With two weeks to voting, Fabricio Alvarado leads in the polls
With the election two weeks away, if the voting took place today Fabricio Alvarado of the Partido Restauración Nacional (PRN) would be elected the new president of Costa Rica.
With two weeks to voting, Fabricio Alvarado leads in the polls
According to the latest poll by Opol Consultores published Friday, Fabricio has a 13.8 point lead over his opponent, Carlos Alvarado – no relation – of the Partido Accion Cuidadana (PAC).
The Opol poll took in the responses of 3,300 people between March 12 and 16. The margin of error is 1.7%.
A week ago, the evangelical candidate had 10.4 percentage points more than his rival, so the advance is significant.
According to Opol Consultores, Fabricio Alvarado has 56.9% of the decided vote, while Carlos Alvarado 43.1%.
However, when taking into account all voters – decided, non-decided and electors who will not vote – the numbers look a little different: Fabricio’s lead over Carlos is only 8.8 percentage points.
The Opol poll reveals that among all voters:
36.5% would vote for Fabricio
27.7% for Carlos
13.6% are undecided
22.2% will not be voting
Thus, voters would go to the polls with reservations, since the undecided could change the outlook in the final voting that takes place on Sunday, April 1.
The newly elected president takes office at noon on May 8, when Luis Guillermo Solis of the PAC steps down, ending his 4-year mandate.
The foreign company inaugurated its facilities at Amazon Market Place, in Costa Rica, on February 12. Photo: Albert Marín.
Amazon, the American giant confirmed the dismissal of some of its employees in Costa Rica without detailing the numbers. An Amazon spokesperson explained that the company is comprised of multiple initiatives, some of which are shrinking, while others are growing rapidly.
Amazon inaugurated its facilities at Amazon Market Place, in Costa Rica, on February 12. Photo: Albert Marín.
“We have made small staff reductions in a couple of places, while continuing to contract aggressively in others.” In Costa Rica, our human resources team is supporting employees during this transition,” cites the company statement.
Recently, Amazon Costa Rica had announced that it would generate 1,500 new jobs in the country during 2018, including 350 for a new unit that provides support and attention to small and medium businesses that sell through the Amazon Marketplace.
At that time the country general manager, Alejandro Filloy, mentioned that they were proud to continue investing in Costa Rica.
“Here we have found great talent, which has allowed us to build a great team that demonstrates every day its obsession to provide the best service to our customers. Our commitment to Costa Rica remains firm and we hope to hire hundreds more employees and thus grow our great team,” added Filloy.
The company started operations in Costa Rica in 2009 with just 30 employees.
Currently, Amazon reports having more than 6,500 employees distributed in various business parks, including El Tobogán Corporate Center (Barrio Tournón), Ultrapark Lag (Lagunilla), American Free Zone (San Francisco de Heredia) and the Zona Franca del Este (Calle Blancos).
The average lifespan in the U.S. is about 78 years, and for the first time since the 1990s, it’s getting shorter.
Despite spending much more on health care, Americans are sicker than people in other wealthy countries, with illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and stroke on the rise. So are “despair deaths” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, according to researchers, with social isolation, poverty, and addiction laying the groundwork.
A long life is not just a health issue; it’s a justice issue. The wealthiest 1 percent, according to a study reported in The Lancet medical journal, now live on average 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent. The shock of that statistic belies some basic logic that says the length of your life should not depend on the size of your bank account.
How long should we be living? It’s true that living past 100 while remaining healthy has much to do with genetics, but what about getting close to 100? There are cultures that regularly see people healthy into their 90s, free of the many diseases associated with aging.
In 2005, Dan Buettner’s National Geographic project studied such communities and found their commonalities. His research team of doctors, anthropologists, and epidemiologists discovered five “Blue Zones,” places in the world where people live the longest: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California. Buettner’s book The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest became a bestseller.
“At first, it was purely a research question,” Buettner says. “It was a way to solve a cool mystery. It took about five years for me to realize that our findings could help Americans with their health.” Now he and his team are using what they learned about healthy longevity to transform communities in this country.
“None of the people in the Blue Zones tried to live longer than everyone else on earth,” Buettner says. “It’s the way they live naturally. So rather than nag people to exercise or eat healthy, why not shape people’s environments so that health is basically mindless?”
The Blue Zones Community Project was born. It aims to reshape culture and environment to change individual behavior, so the changes stick. “The thing about these longevity principles,” Buettner says, “is that you have to do them for a long time. If you’re a vegan for two years and then eat burgers and fries for the rest of your life, that vegan diet won’t do much for you.” So far, Blue Zones Project initiatives have reached almost 3.5 million people in more than 40 cities.
Leaving long life and good health up to individuals means economic inequality comes into play, but when longevity is a group effort, communities can use Blue Zones research to help everyone live longer and healthier. Studies show that social change begins to happen when as little as 10 percent of a population changes its thinking. This is why Blue Zones teams only need about 20 percent of the population to sign Blue Zones pledges—de-conveniencing their homes to promote more movement, starting to volunteer, joining a moai group. “I don’t advertise,” Buettner says. “Cities come to me—most recently my own, Minneapolis.”
Buettner likes to deal at the city and community level; there are typically five to 10 low-hanging fruits in terms of changes to make right away that don’t stir up political tension or cost the city a lot of money. “I’d rather go to a city council and get them to pass an ordinance limiting the number of fast food restaurants within a given area than nag people to eat healthy,” Buettner says. “I get so much more done.”
Here are five principles communities can adapt to create a culture of longevity—and justice.
1. Eat Mostly Plants
Lessons from Sardinia, Italy
Sardinia, the first Blue Zone researchers identified, is a genetically and culturally isolated island in the Mediterranean with the world’s longest-lived men. The common diet is heavy on plants, legumes, and fish, with meat only occasionally. Importantly, eating is a social activity. Laughter with friends reduces stress, which in turn contributes to less heart disease, improved immune systems, and sharper cognitive function.
While it is becoming more widely accepted that eating more plants is better for human health and the planet, it’s often individuals left to make diet changes. But what if the commitment to a plant-based diet were community-wide?
Beacon Food Forest, 2 1/2 miles south of downtown Seattle, is more than 5 acres of permaculture food farming, providing food access for anyone who needs it. “We want people who are not software engineers in this city to know we still care about them,” co-founder Jackie Cramer says.
A large strip of seasonal vegetables lines the forest to the west, and a gravel path separates the veggies from an abundant welter of fruit trees and bushes bearing everything from goumi and goji berries to the more familiar blackberries and blueberries. Some plants are specifically for supporting native pollinators. There’s a nut grove and mushroom hut. Anyone can walk through the public part of the forest to forage.
The forest is run by volunteers—a committed core of 20 to 25 people plus others who can be called upon if needed for specific tasks. “We’re not strict with our volunteers,” Cramer says. “If you don’t like a project, walk away and join another team. And if you have an idea for a project, we’re totally open.” Maybe this is why Beacon Food Forest never lacks workers. The project not only introduces volunteers to food-growing that respects seasonality and the ecosystem, but it connects them to their community. “I’ve never met so many people in such a short amount of time,” says volunteer Joe Sutton-Holcomb.
Food as a way to build community has been effective in this fearful political climate of the Trump administration. “We’d put signs out indicating free food,” Cramer says, “but some of the neighbors across the street wouldn’t come. So we took the food to them and found out that they weren’t visiting because they weren’t sure if they needed identification.”
2. Move Naturally
Lessons from Ikaria, Greece
“The world’s longest-lived people,” the Blue Zones project says, “don’t pump iron, run marathons or join gyms. Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it.” The people of the small island of Ikaria have perfected the healthy art of natural movement. The very oldest members of this community are generally poor and living in the highlands, but they are healthy. Between active days of gardening or frequent walks to friends’ houses, residents don’t have to set aside time dedicated to movement.
In the United States, our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and culture have been built around the automobile. To address the deadliness of this sedentary lifestyle, employers include gym memberships in benefits packages. Doctors repeat the recommendation to exercise for 30 minutes five times a week so often that many people live with guilt for not fitting a workout into their day. But what if exercise wasn’t just one more item on our already overstuffed to-do lists?
We all can’t hoof it up a hill to hang out with friends, and city living makes gardening challenging. But all environments, from dense urban centers to rural neighborhoods, can be reconfigured to support more walking as transportation.
Feet First, a pedestrian advocacy organization in Washington state, has been working since 1995 to make communities safer and easier to walk in. Feet First works to establish safe routes for kids walking to school and trains volunteers to design and lead walks through their own communities, with themes such as “Hidden Beauty” or “How to Get All Your Errands Done on Foot.” The group develops educational materials for commuters and engages legislators to make policy and budget choices that favor walkability.
Imagine those neighborhoods you see in old movies where people are waving to each other on the way to the grocery store. Achieving that depends largely on where you start. “People have an easier time intuitively understanding grids than cul-de-sacs,” says Feet First’s Policy Committee Chair John Stewart. Neighborhoods built before World War II are easier to work with than much of what we’ve built in the last 20 years. He says, “It’s really about a sense of social cohesion. Cyclists, pedestrians, drivers. The way we think about things right now, these are three separate and sometimes adversarial communities.”
Safe, walkable neighborhoods put more natural movement into your day and also build community solidarity. “You’ll know about the elderly person who needs to be checked up on or the person who needs a certain medication,” Stewart explains. This awareness is a crucial part of emergency preparedness.
Overcoming the barriers to walkability requires stretching our definition of community building. “Coalitions of like-minded people—including legislators, residents, those working to expand public transit, and researchers who understand that pedestrian advocacy is a long-term commitment—are essential. It took us a long way to get as far from walkable communities as we are, and it will take us a while to get to the level that Denmark or Amsterdam are, for example,” Stewart says. “It will require a design shift to make driving less convenient than walking. But it will also take a culture shift to get people thinking less ‘I have to give up something’—namely convenience when they drive less—and more ‘I am gaining something’—namely exercise and community when they walk more.”
3. Decrease Stress
Lessons from Nicoya, Costa Rica
Residents of Nicoya value traditions and social connections. Nicoyan centenarians get frequent visits from neighbors. They work hard physically throughout their lives, even the oldest among them, and continue old ways that go back to the Chorotega, Indigenous people of the region, including a diet of fortified maize and beans.
