Newcomers Club holiday event
Wine, cheese, bocas, chamber music, collecting toys, canned goods, rice, beans, etc. for Helping Hands Costa Rica, at noon, Swiss Travel, Ciudad Colón, 2416-1111, newcomerscr@yahoo.com.

Vallejo para Siempre
Homage to a Peruvian poet, 7 p.m., Taller del Artista, Tres Ríos.

Batuque Congo and Favio Abelino in concert
Electro Brazilian, 10 p.m., Jazz Café, Escazú, www.jazzcafecostarica.com.

Jazz jam session
10 p.m., Jazz Café, San Pedro, www.jazzcafecostarica.com.

Sixty years after abolishing its military, Costa Rica is promoting an ideology abroad that defense spending should instead fund social programs. B ut the country is not doing enough at home to keep the peace, according to Karen Olsen de Figueres, second wife of the man who famously disbanded Costa Rica's armed forces in 1948, President José “Pepe” Figueres.

“I say with great sadness that we are not doing what we've been capable of doing,” the former first lady told The Tico Times.

“I think that while we have violence in our streets, while we have in-fighting amongst us, this is not maintaining a culture of peace,” said Olsen, 78, born in Westchester, New York to a Danish family.

Olsen spoke yesterday following an official gathering to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the abolition of the military in the garden of San José's National Museum – which once served as military barracks known as the Cuartel Bellavista.

Attended by flag-waving schoolchildren, war veterans and politicians, yesterday's event was a forum in which the nation's leaders gave impassioned speeches praising the modernizing force of Figueres, who died in June 1990 after leading the country from 1948-1949, 1953-1958 and 1970-1974.

Known affectionately as don Pepe, Figueres rose to power after leading a victorious 44-day rebel uprising against President Teodoro Picado, only later to disband the military and oversee the drafting of a new c onstitution. 

Francisco Antonio Pacheco, acting president while Oscar Arias is in Asia, underscored the importance of Costa Rica's the international need to pass Figueres' peace torch, citing contemporary campaigns such as the Costa Rica Consensus, which, he said, “ urges countries to spend on the people rather than the military.”

In his speech, Acting Foreign Minister Edgar Ugalde linked Figueres' legacy to that of other leaders of the Americas.

“‘We are supporters,'” said Ugalde, quoting Figureres, “‘of the ideal of the New World of America … of Washington, Lincoln, Bolívar and Martí.'”

Several speakers also applauded President Arias' efforts abroad to push for stricter norms in the weapons trade.

Still, other peace-lovers sat with little ease during the annual Dec. 1 commemoration. The nonprofit Center for Peace is protesting a government move to send Tico police to train at the U.S. military school, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, at Fort Benning, Georgia. The institute took the place of the controversial School of the Americas (SOA), whose student body has included the likes of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

“Here we are talking about peace and we're sending (police officers) to Fort Benning. It's shocking; it's a disrespect for the people who have died” at the hands of SOA alumni, said San José-based Center for Peace's director Isabel MacDonald.

Following a year of deadly storms, Europe is moving to pad out Central America's finances toward disaster preparedness with a $10 million fund, according to the European Commission's Guatemala office.

The money will be deposited into a disaster preparedness fund of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid department, called DIPECHO, started in 1996, the CE office said in a statement.

The commission said DIPECHO will be used to carry out 20 new projects across the region aimed at enhancing Central America's response to natural disasters, helping some 600,000 residents.

Since Central America entered DIPECHO in 1988, the international aid package has put some $22.5 million toward financing nearly 70 projects.

Managua mayoral hopeful Eduardo Montealegre stood his ground yesterday, saying his opposition contingent – Vamos Con Eduardo, the “We're Going with Eduardo” movement – categorically refuses any attempt to negotiate a political solution to the country's governability crisis with the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Montealegre's statement echoes the position reiterated on Sunday by the opposition Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC), which says there is “nothing to negotiate” with the Sandinistas if the electoral results from the Nov. 9 municipal elections are not respected.

Montealegre, the PLC candidate for mayor of Managua, insists he won the popular vote and that the PLC and Vamos con Eduardo alliance members won a majority of the elections across the country, despite official results that gave the Sandinistas victory in Managua and most of Nicaragua. The disagreement over the elections has resulted in a government gridlock.

“Our position is that there has to be a recount in each municipality,” Montealegre said, adding that if a recount doesn't happen, the opposition lawmakers will vote to annul the Nov. 9 elections and demand a revote.

“For this reason, there is nothing to negotiate with the Sandinista Front, not today, not tomorrow and not the day after tomorrow, so long as they don't respect the will of the people of Nicaragua,” Montealegre said in a statement.

Montealegre's comments come after PLC lawmaker Francisco Aguirre, a confidant of party boss and incarcerated former President Arnoldo Alemán, said there needs to be a new political accord between the Sandinistas and PLC to provide a basic stability to the country and allow it to move forward.

The PLC later rejected Aguirre's comments and said the high-ranking party official was not speaking on behalf of the party.

Political pundits have speculated that President Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas and Alemán's Liberals will eventually seek a political accord – a redefinition of the terms of the decade-old power-sharing political pact, or “ el pacto ” – to resolve the crisis.

High-ranking Sandinista officials, including Supreme Court judge Rafael Solís, have already started lobbying for a semi-parliamentary system to replace Nicaragua's current presidential system. The idea is one that Ortega has advocated for several years, and something that critics have long warned could be the force behind the pacto – a political system that would allow Ortega and Alemán to solidify their bipartisan rule over Nicaragua, one as president and the other as prime minister.