Guitar Concert
By the Escuela Superior de Guitarra, Jan. 16, 10 p.m., Jazz Café, San Pedro.

Opening of Palmares Fiestas
Featuring a soccer game and fireworks, Palmares, Alajuela, 6 p.m. fiestaspalmares.com

Children Activities
“Don Teo's Farm,” ages 3-11, at National Biodiversity Institute (INBio), Santo Domingo , Heredia, 507-8100.

Astronomy Workshop
Ages 9 and up, 9 a.m.-noon at National Museum.

The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) plans to offer a new variety of super high-speed, high-volume Internet connections to companies in the Central Valley.

Known as the Red Metro Ethernet (Metro Ethernet Network), the service will offer connections of between 6 megabits per second and 1 gigabit per second. (By comparison, ADSL and cable Internet connections for a home operate between 128 kilobits and 1.5 megabits per second.)  

ICE said it will begin offering 3,800 of the high-volume connections this year, though the agency has yet to set a start date. ICE has invested about $5 million in the service, according to a press statement.

-Tico Times

By Gillian Gillers
Tico Times Staff | ggillers@ticotimes.net

Costa Rica moved one step closer to entering a free-trade agreement with the United States this week.  

Lawmakers approved the third of 11 bills required, in some form, to put the country in compliance with the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA), approved by referendum in October.  

The controversial law, a rallying point for the treaty's opponents, would give developers of new plant varieties the exclusive right to market them for up to 25 years. Lawmakers applied a fast-track process to the bill in October and passed it in an initial debate Monday.  

The Citizen Action Party (PAC), which opposes the treaty, plans to challenge the bill before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV), in a process that could take up to a month. For the bill to become law, the assembly must approve it a second time, and President Oscar Arias must sign it.  

The bill's final passage would block efforts by three environmental groups to hold a referendum on the proposal. The Supreme Elections Tribunal (TSE) gave a green light last month to the environmentalists to begin collecting signatures for a referendum.   

Monday's vote is a triumph for President Oscar Arias' administration, which has been pushing CAFTA for months. Still, several lawmakers said they doubt that all 11 CAFTA bills can be passed by a Feb. 29 deadline.  

Arias will decide in the coming weeks whether to ask for an extension from the treaty's other signers – the United States, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

The U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul A. Trivelli has sent official word to President Daniel Ortega's government of his departure in July, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday.  

Trivelli, who started the job in Managua in the fall 2005, taking the reins from Barbara Moore, did not give an exact date but told Foreign Minister Samuel Santos that he would step down as ambassador probably in July – turning the page of another rocky chapter in the relations between the embassy and its Sandinista host.  

The ambassador sparked controversy for his remarks about the 2006 Nicaraguan presidential election, expressing the U.S. administration's preference for seeing the conservative parties unite behind a single candidate and even offering to help finance a joint primary election.  

Warning against the outcome of a re-elected Sandinista government, Trivelli also threatened to cut off millions of dollars in U.S. aid.  

Then, in July, President Ortega accused the embassy of holding secret meetings with opposition groups, manipulating the media and paying demonstrators in a conspiracy to “discredit the Sandinista Front.” Trivelli denied the accusations.  

The United States did not take kindly to such claims, nor did it appreciate Ortega's outburst before the U.N. General Assembly in October in which he snared that the superpower to the north is “the biggest and most impressive dictatorship” in history.  

“Certainly the rhetoric is not helpful, particularly for investment,” Trivelli said in an interview in the fall with The Nica Times, a publication of The Tico Times (NT, Nov. 23).  

“Capital tends to go where the people feel that the risk is manageable,” he added. “And when they hear rhetoric they start to worry about and measure their risk.”  

And yet, despite the icy moments, Trivelli described ties between the United States and Nicaraguan as “satisfactory.”  

“We have a broader U.S.-Nicaragua relationship that, to me, is extremely deep,” he said.  

Born in 1953, Trivelli entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1978 and for most of his career has served as an Economic/Commercial Officer. He has been posted in such Latin American cities as Quito, Mexico City and Panama City.  

The embassy has not yet named a successor.  

The announcement, coupled with the imminent changeover at the embassy in San José, Costa Rica, marks a further step toward fresh U.S. faces in diplomacy with Central America.  

Trivelli's counterpart here, Mark Longdale, who arguably had an easier time engaging in diplomacy with his hosts, leaves at the end of the month.