On an individual level, de-stressing might look like a regular yoga or mindfulness practice, spending time in nature, prayer, or journaling. While these can be beneficial, in an era where thousands of jobs are being outsourced or outdated and nearly 1 in 4 Americans says they have no one they could turn to for support, a bunch of individuals reflecting on their days or doing breath work isn’t going to be enough, even for those individuals. We are social beings; we need to reduce collective stress by supporting each other.
Modern Western communities have become unmoored from traditions and extended social groups, and the resulting individualism may be at the root of one of the greatest modern stressors: inequality. Chuck Collins, author of Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, suggests that solving economic inequality requires “an economy that supports working, yes, but much more time for taking care of each other, playing, and making art.”
“Disconnection is a drug; privilege isolates and anesthetizes,” Collins writes.
So how can a community de-stress together? Fight inequality. Reach outside your socio-economic sphere, befriend people in different social classes. Find common goals to work toward together: community gardening, repairing houses, improving public spaces. Organize support for those who are vulnerable in this current regime of hatred.
4. Cultivate a Sense of Purpose
Lessons from Loma Linda, California
The 9,000-member Seventh-day Adventist Church makes up the core of the only Blue Zone in America. Church members create a social fabric out of helping others in the community, and the church provides many opportunities for volunteering. Giving time to others not only staves off depression, but doing so with others as part of a larger mission amplifies the benefits.
Two-thirds of Americans hate their jobs. Yet meaningful work is good for our health. Blue Zones research explains, “Knowing your purpose adds up to seven years of life expectancy.” Opportunities to change jobs can be limited by circumstances, though.
Perhaps we can get those health benefits by creating communities with a shared sense of purpose. Native cultures share a stewardship for the Earth, believing that it belongs to everyone, including future generations. Alaska has built into policy the idea that its resources do not belong to any individual exclusively, so every Alaskan resident receives a portion of oil revenue.
In Montana last year, the idea of opening up the state to take in refugees started with one woman but would likely not have grown into Soft Landing, the nonprofit in Missoula that welcomes and resettles refugees, had it not been for others joining her. Mary Poole was spurred by a viral picture of a dead Syrian child, and was joined by other Montana moms in creating space for refugees. “I’m not a political person. I’m not a save-the-world activist. I don’t have a TV. I didn’t know about refugees, that it was a debate,” Poole says.
She may not have started out as an activist, but she and the other Soft Landing moms who joined her have a clear sense of purpose. So far, 30 refugee kids have a place in Montana schools. “Our sense of purpose is still very focused. On the simplest level, it’s how do we create a welcoming environment for refugee families in our community? More broadly, it’s how do we be a good community member as an organization and extend that welcome to everyone in a rising-tide-lifts-all-ships sort of way? So we do dialogue training, join the housing conversations that our community is having—you know, really exist within a community. We now have 30 volunteers that do one-on-one tutoring with every single English-language kid, not just refugees in our schools.” This is what happens when you get to know your surroundings: You see needs and create ways to meet them.
Human beings are social. If we tell stories of what we can do together, then everyone can draw some sense of individual purpose from the shared purpose. We will also have more stamina and inspiration for the tough battles ahead—dismantling racism, dealing with police brutality, climate change. And we might begin to combat social isolation and loneliness at the same time.
5. Belong to a Healthy Tribe
Lessons from Okinawa, Japan
Okinawa is where women live longer than anywhere else. Okinawans stay active by keeping “medical gardens” full of vegetables, herbs, and spices that they consume every day. They have ikigai, a strong sense of shared purpose. They maintain deep dedication to friends and family, with social networks, moais, groups of friends dedicated to each other for life. These tribes promise financial support in times of need, allowing for the emotional security of knowing that someone is always there for them.
Smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness all have been shown to be contagious. So it stands to reason that the longest-lived people live in communities where most people are making healthy choices. Think of this “group mind” as positive peer pressure.
But healthy tribes to surround us are largely missing in the U.S. Generations move away from each other, and a Western culture of individualism is one part of the problem. Consider that romantic relationships are valued higher than friendships. Can we reverse that? Our health and longevity would improve if we did.
How do we create a moai culture? Social philosopher Roman Krznaric suggests that one way to do this is through restoring a sense of belonging, and to do this we cultivate empathy. “There are two kinds of individualism, and there are at least two kinds of empathy,” Krznaric says.
“Individualism that pictures each human being as totally self-sufficient providing for all of his or her material, physical, and social needs is damaging and dishonest. But individualism that celebrates each human being’s unique personhood and potential contribution to the world—we’ll call that individuality—that’s good and necessary,” he says. Shifting our collective story away from rugged individualism and more toward interconnected individuality will reduce the stigma around asking for help and relieve the terrible burden of loneliness and stress if one has to make it all on one’s own.
A culture that supports, protects, and honors friendships will give everyone more opportunities to be surrounded by caring people making healthy choices. Changing our environments might be difficult, but it’s easier than changing all by ourselves.
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QCostarica.com was not involved in the creation of the content. This article was originally published on Yesmagazine.com. Read the original article.
New experiments show that dominant male Long-billed Hermits have better spatial memories and sing more consistent songs than less successful males, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports.
In the glitzy world of hummingbirds , one species seems to profit more from mental prowess than physical flamboyance.
Moscow will follow the US policy with respect to the countries of Latin America in light of US President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Mike Pompeo to head the State Department, Alexander Schetinin, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Latin American department, said on Thursday.
“We have heard everything that was said with respect to Cuba, we have made comments assessing the US policy pursued by the former state secretary [Rex Tillerson]. Let’s see what Pompeo’s course will be like,” Schetinin said, answering a question about whether Moscow expected any changes in US policy in Latin America, in particular in relation to Cuba.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump announced the replacement of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with current CIA director Pompeo, which has yet to be confirmed by the US Senate.
In late 2014, the United States and Cuba expressed their intention to start work on the normalization of relations between the two countries. In July 2015, Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations. Subsequently, the two governments have signed several bilateral agreements.
However, US President Donald Trump declared the abolition of the policy of his predecessor Barack Obama aimed at the normalization of bilateral relations with Cuba in June.
Travelers to Brazil are being warned to vaccinate themselves against yellow fever due to an outbreak of the disease in urban areas, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warned in a press release on Friday.
“In response to a large, ongoing outbreak of yellow fever in multiple states of Brazil … CDC is recommending travelers to the country protect themselves from yellow fever by getting the yellow fever vaccine at least 10 days before travel, and taking steps to prevent mosquito bites during their travel,” the release said.
Those who are unable to get yellow fever vaccine or are not recommended to get it should avoid traveling to areas of Brazil where the yellow fever vaccination is recommended, the release added.
Travelers going to areas with ongoing outbreaks may consider getting a booster dose of yellow fever vaccine if it has been 10 or more years since they were vaccinated, the release said.
Brazilian public health authorities announced in early 2017 an outbreak of yellow fever in several eastern states of Brazil, including areas where yellow fever was not traditionally considered to be a risk, the release noted.
Since the end of 2017, yellow fever cases have reoccurred in several states, especially in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo, including areas close to the city of São Paulo, according to the release.
Nicaragua’s National Assembly reiterated its support for Cuba in the international campaign to condemn the economic, commercial and financial blockade that the United States Government has maintained for more than half a century.
This pronouncement took place during a meeting between the president of the national parliament, Gusto Porras, and the Cuban ambassador here, Juan Carlos Hernández, who thanked the Central American nation for its constant support against Washington’s hostile policy.
Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly voted, with more and more countries in favor, resolutions that demand the end of the siege, imposed under the presidency of the US citizen John F. Kennedy in 1962.
Last year a similar initiative received the support of 191 of the 193 member countries of the United Nationas (UN), while the United States and Israel voted against it.
Cuban authorities keep saying that the US embargo against Cuba caused damages to the island for more than US$822 million dollars in almost six decades.
Roasting cacao beans in Costa Rica. Photo by David Sovka
A small lizard is doing a slow-motion dance just off my starboard bow. That is to say, three feet from where my hammock nearly scrapes bottom, a tiny reptile is slowly lifting one leg, then another, then another, through a dance-like cycle aimed at protecting its wee piggies from the baking hot tiles of the hotel courtyard.
It’s an interesting strategy, one might even say a darling strategy, given how cute the lizard is, but it is not my preferred approach to beating the heat (I may have neglected to mention the large bottle of ice-cold beer sharing the hammock with me).
Roasting cacao beans in Costa Rica. Photo by David Sovka
My point is that every animal here in Costa Rica needs a strategy for coping with the heat, the rain and the super-abundance of larger, more toothy creatures that make for such interesting-sounding nights in the jungle.
At nighttime in the jungle it is dark, and moist, and still warm, and it is surprisingly loud: shrieks, howls, chirps, whines and — eventually — crunches followed by satisfied lip-smacking, dominate the soundscape. You might think that it would be far too loud (and dark, moist and hot) for such prosaic activities as, say, sleeping.
But … here’s the strangest thing about the jungle. As night deepens, the pervasive sounds strongly suggest that you are about to die in the jaws of something really awful at any second, and what’s more, everybody else in the neighbourhood is very excited about snacking on the leftovers.
Nevertheless, you settle in, tucking in the mosquito net, and trying to shut off your ears, because what else are you going to do, go home and watch TV?
Miraculously, you do not fall prey to the jaguars (a real thing here) or bird-eating tarantulas (also a real thing here). Instead, the jungle sounds lull you to sleep like a young Tarzan on Kala’s big soft gorilla bosoms.
I suspect the organic, frightening sounds of the jungle turn out to be unexpectedly soothing because they remind us, way down in our fetal memories, of our mothers. Specifically, the sounds of our mother’s digestive system in action.
The whips and scorns of time
This morning we cycle 20 kilometres uphill and inland from Puerto Viejo de la Talamanca and the Caribbean Sea, stopping from time to time to admire a toucan flash by, or to watch a sloth sleep, high up in the trees away from predators.
I assume they are sleeping. Maybe they’re doing their taxes, or writing memoirs. With sloths, who can tell?
Eventually, we reach the Bribri farm of Catato López and his family of eight children and 14 (so far) grandchildren. Senor López and his wife greet us like old friends.
Like all indigenous people here, they are both small in stature and look no more than 40 years old. They might be 80 or 800.
Don’t let Canadian ideas of farming — big and flat, full of cows and tractors and terrible country music — shape your thoughts.
This is a Bribri jungle farm: small plantings of cacao, coffee, bananas, and many medicinal plants grow in dark tropical groves, surrounded by a few simple buildings with palm-thatched roofs and springy palm-stalk floors.
