourism.
They make the now famous Antarctic-to-Costa-Rica trek, one of the longest in the animal kingdom, because Costa Rica’s waters are a prime place to make a little whale big enough to survive in cold seas full of large predators. Around the end of the rainy season, they head back to the Southern Ocean, the best place in the world for these unique mammals to become full-sized whales.
Adult whales need to eat more than your car weighs every day to grow bigger than a bus, and they cannot find that much food in Costa Rica. The Southern Ocean is where whales feast on vast amounts of shrimp-like krill and other tiny creatures that congregate into cloud-sized swarms. But Costa Rican-born whales may be in big trouble when they head back south for food this year.
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Finshots: Photographs of fin prints can be used to identify whales born in Costa Rican waters. |
The same whales that thrill tourists and locals alike and support one of the fastest-growing segments of Costa Rican tourism may be hunted and killed by illegal Japanese whalers when they return to the Southern Ocean. According to the May 2006 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine, when the whales arrive south, Japan plans to kill 50 or so humpbacks in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary for research and later sale of the meat. Fifty dead Tico whales would probably mean the end of Costa Rica’s whale watching, as probably only about 50 of these endangered species come to Costa Rica each rainy season.
So what can tiny Costa Rica do against a powerful First-World nation that is an expert at exploiting the resources of other countries? Probably not much, but perhaps we could take an important symbolic step. Using fin-print photos, why not declare the easily identifiable whales born in Costa Rican waters Ticos, and ask the countries of the world to respect these citizens and not kill them when they visit other places? The whales will generate far more money in the long run from whale watchers in Antarctica and Costa Rica than they will with a onetime sale of meat in a fish market.
Tourists of the world are already starting to boycott nations that support whaling. By declaring whales born here to be Ticos, Costa Rica would set a worldwide example of helping to protect these mysteriously intelligent mammals that have been hunted to near extinction in the past. We would also be poised to receive all the tourists who will stop going to offending destinations that normally compete with Costa Rica.
Too bad Nicaragua doesn’t see the writing on the wall. If it worked together with Costa Rica to develop dolphin and whale tourism, both countries could make untold money year after year. Sadly, at least one Japanese whale-factory ship is registered in Panama, and that might not bode well for our other neighbor’s marine tourism prospects. The three countries working together would be that much more influential, and could help establish the area as a mega marine tourism destination.
If you like the idea of Costa Rica’s whales not being killed when they visit feeding waters, or if you like to make money working with tourism, tell everyone you know to help save these whales by declaring them officially Ticos.
For more information, call 835-6041, e-mail shawn@costacetacea.com or visit www.costacetacea.com.
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