Q COSTA RICA – The increase in demand and the possibility of diversifying the insurance business, the State insurer Instituto Nacional de Seguros (INS), announced a second tower to the Hospital del Trauma (Trauma Hospital).
The plan was recently approved by the INS Board of Directors.
The INS Hospital del Trauma opened its doors in December 2013.
With this second tower the INS expects initially to double the number of beds currently available, and “… take advantage of facilities they have in the current hospital: administration, medical imaging, blood bank.”
Elian Villegas, executive president of the INS, told Nacion.com: “…’What we want is for the medical network we are developing and whose pillar is the (Trauma) hospital, to have more capacity for action so that from there, we can generate insurance at a lower cost, we can sell on mass and allow the middle class to do their tests and procedures directly in the hospital and in our medical centers’.”
According to Villegas, this will allow the INS to diversify the risk, while helping to relieve the waiting lists of the state health system, the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (CCSS) – Costa Rican Social Security Fund, by attracting people of medium and low-income to its network.
Among the services that they visualize are specialty services such as Orthopedics and (baby) deliveries.
The INS is developing its network of health services, composed of 22 medical centres, throughout the country.
The aim of the INS is to go beyond the coverage of compulsory insurance for automobiles and workplace risks.
Villegas explained that the costing plan should be ready within two months and the project up and running in 2019.
The Trauma Hospital is located in La Uruca, on Calle 86, southeast of the Hospital Mexico.
Q COSTA RICA – The number of constructions works in Costa Rica grew by 4.2% compared to 2015, mainly explained by the increase of 16% in the province of San Jose and 11% in Guanacaste.
According tothe report by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC):
In 2016, the number of works increased by 4.2% compared to 2015. Overall there was an increase for all provinces, the greatest increase was in the province of San José with 16.4%, followed by Guanacaste with 10.5%.
Permits for housing construction in 2016 show an increase of 15.10% compared to 2015, standing out in particular are those measuring less than 40 m2 with an increase of 35.3%, and those measuring 40 to 70 m2 with 19.8%; on the other hand, the largest decline was seen in homes with measuring from 150 to 200m2 with -14.1%.
The INEC annual report includes data from construction permits granted by the 81 local governments – the municipalities – across the country, that includes basic information such permits for type for construction, extension, repair or earth moving; class, destination, economic activity and financing of the work; number of works, area and value of the construction, as well as the predominant materials.
Rebeca Grynspan, during an interview with EFE in Medellín, Colombia. (Photo: EFE / Luis Eduardo Noriega A.)
Former UN Under Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan warned that this “window of opportunity can close”. [Inter-American dialogue/ Flickr]Q COSTA RICA – The head of the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB) has insisted that an alliance between Latin America and Europe is crucial to achieving “ambitious agendas” like the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, EURACTIV Spain reports.
SEGIB Secretary General Rebeca Grynspan, who was also vice-president of Costa Rica between 1994 and 1998, told an audience in the European Parliament yesterday (on March 21) that this particular transatlantic alliance is a significant catalyst for ambitious global pacts.
Grynspan, said that now “is a time of great opportunity between Latin America and Europe” but warned that “it is a window that can close”.
To this end, the Costa Rican economist pointed out that China has increased its trade with the region by 22 times since the start of the 21st century. However, she acknowledged that the region cannot rely “just on Asia”, even if it is a “source of financial investment”.
Rebeca Grynspan, during an interview with EFE in Medellin, Colombia. (Photo: EFE / Luis Eduardo Noriega A.)
But she insisted that Latin America is “bi-oceanic” and that its relations with Europe are “much more symmetrical and horizontal than in the past”.
Deputy Secretary-General of the European External Action Service (EEAS) Christian Leffler pointed out that the peace process in Colombia, cooperation agreements and joint work on climate change are “areas where we can see the close cooperation” between the two regions.
Leffler also cited the EU’s Association Agreements with the different countries of the region, claiming that “they don’t just cover trade cooperation; it’s broader”.
The talks at the Parliament between different MEPs and analysts is part of a process aimed at preparing a report on renewing strategic relations between the two regions, with a vote expected after the summer.
“Given the international situation, relations between the EU and Latin America have become a real priority for us,” Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya MEP Javi López (S&D) told EFE, adding that no one shares Europe’s “vision of international relations” in the same way as Latin America.
The window of opportunity to reevaluate the alliance has been opened by the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s election victory, according to López.
“When I say that we share the idea of multilateralism with Latin America, it is very important because today we have a White House that doesn’t,” warned the Spanish politician.
Q COSTA RICA by Jack Donnelly – Costa Rican love horses, even if they live in the midst of dense urban sprawl and wouldn’t know a horse pucky if they stepped in one. Two Tico traditions easily seen in all parts of the country are topes and cabalgatas. These events are emblematic of the rich horse and cattle heritage of the country. Ranching and cowboy, sabanero, traditions are especially strong in the northwest province of Guanacaste.
Photo by Jack Donnelly
A cabalgata is a recreational horseback ride, a trail ride, from one place to another. It is more for the enjoyment of the riders than any observers. Many places have these rides as annual events. Sometimes there is an entrance fee to raise money for some worthy cause.
One very interesting cabalgata takes place on the night of the full moon every March. As the bright moon rises over the town square, the troop leaves the town of Tempate de Santa Cruz and heads through the hills on a gravel road to Playa Potrero on the coast. The ride takes about two hours and they split up as they enter Potrero, some going directly to the party and others circling around to make their approach by way of the beach. A small musical group rides along playing from the back of a 4 x 4 pickup truck. For the sake of tradition, the riders also drive steer or a bull. They call it a toro, a bull, and people in Potrero are duly cautious. The animal had big horns; it was very dark; I did not think a closer inspection of the beast’s privates would be prudent.
Photo by Jack Donnelly
A big party awaits the riders at the end of the trail. After the merriment, the more affluent riders load up their mounts and leave by truck. Some sad looking souls have to ride back the same dark trail to Tempate, after having consumed an ample amount of beer.
A tope is a horse parade strictly for show, following an established route through a populated area for the benefit of the spectators. As many riders and their mounts as can be found will parade through town, strutting their stuff for the appreciative crowd.
Photo by Jack Donnelly
The verb ‘topar’ in Spanish means to bump; ‘toparse’ con means to bump into (somebody). In days of old, livestock came and went through the ports. They made the journey between the ports and the ranches over rough roads in drives. They were, if you will, bumped along the road by cowboys. Thus, the term tope came to be used for a horse parade. Many fiestas and even religious events will feature a tope as part of the festivities.
One sure crowd pleaser at all topes is the Costa Rican Step Horse. These animals are rigorously trained to dance or high step their way along the parade routes. They are very impressive to watch.
Jack Donnelly has been a life-long enthusiast of Latin American folk culture. Donnelly is the author of COSTA RICA: Folk Culture, Traditions, and Cuisine which is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Now, lives in Heredia, Costa Rica. He travels around the country investigating and documenting folkloric events.
Costa Rica's First Lady, Merecedes Peñas, a Spanish national and her better half, President Luis Guillermo Solis. The couple, who have a daughter together, are not married, requiring the First Lady to take the exams to become a Costa Rican national.
Costa Rica’s First Lady, Merecedes Peñas, a Spanish national and her better half, President Luis Guillermo Solis. The couple, who have a daughter together, are not married, requiring the First Lady to take the exams to become a Costa Rican national. Photo Ameliareuda.com
Q COSTA RICA – Living in the country for the past 27 years, Costa Rica’s First Lady, Mercedes Peñas, has finally decided to apply for Costa Rican nationality.
Although she has lived more than half of her life in Costa Rica, she says she has long felt a strong attachment to the country, and now wants to become a citizen.
Doña Mercedes on Saturday finished her exams required to acquire nationality.
“The truth is that I have been living in Costa Rica for many years, I am happy here. The country has given me a lot and I have been working for years in the territories, so I sincerely felt that it now was time,” said Doña Mercedes to Ameliareuda.com.
The First Lady taking the nationalization exam. Had she and President Solis been married, she, like any other foreign national married to a Costa Rica, would not have been required to take the exam. Photo Ameliarueda.com
“I’ve lived here more than I’ve lived in Spain. I came here at 21 and I’ve been here 27 years and the roots and identity that one feels for Costa Rica are very strong, apart from my daughter and Luis being Costa Ricans, but it is true that I have taken root here,” she added.
The First Lady said she made the decision last year. One of the exams was scheduled for November last, however, the events of Hurricane Otto forced her to postpone her plans, to contribute to the work of helping out the affected.
After the national emergency, Doña Mercedes resumed her plans.
Doña Mercedes admitted that some parts (of the study) cost her more than others, luckily, her better half (President Solis) is a historian by profession and lent her a hand from time to time.
“I studied history in Spain and I knew the subject of the conquest and colonization, it is not the same to see it with from a Spanish perspective than to see it from Costa Rica and specifically how it happened in Costa Rica. In any case, it helped me a lot that I accompanied Inés (her daughter) to Social Studies and if I had any doubts, I asked Luis,” said the First Lady, sociologist and political scientist.
Doña Mercedes expressed her satisfaction at being able to become a Costa Rican citizen and also maintain her Spanish nationality.
Like every other foreigner aspiring to become a Costa Rican national, the process takes time. Doña Mercedes’ exams results will be available by mid April, in the hope of obtaining positive results. After than, she can continue with her citizenship application.
