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Jurassic rock: Guitarist Ranferi Aguilar and cellist Paulo Alvarado perform Saturday at Torre Gecko Convention Center in Heredia, north of San José, with the Guatemalan band Alux Nahual, which helped pioneer Central American rock when it formed in 1979. |
Ronald Reyes / Tico Times |
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| Betancourt's ex-husband to be French ambassador in Costa Rica |
Fabrice Delloye, the ex-husband of former hostage Ingrid Betancourt, will soon be named as France's new ambassador to Costa Rica, according to wire reports. |
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| Nicaragua priest Cardenal: ‘I'm ready to go to jail' |
| Revolutionary Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal charged Thursday that President Daniel Ortega handed down a sentence to a judge that convicts him of defamation in a “political sentence without any legal basis.” |
| See More... |
| Costa Rica president breaks silence on Chinese bond purchase |
Faced with mounting pressure from the press and opposition leaders, President Oscar Arias has revealed details on the sale of state bonds to China. |
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| Canadian firm to pump 5,000 barrels of Nicaragua oil in two months |
A Canadian energy company expects to pump some 5,000 barrels of petroleum from a well in western Nicaragua in the next two months, Energy and Mines Minister Emilio Rappaccioli told state media.
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Costa Rica Was
Ancient Cultural Frontier |
This new Tico Times column will provide insights and news on Costa Rica's fascinating ancient past. Archaeologist Michael J. Snarskis, Ph.D., has lived and worked in Costa Rica for more than 30 years |
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Betancourt’s ex-husband to be
French ambassador in Costa Rica |
Fabrice Delloye, the ex-husband of former hostage Ingrid Betancourt, will soon be named as France's new ambassador to Costa Rica, according to wire reports.
Delloye was married to French-Colombian politician Betancourt from 1981 to 1990 and has two children with her, Melanie and Lorenzo. He lobbied vigorously for Betancourt's release from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), who held her hostage from 2002 to July of this year.
A career diplomat, Delloye has served as economic adviser for the French embassy in the Republic of Seychelles, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, and as France's cultural representative to Peru.
One of Delloye's tasks will be to help find new educational options for families at the French-Costa Rican School in Tres Ríos, east of San José. France recently decided to withdraw funding from the school, leading to its possible closure at the end of 2009.
Delloye would replace Jean-Paul Monchau, who left Costa Rica last month after a three-year term. |
-EFE and Tico Times |
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| Nicaragua priest Cardenal: ‘I'm ready to go to jail' |
By Blake Schmidt
Nica Times Staff | bschmidt@ticotimes.net |
Revolutionary Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal charged Thursday that President Daniel Ortega handed down a sentence to a judge that convicts him of defamation in a “political sentence without any legal basis.”
“It's simply revenge for Ortega,” said Cardenal, an 83-year-old Sandinista priest whose poetry earned him a recent Nobel nomination.
In a press conference at the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center in Managua, Cardenal alleged that Ortega is using his sway in the Sandinista-dominated judicial branch to prosecute Cardenal, a priest and poet who strayed from the Sandinista party ranks in the 1990s after serving as Ortega's culture minister in the 1980s
Ortega has not commented on the case. But Sandinista judge David Rojas, who ruled against Cardenal, has denied to local press that the sentence was at all political.
After being dismissed years ago, defamation charges filed against Cardenal in an ongoing land dispute were suddenly taken up again – just a week after the white-haired priest/poet's comments in Paraguay, accusing Ortega of trying to reestablish a dictator dynasty akin to that of the Somoza family.
“In this system now in Nicaragua, anything's possible. I'm ready to go to jail,” said the beret-donning priest. |
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Costa Rica president breaks
silence on Chinese bond purchase |
By Gillian Gillers
Tico Times Staff | ggillers@ticotimes.net |
Faced with mounting pressure from the press and opposition leaders, President Oscar Arias has revealed details on the sale of state bonds to China.