Estimates of Costa Rica’s Bribri population vary wildly, somewhere between 10,000-35,000 people in isolated matrilineal clan groups in the big and scary Talamanca mountain range and islands off the coast.
“Isolated” is the key reason nobody knows exactly how many Bribri there are — and also the key reason why the Spanish did not wipe them out like most other indigenous Mesoamerican peoples they found in the New World. The Talamanca region is unforgivingly creative in the many ways it finds to kill unwary visitors: poisonous swamps thick with disease-carrying mosquitos, spirit-sapping cloud forests, and dangerous jungle full of jaguars, snakes, and other certain death unless you really know what you’re doing. As tough and technologically advanced as they were, the would-be Spanish conquerors did not. The Bribri did, and they still do.
Catato López is an entrepreneur. In addition to his family farm, he is building up a tourist-friendly side business showing people how to make chocolate from jungle-harvested cacao pods, guiding people in the identification and harvest of medicinal plants, and showing off his very own open-air zoological park for family Dendrobatidae (poison dart frogs). I have no idea how anyone knows about this remote hillside in the Talamancas, but they obviously do, and in numbers big enough to keep the López family busy showing us around.
We begin with chocolate-making, which is as ridiculous and unlikely a process, as the product is delicious and wonderful. Step one is to harvest the cacao beans that grow in weird pods about the size of a submarine sandwich. Cacao pods grow directly out of the trunk of the cacao tree, starting tiny and green, growing larger and purple, and finally ripening to an orange-red colour. Splitting the pod open gives access to the cacao beans, which need to fermented for a couple of days, and then dried.
I’ve spent my entire adult life not knowing how to pronounce the word “cacao.” Today I finally ask for help, under the pretext of improving my Spanish. The correct pronunciation (in both English and Spanish) is “ka-COW;” not “CO-co” which is the chocolate end product, nor “co-co” which is the Spanish word for coconut; nor “co-CO” which is not a word at all and makes you sound silly in both English and Spanish. Isn’t language fun?
We roast the cacao beans in a shallow cast-iron pan over an open fire. Soon they make popcorn sounds, and turn a darker colour, like roasted coffee beans. We de-husk the roasted beans using a winnowing movement like Ma Ingles on the prairie, and then put them in a manual grinder that turns the dry, hard, dusty beans into a dark, oily, delicious paste. The process is pure magic. The product is pure chocolate. We spread it on the tiny, sweet bananas that grow at head height every where you look. Ohhhhhhhh yeahhhhhhhhh.
Making chocolate is one of those impossible wonders that gives credence to the ideas of wing nuts like Erich von Däniken: maybe ancient humans had alien help to make something so yummy. How else would we have have figured out how to get from X to Y to Z to chocolate? I feel this way about almost everything growing on Catato López’ property, from the cinnamon tree (SPOILER: the spice is in the bark!) to the tiny poison factories harvested for hunting and warfare (SPOILER: do NOT lick).
That’s right, the jungle is — quite literally — hopping with poison dart frogs, each with enough lipophilic alkaloid toxins on its skin to kill 10 men. Despite this, they are as cute as an armful of puppies. Some are bright red, some are green with spots. There are over 170 species of Dendrobatidae, most of them tiny and very brightly-coloured as an aposomatic warning to potential predators: Don’t eat me, bro, I’m like super poisonous.
Orange you glad I didn’t say bananas?
Eventually we leave the Bribri people, and the chocolate, and the frogs. We have a 50 km ride ahead, through banana plantations toward the Sixaola River border crossing between Costa Rica and Panama.
Most of Limón province is in the Caribbean lowlands, which means that it is banana country. Lots and lots and lots of bananas, planted in neat rows off into the distance. Bananas were first grown here in 1878. Three companies dominate the industry, which exports bananas all over the world. Today we know them as Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte, but they have had many names over the past 100-plus years of extremely bloody history. The history of bananas is the history of banana republics, and it is not a happy history.
But here’s a happy bit of banana lore: banana bunches grow pointing upward, while their less-sweet cousins, plantains, grow pointing downward. Cycling past a hundred thousand banana plants (the banana is technically a herb, not a tree) makes me crave more of that chocolate paste from this morning. Also, banana muffins and pancakes. And now that I’m considering options, a banana split sundae also strikes me as being a pretty good idea right now.
The undiscovere’d country
It is 35C and the humidity — oh the humidity! — is only slightly less than the bottom of the Pacific ocean. We are drenched in sweat and road filth, and approach the border crossing looking like the kind of people they probably don’t want in their country.
Four years ago, when I last crossed this border with my dad, the bridge only — and barely — accommodated foot traffic. Now a new bridge is being built, which currently allows for a narrow, single lane of large trucks to compete with the pedestrians.
I’m not sure how this is an improvement, but at this point I am devoting every resource I can muster to just get through the inefficient Third-World border control process (think forms, lots of forms, all wet and sticky from being clenched in my hand). We pay seven moist American dollars each to enter the country, or maybe it is to leave the other country, while three different sets of officials examine our documents and frown at us. One of them yells, but he does it in such thickly-accented English that I have no idea what the problem is, and try not to make eye contact. Eventually they let us in to Panama.
My theory, based on a lot of experience with this sort of thing, is that the poorer and smaller the regime, the more silly and self-important the border officials. I don’t mean to criticize, but I do mean to compare our entrance to Panama with our return to Canada a couple of weeks later: the Canadian border officer at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport actually smiled at us, and said just two words as he waved us in: “Welcome home.”
Two of my very favourite words. Like chocolate and bananas.
Colombian authorities want the face value of 500-peso coins to be slashed to 50 centavos, while the minimum wage would be reduced from 781,242 pesos to 781.
A drastic reduction in the values of change, however, it should not be something alarming, likely only to cause minor inconvenience, the authorities argue.
The new family of $20 thousand bills (top) in ciculation since June 2016 no longer carries the three zeros as in the previous series (bottom). Banco de la República
What happens is that the government decided to present a plan to eliminate three zeros to the banknotes and coins, an old initiative that is now gaining more strength because of the situation the country is experiencing.
In the change is approved, instead of paying 4,000 pesos for an arepa with meat and cheese in the streets of Bogotá you will pay only 4 pesos.
A ticket in low season to travel from the Colombian capital to Cartagena will no longer cost 441,500 pesos but 441 pesos with 50 centavos, a much less bombastic sum.
Not to mention the real estate, where now the rents are paid in millions of pesos and the price of a house in an exclusive neighborhood can have 11 figures.
The proposal to be sent to Congress and may be one of the last major measures to be approved (or at least discussed) by the current legislature, since Colombia will have a new Legislative Power and government come August of this year.
In an interview this week, President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed that the project will be presented in the coming days.
The proposal has the been raised by legislators for almost two decades, presented to Congress several times in the last 18 years, but it has always been diluted in the middle of the legislative bureaucracy.
On this occasion, however, the project is already drafted, it will be presented this month and if approved, it will begin its implementation on January 1, 2019.
Among the benefits, the government maintains, it will make everyday transactions simpler.
“It’s going to make life easier for everyone, it’s going to make accounting easier for companies, printing price lists and menus, and now that we have more tourists the currency exchange will also be favorable,” the minister of Finance and Public Credit, Mauricio Cárdenas said.
But, is it possible?
Consulted in this regard, the economist specialized in markets and consumer Camilo Herrera said that although removing three zeros to the currency is not an emergency, it is “sensible to facilitate the lives of people.”
“Politically I see it as possible, I see it as possible and economically as I see it as useful,” said the expert who is also president of Raddar, a corporation dedicated to consumption analysis based in Bogotá.
Herrera indicated that among large companies and financial sectors the transition would be relatively easy due to the broad understanding they have of these processes.
Therefore, he estimates that the sector where problems may arise is in those who use the notes and coins every day.
“There can be a very high psychological shock for the person who goes from earning one million pesos a month to earning 1,000, that is, you have to know how to handle it well,” the analyst explained.
The expert adds that this is why an important educational campaign must be carried out by the government, the Banco de la Republica (Colombian Central Bank), public institutions and trade to avoid that the change generates confusion or discomfort.
For his part, economist and teacher Andrés Álvarez argues that Colombia has reached a level of stability enough to start the process of eliminating the three zeros.
“The country in terms of monetary stability has managed to consolidate clearly, except for some shock by the fall in oil prices a few years ago,” said the professor of the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá.
Álvarez explained that the issue has matured little by little by the authorities and showed that the current bills are already designed not to include the three zeros.
In the new paper money family that circulates in Colombia, for example, we read “20 thousand pesos” instead of 20,000 as in the old bills.
What are the costs?
Colombian media published estimates that the cost of the transition could cost around 800 billion pesos (more than US$280 million dollars).
In this regard, Minister Cardenas said that the amount is exaggerated because the change would not be made overnight.
“That figure is not correct and could be much less than what is spoken because there will be a broad transition period and with a gradual entry of new banknotes,” the authority explained.
Finally, Camilo Herrera of Raddar, argues that removing the three zeros is not only a way of telling Colombians that there is economic stability, but also an enormous possibility of sending a message to the world.
“It is the opportunity to say that Colombia is now much better and that we are not the Colombia of the last century, we will have a better and stronger currency because Colombia today is better and stronger”.
Spending is not the path to salvation. Photographer: Daniel Ramalho/AFP/Getty Images
(Bloomberg) With its open doors to tourists, no standing army since 1948, and proud claims as Central America’s oldest democracy, Costa Rica is not the place you’d look for a religious uprising. Yet this country of 4.9 million may be poised next month to elect a former gospel singer and television evangelist dedicated to fighting gay marriage and rescuing the country from the Devil’s designs.
Spending is not the path to salvation. Photographer: Daniel Ramalho/AFP/Getty Images
Sure, when Fabricio Alvarado Munoz topped a dozen rivals to win the first round of the presidential election last month, the 43-year-old evangelist sounded almost ecumenical in his call for a movement “of solidarity, values, of innovation and of genuine progress.” Parse the stump speech, though, and catch the new grammar of the Latin American reformation, where an aggressive faith-based conservatism is moving from the pews to politics. But in Costa Rica as elsewhere in the region, that could spell trouble for efforts to deal with deep-seated economic problems, not least the world’s highest overall fiscal deficit.
Just a few decades ago, evangelical Christians in mostly Catholic Latin America were targets of discrimination and harassment, and they steered clear of electoral politics. The cloister ended with the rise of Pentecostal sects, now the majority among the region’s Protestant orders, where ambitious pastors with an eye on secular glory whipped their growing fold into disciplined cadres, especially at election time. Boston University political scientist Taylor Boas calls the evangelicals’ rise a feature of the “new inclusion” in Latin American democracy.