The boulevard or pedestrian walkway in the area of the Legislative Assembly is a magnet for illegally parked vehicles.
The boulevard or pedestrian walkway in the area of the Legislative Assembly is a magnet for illegally parked vehicles.
Q COSTA RICA – Drivers insist on parking in areas such as boulevards and any space to squeeze into rather than pay for space in a lot. The illegally parked vehicles no doubt add to San Jose’s inner-city traffic congestion.
The Policia de Transito (Traffic Police) with its limited resources of manpower, has done what it can to stop this practice, issuing some 3, 3.340 parking tickets in first 79 days of the year.
The average is 42 tickets a day.
The director of the Policia de Transito, Mario Calderon, explains that his officials have been ticketing cars illegally parked in all areas, not just the boulevards – the pedestrian walkways – like that around the Legislative Assembly building that daily converts into an impromptu parking lot.
Helping out the Transito officials is the San Jose Municipal Police, authoritez by the Traffic Police to issue parking tickets, that keep an eye on illegally parked cars around the clock.
A fine for illegal parking is ¢51,000 colones, plus costs if the vehicle is towed, that can include tow fees and storage.
Calderon emphasizes that they will attempt to remove (tow) vehicles blocking access, where possible and fine the others and that his officials could issue multiple tickets (on the same day) to a ticketed vehicle that is moved and again parked illegally.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, El Jobo and Cerro Verde are the only towns in Nicoya that farm with water reservoirs. In both cases, the University of Costa Rica built the first reservoirs over fifteen years ago.
Q COSTA RICA, by David Bolaños, Vozdeguanacaste.com -El Jobo and Cerro Verde are two small villages boxed in by Nicoya’s mountains. In order to get there you have to travel over narrow dirt roads that rise and fall in the foothills. Once you arrive, quiet reigns while the inhabitants are out working in the fields.
However, the volume of water coursing through streams has dropped during the dry season, and a lack of water is a constant subject of conversation.
That’s why farmers in these towns are trusting their continued subsistence in new water-rationing methods. Thanks to these techniques they will have everything they need so that their farms remain green during the scorching Guanacastecan summer.
Its advantages are carved into the mountain: reservoirs and ponds that store rainwater and capture water form nearby streams guarantee that crops can be watered year round.
Ensuring water for their lands have encouraged farmers to test new, completely organic crops. Their worry now is how to sell these new products in the province. Water is no longer a huge obstacle.
“Here, water will not die,” says Carlos Corrales, in El Jobo, as he inspects a hose that connects the reservoir to his crops.
Carlos Corrales lives in El Jobo with his son who has the same name. For the last five years they have enjoyed uninterrupted production of onions, tomatoes, and tilapia at their small farm by using drip irrigation.Part of the Corrales’s farm gets water directly from the reservoir, while the other part is irrigated using water from the tilapia ponds. “This water already has fertilizer from the tilapia’s excrement. It’s also rich in hydrogen, which is good for tomatoes,” explained Carlos senior.
The Corrales family aspires to a completely organic harvest. “It’s hard to be totally organic because this land has been exploited with chemicals for so many years,” said the son.
The Corrales family is from San José, where the father was a cobbler and the son was a messenger. Today all of their attention is focused on their farm’s success, which is why they’ve invested in the reservoir, drip irrigation, and chemical-free farming. “You have to invest in your future welfare,” says the younger Carlos.
Thanks to the reservoirs, Minor Barrantes has half a hectare planted with celery, lettuce, bok choi, kale, carrots, Chinese mustard, cilantro, parsley, eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage, all of which he sells to restaurants and hotels.
The economic benefits that stem from the reservoirs have encouraged farmers in Cerro Verde to build more holding ponds. The village currently has five functional reservoirs like this one, which is covered with a shade to reduce evaporation.
Article originally appeared on Vozdeguanacaste.com and is republished here with permission.
Q BUSINESS – Two Colombian companies in the textile and apparel sector are expanding in Central America, with the expectation of some new 1,700 jobs, mostly in a Nicaraguan apparel operation, the result of a US$8 million investment by Cali-based Supertex.
A subcontractor for sportswear brands, which include Adidas, Nike y Under Armour, Supertex expects to hire 1,500 garment workers within three years of operation.
The company, established in 1983, has two facilities in Colombia, with a total of 2,000 employees, and a monthly capacity of 900.000 units, and two in El Salvador with 2.400 workers and a capacity of 1.1 million.
Bogota-based Proquinal for its part will hire 160 employees, as part of a US$24-million expansion of its plant in Alajuela, Costa Rica, which since 2004 has been producing vinyl-coated fabrics for the automotive and marine industries.
Proquinal is part of United States-based Spradling Group, with sales in 70 countries.
As of last year, Colombian investment abroad was valued at some US$50 billion, of which nearly a quarter went to Central America.
Dozens of cyclists ride on this edge without safety equipment at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday on the Santa Cruz- Nicoya route. Photo by David Bolaños
Dozens of cyclists ride on this edge without safety equipment at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday on the Santa Cruz- Nicoya route. Photo by David Bolaños
Q COSTA RICA, by Wilberth Villalobos wilberth, vozdeguanacaste.com – Residents of Liberia, Nicoya, and Santa Cruz have already started pedaling in search of their own bike lanes on freeways and highways. These residents have presented projects asking each canton’s municipal councils to invest in these structures. This movement has been occurring throughout the country, with a few successful examples.
A bike lane runs parallel to a street or highway and is usually marked by a physical barrier that allows only cyclists to use it. There are also bike paths, which are lanes marked with paint but not set apart with obstacles.
The goal of both types of lane is not just to make traffic more orderly, but also to look after the many Guanacastecan cyclists’ safety.
Throughout Guanacaste’s highlands and lowlands it is common to see professional cyclists training on highways during the morning and afternoon. Others use their bicycles as a way to get to and from work, and even to take their children to school. Very few wear helmets or use reflective lights.
These safety omissions put riders at risk of accidents, which is why the Santa Cruz community representative Jorge Leal presented a motion before the municipal council to include a budget amendment and to build more bike lanes in the canton.
His proposal includes the highway that runs between Santa Cruz and Arado to Santa Bárbara and Santa Cruz, as well as the Huacas-Flamingo route. All of these are high-traffic routes frequently used by tourists.
For the time being, the canton has only 16 kilometers of road marked for bike paths by the National Highway Council last year. This segment is between the communities of 27 de Abril and Villareal, along national routes 152 and 155.
Students Need It
Residents of Liberia do not want to be left behind, so they have proposed a bike lane along route 21 from the main entrance to the city to the local University of Costa Rica campus.
Jorge Araya, a member of the neighborhood council, said that there are many important educational institutions in this area that serve around 8,000 students daily. That is why they are taking steps so that CONAVI (National Highway Council) answers their requests.
Nicoya, on the other hand, has gotten off the bike and now walks slowly in search of a solution.
Since 2015, municipal leaders from the previous administration declared the construction of the Nambí bike lane as a project of public interest. This lane would be located between the Dos Pinos plant to the main entrance of the Las Palmas neighborhood, along Route 21.
The declaration is stuck on paper. Cristina Baltodano, current municipal councilor, said that more than 100 community members and the Nambí Development Association presented a signed document requesting the bike lane.
According to the council member, the project is currently on hold. The hope is that current members of Nicoya’s council will take up the project once again.
Yes We Can
The residents’ and municipalities’ perseverance has shown that progress is possible in this country.
At example is Montes de Oca, in San José province, where in 2014 a group of residents organized and painted a section of the canton’s routes as if they were bike paths. The project was well received by both drivers and cyclists.
“A group of civilians painted an unofficial bike path that has helped drivers visualize space for cyclists,” said architect Gillio Francesca, director of Urban Planning for the municipality of Montes de Oca.
Because of the project’s success, two more bike lanes will be built in 2017 (one is a redesign of the current lane that will incorporate both vertical and horizontal demarcation).
The budget is ¢50 colones.
Article originally appeared on Vozdeguanacaste.com and is republished here with permission. Read the original.
Francisca Ramírez, the head of the peasant movement that is leading the fight against the construction of an inter-oceanic canal in Nicaragua, which has made her a victim of harassment by the administration of Daniel Ortega. Credit: Luis Martínez/IPS
TODAY NICARAGUA – MANAGUA (IPS) – The unequal battle that small farmer Francisca Ramírez is waging against the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega has become so well-known that people are calling for her security and her rights from the political heart of Europe.
Who is she and why did the European Parliament order Nicaragua on Feb. 16 to protect her life and rights, as well as those of thousands of peasant farmers in the centre-south of this impoverished Central American country?
Ramírez is a 40-year-old indigenous farmer who has lived all her life in the agricultural municipality of Nueva Guinea, in the Autonomous Region of Caribe Sur, 280 km from the capital.
She told IPS in an interview that her family has always lived in that rural area, which was the scene of bloody fighting during the 1980s civil war.
When she was eight, her father abandoned them and her mother had to work as a day labourer, while Ramírez took care of her five younger siblings.
Having survived the U.S.-financed war against the government of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (1979-1990), Ramírez learned agricultural work, got married at 18, had five children, and with the effort of the whole family, they acquired some land and improved their living conditions.
Ortega, who governed the country in that period, after overthrowing the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, returned to power in 2007. In January, he started a third consecutive term of office, after winning widely questioned elections where the opposition was excluded, supported by a civil-military alliance which controls all the branches of the state.