China is buying $150 million in bonds in 2008 and another $150 million in 2009, Arias announced Friday after keeping the information secret for months. Costa Rica has to pay back the money within 12 years at an interest rate lower than 4 percent. Arias refused to specify the rate, saying it could be between zero and 3 percent. Since Costa Rica forged diplomatic ties with China in June 2007, the Arias administration has come under fire for being tightlipped about cooperation with the Eastern giant.
Leaders of the opposition Citizen Action Party (PAC) sent a letter to Arias first in January and again last month requesting details on the bond purchase. In February, the daily La Nación challenged Arias' secrecy before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV), which has yet to rule on the case.
“Nothing is more public, under the Constitution, than public debt to other countries,” PAC leader and former presidential candidate Ottón Solís wrote in a letter to Arias last month. “It would be unfortunate if diplomatic ties with China started out on the wrong foot in terms of ethics and transparency.”
Arias said Chinese authorities at first did not want him to spill details because China gave Costa Rica a much lower interest rate than it gives to other countries.
The president said he asked China to purchase bonds rather than lend money in order circumvent the Legislative Assembly, which must approve conventional loans. |
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Canadian firm to pump 5,000
barrels of Nicaragua oil in two months |
A Canadian energy company expects to pump some 5,000 barrels of petroleum from a well in western Nicaragua in the next two months, Energy and Mines Minister Emilio Rappaccioli told state media.
Pumping crude out of the well “is a good sign that probably the petroleum that is there can be exploited commercially,” the energy minister told Radio Nicaragua.
Rappaccioli said Canada's Norwood Resources had a concession in the Pacific region to explore for oil and had drilled three wells in 19 months.
In May, Norwood said that in light of the initial exploration work conducted in the San Bartolo region, 50 kilometers west of Managua, it was examining the possibility that a field with “significant hydrocarbons” existed in Nicaragua.
The energy minister said Norwood had drilled to a depth of nearly 3,000 meters “and they have found clear traces, specifically, of liquid petroleum and gas.”
These traces “substantially improved” in the third well and the company agreed to drill once again “with the goal of getting petroleum out and not to study or explore,” Rappaccioli said.
“It's expected that 4,000 or 5,000 barrels of petroleum will be brought out in the next two months,” the energy minister said, adding that it would take six months to know whether the field was commercially viable.
The Nicaraguan government has also granted oil concessions in San Rafael del Sur, in the Pacific region, to Oklahoma-Nicaragua S.A., known as Indoklanicsa, and concessions in the Caribbean region to U.S.-based MKJ Exploraciones Internacionales S.A. |
-EFE |
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| Costa Rica Was Ancient Cultural Frontier |
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This new Tico Times column will provide insights and news on Costa Rica's fascinating ancient past. Archaeologist Michael J. Snarskis, Ph.D., has lived and worked in Costa Rica for more than 30 years. He founded and directed the first scientific archaeology program in the National Museum and trained the first generation of Costa Rican students there and as a professor at the University of Costa Rica. A graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, he has published 67 books and articles, including catalogues for acclaimed museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
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| Good Points: At left, a preform for a Clovis spear point; center, whole and fragmented bifacial finished Clovis points; at right, a fishtail fluted spear point, all from Finca Guardiria, near the Caribbean-slope town of Turrialba. |
Michael Snarskis | Tico Times |
Are you intrigued by old, enigmatic objects? Sometimes wonder about those unusual different-colored layers in road cuts? Found some pottery fragments in your garden that don't look like anything modern? You dig?
Well, whether you dig or not, this column will provide answers to a lot of these kinds of questions, elucidate Costa Rica's key role in the archaeology of the Americas, and highlight landmark discoveries in the country over the past 50 years. Your questions are welcome.
The First Costa Ricans
Given current archaeological evidence, the first people in Costa Rica were definitely present at least 10,000 to 11,000 years B.C. Two things are important here: 1) they left behind chipped stone artifacts – spear points, hide and wood scrapers, drills – that have been securely radiocarbon-dated (C-14) to those times in other parts of the Americas; and 2) they were already physiologically modern human beings (Homo sapiens), just like we are today.