Evangelicals arguably are still underrepresented in public office, but they have scored important wins. Some 80 of Brazil’s 513-member lower house are self-defined evangelicals; Rio de Janeiro, the country’s second largest city, is run by a Pentecostal mayor, a first among the country’s 27 regional capitals. Evangelicals have brokered their support of mainstream candidates, like Mexican presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. And while Protestant churchgoers have long thrown their weight behind establishment leaders, such as former Peruvian autocrat Alberto Fujimori or evangelical strongman Efrain Rios Montt, more recently they are forming their own religion-based parties and challenging legacy politics.
Granted, a good part of this shift is down to the lackluster competition: Catholic liturgy has lost its allure before a nimble class of pastors with their brightly lit temples, catchier soundtracks and seismic sermons that inveigh against the indulgences of the flesh and spirit, and promise real-time salvation.
Of course, such trappings also can be an invitation to obscurantism. Consider Brazil’s evangelical congressional caucus, which took point on legalizing so-called reconversion therapy for homosexuals, or Alvarado’s vow to pull his country from a marquee Latin American human rights convention rather than obey the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. Never mind that the convention is the San Jose Pact, named for the capital of the host nation, Costa Rica.
If there is a lodestar for evangelical politicians, it’s “Know thy constituency”: 69 percent of Costa Ricans reject gay marriage, and despite recent legal reforms most Latin Americans still say amen to that. “While nations such as Argentina and Brazil were among the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex unions, it was often achieved through supreme court decisions instead of national referendums,” Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me.
What’s less clear is whether such evangelical ardor can be leveraged into vital reforms in countries that have long been hostage to cronyism, corruption and fiscal sins.
Until this year, Alvarado was a relatively obscure federal legislator, whose National Restoration Party wielded little clout in congress. Even as his closest rival — who actually shares the same family name — announced plans this week to slash the deficit and limit public borrowing, front-runner Alvarado has said next to nothing about public spending, now running at 21 percent of gross domestic product, or on reducing the national deficit, which climbed to 6.2 percent in 2017, a 34-year high, according to Giancarlo Morelli of the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Aside from its predictable opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, Brazil’s sizable evangelical caucus was best known for lobbying last year to pardon millions of dollars worth of church debts and win tax breaks for its congregation. So much for Weberian self-reliance and the Protestant work ethic.
“It’s probably unrealistic to expect evangelical politicians to behave differently in a region where distributing public resources to your constituency is the rule,” said Boas in an interview.
Not everyone agrees. “Protestantism could be a force to modernize the state by calling for concentrating public services in education, health and security,” theology scholar Franklin Ferreira, an independent pastor who lectures at the Brazilian chapter of the Martin Bucer Seminary, told me. “But I don’t see many evangelicals embracing that agenda.”
Instead, Ferreria said, evangelical politicians are more likely to “exploit Christian clichés” as they serve up more familiar political fare, such as cash handouts and subsidies, which political bosses can easily hijack. “Populists, amateurs and the unprepared” is how Ferreira described his country’s evangelical politicians in a recent book, suggestively titled “Against Idolatry of the State.”
Marcelo Neri, who studies the religious economy at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio, traces the populist jag to the shifting demographics of faith during times of duress. Neri’s studies show that the ranks of evangelicals surged from 6.6 percent to 16.2 percent of the population from 1980 to 2000, which were “lost decades” for the Brazilian economy. “In times of economic emergency, with inflation and high unemployment, the evangelical churches end up taking on a paternalist role, mimicking the state,” Neri told me.
Sure, evangelicalism has also been an important ladder for social groups that have been left out of traditional politics and slighted by organized religion. Latin American evangelicals are generally poorer, blacker and more female than their Catholic counterparts, and practice their faith more fervently, according to a survey by Latinobarometro. That holds even for Costa Rica, where Catholicism is the state religion but bleeding souls. “Small evangelical orders are gaining devotees and helping people prosper in less privileged areas, where the state can’t reach,” Morelli explained. “That means political machinery.”
Given the soldierly discipline, devotion and handsome collections that pastors marshal from their flock, the potential political capital for aspiring candidates of all political persuasions is irresistible. That’s one reason why instead of waging holy war, Catholics and evangelicals are increasingly likely to team up to push socially conservative policies of mutual interest, such as fighting abortion, boosting (heterosexual) family values, and keeping vexing gender politics out of the classroom.
If only the same alliances could work their miracles on the region’s incorrigible state finances.
Costarica.com was not involved in the creation of the content. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners, and was originally published on Blooberg.com. Read the original.
Temperatures in the Central Vally could reach as high as 31 Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) today, March 17, a few degrees hotter than than usual.
That is the prediction by the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional (IMN) – national weather service, that added outside the Central Valley, in places like Liberia, Guancaster, 35 and 36 Celsius will be norm today. Record numbers could also be along the Pacific coasts of the country.
A fire that broke out in the center of the barrio in Villa Paola de San Francisco de Heredia, had firefighters (bomberos) scrambling to prevent the flames from burning the entire low-income neighborhood to ashes.
The humble home of Felipa Caldero, a Nicaraguan national who has lived in the home for the last 18 years, was burned to the ground
The bomberos combatted the fire from all sides using two pumpers and a tanker truck (for the supply of water), weaving their hoses through the narrows passages between the shanty homes mainly built of wood and zinc.
The efforts of the firefighters saved the barrio, but not the home of Felipa Calderon, a Nicaraguan national who has lived in the small home for the last 18 years with six other adults, where the fire began. Felipa said the fire broke out while she was at work and no one home at the time, the fire completely destroying her home and everything in it.
The cause of the fire is believed to be a short in the electrical system. At the entrance of the shanty town, authorities located 34 electrical meters, but could not estimate how many of the homes were connected to the system.
The photo is typical of electrical connections in shanty towns across the greater metropolitan area of San Jose.
The Organismo de Investigación Judicial (OIJ) presented the first report of the deaths of Randall Gerardo Chacón Chavarría, 51 years old and his son Allan Gabriel Chacón Vega, 26 years old, in Mata Redonda, in La Sabana, on Thursday, on the west side of San Jose.
Authorities theorize the murder of the father and son could have been a result of a robbery or assault, however, are not clear on the motive, meanwhile the neighbors question how the murderers entered without raising suspicion.
José Francisco Rojas Padilla was sentenced to 12 years in prison on 3 counts of sexual abuse against a minor, who at the time of the events was only 10 years old.
The incidents occurred in 2014, when the man took advantage of the fact that he worked as a school bus driver, transporting students to and from a school.
During the investigation, the accused continued to work as a student transporter, until he was sentenced by the Pococi Criminal Court (Tribunal Penal de Pococí) Thursday, March 16, 2018.
The court also ordered the immediate diqualification man’s license to drive minivans or transport students.
Looking for something interesting and different to do this weekend? Transitarte 2018 may be the thing. Also called the “Festival de Verano”, the event is running to Sunday in the heart of Costa Rica’ capital city, San Jose.
One of the more interesting exhibits is the rocks. No, not the moon rocks. Or the Mars rocks. They are the last 10 rocks thrown at the commuter train in the last four months of 2017. The Incofer – the national railway – has on display a number of rocks, from small to larger, that have caused millions of colones – ¢33,960,458 colones in fact – of damages to moving by trains.
The head of the Incofer, Elizabeth Briceño, explained the exhibition is to bring public awareness to a social problem, one that is causing financial strain on an already financially embattled public institution.
The event also includes more than 700 artisan artists and exhibits from the Atlantic train station to the Parque Morazan.
The event is free. There is traditional food, concerts and games for children.
There will be train service (hopefully with no rocks thrown at) on Saturday and Sunday with departure on Saturday every hour, from 6:30 am in the morning from Alajuela, Cartago, Heredia, San José and vice versa, Sunday will be from 10:30 am in the morning.
The event is organized by the municipality of San Jose. “This is the 14th edition of the Transitarte and this year we’re giving our best,” said Johnny Araya, mayor of San Jose.
The mayor explained how the name Transitarte came to be, a combination of ‘transit’ and ‘arte’ that defines the city’s culture.
Emilia Navas was elected this week as Costa Rica’s new Fiscal General or Chief Prosecutor, a position she had been holding in in the interim following the announcement of Jorge Chavarria retiring following links to the #Cementazo scandal.
For the second this week, on consecutive days, traffic in the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM) also called the Central Valley, got complicated due to early morning traffic accidents.
Thursday morning, near the Cariari, the driver of a passenger vehicle lost control, slamming into the concrete divider, losing his life and sent his passenger to the hospital in critical condition. The accident occurred around 1:00 am, forcing the closure of the autopista General Cañas in the San Jose – Alajuela direction for hours.
Making matters worse was the slow response by judicial officials – a judge and prosecutor – required at the scene of an accident when there is a fatality. The officials did not arrive at the scene until after 6:00 am, causing many to demand reforms.
Friday morning, though both drivers survived the crash, two laden tractor trailers collided head-on on the Ruta 27 in the area of Escobal de Atenas.
The force of the impact caused the cab of one of the trucks to light up a fireball. A cloud of black smoke could be seen from the air, from planes coming in for a landing at the San Jose airport.
The crash occurred around 5:30 am and forced the complete closure of the Ruta 27 at kilometer 41 for hours while investigators pieced together what had occurred and allowing for time to put out the fire, unload the trucks and clear the road of debris.
One of the drivers was taken to the hospital, the other, unhurt, remained at the scene. Traffic Caldera bound on the Ruta 27 is chaotic, backing up for kilometers.
Authorities said fatigue could have been the cause of the accident, the driver of the truck with a full load of cement bags, headed for San Jose, crossed the median and collided with an oncoming tractor-trailer on its way to Caldera.
The driver of the cement bag loaded truck, who was taken to the Atenas medical clinic, was coming from Guanacaste and headed for the Limon port.
At 7:15 am, the Policia de Transito opened one lane to through traffic, it wasn’t until mid-day that traffic conditions began to normalize on the Ruta.
See the video posted on Facebook.
And this one.
Want to keep on top of the accidents occuring daily on Costa Rica’s roads? Check out Accidentes de Costa Rica and Ruta Alterna. The website Camarasviales.com offers live traffic conditions on roads in the greater San Jose area.
The dollar exchange rate dropped almost ¢4 colones in less than a week, as the Colon is now exchanged at less than ¢570 per one US dollar.