Ramírez was happy with her life until 2013. “They told us over the radio that they were going to build a canal and I thought that it was a very important thing because they said that we were no longer going to be poor,” she said.
Then, gradually, the news started to change her perception of the project to build the Great Nicaraguan Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, granted in concession to the Chinese group HKND in 2013, and she started to ask questions that nobody answered.
One day, bad luck knocked on her door: delegations of public officials who her community had never seen before, accompanied by members of the police and the military, escorted delegations of people from China who made measurements and calculations about the properties of the farmers.
“The route of the canal runs through your property and all of you will be resettled,” they told her.
Law 840, passed in 2013 to give life to the over 50-billion-dollar mega-project, which she was barely able to understand with her three years of formal schooling, was very clear: they would be paid for their lands a price which the state considered “appropriate”.
So the resistance began. “At first everybody was happy, we thought that at last progress was coming, but when overbearing soldiers and police officers started to show up, guarding the Chinese, the whole community refused to let them in their homes and we started to protest,” she said.
Since then, she said the official response has not varied: repression, harassment and threats to farmers who refuse to give up their land.
She started marching behind the rural leaders who led the first demonstrations against the canal.
One of the many demonstrations by small farmers who came to Managua from the southern Caribbean coastal region to protest the construction of an inter-oceanic canal that would displace thousands of rural families and cause severe environmental damage. Credit: Carlos Herrera/IPS
Later on, the leaders were arrested, threatened, intimidated and repressed by the police and military, and Ramírez unexpectedly found herself leading the demonstrations in 2014.
Her leadership caught the attention of the national and international media, human rights organisations and civil society.
Soon, the peasant marches against the canal became a symbol of resistance and more people joined, turning the movement into the most important social force to confront Ortega since he took office again 10 years ago.
The peasant movement against the canal “is the strongest social organisation that exists today in Nicaragua. Within any movement, an authentic and genuine leadership emerges, and that is what Mrs. Ramírez represents,” sociologist Oscar René Vargas told IPS.
The president “is aware that the movement is the most important social force that his government is facing,” he said.
The admiration that Ramírez arouses, with her ability to organise and lead more than 90 demonstrations in the country, has irritated the authorities.
More than 200 peasant farmers have been arrested, about 100 have been beaten or wounded by gunfire, and the government has basically imposed a military state of siege in the area, where it refuses to finance social projects, according to the movement.
Police checkpoints along the entire route to Nueva Guinea and military barricades in the area give the impression of a war zone.
Ramírez has not escaped the violence and harassment: her house has been raided without a court order, her children and family persecuted and threatened by intelligence agents and police officers, her belongings and goods that she sells, such as food, confiscated and damaged, and she has been accused of terrorist activities.
One of the latest episodes occurred in December 2016, during a visit to Nicaragua by Organisation of American States (OAS) Secretary-General Luis Almagro, to discuss with Ortega the allegations of attacks on democracy.
To keep Ramírez and other leaders of the movement from meeting with Almagro, police convoys besieged the community and repressed members of the movement, she said.
They partially destroyed the main bridge out of the area, and suspected members of the movement’s Council were held at military checkpoints.
They even confiscated Ramírez’s work vehicles, used them to transport troops and later damaged them, according to Gonzalo Carrión, from the Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre.
“Ortega’s government has visciously mistreated Francisca Ramírez and the farmers who follow her. Her rights have been violated, from the right to protest to the right to freedom of movement, and we fear that they will violate her most sacred right: to life,” Carrión told IPS.
Walking along footpaths in the dark and crossing a deep river, where she almost drowned, Ramírez got around the military cordon and travelled, disguised and hidden in a truck, to Managua, where she was able to meet with Almagro on Dec. 1, 2016 and tell him of the abuses to which her community had been subjected for refusing to give up their lands.
On Feb. 16, the European Parliament issued a resolution condemning the lack of protection for human rights activists in Nicaragua, putting a special emphasis on the case of Ramírez, and lamenting the deterioration of the rule of law and democracy in this country.
The members of the European Parliament urged “the national and local police forces to refrain from harassing and using acts of reprisal against Francisca Ramirez for carrying out her legitimate work as a human rights defender.”
“Francisca Ramirez is a victim of abuses by the police in the country aiming at risking human rights defenders’ security and livelihood,” the European Parliament denounced.
“Ramírez, coordinator for the Defense of the Land, the Lake and Sovereignty, was in Managua to file a formal complaint over acts of repression, violations of the right to free circulation, and aggression experienced by several communities from Nueva Guinea on their way to the capital city for a peaceful protest against the construction of an inter-oceanic canal, projects which will displace local farmers activities and indigenous people from the premises of the construction,” the resolution states.
While the government remained silent about the resolution, social activist Mónica López believes that it represented a victory for the rural movement.
“Without a doubt, the resolution is a social and political victory for the peasant movement against the canal, a condemnation of Nicaragua, and a global warning about what is happening against indigenous peasant movements in Nicaragua,” López told IPS.
The government asserts that the canal project is moving ahead, although a year has passed with no visible progress, and it maintains that it will eradicate the poverty that affects more than 40 per cent of the 6.2 million people in this Central American country.
El Salvador had a rate of 103 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. (El Tiempo Honduras)
El Salvador had a rate of 103 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. (El Tiempo Honduras)
Q24N – There were 30 murders in El Salvador on March 15 in El Salvador. Just on March 15.
Afterward, Justice and Security Minister Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde came out saying the country will have to face some rough days and hard times if it is ever going to win against the country’s widespread problem with violence.
In 2015, El Salvador had a rate of 103 murders per 100,000 inhabitants and 81.7 in 2016. There are an estimated 60,000 gang members in the country. The Mara Salvatrucha gang has 30,000 members in El Salvador and another 50,000 around the world, of which between 8,000 t0 10,000 live in the United States.
On March 16th, a study titled “The New Face of Street Gangs: The Gang Phenomenon in El Salvador,” was published by the Kimberly Green Center for Latin America and the Caribbean, in coordination with the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at the International University of Florida.
The study is based on a survey of gang members and former gang members and seeks to explain why they join a mara (gang). For the study, 1,196 imprisoned gang members were interviewed, both retired and active, in six prisons.
More than 62 percent of men who have joined gangs or maras in El Salvador did so for “leisure” or “friendship.” They wanted to be accepted and when they see how bad it can get, 19.6 percent said they felt they could not get out. Twenty-one percent of women, however, entered gangs “due to family problems” and 12.3 percent said they joined because they were forced.
How to rehabilitate a gang member?
James Garbarino is an expert on children who commit crimes. He gave an interview to the Salvadorian media outlet La Prensa Gráfica, during which he spoke about violence in El Salvador.
One statement that is often made about children who have committed murder is that they are “monstrous” human beings. However, in a study done by Gabarino, he tried to give a humane explanation for those actions.
“I have worked with many judges and I notice that whenever juries have this conception of ‘absolute evil’ it is more complicated for them to dictate more accurate sentences,” he said.
According to the expert, the appropriate action to take with these children is to give them rehabilitation, not condemn them to continue in a cycle of violence.
“There are only a small percentage of individuals that cannot be rehabilitated, and in psychology the classic term for these people is psychopaths.”
In El Salvador, few people believe in the rehabilitation of gang members, the conception of them being that they are more or less psychopaths. However, others want to give them a second chance.
Gabarino has studied the psychological evolution of adolescents who were sentenced to a life in prison for having committed a felony in their adolescence. And in the last 20 years, he has become convinced that rehabilitation is possible. He showed that it requires learning and spiritual experiences, reading and meditation — something that changes your conception of the world.
The expert asked teenage murderers how their lives would have gone had they not been locked up. Most agree that they would have remained in crime and would not have survived. At age 25, the brain is reportedly more mature and can better analyze situations than when committing crimes at a younger age.
When a person is imprisoned, they have the option to change their lives. In El Salvador, there is no such opportunity, because the prison system is broken.
“When these people go to prison, they have to make a decision: to become savage barbarians or become monks. In some prisons in the United States, inmates are given facilities or spaces for the latter. If we look at a spectrum of prisons from Scandinavia, which are focused on human rights and rehabilitation, and we go to the other extreme, to the United States (we can see that) that the issue of rehabilitation is not just a psychological issue, it is also a political issue. “
According to the expert, the only way to achieve real rehabilitation is to change the mentality we use to construct prison systems.
“It is possible to change the social environment inside prisons,” he said. “It does not happen by force, but rather through reflections, meditations, through a respectful approach.”
Cuban hospitals have begun to issue “symbolic” bills to their patients (Cubanet).
TODAY CUBA – A report from Cuban television noted that Cuban medical institutions have begun to provide their patients with symbolic bills with the actual cost of services rendered.
Miosotis Moreno, director of Economics and Planning at the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) clarified that the health services will not start actually charging their patients, but the account is “symbolic”.
“It is not the intention that the services will be charged … It is only so that the people feel the commitment with the services that we are offering today, how we do it, what the cost is to the Ministry of Public Health and the country,” the official said.
According to the National Television News, the bill seeks to help the Cuban people know “that the services in our health system are free [for users], but cost [the system].”
“Most Cubans were born with the Revolution and we never worry about how much a surgical operation costs, or a clinical analysis, or an ultrasound, not to mention many of the other medical services that the population receives,” said the program’s director in the report.
“This way it is convenient, it is educational, it is a better way to give recognition to what we have done … It allows institutions also to really see what we are investing, it forces us to be more aware of the costs, which for a long time has been something that has not been given the right importance,” said a professional interviewed in the report.
