'Todo sobre mi madre' showing
Pedro Almodóvar's award-winning “All About My Mother,” 7 p.m., Spanish Cultural Center , Av.13, Ca. 31. Info: 2257-2919, ext. 118.

Review of Women's Club Cookbook
With recipe demonstrations, 9:30 a.m., Institute of Mexico, Ca. 41, Av. 10. Info: 2268-6130, 2293-4276.

Costa Rica's Public Services Regulatory Authority (ARESEP) approved this week increases in residential electricity rates ranging from an average of 11% to 41%, depending on the level of consumption.

Fernando Herrero, the regulator general, cited in an ARESEP statement an increased demand for electricity, a recent reduction in hydroelectric generation capacity and the rapid rise of petroleum prices among the reasons for the higher rate of increase this year.

Users who consume 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month will see an average increase of 11% in their bills. Those who use between 200 and 300 kwh will have a 14% increase, and consumers of more than 300 kwh per month will see a 41% increase.

Rates for factories will rise 22%.

“There is no more cheap electricity,” Herrero said. “We all have a responsibility in our electricity use. Those who use more should pay more. Energy is a commodity that costs us a lot.”

According to the statement, the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) requested the equivalent of a 74% increase in rates to absorb all costs incurred in 2008. However, ARESEP concluded that with an increase of 30%, ICE can cope with their financial obligations without risk to short-term financial sustainability.

The new rates will go into effect in mid-April, after their publication in the official government daily La Gaceta.

Twenty-four years ago a bomb exploded in a press conference at the Rio San Juan jungle headquarters of anti-Sandinista guerrilla leader Eden Pastora, killing three journalists – including Tico Times staffer Linda Frazier – and injuring 22 others.

Now a veteran Swedish journalist who claims to be a survivor of the May 30, 1984, bombing at La Penca, Nicaragua, has come forward to accuse various high-level Sandinistas of masterminding the plot.

Peter Torbiornsson, who covered the Sandinista revolution and contra war for Swedish media in the 1980s, returned to Nicaragua after being away for 18 years to accuse former Interior Minister Tomás Borge (currently ambassador to Peru), former chief of intelligence, Renán Montero, and former chief of counterintelligence, Lenín Cerna, of “crimes against humanity,” according to an interview yesterday in the daily El Nuevo Diario.

Torbiornsson acknowledges he was a former sympathizer of the leftwing Sandinista revolution.

But he says those sentiments were exploited by the Sandinista intelligence machine when a month before the bombing, Montero contacted the Swedish journalist and asked him for help introducing another journalist to contacts across the border in Costa Rica.

The ex-intelligence chief told Torbiornsson the man was a Danish journalist named Per Anker Hansen.

Torbiornsson, based in Costa Rica at the time, said he obliged. He ended up living for awhile with Hansen, whom he says he suspected of being a spy for the Sandinistas.

Hansen, in fact, turned out to be Argentine Marxist Roberto Vital Gaguine, who later carried a remote-controlled bomb to the La Penca press conference in an attempt to kill Pastora.

The bomb, which was placed inside a camera case under the table where Pastora and the journalists sat, got knocked over before detonating, and exploded in the wrong direction. Pastora was injured but survived, while others, including The Tico Times' Frazier, bled to death on the floor waiting for help that never came.

Subsequent media investigations found that Vital died in 1989 in an attack on a military barracks in Argentina. But it was never entirely clear whom he had been working for.

Torbiornsson alleges the Sandinista inner circle, including President Daniel Ortega, knows the truth about the La Penca bombing.

“Sooner or later the truth has to be known,” Torbirnsson told El Nuevo Diario, in an interview that the newspaper apparently waited to run until the journalist had left the country. “I didn't feel good about myself … I think it is the moment to tell the truth about this.”

President Oscar Arias and El Salvador's Antonio Saca signed an accord yesterday promising to cooperate on tourism, technology, trade and regional integration.

Speaking at a press conference in San José, Arias said Costa Rica would help El Salvador develop sustainable tourism, while El Salvador will help the Costa Rican government use more technology and better nurture small businesses.

Next week, El Salvador will host the third round of negotiations for an accord between Central America and the European Union, which will include political cooperation, E.U. aid and free trade.

Saca said he respected Arias' decision thus far to shun other regional integration efforts such as the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) and the Central American Court of Justice.

“I hope Costa Rica joins,” he said. “But we're going to respect Costa Rica's timeline and its decisions.”

The two presidents discussed crime, but Arias distinguished his country's problems from those plaguing the rest of Central America, where Saca said gangs are wreaking havoc.

“Fortunately, our problems are less worrisome,” Arias said. “Here we have seen an increase in robberies.”

Still, drug traffickers have descended on Costa Rica in recent years, and the government is investigating inroads by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

A Panamanian photographer was stabbed to death yesterday in a taxi while en route to a shootout in a neighborhood in the nation's capital, Panamanian media reported.

Eliécer Santamaría, of the daily El Siglo, died at 4 a.m. (local time) in Panama City's Santo Tomás Hospital after doctors could not save him.

Santamaría was in the La Porqueriza area of the barrio Pueblo Nuevo, when unidentified assailants stopped him in his tracks, killing the photographer and making a getaway.

The National College of Journalists decried the murder and demanded the authorities carry out an exhaustive investigation to find the killers.