On Monday, the official dollar exchange reference rate of the Central Bank was ¢566.41 for the sale and ¢572.11 for the buy. This morning, Saturday, it is ¢562.68 and ¢568.66, respectively, a drop of ¢3.73 and ¢3.45.
The reason for the drop, according to Central Bank officials, is the US one billion dollars the Central Bank has currently on hand.
The rate at banks is slightly different than the reference rate set by the Central Bank. The law allows the financial or commercial market to apply different exchange rates to the dollar and for now there is no reform proposed to change this.
For example, this morning the exchange rate at the Banco de Costa Rica (BCR) is ¢559 for the buy and ¢571 for the sell and ¢569.50 and ¢572.50 at the Banco Nacional (BN).
At the private banks, the exchange rate at Scotiabank – the largest of the private banks in Costa Rica – and Banco BAC, this Saturday morning is ¢559 for the buy and ¢572 for the sell.
From the pint-sized toilets to the colorful bedrooms and backyard filled with overturned tricycles, there’s no question children live here.
What’s less obvious is that the 38 babies and toddlers bunking with their mothers at the Vilma Curling Rivera Institutional Service Center are in prison.
Their mothers are serving time for crimes from fraud, to drug dealing, to robbery – but also devoting time to nap schedules and potty training. As one mother makes funny faces to a scrum of giggling toddlers in the common area, another, Magela (who asked to withhold her full name for her family’s privacy), is putting her young daughter down for a nap. The walls of the bedroom are almost entirely covered by tapestries depicting children’s movie characters, like Elsa from “Frozen.”
“It’s hard to be here with my daughter, but amid all the bad, she gives me hope,” says Magela. She’s been here for six weeks with her 1-year-old daughter while awaiting sentencing on human trafficking charges.
Across Latin America and much of the world, it’s increasingly common to find mothers and their children together behind bars. Although rare in the United States, the practice stems from the perspective that young children are better off bonding with their mothers (and in some prisons, like in Bolivia, with their fathers), even if they have committed a crime. But it raises tough questions about safety, justice, and sacrifice. Should children have to “serve” a parent’s sentence, for example? Is a motherless childhood better than one in prison? And does spending time in prison at a young age encourage cycles of crime or poverty, or break them?
Tatiana Ribeiro holds her newborn as she shows the names of her other two sons tattooed on her arms, inside the nursery at the Bangu Penitentiary Complex in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The prison allows inmates’ babies to live at the nursery for six months. Felipe Dana/AP
Increasingly, the practice is viewed through a human rights lens – with the focus on the rights of the children.
“In prison, the presence of a child is the child’s right – to be with his mother, to breastfeed, to meet essential development needs,” says Kenly Garza, assistant director of the Vilma Curling Rivera prison.
In Costa Rica, children are allowed to live with their mothers for the first three years of their lives. In Mexico, children can stay with their mothers until they are 6 years old. In Afghanistan, a child can famously languish in prison with her mother until she’s 18. Roughly half the countries in the world allow mothers serving a sentence to live with their children, if only for a few months, according to a 2014 Library of Congress report.
“There are some who think this is a good thing, and some who see it as bad,” says Ms. Garza. “But in most cases, opinions are based on stereotypes. If you’re in prison, you’re automatically [labeled] a bad mother.”
‘I’d go crazy without her’
A young boy scrambles on the orange-tile floor, grabbing for his paper airplane, on a recent morning at Vilma Curling Rivera. Above him an eager playmate lets out a shriek trying to wiggle his way out of his high chair. Mothers and children sit along the periphery of the common area, sharing food and soft drinks, rocking babies in strollers, and some eyeing news of snow in Europe on the flat-screen TV.
Under Costa Rican law, children don’t spend their entire day in prison; they’re sent to off-site day care for several hours. Nongovernmental organizations teach mothers parenting skills and work on personal goal-setting and development.
Lady, who also asked not to use her surname, was pregnant when she was sent to prison five months ago on fraud charges. That meant living with the general prison population, who sleep in tightly squeezed rows of bunk beds. She had 50 roommates at the time. Once her now four-month-old daughter was born, she was moved into a private room with a crib, and neighbors who instantly had something in common: motherhood.
“It’s definitely nicer here,” she says of the children’s area, its own building in the low-slung prison complex. “I think I’d go crazy without her,” she says of her daughter. “I think I benefit most from having her here.”
Guards play with a child at a nursery school inside Santa Monica women’s prison in Lima, Peru. Mariana Bazo/Reuters
Critics say perks like a private room or the constant companionship of a child will incentivize more inmates to get pregnant. Garza says evidence doesn’t back that up – the population of mothers with children has remained steady over the past several years. Others argue prison becomes less of a punishment when family is permitted to join those serving time, that committing a crime punishable by prison makes a mother unfit, or that it’s an inherently harmful place to grow up.
“The children might be exposed to bad language, sometimes there’s aggressive behavior [among inmates],” says Isabel Gámez Páez, who runs programming for women in prison in Costa Rica’s Ministry of Justice. She argues prisons need to be redesigned overall to better accommodate the unique needs of women, including motherhood.
But the reality is that children are often better cared for in prison – where meals are guaranteed and an adult is always present – than on the outside, Garza says.
The majority of women in prison in Costa Rica are there for drug-related crimes, like small-scale trafficking, an offense that research suggests is frequently motivated by a lack of employment opportunities, poverty, or coercion by family or romantic partners. A 2010 study found that 95 percent of women in jail for bringing drugs into prisons in Costa Rica were single mothers. Often, when women go to prison their dependents are put at risk of falling deeper into poverty, or taking part in criminal acts as well, experts say.
Improving the system
For cases where children do end up behind bars with their mothers, there are best practices around the world that could be applied elsewhere, experts argue. In Norway, for example, children aren’t allowed to live in jail, but they can visit three times a week and call at any time. They also have modular homes, outside of the prison, where incarcerated mothers can visit with their kids.
Alternative sentencing for non-violent crimes and low-level drug violations could also balance the tension between serving justice and the needs of a minor, writes Fabiola Mondragón, a researcher at the Mexican think tank CIDAC, in a 2017 opinion for news site Animal Politico.
That’s a relatively new process in Costa Rica, where women who have trafficked drugs into prisons and who come from vulnerable backgrounds – like caring for dependents alone – have the chance to go to rehab and serve community service instead of going to jail.
“A mother is a figure you can’t substitute in the life of a child,” says Magela, her young daughter crawling cautiously under an empty high chair. “They are tiny. Being here as an infant isn’t so traumatic. The separation would be far worse.” She has experience with that as well: her 5-year-old daughter isn’t living with her here, though she can visit frequently.
“Right now I’m vague [when telling my older daughter] about where I am. But when a child is old enough, you have to tell her the truth: Your mother made a mistake.”
In the photograph Juan Álamo (left), general manager of the construction company. Gerson Vargas / The Republic. Álvaro Monge (right), general manager of the real estate division of the Montecristo group. Esteban Monge / The Republic
In the photograph Juan Álamo (left), general manager of the construction company. Álvaro Monge (right), general manager of the real estate division of the Montecristo group. Esteban Monge / La Republica
Real-estate developers in Costa Rica have set their sights on Alajuela, not least because it is close to the nation’s leading airport.
At the moment five projects that amount to 15,000 square meters of construction, including potential for warehouses, offices and factories.
Costa Rica’s government plans to seek a bilateral agreement with the US on steel shipments following last week’s announcement of a 25% tariff on all US steel imports, according to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Trade.
“Costa Rica has been clear in arguing that the exports of these [steel] products from our country do not constitute a threat to the national security of the United States,” it said late Wednesday.
According to the ministry, the government is analyzing in detail the measure in order to defend Costa Rica’s interests, but continuing to promote activities within the US.
“The administration prioritizes a bilateral approach while monitoring the evolution of the issue at the World Trade Organization,” it said.
Trade minister Alexander Mora said the country will continue to work with the US to find a satisfactory solution, “in keeping with the spirit of cooperation and trust that has characterized trade relations between the two countries and the broad mutual assistance on issues of national and regional security.”
Costa Rica’s sole steel producer is a rolling unit of ArcelorMittal that processes billets and produces up to 280,000 mt/year of bar and rebar and 50,000 mt/year of wire rod.
The US will implement a 25% tariff on imports of steel and a 10% tariff on imports of aluminum starting March 23.
Canada and Mexico will be excluded from the initial tariffs. The proclamations signed by President Donald Trump on March 8 allow other countries to request an exemption, a senior administration official said in a media briefing ahead of the signing.
Following a nine-month investigation into the effect of steel imports on national security, the Department of Commerce delivered its Section 232 report and recommendations to Trump on January 11.
A global tariff of at least 24% on all steel imports from all countries was one of three recommendations presented by Commerce in its report. However, the administration decided to impose a tariff of 25% on steel based on additional data and analysis by Commerce following delivery of the initial report, the administration official said.
Sandra has been in and out of juvenile detention and prison since she was 14 years old. She was introduced to drugs in jail, and often found herself back behind bars after using, going into debt with dealers, or selling or trafficking to pay off her debt. But after her most recent arrest, in 2015, she benefitted from a new law that offers alternative sentences. Instead of jail, she's gone through rehab and job training. She poses outside her temporary home in San José, Costa Rica, on Jan. 23, 2018. Whitney Eulich
San José, Costa Rica—When Sandra was arrested for smuggling drugs into a men’s prison in 2015, she accepted it as part of the familiar cycle of her life. She’d been in and out of detention since she was 14, when she moved on to the streets, fleeing abuse at home.
But a lot has changed in the penal system since Sandra, whose last name has been omitted for privacy, first arrived at Costa Rica’s only women’s prison in the 1990s. The institution changed names, the soccer field crumbled into a river during a rough rainy season, and the prison population exploded, growing by upwards of 50 percent nationwide between 2006 and 2012.
Sandra has been in and out of juvenile detention and prison since she was 14 years old. She was introduced to drugs in jail, and often found herself back behind bars after using, going into debt with dealers, or selling or trafficking to pay off her debt. But after her most recent arrest, in 2015, she benefitted from a new law that offers alternative sentences. Instead of jail, she’s gone through rehab and job training. She poses outside her temporary home in San José, Costa Rica, on Jan. 23, 2018. Whitney Eulich
Following Sandra’s most recent arrest, she learned of an even more profound change: her life experiences would be studied and taken into consideration during sentencing, and there were alternatives to going to jail.