The report was aired on Saturday, March 18, during the Noticiero del Mediodía.
Cuba, under the tenure of Raul Castro, has pledged to continue with its socialist economic policies, but has begun to allow limited free market reforms.
Cuba is living in an age of uncertainty, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s recent death, and Donald Trump‘s election as president of the United States. Trump has vowed to take a hard line on the island’s Communist regime.
Teachers claim their main reason for leaving is low salaries. (Flickr)
TODAY CUBA, MAYABEQUE, CUBA — Teachers and other education professionals started leaving their jobs at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year in Cuba’s Mayabeque province. Over the next few months, many followed suit.
This year’s figure constitutes the biggest exodus of teachers since 1998, according to a source from the Provincial Education Directorate.
“The accumulation of teachers who left classrooms this 2016-2017 period exceeds 250 … and in this province alone!” said a source speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Educators left their schools in three stages: at the end of the last school year, during the first week of September and then throughout the following months — all arguing they receive extremely low salaries.
A primary and secondary teacher earns between 450 and 500 Cuban pesos, or about US $20 a month.
In the last 10 years, wage increases for teachers amounted to around US $3. Meanwhile, workloads and responsibilities were multiplied due to a lack of educators.
At the beginning of 2016-2017 school year, the Ministry of Education of the province was silent about the exodus of teachers.
Some also reportedly left due to a lack of “appropriate conditions to exercise their profession,” poor quality of food in schools and difficulties in getting to and from work.
As the problem has grown, increasingly fewer people are entering the teaching field. Though there is a teacher training school in the Mayabeque province, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” which this year welcomed 600 students, many have abandoned the career path altogether.
“The teachers we currently have in schools throughout the province are mainly older than 50,” the source said.
Yailen Sanchez, a student, said to be a teacher is to die of hunger, and that she would never pursue the profession. Instead, she chose gastronomy.
“Maybe I can work in tourism,” she said, “which is where teachers are going, because they pay better.”
Teachers receive more dividends for private, off-the-books services often taught out of their homes. Others resort to fraud, or are allowed to receive gifts from students to improve their grades after difficult exams.
“It is likely that many other teachers will continue to abandon their jobs and look for better salaries in the private sector,” said María de los Ángeles Rodríguez, a Cuban history teacher who left last year.
“In general, the whole country is affected by this situation, off-the-book classrooms are popping up where professionals have the opportunity to teach higher quality classes because when students pay for their lessons, they are obliged to pay more attention and respect,” said Nora, an English teacher, who runs a home with 10 students, three hours a day from Monday to Friday, for two dollars a week.
“I’m afraid to tell you this,” Nora said. “In Cuba, private schools are not allowed, though it is clear that a student learns better according to the care that the professional can offer, and the results justify the professional’s payment.”
Article originally appeared on Panampost.com. It was originally published in Hablemos Press, an independent Cuban media outlet. The PanAm Post has established a strategic alliance with Hablemos Press to present Cuba’s reality to our readers, which is ignored by the traditional media.
The Venezuelan government has been closing or expropriating bakeries throughout Caracas (Twitter).
TODAY VENEZUELA – More than 20 closed bakeries, 2 occupied by the government and 4 closed, is the balance that has been left by the new regimen of bakery inspections implemented by the regime of Nicolás Maduro at Caracas locales.
There are more than 700 bakeries in the Venezuelan capital; most of them have been the result of work and sacrifice of immigrants who have been working in Venezuela for more than thirty years and have prospered thanks to their skills.
However, the Maduro government undertook an audit that has not only created uncertainty in the country’s commercial sector, but has also has occupied at least two bakeries and left them in the hands of inexperienced chavistas and military.
Emilio Dos Santos, owner of the bakery Mansion’s Bakery, which was expropriated by the government, said that the place was taken over by criminals.
“They arrived to close the bakery for 90 days because there was supposedly no bread, but we were selling bread at the time. The state security apparatus closed it, kicked us out of the premises and now have some rascals attending the bakery,” he said.
The merchant, of Portuguese origin, said that the national superintendent of Fair Prices, William Contreras, arbitrarily entered the trade and threatened to close it. He pointed out that Contreras did not allow him to defend himself or justify himself during the intervention: “I was out of work,” he said.
Dos Santos said he had been working in the bakery for 25 years: “The people in the nearby buildings are with me. The only thing we ask is that the state return all bakeries to their owners.”
“State security hurt an immigrant family that had been working for decades in the country and also affected the community that for 25 years baked the bread in this place. These people, who we do not know who they are, are damaging the tradition,” he added.
Social networks have reported that one of the new bakery managers is a militant of the ruling party Jose Solorzano, who in 2004, was captured in photographs knocking down a statue of Christopher Columbus.
The bakeries in the South American country must not only face price controls, exchange controls, and the governmental monopoly on the importation of raw material, but are also obliged whether they “like it or not” to meet three requirements: continuous production, regulation of raw material, and verification of the legality of inputs.
For the layman, the development of computer programs and applications might as well be magic. There is a reason that it is so difficult to find strong programmers to fill entry level jobs and why veteran developers are feverishly fought over. The skills required to create software are novel, and require a huge time investment to become proficient in. What’s more, just having technical expertise isn’t enough. The creation of a successful software application requires that its developers have an adherence to engineering principles and conduct sensible design practices.
Simple Apps That Aren’t So Simple
Finance Software
On the surface, many proprietary finance applications might seem like simple calculators. However, under the hood these applications use complex algorithms to assist investment bankers and underwriters. The logic requirements of these applications may be simple, but the mathematics involved in calculating results for risk analysis can become very complex. Additionally, many times brute force solutions are not viable and require more elegant algorithms to improve application performance. IBM’s SPSS is heralded as the standard in risk management software.
Search Engines
When one thinks of a search engine, they probably jump straight to Google. Google is after all the most popular search engine in the world outside of China. However, search engines exist in many forms. Many websites and even offline applications utilize search engines to allow users to completely skip navigation. What is clear, is that search engine capabilities, and thus complexity can be inconsistent. For example, many proprietary search engines rely on exact string matching. The search engine parses everything included and then regurgitates any location where it found an exact match. This approach is quite simple, and isn’t exactly sophisticated. Search engines such as Google however, have complicated algorithms that determine the relevancy of individual terms in query, account for misspellings and penalize websites trying to game the search algorithm. Search engines also have to be able to scale, and often utilize concurrency in their programming.
Social Media
Forget about all of the crazy features that Facebook has implemented over the past few years. When Facebook originally hit the scene back in 2004, it was nothing more than a CRUD app written in PHP. In other words, it was a database backed application that was able to create, read, update and delete records. What started as a simple application eventually exploded in popularity. What was interesting in the case of Facebook was that it grew so fast it became essential to develop more efficient ways to serve the content to users. Much of the original PHP code became rewritten into C++ and D code.
Scaling is the common complexity
For the most part, computer hardware performance has gotten to a point where it is sufficient enough to run all but the most memory leak ridden code at an acceptable rate. However, many large scale applications eventually reach a point where the efficiency belt has to be tightened, and developers have to retreat to their software engineering roots of writing elegant, scalable algorithms.
Poverty at record high in Venezuela. A woman waits in line to check out at the Dia a Dia supermarket in the Propatria neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela. Popular items with government fixed prices that have been running short are coffee, cooking oil, precooked corn flour, sugar, milk, toilet paper, disposable diapers, detergent and fabric softener, among other items. Photo: AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos
TODAY VENEZUELA – In a public statement, the Venezuelan National Academy of Economic Sciences (ANCE) has brought forward a series of economic proposals in order to “overcome continued deterioration in Venezuelans’ living conditions and the visible unwillingness to amend the causing policies by the Executive Office.”
The scholars deemed it necessary to address themselves to the nation, as “the dire inflation rate, the highest in the world in the past three years, impoverishes the people in worrisome terms.”
The text, signed by Humberto García Larralde (president) and Sary Levy Carciente (secretary), refers to the Survey on Venezuelans’ Living Conditions (Encovi), conducted in tandem by Andrés Bello Catholic University, Central University of Venezuela and Simón Bolívar University.
The findings could not be more alarming: the poverty rate, already very high in 2015 (73%), hits 81.8% of households, the first ever recorded in Venezuelan modern history. More than half Venezuelans are in extreme poverty (51.5%). Altogether, only 18.2% of families are not poor.”
The Academy suggests to reduce “urgently” the State fiscal deficit, remove monetary financing, unify the exchange rate at its real values and unleash the production forces to meet the needs in the domestic market.
The Costa Rica cedula issued by the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones is the official identification of citizenship. Naturalized citizens obtain the same cedula, with the only difference being the first digit of the ID number, it starts with an 8. Image for illustrative purposes
Q COSTA RICA – The following article in the ‘A Dull Roar’ answers questions face by many foriegners living in Costa Rica, especially from North America and Europe, who after living in Costa Rica for some time decided to trade in their ‘residency’ for ‘citizenship’.
The decision is a personal one.
The Costa Rica cedula issued by the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones is the official identification of citizenship. Naturalized citizens obtain the same cedula, with the only difference being the first digit of the ID number, it starts with an 8. Image for illustrative purposes
From A Dull Roar – I’ve been arguing with myself for over a year about pursuing citizenship here in Costa Rica. I’ve put in the time, which is 7 years, why not get something for it?