There was no human evolution in the American continents prior to Homo sapiens; that biological evolution took place in Africa, Asia and Europe only. The consensus among modern scientific archaeologists is that the first small bands of hunters following the last ice-age big game (megafauna such as mastodons, mammoths and others) across the frozen Bering Strait from Asia found themselves in a hunter's paradise, where big meaty animals did not know or fear humans and thus made easy prey. Some other archaeologists believe that humans entered the Americas as early as 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. These early human hunters killed by trapping giant animals in swampy ground and killing them with spears.
About Spear Points: Clovis and Fishtail
A pervasive theme that I will be mentioning here and in most of my columns to come is the importance of Costa Rica as a dynamic, fluctuating frontier zone between two major spheres of pre-Columbian cultural influence: Mesoamerica (central Mexico through El Salvador) and northern South America, primarily Colombia. (For those who might be wondering, the Andean high civilizations such as the Inca and their predecessors had very little to do with Costa Rican indigenous cultures.)
Remarkably, this cultural frontier role is evident even in the first human artifacts found in Costa Rica, which, in 1975, I found in a recently plowed sugarcane field called Finca Guardiria, near the Caribbean-slope town of Turrialba.
With the first archaeology students I had hired at the National Museum, we were surface-collecting the chipped flint-like stone artifacts we observed, first staking out a two-by-two-meter grid for better spatial control of the uppermost terrace of the cane field. There were lots of interesting man-made flint chips and reworked tools, but imagine my surprise when the student archaeologists emptied their collected bags back in the National Museum: two Clovis (named after Clovis, New Mexico, where one of the first examples was found 80 years ago) and one fishtail fluted (a bifacial channel made on the base to aid firm hafting) spear points. Big news!
There had been no previous artifact evidence of a Paleo-Indian occupation in Costa Rica, except a lone Clovis point supposedly found in the early 20th century by Carl Harman, a Swedish archaeologist, in the northwestern Guanacaste province, site unknown. The students hadn't realized what they had picked up, but those points and several other kinds of Paleo-Indian chipped stone tools revealed to me the first solid evidence of a workshop and probably habitation site on a terrace overlooking the Reventazón River and perhaps a now-vanished lake. The early hunters would lie in wait for the giant mammals to arrive and drink and then ambush them. The source of the flint was found in large boulders washed out of an ancient limestone ridge and into a small stream right below the terrace.
I published this important discovery, first in Spanish in Vínculos, a professional journal I founded in the National Museum, and then in American Antiquity, the foremost U.S. archaeological journal. The Tico Times gave front-page coverage to the discovery (TT, Sept. 17, 1976), a tradition the paper has continued to the present.
But here is what I find fascinating: Clovis-type Paleo-Indian spear points are found from Central America north to Alaska, while contemporary fishtail spear points, so named for their shape, are known from Costa Rica all the way to Patagonia, the tip of South America. In Costa Rica, we now have recovered seven Clovis points and three fishtail points made by these first human inhabitants. But in Panama, seven fishtail points and only two Clovis points are documented. More than 10,000 years ago, Costa Rica's role as a major ancient cultural frontier was first recognized, and it continued from that time until the Spanish arrival in the early 1500s.
Interested? I certainly was, and in the following years this key cultural frontier aspect of ancient Costa Rica was substantiated time and time again.
Dr. Snarskis guides tours to Guayabo, an ancient city and ceremonial center near Turri-alba, and to all local museums. Direct queries to snarskis @racsa.co.cr or phone/fax 2235-8824. See his Web sites at www.archaeocostarica.com and www.arqueocostarica.net. Reserve tours at Costa Rica Outdoors Travel Division, www.info.costaricaoutdoors.com or call toll-free from North America at 1-800-8308-3394.
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