The narcotics-law reform that resulted in Sandra going to rehab, getting job training, and serving three years of probation instead of years behind bars is known as 77-bis. The law is narrow – it only applies to women arrested for smuggling drugs into jails – but it’s revolutionary in a region that prioritizes hard-line punishments for drug crimes. As organized crime carves out deeper and more far-reaching paths across the Americas, most citizens and politicians are arguing for solutions that result in more people, and more time, behind bars.
In Costa Rica, drug-smuggling into prison is almost entirely carried out by women. By focusing on women like Sandra – non-violent offenders, coming from situations of poverty – 77-bis released roughly one-fifth of Costa Rica’s female prison population, essentially waving a magic wand at chronic overcrowding. But the conversation about how to reform drug laws with that cohort in mind has created broader opportunities by allowing policy-makers, public defenders, judges, and civil society to look at drug policies and punishments in a new light. That can help both men and women, and society at large, proponents hope.
“My life has always been a disaster,” says Sandra, who was introduced to crack in prison. When she was offered the opportunity of an alternate sentence under 77-bis, it required that she get sober. “I never wanted to stop using drugs before, but prison was so awful, I decided it was worth trying.” Today she’s reconnected with her siblings and grown children, is looking for work as a cook, and is 9-months sober.
A view of Costa Rica’s only women’s prison. More than 60 percent of prisoners here are in for drug-related offenses.
“I’m alive because of this opportunity,” she says.
“Some people see this as a ‘benefit’ for people who have committed crimes,” says Cecilia Sánchez, a former minister of justice who is now the director of the Latin American Institute of the United Nations for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders. “But, the idea that putting everyone in prison will suddenly create a safe society? We know that’s not true. It takes a lot more work than just putting people behind bars. There are questions of equality, poverty, and education.”
Outsized impact
As the population of female prisoners across Latin America blew up over the past two decades, growing on average 52 percent between 2000 and 2015, nations from Mexico to Argentina have struggled with overcrowding. Experts point to growth in the multinational drug trade, combined with few social safety nets and drug laws that barely differentiate between low-level involvement and powerful kingpins when handing down sentences. With the exception of 77-bis, drug-related offenses in Costa Rica are considered federal crimes, punishable by eight to 20 years in jail.
The region’s male prison population, by comparison, has grown roughly 20 percent. In absolute terms, they make up a far greater percentage of prisoners in Latin America. But “punitive drug policies are falling more heavily on women” across Latin America, says Coletta Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) who researches drug policy and has written extensively on female incarceration rates. “Jails are overflowing with women who aren’t violent and aren’t serious threats to public safety.”
Women tend to take on the high-risk, low-reward tasks of moving drugs, motivated by economic desperation, bullying or coercion by a partner or family member, or a simple lack of opportunity, studies show. In nations like Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, more than 60 percent of women behind bars face drug charges. One woman who benefited from 77-bis told The Christian Science Monitor that she could make $150 each time she successfully brought drugs into a prison, trying to support her family. She’d go to multiple jails in one day delivering drugs. If she failed, she was easily replaced.
‘This wasn’t a quick decision’
A three-minute walk down an undulating sidewalk flanked by chain-link fence and swirls of razor wire, sits a series of concrete-block structures at the Vilma Curling Rivera women’s prison here. Inside one building, women linger in the paved courtyard, writing in journals or hanging laundry in dense rows.
Cheryl Myers fidgets on a cement bench waiting for one of the bright blue payphones. She’s served about a quarter of her 8-year sentence for selling drugs, and says she’s struggling. Her five children live an expensive four-hour trip away and they’ve only come twice so far. Many prisoners depend on family to provide food and clothes while they’re behind bars.
“Where I live, it’s really poor. It’s banana territory,” Ms. Myers says. After an injury working with bananas near her home in eastern Costa Rica, she had to look for another option. She tried cleaning homes, but only scraped together $8.50 a week.
“My kids were going hungry,” she says. “There were lots of opportunities to sell drugs. Everyone knows someone doing it. And it pays,” she adds. “I thought about it a lot, a lot…. This wasn’t a quick decision.”
When women go to jail, dependents – whether children or the elderly – are at greater risk of poverty or getting involved in criminal activity themselves. And once released, women’s criminal records tend to carry a heavier social stigma than men’s, making it tougher to break out of the cycle of poverty that often directed them toward the drug trade in the first place, Ms. Youngers, of WOLA, says.
“The traditional role for women here is taking care of the family,” says Kenly Garza, the assistant director of the Vilma Curling Rivera prison, who previously worked in men’s prisons for over a decade. “That doesn’t change once they’re behind bars,” she says.
“For women, the impact of prison is all about what’s going on outside: they call on social workers and psychologists because they’re losing sleep over their kids skipping school, worrying their children don’t have enough to eat, wondering if they’re safe and taken care of.”
One punishment, one crime
In 2010, the United Nations passed the “Bangkok Rules” for treatment of female prisoners. It called for “gender-specific options” for pretrial and sentencing alternatives that take into account “the history of victimization of many women offenders and their caretaking responsibilities.”
Costa Rica prides itself on prioritizing human rights. But that can sometimes clash with deeply conservative values. While many politicians were pushing for popular tough-on-crime responses to growing trafficking and cartel presence here, the Bangkok Rules laid the groundwork for imprisoned women’s advocates to put forth their case.
“It’s not the same to be poor and alone vs. poor with five kids,” says Roy Murillo, a judge for more than two decades. “If the reason behind the crime is distinct, why can’t the punishment be distinct?”
In 2009, a public prosecutor in the country’s north found that nearly 90 percent of all people bringing drugs into prisons here are women. Further research found that 95 percent of women in jail for trafficking drugs into prisons were single mothers, and the majority were between 18 and 35 – making the crime a more palatable place to start drug reform, observers say.
Costa Rica’s ministry of justice and public prosecutors office led an effort to encourage politicians and judges step back and look at the bigger picture.
“Things pile up, and when there are no opportunities or when someone is not educated or prepared for opportunities, that’s where social policies fail to reach, but organized crime shows up,” says Zhuyem Molina, who worked as a public prosecutor for nearly 20 years and recently began researching potential penal-code reform for the Ministry of Justice.
77-bis “was a small window [of opportunity] that’s opened many doors since,” Ms. Molina says.
For example, employment remained a central obstacle for many of the first women who benefitted from 77-bis. No matter what sentence or what type of crime, anyone who had been to jail carried a public record for at least a decade.
“When your opportunity to work [after serving a sentence] is blocked, it’s like having two punishments for one crime,” says Judge Murillo.
Controversial approach
Ms. Sánchez, as minister of justice, agreed. And not just for women. In 2017, a registry reform went into effect that eliminates criminal records for men and women who meet criteria like having non-violent crimes, and were in a “vulnerable” situation at the time. Currently, a broader sentencing-reform bill is in the national assembly.
77-bis also helped create a formal support network for women in the criminal justice system. It’s managed by the public defenders office – and by all accounts is in serious need of funding. It focuses on the factors that most often drive women toward crime in the first place. NGOs and government institutions help connect women with job training, rehabilitation services, and financial support.
But some wonder if addressing problems in terms of gender is perpetuating problematic stereotypes. 77-bis “is positive,” says Ernesto Cortés, executive director of the Costa Rican Association for the Study and Intervention of Drugs. But in some ways it plays on stereotypes, “reproducing an image of women as victims who are forced to do things.”
Claudia Palma Campos, an anthropologist at the University of Costa Rica who has conducted oral histories with female prisoners since 2008, says the reform’s narrow focus made it easier to pass, but it doesn’t go far enough.
“It’s an important law with concrete benefits, but it’s politically correct,” she says. “What [lawmakers] say is that women, due to their vulnerability, are obliged to bring drugs into prisons. What I say is that when it comes to being marginalized and affected by violence, every drug crime” is fair game, and social circumstances need to be considered for any non-violent drug crime, regardless of gender.
Making a ‘miracle’?
When a woman is offered an alternate sentence under 77-bis, she, her lawyer, and a judge agree on a “life plan”: steps like enrolling in a rehabilitation program or job-skills course, as well as regular check-ins and often community service hours. Less than 2 percent of women given alternative sentences via 77-bis have violated their parole or committed a new crime that put them behind bars, Molina says, citing 2016 data from the public prosecutor’s office.
But the lives of women given alternate sentences don’t automatically transform into fairy tales. Mariana, who asked not to use her given name for her family’s privacy, is a young sex worker who isn’t behind bars thanks to 77-bis. She joins Molina for a hot chocolate near the Supreme Court on a recent afternoon. Her story has captured the hearts of a number of lawyers and social workers, but her path has been far from perfect.
Mariana was sentenced to six years of parole and 600 hours of community service. She had a rocky start, but no longer uses drugs and always asks for help when she needs it. “She hasn’t committed a crime since we started working with her,” Molina says. Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica. “It’s been hard, but she’s learned to survive in the jungle where she moves without breaking the law.”
Molina refers to Mariana numerous times as a “miracle.” Mariana visibly bristles or shakes her head and quietly whispers, “No.”
“A miracle is something that comes from nowhere, an act of God,” she says.
“A lot of people have put in a lot of work to get me here.”
Somewhere between whipping up batches of fresh (and medicinal) mint mojitos in your cramped city apartment after work and getting sunburned on exotic beaches during your two measly weeks of vacation a year, a lightbulb switches on. Why not live the tropical life all year round?
It’s a not-uncommon fantasy in these waning days of a long winter: Ditch the high heating bills, smothering winter coats, and oppressive tweetstorms of your homeland, decamp to an inexpensive beach town abroad—and live like royalty.
We’re here to tell you: It can be done.
But buying a home on U.S. soil is stressful enough. Finding an abode abroad can be even more so—you want somewhere both safe and affordable, with a community of expatriates for company. And once you whittle down your list of potential new homelands, you’ll have to contend with a host of laws governing foreigners buying property.
This is where the peripatetic data team at realtor.com® comes in. We found some of the most affordable international beach towns where expats-wannabes will want to live—and where the regulations make it entirely possible.
“If looking out at the ocean every day and surfing and walking on the beach are your No. 1 [priorities], then you should be looking overseas—doing that in the United States today is seriously expensive,” says Jennifer Stevens, executive editor of internationalliving.com, a website geared toward Americans searching for a home in a tropical paradise.