There are a lot of benefits, such as drastically lower health insurance premiums (like so low they fall into my budgetary noise), a free 10-year cedula, easier banking, ability to leave Costa Rica and return at will and return of my US$200 residency security deposit.
I’ve also been told by those who have gone this path before that many everyday transactions that involve use of ID become somehow easier because you are no longer a foreign contaminant in the eyes of Ticos, especially those that control various process gateways. Doors open that swung with difficulty before and the wheels of bureaucracy in general suddenly present less friction if you are perceived as “normal.” Those benefits are rather intangible to me at the moment.
And, of course, one mustn’t overly discount the “coolness” factor of having dual citizenship and that inoffensive passport when visiting certain places disagreeable to the latest U.S. meddling around the world.
One drawback that I was hung up on for a while was the name change thing.
Here names have a set pattern and they want you to conform to the norm too, which is your first name (and optionally your “middle” name) followed by the surname of your father and mother in that order. So, forgoing my middle name, my new name would be Casey Bahr Lehman. That bothered me for quite a while because … well it’s your name!
I’m over that now, it’s fine, who cares. It doesn’t mean I change my U.S. name after all, but it does mean the hassle of several changes to various documents and minor IDs such as my Costa Rica driver’s license.
Another drawback is that transforming yourself from resident to citizen is, naturally, a bureaucratic hassle. The most painful of these magic documents to procure is my FBI background check, which if you are an ordinary citizen takes about 14 weeks plus or minus not counting transit time in the mail. Additionally, that doc has to carry an apostille from the U.S. Dept. of State, which takes another 3 weeks plus transit time.
In my case, those transit times are significant because stuff I mail from here to the States generally takes 2 weeks, and mail from the FBI and the Dept. of State must go to my U.S. mailing address first, which takes roughly a week, maybe less. So, just for that single critical doc, I figure 5 to 6 months before it’s in my hands all apostill’d and shit.
I also need a new certified birth certificate with apostille but my home state is pretty fast with that stuff and can do the two-step process in one go, so I’m not so worried about that one. However, I want to time the fetching of that document carefully. If I were to send for it at the same time as the FBI check, it would age about 20 weeks, which is not good, because both those docs cannot be older than 90 days when I present them to the office here that grants citizenship (which is not Migración by the way).
The final drawback is that I could save myself a lot of headaches by using a lawyer to handle all this stuff and a service known as a background check “channeler” that can get that FBI check with apostille to me in 2 weeks. Trouble is, all that is spendy, just the channeler service costs $400, the lawyer $800, etc.
Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (TSE) runs the citizenship process, not Migración (immigration service).
If I can be patient (easier said than done), however, I figure I can do the whole thing myself including the BC (for which there is no channeler) and the citizenship bureau fee of US$250 for a grand total of about US$600. Minus my residency deposit, the net then is US$400 but it takes me about 6 months longer than using the lawyer. So, that’s my plan and I’m stickin’ to it. If I flub it, I apply lessons learned and try again and still be money ahead. By the way, all told this DIY process is likely to take a year, so time’s a-wastin’!
Oh, there is also the small matter of having to take both written and oral tests in Spanish, one on Costa Rica civics and the other to ensure I speak good-enough Spanish. However, those come at the very end and there is an official study guide, so I think it’s no sweat. If they want me to sing the CR National Anthem, then we might have a problem.
Once I get citizenship, my wife can apply as the spouse of a Costa Rica citizen and she gets a waiver on the test. My son, who is now of majority age here, will decide for himself if he wants to continue as a Permanent Resident or apply for citizenship. He will breeze through the test of course if he chooses to become a citizen.
Is it all worth it? Won’t really know until it’s a done deal I think, but for sure there will be an economic payback. In less than a year, just counting the reduction in my gov’t health insurance premiums alone, I’ll have recouped the money I spent if not my time. I kind of doubt that I’ll really ever use my Costa Rica passport though (that’s actually a separate process by the way, they don’t just give you one when you achieve citizen status).
Article Casey Bahr originally appeared on http://adullroar.blogspot.com.
Q COSTA RICA – Getting the train moving is no easy task, financially. For many, the commuter train is the only hope to not get stuck in traffic, for authorities to reduce the nightmare traffic congestion of the Greater Metropolitan area (GAM).
But it costs.
And the Instituto Costarricense de Ferrocarriles (Incofer) – the state railway – doesn’t have the money.
For that, the government of Luis Guillermo Solis is promoting a bill, from the creation of the Partido Accion Cuidadana (PAC), to raise tolls and the cost of the Marchamo, to finance the commuter train service.
The bill that was presented by legislator Marco Vinicio Redondo, following discussion with other legislators and Incofer officials, resumes the derailed legislative proposal of more than year ago.
Specifically, the bill aims to raise the property tax on vehicles (included in the annual circulation permit or Marchamo), the tax on the transfer of property of vehicles and increase the tolls on national highways. It is unclear if the increase in tolls would also apply to the Ruta 27, a public road under concession with a private operator.
In the case of the Marchamo, the increase in the property tax could be a minimum of ¢1,000 colones, plus an increase in the tax rate that uses the ‘fiscal’ (tax) value to determine the total tax payable.
The bill sets out the percentage of the total taxe(s) collected that is to be destined for the railway, to be used to modernize train service, that incudes the purchase of more locomotives and passenger cars, additional track and services, among others.
UPDATE (10:47am) – Thank you Carolyn Barker, who posted on QCR’s Facebook post of knowing the Kapil (the missing brother) and called the worried sister. See FB post here.
Q COSTA RICA – The following letter was sent to the Q by Anjali Hariyani in the hopes of finding her missing brother, Kapil Hariyani , who arrived in Costa Rica on February 20/21, 2017 and his last known location is Between Calle 10, San Jose Costa Rica and 10101 San Jose Costa Rica.
Kapil Ashok Hariyani. Photo submitted by Anajali Hariyani
“I spoke to him last on February 22, 2017 after which he has been missing. He expressed interest in visiting Panama. We have tried a lot of routes to search him and seek your help,” says the letter received by Q Costa Rica.
“I am hopeful that if this missing advertisement (sic) is posted in your newspaper, we would be able to find some help from people reading it. Please let me know the procedure or requirements to do the same as my brother is of Indian nationality,” says Anjali.
If you know of Kapil’s whereabouts or have seen him, hopefully alive and well, you can contact Anjali at: (617) 899-4094 in the U.S., email at: anjaliashokhariyani@gmail.com.
You can also use the comments section below or post any information our official Facebook page.
This notice is posted under our community service police, a free service by the Q. We do not take responsibility for its accuracy, we are only relaying the information received. Any contact directly is at your own risk.
Officially known as the “Alfredo González Flores”, but will forever be the ‘platina’, the three lanes of the south half of the bridge were opened to traffic this morning.
Q COSTA RICA – As promised last week, the three lanes of the south half of the ‘platina’ bridge – officially known as the “Alfredo González Flores” – opened to traffic this morning. With television news cameras grabbing the action, President Luis Guillermo Solis at 6:00am this morning donned the role of traffic cop and waved the first cars from Alajuela to San Jose, to cross the bridge.
In the words of the President, “We want to emphasize the work is not complete…drivers should use caution in crossing…we couldn’t wait any longer.”
With arm raised, President Solis, donning the had of traffic cop, waves traffic to start flowing on the new half of the ‘platina’ bridge
With the President’s hand motion, Transit police immediately removed the barriers and tow lanes of Alajuela – San Jose bound traffic began normal flow. Once traffic of the San Jose – Alajuela bound was diverted onto the one lane of the three new lanes, work crews began immediately working on the north half of the bridge, those three lanes expected to be ready for traffic by April 30.
The opening of the new lanes also means a relief for traffic congestion on the alternate routes.
Also, restrictions for crossing the ‘platina’ bridge were lifted. That is, all vehicular traffic can now move across the bridge, at all hours, removing the limit of only public transit vehicles during morning and afternoon rush hours.
To move the maxim traffic flow in the right direction for the morning and afternoons, the bridge will be two lanes to San Jose and one lane to Alajuela from midnight to noon; and two lanes to Alajuela and one lane to San Jose from noon to midnight. Basically, the centre lane becomes a reversible lane.
A rise in violent crime, including multiple murders of tourists, is threatening Costa Rica's peaceful image.
Costa Rica has one of Latin America’s most trusted police forces, says Insightcrime.org report
Q COSTA RICA, via Insightcrime.org who has put together a selection of some of the region’s best — and worst — police forces.
In the report, Costa Rica is among the countries with the best police force.
Insightcrime.org says Costa Rica has one of Latin America’s most trusted police forces. And compared to other Central American countries, Costa Ricans do not widely perceive their police as being involved in criminal activities.
However, this may change as local groups gain more control and adopt the modus operandi of more powerful patrons, while the volume of drugs flowing through the nation appears to be on the rise.
One indication of local police’s criminal ties was uncovered in late 2016, when at least ten Costa Rican police officers were arrested in an operation against a transnational drug network.
Moreover, Costa Rica has seen its security forces challenged by the abrupt escalation in drug-related violence as native gangs evolve, and has responded with potentially worrying measures. By the end of 2017, the government aims to boost police ranks by cutting down on training time, a move that risks weakening the efficiency and trustworthiness of the force.
The other countries in the ‘best’ category”
Chile
Chile’s Carabineros — the police force with possibly the highest confidence rating in the region — has had its reputation tarnished in a surprising case of high-reaching fraud. By March 10, at least 10 officers left the force — including a general and a captain — following revelations that a corrupt network syphoned around $12 million from the agency between 2010 and 2015. Investigations show that this group transferred funds from an institutional bank account into their personal accounts. More officials are expected to be fired as internal and judicial investigations continue.
The scandal is not the only one to hit Chile’s most trusted institutions in recent months, and some observers believe it will not be the last. The military — which is considered to be less corrupt than the police, according to a public survey — was shaken last year by another case of internal fraud nicknamed “Milicogate,” in which officials allegedly misused over $8 million in funds.
Nicaragua
Nicaraguans have high levels of trust in their police force. But this does not necessarily mean the public believes officials are not involved in criminal activities. Over half of the public think that the criminal interests have corrupted a police force that is nonetheless considered trustworthy. Indeed, Nicaraguan police are known to collaborate with drug traffickers and drug theft groups.
A 2014 police reform that made President Daniel Ortega its “supreme commander” has sparked concerns that this apparent politicization may weaken the integrity of the force.
But the high levels of public confidence in the Nicaraguan police are perhaps most surprising when considering the vast number of human rights denunciations the force receives compared to other state institutions.
Ecuador
Although not as highly regarded as the police in Chile or Nicaragua, trust in Ecuador’s officers is around double the regional average, and the force has been described as a “model for the region” to follow by Latin American leaders. Ecuador’s homicide rate, which is among the lowest in the region, has been viewed as an indicator of police efficiency.
A large-scale police reform effort in recent years has increased police training and salaries and, perhaps most importantly, strengthened police-community relations. Still, it is unclear exactly how much police tactics have contributed to reducing violent crimes in the country.
But severe problems remain within the institution, and 866 police officers were expelled between 2013 and 2016, according to a recent US State Department report on human rights practices for 2016. Active and retired police officers have been arrested or sentenced in organized crime and corruption schemes in the past.
For the ‘Worst’:
Honduras
Honduras may have the most criminally corroded and least trusted police force in the region, according to public perception surveys. In 2016, however, the country took some steps towards cleaning house.
The nation launched an extensive police reform effort following allegations that top-ranking officers had plotted the assassination of the country’s drug czar under orders from drug traffickers. The reform commission made impressive advances, and by early 2017 had reportedly forced over 2,500 officers to lose their position, or almost 20 percent of the force.
However, this probing process has already met with resistance, with the reform commission starting to receive death threats almost immediately.
Similarly to Costa Rica, however, Honduras’s reform commission seeks to boost police numbers to double the current amount by 2022, which may be counterproductive if standards are lowered.
Much rides on this reform bringing about long-term changes. In the past, failed purges have been followed by the creation of new elite forces such as the Military Police (PMOP), which is currently more trusted by Hondurans than any other security force. But this militarization of public security has seen fatal abuses and cases of apparent impunity, according to the US Human Rights Report.
Mexico
In Mexico, organized crime has deeply permeated police institutions. The municipal forces are probably the most corroded and in the past have acted as private hit squads for mayors with drug ties. This was allegedly the case in the well-known disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero state.
The US Human Rights Report says that state and local police “were involved in kidnapping, extortion, and providing protection for, or acting directly on behalf of, organized crime and drug traffickers.”
Furthermore, police officers who failed vetting procedures were kept on duty, the report adds.
This corrosion has had repercussions in Mexico‘s war on drugs, which has become increasingly militarized. Despite being responsible for a host of human rights abuses, the army remains the most trusted institution for tackling organized crime, and will probably remain so as long as the police do not become a more reliable and efficient force.
Dominican Republic
One of Latin America’s most notoriously corrupt forces, Dominican police have been accused of everything from petty corruption to running their own drug trafficking networks.
The US State Department report also points out that in 2016 “police officers particularly targeted undocumented immigrants of Haitian descent to extort money by threatening deportation.” According to the report, however, judicial efforts are hampered by widespread tolerance for “petty corruption.”
The report also states that police in the Dominican Republic — as in many other countries — operate in a “dangerous environment” where many civilians own guns and urban homicides are frequent. This reality may push officers to adopt excess force at times on criminals and civilians alike.
El Salvador and Brazil
In El Salvador the police are routinely accused of infiltration by gangs, extrajudicial killings and of forming death squads.
Brazil also has a huge problem with excessive use of violence by its heavy-handed military police. But many such cases are investigated in special military police courts, which has cause a large number to expire under the statute of limitations, according to the US State Department report.
Nevertheless, public trust in Brazilian and Salvadoran police is relatively high compared to the rest of the region. This may be at least partly due to the great public security threats faced by the public, who then rely more on state authorities. The dangers of a weakened police force was illustrated only last February, when a police strike in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo saw murder rates increase sixfold, with over 130 killings in one week.
Article originally appeared on Insighcrime.org, republished here with permision with editing by the Q.
Q BLOGS – Once again President Luis Guillermo Solis is on a mission, or a jaunt to raise money for Costa Rica, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day or purchase some more clothes over the weekend visit?
If it truly is to raise money for a Poora Vida, he could not have picked a worse time. The Trump guys want to enhance by US$54 million the military budget while reducing, among many other things, the foreign aid allocation by some 28% (US$58 billion in 2016 and US$14 billion now.)
What’s left is to be divided about the globe.
And they can say, “We told you so.”
Solis, who met with Vice President Pence on Friday, better have a very, very good story to tell in about a ten-minute time frame. Such as how we will invade Florida if you do not give lots and lots of money, just like “The Mouse That Roared.”
Commitments of assistance have been made, but they are just as easy to be broken. Example; after all these years we of applying we are now renegotiation NAFTA, and using some lame excuse to not import delicious Mexico avocados as well as rice, a major staple in Costa Rica.
We have to ask “why?” is the president making this one of his many trips abroad at this time and really, what does he expect to accomplish? After all this is a tax payer’s cost, right?
Sort of our national motto, “Watch the parade go by.”
A peasant walks among coca crops in Cauca, Colombia. Picture taken January 27, 2017. REUTERS/Jaime Saldarriaga – RTSXUBA
TODAY COLOMBIA – Colombia’s current peace process is facing numerous challenges. In a country that has suffered the worst impacts of the international drug war, one main dilemma is this: what to do with rural regions which have specialised in producing coca leaf, the main ingredient in one of the world’s most lucrative products?
For 35 years, the international cocaine trade has made drug cartels rich and helped fund and expand the activities of the FARC guerrillas throughout Colombia’s most remote areas. Even as the three-year peace negotiations were underway, coca cultivation in Colombia increased by 39%, from 69,000 hectares in 2014 to 96,000 in 2016.
Colombian coca growers have not benefited from the cocaine trade in the same way, of course. They remain, for the most part, poor farmers. But coca leaf, or hoja de coca, has provided a livelihood for thousands of families for generations. How can Colombia’s government move them out of this market while demobilising the guerrillas that once controlled coca-producing areas?
One of the least controversial proposals in the FARC peace accords is the idea of crop substitution and alternative development in these regions. With support from the government and the UN, some 100,000 families in the Nariño, Cauca, Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta, Guaviare, Catatumbo, Antioquía and Bolívar provinces would begin to grow cacao, coffee or honey instead of coca.
This sounds good in theory. But in practice it’s an extremely complicated proposal because of the uncomfortable truth about international agricultural markets: only in illicit ones are poor local producers able to sell their product for a price that actually covers the cost of inputs: land, labour and capital.
In a globalised world, illegal crops such as coca, cannabis and poppies are poor farmers’ rational response to the ruinously low prices of imported subsidised farm products.
Farm subsidies distort the agricultural market
Governments pay agricultural subsidies to farmers and agribusinesses to supplement income, manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and influence the cost and supply of commodities.
The corn market, for example, is highly subsidised. From 1979 to 1992, OECD nations’ subsidies for maize producers increased from 28% to 38%. In the US, the market price for corn stayed steady at about US$2.50 a bushel during this 13-year period.
Neither Colombia nor other Andean countries could afford such subsidies, meaning local producers couldn’t compete with low-cost imports. In Colombia, the market cost of corn dropped about 20% from 1979 to 1992; coffee, cacao and sugar prices plummeted even further.
The relationship is not linear, but it’s real: in 2002 the FAO acknowledged that rich-country farm subsidies hurt producers in the developing world. They allow farmers and agrobusiness to distort the market by offering cheap commodities that sell for less than the cost of production, eliminating competition from producers in poorer countries.
It’s no coincidence that major Andean coca cultivation also began when rich-country farming subsidies increased. From 1980 to 1988 in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru the area dedicated to coca growing rose from 85,000 hectares (99,000 metric tonnes produced) to 210,000 hectares (227,000 metric tonnes produced). Production has since stabilised at around 157,000 hectares, producing some 170,000 metric tonnes of coca leaf.
Coca cultivation, in short, is just one part of a revolution in the global agricultural trade in which traditional roles of producing countries and consuming countries have been inverted. In 1977, developing countries were running a trade surplus of US$17.5 billion with developed countries; by 1996, that surplus had become a deficit of US$6 billion with the rich world, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The rationality of coca
In such a system, illicit crops became one of the only ways for many farmers areas to make a decent living.
The international experts who promote alternative development as the solution for Colombian coca seem to be forgetting or avoiding this fact. For markets to be effective – whether legal or illegal – they must provide proper remuneration of input costs. If the price of goods is below the local production costs, that business model will necessarily fail.