So what kinds of folks are relocating to exotic sand- and sun-filled locales? Let’s check off the boxes: Retirees with fixed incomes searching for more bang for their buck. Recent college graduates looking for adventure and new opportunities. Tech employees who can work remotely. Or just everyday Americans who have had enough of the corporate lifestyle.
The U.S. State Department estimates there are nearly 9 million Americans living overseas.
But this isn’t a decision that should be rushed.
“My No. 1 caution is that [home-buying] laws in other countries do not look like the laws in the United States,” Stevens says. “You need to get a good attorney, who isn’t representing the seller, to lead you through the process.”
To create our list, the realtor.com data team first ruled out countries that have extremely restrictive policies on foreigners buying property. We also eliminated landlocked countries, and limited the final ranking to no more than five countries per continent. Then the following data points* were pulled in:
Citizenship ranking from U.S. News & World Report, which measures human rights, gender equality, and religious freedom
Top expat destinations ranking of 65 countries from InterNations, a global network
Average internet connection speed (so you can work remotely)
Coastline size
Low homicide rates
Home affordability index from numbeo.com, a global consumer prices website
Cost of living index from numbeo.com
Average yearly temperature, to ensure plenty of beach days
Once we got our list of countries, we aggregated several international beach rankings from publications such as Condé Nast Traveler, CNN, and TripAdvisor to help us come up with our list of beaches. And we eliminated beach communities without nearby homes under US$250,000.
Ready to find your dream home abroad? Grab the passport and let’s travel.
The Eastern European country of Croatia probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think beaches. But maybe it should be. The clear blue waters of coastal town Zlatni Rat make for world-class scuba diving, and some epic sailing too.
That’s probably why Condé Nast Traveler named Zlatni Rat the 10th best beach in Europe last year.
“Zlatni Rat stands out for its striking and unusual shape (which actually changes depending on the current). Though it looks like a golden sand beach, its shoreline is made up of smooth, tiny pebbles and stretches out for half a mile on either side of the tip,” Condé Nast wrote.
Zlatni Rat is located on an island in the Adriatic Sea called Brač, with a population around 14,000. It is a popular spot for windsurfing, stand-up paddleboarding, and other watersports.
But unlike many of the other topped-ranked beaches in this part of the world, Croatia comes at a reasonable price. Look no further than this two-story Mediterranean stone house for $165,000 just a pebble’s throw from the beach.
Americans can buy homes in Croatia, but they require approval from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Securing that approval can take two to six months, as it requires a nonconsummated purchase agreement between the buyer and seller and proof of your U.S. citizenship.
2. Myrtos Beach (Greece)
On Kefalonia Island at the feet of Kalon Oros and Agia Dynati mountains, you can find the beautiful sand and waters of Myrtos Beach. It’s as prized for its idyllic and dramatic beauty as it is for its serenity. If you’re leaving the U.S. to get away from the hustle and bustle, this is your place. No watersports allowed! Frolicking in the surf, basking in the sun, reading Socrates, and contemplating life, however, are all heavily encouraged.
There isn’t a lot of real estate right on the beach, but there are a number of affordable nearby villages. The road from the small town of Divarta, with some terrific Mediterranean and seafood restaurants, takes sun worshippers directly to the ocean. Most of the homes are detached bungalows or villas. Greek real estate prices are still pretty low after the country’s economic woes (remember the Euro crisis?), so you’d be advised to buy soon.
Americans can buy real estate in Greece, but it is a difficult process and requires an application. The U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Greece recommends Americans contact a lawyer before starting the application process. If you buy a home, you’ll need to obtain a tax ID number through Greece’s Ministry of Finances. And some areas, such as those near military bases, are restricted to foreign buyers.
3. Tulum (Mexico)
Tulum, about two hours south of spring break magnet Cancún, is a top destination for visitors from around the world who want to take in the Mayan ruins that overlook the blue waters of the Caribbean, or go snorkeling in the azure waters of the Gran Cenote, a limestone cenote and cavern.
Its growing popularity as a vacation spot has spurred more and more Westerners to choose it as a place to put down roots. This ancient town of 18,000 is extremely cheap, housingwise. You can find luxury condos in new developments and single-family houses under $100,000. Check out this $79,000 home in a self-sustainable community.
InterNations named Mexico the third-best destination in the world for expats in 2017. It’s particularly hot among American, Canadian, and European buyers, who like the fact that they don’t need to speak Spanish to get by. They also dig the top restaurants, taco joints, fun bars, and friendly locals. Heck, less than an hour’s drive north, in Playa del Carmen, you can even find a Home Depot and a Walmart.
Buying property in Mexico is possible, but it’s a difficult process. The most desirable parts of Mexico, near the coast or the U.S. border, require you to set up a trust through a Mexican bank. That trust is valid for 50 years and can be passed down to heirs.
4. Port Dickson (Malaysia)
Malaysia, in Southeast Asia, is home to some of the world’s premier beaches. But many of these places would break your home-buying budget. In Port Dickson, a coastal town with a population of nearly 120,000, you can still get a beautiful beach home at a reasonable price.
And it’s fairly easy to buy as a foreigner. The main requirement is that the property not be valued more than 1 million ringgit ($254,000). However, there is a workaround for that price minimum. If you get a 10-year visa, common among foreigners working in the country, you can buy homes for around $127,000. And there’s a lot on the market around that price point.
Unlike some international beach towns, there are a good number of high-paying jobs in Port Dickson. The community is home to two oil refineries, including one operated by Shell Refining. And with that comes lots of engineering jobs. It’s one of the reasons this town has expats from all over the world, particularly the United Kingdom.
5. Praia da Rocha (Portugal)
Along the southern coast of Portugal you’ll find the Algarve region, which is known for its beautiful limestone rock formations that lead up to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Among its most famous beaches is Praia da Rocha, which offers “3,000 hours of sun a year, golden beaches backed by cliffs, [and] unique conditions for watersports and golf courses,” says Ricardo Costa, CEO of Luximo’s Christie’s International Real Estate in Portugal. It’s “a perfect destination for every season of the year.”
InterNations ranked the country the fifth-best destination in the world for expats in 2017. It’s home to plenty of retirees from the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands looking to escape the northern European cold. There are also plenty of Americans here passing the time away at the Hotel Algarve Casino—a five-star hotel with slot machines, blackjack, and roulette.
When it comes to buying property, Portugal had one of the most liberal policies among the countries we ranked. If you buy a home worth more than 500,000 euros ($610,000), you’ll become eligible for the “golden visa,” which gives you up to a five-year residency.
6. Sunny Beach (Bulgaria)
Sunny Beach is a formerly notorious resort located on the coast of the Black Sea. It was built in the 1950s by the former Communist regime as a playground for the Soviet-era elite. Over the past decade or so it has come into its own as an expat hot spot for European and U.S. home buyers alike.
“It attracts mostly people seeking an alternative life: freelancers and IT professionals who can work from anywhere they choose,” says Polina Stoykova, managing director and head of research at Bulgarian Properties, a real estate agency. “We have great broadband internet everywhere, good quality of life, and they can integrate with locals.”
But where Sunny Beach really has the advantage is dollars and cents. Bulgaria is inexpensive. Among the countries on which we collected data, only three European countries had a lower cost of living: Belarus, Serbia, and Romania. And the country is friendly to foreign investment.
Stoykova’s firm has seen more Americans inquiring about Sunny Beach–area homes as of late. Most are looking around the 20,000 euro ($25,000) price point, for either a studio or one-bedroom. Bulgaria allows foreigners to buy apartments, condos, and homes—just not the land they sit on. But once you own the home, you’re allowed to rent it out. So you can net a little side cash.
7. An Bang Beach (Vietnam)
Blue waters, soft white sand, and palm trees leading right up to the beach: That’s what you get at Vietnam’s An Bang Beach in Hoi An, a city of over 120,000.
In 2017, it made CNN’s 100 best beaches around the world, coming in at No. 86. Beyond the sand and surf, it’s also known for its fab restaurants. And that’s led to its big tourist and expat community.
“It’s a fantastic getaway from the hustle and bustle of urban cities. The old town hasn’t changed much over the past century,” says Piumi Rajapaksha, who works on the marketing team at Christina’s & Onetrip, a Vietnam travel company that connects travelers with local guides. “It is absolutely beautiful with lantern-lit alleyways, ancient yellow teahouses, and the Thu Bon river in the center. There’s a bunch to explore on the outskirts, such as traditional villages that specialize in pottery [and] carpentry.”
When it comes to buying in Vietnam, you can own the home, but foreigners and locals alike have to lease the land from the government. And while you can find some affordable cribs, it might take some searching. The market has a pretty large luxury side, with lots of two-bedroom villas just meters from the ocean.
8. La Concha Beach (Spain)
Relocating to a foreign beach town often means living in a remote location. That’s not the case at La Concha Beach in San Sebastian, a gorgeous—and large—resort town/city. With a population reaching 180,000, the place features many high-rises, with a wide range of home prices. And it has amenities that you won’t find in most beach towns.
Last year Travel & Leisure named San Sebastian’s stunning, crescent-shaped shoreline the second-best city beach in Europe. Only Barcelona ranked higher. And TripAdvisor named it the sixth-best beach in the world.
Located along Spain’s northern Atlantic Coast, La Concha Beach has long been a go-to spot for Spaniards. Heck, it was one of Spanish royalty’s favorite digs back in the 19th century. Now it’s filled with expats from across Europe, the U.S., and Canada.
That may be because Spain has a fairly open policy for foreign investment in property. Americans can buy homes here—they just need to get ID numbers from the government.
9. Dominical Beach (Costa Rica)
Once a fishing town, Dominical has grown into one of Costa Rica’s hottest surfing spots. All those 10-foot waves have foreigners streaming in from all around the world. That may have helped it to be ranked the second-best destination in the world for expats by InterNations.
Almost two decades ago Clinton Stephenson, then a recent graduate of the University of Nebraska, took a trip to this small town about three hours from the San Jose international airport. He quickly fell in love, and set a new course for his life and moved to Costa Rica.
“I went to beach in the morning, then a waterfall later in the day. I thought ‘this feels so right,’” Stephenson says. Now a senior investment consultant at Costa Rica Real Estate Service, he helps U.S. expats buy homes in the southern Pacific coast region of Costa Rica, where Dominical is located.
Costa Rica is very friendly to Americans buying property. Indeed, residents and foreigners both have the same rights when it comes to purchasing land in the country, according to Re/Max. And the country is well-known for its dirt-cheap property taxes: just one-fourth of 1% annually.