Peasants cannot renounce the higher coca-farming income that supports them and their families, any more than they can change where they live, or the water, weather or soil conditions of the Andean region. Coca is also an ancestral Andean plant with centuries of use by local populations – a non-negligible factor in its enduring appeal.
These questions are part of what has driven the “fight for the land”, the rural bloodshed, the paramilitaries and guerrilla violence that has plagued Colombia for the past 52 years.
This is not to discount alternative development entirely. Comprehensive rural development projects that help local populations gain access to basic needs (potable water, housing, communications and urban infrastructure) and social services (health, education and recreation) are necessary for local communities, whether they grow legal or illegal crops.
But the central strategic problem of crop substitution remains the slim profit margins for legal products such as coffee, honey and chocolate. Until the international agricultural market solves its subsidies problem, coca leaf will always be Colombia’s best cash crop. It raises the question: what if coca were legal, too?
RICO’S JOURNAL – If this has never happened to you, you know that feeling your cellular phone is ringing, you just missed call, having to reach into your pocket to see if your cell phone is actually or still turned on, and so on and on, you can stop reading now. Go onto something else, don’t waste your time here.
But, if what I just described is you, don’t worry too much, it’s normal in today’s age of the cellular phone.
The following article by Daniel J. Kruger, University of Michigan, explains it all. Wait, but before you get to reading, check that cell phone, I think it’s ringing.
What’s behind phantom cellphone buzzes?
Have you ever experienced a phantom phone call or text? You’re convinced that you felt your phone vibrate in your pocket, or that you heard your ring tone. But when you check your phone, no one actually tried to get in touch with you.
You then might plausibly wonder: “Is my phone acting up, or is it me?”
Well, it’s probably you, and it could be a sign of just how attached you’ve become to your phone.
At least you’re not alone. Over 80 percent of college students we surveyed have experienced it. However, if it’s happening a lot – more than once a day – it could be a sign that you’re psychologically dependent on your cellphone.
There’s no question that cellphones are part of the social fabric in many parts of the world, and some people spend hours each day on their phones. Our research team recently found that most people will fill their downtime by fiddling with their phones. Others even do so in the middle of a conversation. And most people will check their phones within 10 seconds of getting in line for coffee or arriving at a destination.
Clinicians and researchers still debate whether excessive use of cellphones or other technology can constitute an addiction. It wasn’t included in the latest update to the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s definitive guide for classifying and diagnosing mental disorders.
But given the ongoing debate, we decided to see if phantom buzzes and rings could shed some light on the issue.
A virtual drug?
Addictions are pathological conditions in which people compulsively seek rewarding stimuli, despite the negative consequences. We often hear reports about how cellphone use can be problematic for relationships and for developing effective social skills.
One of the features of addictions is that people become hypersensitive to cues related to the rewards they are craving. Whatever it is, they start to see it everywhere. (I had a college roommate who once thought that he saw a bee’s nest made out of cigarette butts hanging from the ceiling.)
So might people who crave the messages and notifications from their virtual social worlds do the same? Would they mistakenly interpret something they hear as a ring tone, their phone rubbing in their pocket as a vibrating alert or even think they see a notification on their phone screen – when, in reality, nothing is there?
A human malfunction
We decided to find out. From a tested survey measure of problematic cellphone use, we pulled out items assessing psychological cellphone dependency. We also created questions about the frequency of experiencing phantom ringing, vibrations and notifications. We then administered an online survey to over 750 undergraduate students.
Those who scored higher on cellphone dependency – they more often used their phones to make themselves feel better, became irritable when they couldn’t use their phones and thought about using their phone when they weren’t on it – had more frequent phantom phone experiences.
Cellphone manufacturers and phone service providers have assured us that phantom phone experiences are not a problem with the technology. As HAL 9000 might say, they are a product of “human error.”
So where, exactly, have we erred? We are in a brave new world of virtual socialization, and the psychological and social sciences can barely keep up with advances in the technology.
Phantom phone experiences may seem like a relatively small concern in our electronically connected age. But they raise the specter of how reliant we are on our phones – and how much influence phones have in our social lives.
How can we navigate the use of cellphones to maximize the benefits and minimize the hazards, whether it’s improving our own mental health or honing our live social skills? What other new technologies will change how we interact with others?
Our minds will continue to buzz with anticipation.
A demonstration marking International Women’s Day in Mexico City. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo
A demonstration marking International Women’s Day in Mexico City. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo
(Q24N)
“I actually don’t remember when I was first harassed on the street, but I do remember when I first experienced it as an abusive act: I was an adolescent traveling with my mom in a crowded underground wagon, where men could easily touch women without anyone noticing and with little possibility to prevent it.”
This was the experience of Lucía Vázquez, a researcher in Mexico City, Mexico. Unfortunately, her story is not unique.
According to a multi-country poll by YouGov, Mexico City ranks first among 16 international cities surveyed for physical and verbal harassment on public transportation. Street harassment, a form of gender-based violence against women, can include any act or comment perpetrated in a public space that is unwanted and threatening, and is motivated by a person’s perceived sex or gender.
Violence against women in public spaces is not exclusive to Mexico City, of course. Experiences of street harassment – from being whistled at to being touched without consent – are reported each day on crowd-sourced websites like Hollaback and Safecity in dozens of other locations from New York and New Delhi, to Lawrence, Kansas and Lubbock, Texas.
There is still much to be learned about how harassment and feeling unsafe in public spaces affects the well-being of women and girls – a topic I focus on in my doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice – but the global scale of these experiences is concerning. Studies documenting the prevalence of street harassment in more than 35 countries show it could have widespread health effects across the globe.
Street harassment in Mexico City
One of the latest studies on this issue aimed to understand the extent of street harassment and its impacts on women, girls and communities in Mexico City. All of the women in this study had previously screened positive for intimate partner violence, a prerequisite for inclusion in the parent study.
Paola Abril Campos, a doctoral student at the Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is a native of Mexico City. She said in an interview for this article:
“Growing up, I learned to fake a phone call to my parents to feel safer and avoid harassment. I learned to wear not the clothes I wanted, but the clothes that made me feel ‘safe.’ I learned to take quick detours during my daily commute. And I learned to put up with the impotence I felt when harassed.”
Her experiences motivated her to conduct a study on street harassment that was published in January in Salud Pública de México, a journal published by Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health.
In this study, Campos and colleagues surveyed 952 women who were seeking health care in Mexico City’s community health clinics. More than 60 percent of the women, 62.8 percent, reported experiencing at least one form of street harassment in the past month alone. For one in four women, 26.8 percent, the abuse was physical.
The study found that the harassment, or fear of harassment, had negative impacts on the daily routines of these women. Nearly 70 percent reported some type of disruptions in their mobility, including missing, being late to or having to change jobs or schools. And yet, Campos said, “The costs and consequences of street harassment to women’s lives have remained invisible.”
The study also found that street harassment may diminish women’s sense of connectedness and trust in their community. Social isolation from one’s community can have long-term implications for well-being and can lead to chronic disease and poor mental health. Therefore, street harassment may contribute to these other public health concerns.
For the women in this study who were also victims of intimate partner violence, violence is a threat in both public and private. Jhumka Gupta, a global and community health professor at George Mason University and senior author of the study, stated: “Comprehensive interventions are needed to ensure women and girls’ safety both in public settings and in private spaces.”
Emerging solutions
There is some political will to address the issue in Mexico City. In conjunction with local authorities, UN Women has launched the program “Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for Women and Girls,” which is promoting women’s safety through, among other mechanisms, providing women-only buses throughout the city.
The city’s mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, is also supporting an initiative that distributes whistles to women that they can use when someone harasses them. The idea is to “break the silence” and bring attention to harassers.
Activists have been vocal too. Las Morras, a group of four young Mexican women, have been using hidden cameras to record harassment, which they post on their YouTube channel. Las Hijas De Violencia, another activist group, has a more unconventional approach. Whenever they are harassed they turn on loud punk music and shoot a confetti cannon at the perpetrator. Their intention is to take back their power in a nonviolent way.
These efforts are a step toward acknowledging that street harassment is pervasive and pernicious. However, these approaches share a critical shortcoming: The onus of action remains with women. They are asked to ride different buses, carry noisemakers, expose their abuse and confront their attackers. Still lacking are interventions that change the behavior of perpetrators, and challenge the prevailing social norms that deem street harassment, as at best, an inconsequential part of city living.
Street harassment is a common problem in the United States too. A recent nationally representative survey found that 65 percent of U.S. women have faced street harassment at some point in their lifetimes. These numbers may be rising.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that there has been a post-election uptick of harassment and intimidation of many marginalized groups, including women. However, in February a new bill aimed at preventing street harassment in Washington, D.C. was introduced to its city council. It seeks to “eradicate street harassment in the District of Columbia through education, awareness, data collection and culture change.” The bill is broad and inclusive in its definition of street harassment and comprehensive in its approach. Will other cities follow its lead?
A helicopter of the Southern Command in the Alto Telire, Talamanca, takes part in Operation Pura Vida. (Photo Courtesy of The Ministry of Public Security of Costa Rica)
A helicopter of the Southern Command in the Alto Telire, Talamanca, takes part in Operation Pura Vida. (Photo Courtesy of The Ministry of Public Security of Costa Rica)
Q COSTA RICA – From the top of the great Talamaca mountain range in southern Costa Rica, you can see the Caribbean Sea and the houses of the Bribri and Cabécar Indigenous groups.
According to their cosmology, their ancestors are in every tree, in every river and in every living being found in this reserve close to the border with Panama: The place is sacred.