“Most of us got tired of winter, working in corporate environments, and imagined we would find like-minded environmentalists,” says Faith Mulvihill, a real estate agent and an American expat who has been living in Costa Rica for 10 years.
“We are adventurous and free-thinking individuals who thrive on nature, calling our own shots and learning a new culture.”
10. Salinas (Ecuador)
Along Ecuador’s Pacific Coast you’ll find Salinas, a picturesque city and beach resort dotted with condominium buildings.
Salinas is on the bigger end with a population around 50,000, which swells to around 100,000 during the country’s holiday season. It’s Ecuador’s largest coastal resort. That size brings with it some noise. On the flip side, being a larger beach town means there is no shortage of things to do here. Maybe go watch a soccer game with the locals at Aloha Bar.
Salinas Beach itself is great for swimming, but thrill-seekers head to Punta Carnero, just south of the city. This 1.6-mile beach attracts surfers from around the world with its picture-perfect waves.
When you first move here you might experience sticker shock—the good kind. A cab ride is usually between $2 to $3, and lunch ranges from $3 to $5. And home prices are similarly attractive.
When it comes to foreigners buying property, they have the same opportunity as locals in most parts of the country. Buying into the coastal areas requires government approval—something that is normally granted. And there are some nice places on the market, including this three-bedroom oceanfront condo priced at $230,000.
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QCostarica.com was not involved in the creation of the content. This article was originally published on Realtor.com . Read the original article.
* Data sources: Akamai, Central Intelligence Agency, InterNations, numbeo.com, U.S. News & World Report, and the United Nations
In 2017 Mexico lived the bloodiest year of the last 20 years, exceeding 23,000 intentional homicides, I disagree with data from the Ministry of the Interior.
Latin America has the sad title of being the region that hosts the largest number of most violent cities in the world.
It is certified by the latest report of the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice (CCSPJP), a Mexican civil organization that each year produces a list of the 50 most violent cities in the world.
Their results are taken as reference by both media and international organizations.
In 2017 Mexico lived the bloodiest year of the last 20 years, exceeding 23,000 intentional homicides, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior.
To prepare the list, the CCSPJP uses a simple methodology, comparing the number of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
They also include only those cities that exceed 300,000 inhabitants and compute only intentional homicides or aggression deaths.
Violence has decreased in Central America, according to CCSPJP, with just four of its cities in the ranking and none is among the top 10.
And of the 50 cities in the ranking, 17 are in Brazil, 12 in Mexico, 5 in Venezuela, 3 in Colombia and 2 in Honduras. There is also a city in El Salvador, another in Guatemala and one in Puerto Rico.
San Salvador and San Pedro Sula have improved, although they remain among the most violent city in Central America: San Salvador in 17th place globally improved by ten positions compared to 2016, in the ranking by Mexico’s Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice.
Honduras’ San Pedro Sula showed the biggest improvement, going from the world’s third most violent city to the 26th.
Los Cabos, Mexico, is the most violent city in the world, with 111 murders for every 1,000 people.
Forty-two Latin American cities are among the 50 most violent in the world, according to the report, which tracks the homicide rate per 1,000 inhabitants.
Of the remaining eight cities, four are in the United States and three are in South Africa, while Kingston, Jamaica, rounds out the total (numbers in brackets indicate the global position of each city).
IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, is structuring a transaction to provide up to US$115 million in financing to Nicaragua’s Banco Lafise Bancentro to boost access to credit for small entrepreneurs and provide housing loans for families.
In addition, IFC’s financing is linked to the development of LAFISE BANCENTRO’S climate smart portfolio for companies that want to adopt more energy efficient practices and utilize cleaner energy sources. The financing will allow more companies to access credit to invest in resource efficient and clean energy projects.
“With IFC’s support, we are helping more Nicaraguans follow their dreams – whether that means growing a business or becoming a homeowner for the first time,” said Mr. Roberto J. Zamora Llanes, LAFISE BANCENTRO’S Chairman. “IFC’s support also allows us to make funds available that are targeted to energy efficiency.”
Over the past five years, Nicaragua’s economic growth has averaged about 4.8 percent, becoming the country with the second highest growth in Central America. Despite this, poverty and inequality remain high.
IFC’s loan to LAFISE BANCENTRO aims to improve access to financing and access to housing – two important needs in the country.
Small and medium enterprises in Nicaragua are an important engine for job creation, however they face a substantial credit gap of US$2.4 billion. Only 15% of them have access to formal financing, which limits their ability to grow.
“Financial inclusion plays a vital role in economic development,” said Marcelo Castellanos, Regional Industry Manager for Financial Institutions in Latina America. “It can improve people’s lives in measurable ways by generating income and economic activity. Through this project with LAFISE BANCENTRO, IFC hopes to foster innovation and strengthen the financial sector in Nicaragua.”
Nicaragua’s government estimates that the country needs nearly one million more homes to fill its housing deficit. IFC’s loan will help LAFISE BANCENTRO grow its housing portfolio to provide additional mortgage loans.
LAFISE BANCENTRO will also use the funding to provide loans to finance climate smart projects. By introducing green finance standards into LAFISE BANCENTRO’s lending practices, IFC hopes to encourage other Nicaraguan financial institutions which are unfamiliar with this market to follow suit.
The loan to LAFISE BANCENTRO will be committed in two different tranches: the first tranche, in March 2018, consists of a senior debt of US$42.5 million and a subordinated debt of US$32.5 million that will strengthen LAFISE’s capital. From the total amount, US$50 million will be from IFC’s own account and the remaining $25 million will be provided by OFID (the OPEC Fund for International Development). The second tranche is expected to be committed in April 2018 and includes a senior debt of US$20 million and a subordinated debt of US$20 million provided by other parallel lenders. Senior loans will be granted with a tenor of 7 years and subordinated loans with a tenor of 10 years.
OFID has supported sustainable development projects in Nicaragua since 2000. The institution’s public sector, private sector and trade finance mechanisms have together allocated more than $230 million to projects in the country’s transport, energy, agriculture and water and sanitation sectors.
Banco LAFISE BANCENTRO, S.A. is the largest banking subsidiary of LAFISE GROUP, a financial group established in 1985, with presence in eleven countries and more than US$4 billion in assets. IFC’s relationship with LAFISE GROUP started in 2008. Since then, IFC has provided trade lines for Banco LAFISE COSTA RICA, Banco LAFISE PAMAMA and Banco LAFISE HONDURAS.
Inauguracion Empresa Smith&Nephew Coyol Alajuela tecnologia Medica Industria Zona Franca Presidente Luis Guillermo Solis Alexander Mora empleo COMEX CINDE
According to a directory published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC) – National Institute of Statistics and Census, in 2017, there were some 37,000 companies in the country
According to a registry of the INEC, women represent 35% of the workforce in the private sector in the country, but this proportion rises in the case of companies with five or fewer employees. Photo CINDE
The majority of them are small and have few employees, according to the results of the Directorio de Empresas y Establecimientos – Directory of Companies and Establishments -2017, published on Thursday.
According to the study, in the country, there are some 37,000 companies, of which 64% have from one to five workers; 25%, from six to 30 employees; 6%, from 31 to 100 and only 3% more than 100. The rest is ignored.
This means that almost 90% of the companies in the directory are in the range of 30 to fewer employees.
The Directorio de Empresas y Establecimientos is an organized register of companies and establishments of the private sector in Costa Rica, dedicated to activities of production of goods and services.
The study reveals this sector employs some 725,624 people, of which 65% are men, 35% are women.
The research also shows that there is a concentration in the location of the companies. more than half (52%) are in the cantons of San José, Heredia, San Carlos, Alajuela, Cartago, Escazú, Montes de Oca, Goicoechea, and Puntarenas.
Other data that the study shows is that 1% of the companies in the Directory have subsidiaries abroad, located mainly in Panama, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. On the other hand, 3% of the companies is a subsidiary of a foreign ownership.
Venezuela will put on Wednesday a new highest-denomination 100,000 bolivar bill worth only US$0.50 into circulation, the country’s Communication and Information Ministry said.
The introduction of a new banknote takes place amid the out-of-control inflation in the country, which led to a severe cash shortage. In 2016, a 100-bolivar note was the highest-denomination bill.
The new 100,000 bolivar bill can be used to purchase only US$0.50 on the black market, while US$1 was valued at 215.752 bolivars on Mar. 16, 2018, according to the Dolar Today media outlet.
Earlier in December, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced the creation of a new virtual currency to fight the economic crisis, pay debts, and revive the national economy. In late February, Venezuela launched the presale of cryptocurrency tokens, each backed by a barrel of Venezuelan oil. Maduro has estimated early gains at US$735 million.
Venezuela is going through the worst economic crisis in its history which started in 2012 with changes on the global oil market. More than 95 percent of its export revenues come from oil and its derivatives.
In 2015, with the fall of prices on hydrocarbons to US$50 dollars per barrel, Venezuela’s economy was knocked out, leaving the population with shortages of food and medicine.
Costa Rican authorities dismantled an organization led by Nigerians who sent cocaine to Africa, Asia and Europe by mail.
The detainees were identified as Onyebuchi, 37, leader of the gang and linked to the placement of packages with cocaine and another man was identified as Emogor, 43 years old. Both had applied for refugees in the country.
During the next Semana Santa (Holy Week) civil servants of the central government, autonomous, semi-autonomous institutions and State public enterprises will be off on vacations on March 26, 27 and 28 added to the compulsory holidays of Good Thursday and Good Friday, March 29 and 30.
This, in effect a week off, was detailed in the directive signed on February 20 by the President Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera and the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Alfredo Hasbum Camacho.
The Ministry of Finance reported, in a relevant event this March 13, that the placement of $ 1,500 million in internal debt through the modality of placement contract was declared void. The entity announced, last November, the issue of securities in order to avoid pressure in the local market. Photo: Rafael Pacheco.
Arguing that the financial conditions and the term of the operation were not adequate, the Ministry of Finance has decided not to issue $1,5 billion in debt bonds in the local market.
The Ministry of Finance reported on March 13 that the placement of US$1.5 billion in internal debt through the modality of placement contract was declared void.
The announcement was made by the Ministry of Finance through a Relevant Fact sent to the General Superintendence of the Securities Market.
“… The Ministry of Finance announced that due to financial conditions and the deadline for delivery of the operation, which do not reflect the interests of this ministry, it is not feasible to complete the assigned contract for the issuance, for which it has been declared terminated without an assignment,” the entity reported in a note signed by Martha Cubillo, Vice Minister of Revenue.”