But to the Costa Rican government and the United States Southern Command, its value lies in its mineral deposits and oil.
Costa Rica hasn’t had an official army for the last 68 years. However, in 2013, people in the Talamaca region were surprised by the arrival of a helicopter full of uniformed military personnel, whom they immediately identified as being part of the United States Southern Command. The military personnel were playing the role of missionaries, giving Bibles away. However, simultaneously, they were carrying out various military training activities in the area around Alto Cuen, a Bribri community.
“They said they were missionaries, but no one believed them,” Bribri tribe member Leonardo Buitrago Morales told Truthout. “We knew they were looking for something more. The truth is that they want our lands and our forests to make money.”
Karla Homolka in Montreal in July 2006. Courtesy of Global TV
Q COSTA RICA – Before moving back to Canada, Leanne Bordelais lived with her new husband Thierry Bordelais, the brother of her lawyer, and their children, in Costa Rica.
Since her release from prison in 2005, after serving 12 years, Leanne, now 46, has lived the suburban life in the Montreal suburb of Chateauguay.
By now you must be wondering who is Leanne Bordelais.
If you are Canadian you know her better as the gorgeous blonde Canadian serial killer Karla Homolka, the better half of “Ken and Barbie killers”, the teenage wife of SERIAL killer Paul Bernardo, notorious for the gruesome rapes, torture and the murders they committed.
Karla Homolka, aka Leanne Bordelais, served just 12 years. After he release, she lived in Costa Rica with her husband and children before returning to Canada, where she now lives the suburban life.
They became two of the worst serial killers in Canadian history, killing at least three girls, one of their victims was Karla’s younger sister, Tammy, lured to feed her psychopathic husbands’ thirst for young victims.
Bernardo’s known victims number 19 females, between 14 and 22 years old, but police suspect there were dozens more.
Karla Homolka in Montreal in July 2006. Courtesy of Global TV
It all started in May of 1987, when a series of vicious rapes occurred in one of Toronto’s rougher suburbs. Liking “rough sex” before he embarked on his murder spree with Homolka, Bernardo is known for his savagery.
Bernardo is serving a life sentence. Now, 52, Bernardo has applied for a day parole hearing, due this month, which if successful would see him freed on periodic community release.
Next year, Bernardo will be up to apply for full parole.
Immediately after her release from prison, Homolka gave an interview to Radio Canada.
Saying that she “had done terrible things” but now she was free she didn’t want to be hounded by the media, Homolka blamed it on her youth and Bernardo’s influence. “Back then I was 17 years old. I didn’t know much. I was afraid of being abandoned. I absolutely wanted to have a relationship,” she said.
“I did not have self-confidence. There are a lot of things about myself that I didn’t know then that I know now.”
According to Cairnspost.com, neighbours in her Montreal suburb won’t let her forget, posting signs down the road from the comfortable home of “Leanne Bordelais”. “Never forget the victims,” say the signs that list the names of the three girls who became the couple’s prey.
Michael Pence VicePresidente EEUU, Costa Rica Presidente Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, WashingtonDC, 17 Marzo 2017: Fotos: Roberto Carlos Sánchez
U.S. President Mike Vice (right) with Costa Rica President Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, in WashingtonDC, March 17, 2017. Foto: Roberto Carlos Sánchez
Q COSTA RICA – Washington, with Donald Trump at the helm, is keeping its pledge for police equipment to deal with drug trafficking that Barack Obama offered Costa Rica last August.
President Luis Guillermo Solis on Friday received confirmation by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence during a meeting at the White House.
The day before, Solis met with John Kelly, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, who told Solis that the U.S. firmly supports the logistical support for Costa Rica’s Fuerza Publica (national police force).
Last August, the United States offered Costa Rica a donation, the most important of the last three decades, that includes two patrol boats, two patrol and cargo planes, three helicopters and equipment that will help binational actions to strengthen Costa Rica’s fight against drug trafficking and organized crime.
Keeping Obama’s commitment has wiped away any fears by Costa Rica officials of the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House.
In fact, the White House in a statement said the discussion between Solis and Pence included ways for the U.S. to increase cooperation to combat drug trafficking and illegal immigration from Central America to the United States.
The White House called Costa Rica a “key ally” in promoting regional economic prosperity, security and good governance throughout the hemisphere.
Solis, who is the second Latin American president to visit the White House since Trump took office (the first was Peru’s Pedro Pablo Kuczynski), said that there is no setback in the bilateral relationship.
“We can safely say that we have ratified all we had advanced in joint actions to fight organized crime and drug trafficking and for security in the communities. Both Vice President Pence and Secretary Kelly expressed the willingness of the United States to strengthen The relations with Costa Rica, where they recognize an important ally in the region,” said Solís after the meetings.
Another worrisome subject with the Trump taking of the presidency is the TLC – the free trade agreement between Costa Rica and the United States.
Solis says he raised the issue with Pence. The statement from Casa Presidencial is that the TLC is a different case of that of NAFTA, the free trade deal between the U.S. and its neighoours, Mexico and Canada, and which Trump said he would be asking to renegotiate as soon as he occupied the presidential chair.
Solis and Pence also talked about the willingness of both governments to increase investment, trade and tourism areas in which Costa Rica benefits.
Only in terms of income from U.S. tourists, Costa Rica had, in 2015, a total of 1,077,044 American tourist arrivals.
The Solis – Pence meeting alos touched on a hot topic, Venezuela.
According to the White House statement, Pence thanked Costa Rica for its “constructive position” in favour of constitutional order and respect for human rights in Venezuela.
The meeting between Solis and Pence ended with a pledge by both leaders to continue their dialogue on bilateral issues and maintain strong relations between the United States and Costa Rica.
Q COSTA RICA – It was 4:11am Sunday, January 29th last, in front of the Walmart store in Curridabat, on the old road to Tres Rios, on the east side of San jose, when a speeding car ended the life of three cyclists and seriously injuring a fourth, and then flees the scene.
A fifth cyclist, riding with the group, escaped being hit when she stopped short to take a sip of water.
The mortal victims were identified as Mario Enrique Retana Pérez, 49; Lenín Manrique Ortiz Quesada, 46; and, Pablo Enrique Alcócer Alcócer, 54.
Lucía Mata Durán, to this day, is still in the intensive care unit of the Calderon Guardia hospital.
The driver of the Ford Mustang, identified by his last name Mora, involved in the fatal incident – I refuse to call it an accident – gave himself up to authorities hours after. By that time the toxicology test performed on him resulted in a negative reading.
After an appearance in court, Mora was released.
The case will be dragged out in the courts for some time.
But, what led up to the fatal moments?
According to the report by the specialized section of the Organismo de Investigacion Judicial (OIJ) dealing with traffic fatalities, hours before the incident, at 9:58pm on January 28, Mora was captured on camera entering the Monteverde bar in Siquiares de Alajuela.
The bar’s surveillance cameras shows us that at 10:15pm, Mora approaches the bar and purchases a “balde” (bucket) of beers.
At 11:53pm, Mora returns to the bar with the empty bucket for a new one.
Minutes before 1:00am on January 29, the camera captures Mora drinking at the bar with a woman. By now he had moved from beers to hard liquor. But minutes later he is seen carrying away from the bar a third bucket of beers, according to the OIJ report.
At 1:12am on January 29th, Mora leaves the bar. His bar tab, says the OIJ report, backed up by a sales voucher, was almost ¢200,000 colones.
A witness told OIJ investigators:
“He has been a customer since December (2106), he came in to party and typically used an entire table, on Saturday (January 28) he arrived alone, and his brother arrived later.
“He was served a litre of Chivas Regal, a number of cocktails (16 ‘mamaditas’ and 16 ‘miguelitos’), as well as beers, I don’t recall how many. The total bill was ¢178,000 colones.”
OIJ investigators cannot of will not say if Mora was alone in the car he was driving at the time of the fatal hit and run.
What they do say is that he drove from Siquiares to Curridabat, a distance of about 37 kilometres via the Ruta 27, a 45 minute drive in normal traffic and the posted speed limits.
On the 27, he would have also passed two toll stations (Guacima and Escazu), then onto the Circunvalacion, through the streets of San Pedro and onto the old road to Tres Rios.
Mora is under court order not to drive and not to leave the country, has to sign in at the prosecutor’s office every 15 days, and keep a fixed address.
If found guilty, the 32-year-old driver, faces a prison sentence of up to 30 years.
I photo I took in November in Nicaragua, where passengers literally hang out the back or sit on top of buses. BTW, the back door seemed to be most effecient of getting people on and off the crowded buses. Photo Enrico Cacciator/ The Q Media
I photo I took in November in Nicaragua, where passengers literally hang out the back or sit on top of buses. BTW, the back door seemed to be most effecient of getting people on and off the crowded buses. Photo Enrico Cacciatore / The Q Media
Q TRAVEL – The 20 most dangerous places to drive in the world. If after reading the title you thought Costa Rica must in the list, possibly at the top or near the top would be…wait for it…wrong.
With more than one death daily due to traffic accidents Costa Rica surely has to be on the list, especially when the tally is of deaths at the scene of the accident and does not include deaths after the injured is removed and taken to hospital.
Around the glob, nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year around the world, on average 3,287 deaths a day, according to the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT).
Up to 50 million are injured or disabled globally; most of the victims are between 15 and 44 years of age.
The following list, in no particular order, is based on several studies and analyses – the latest data by the World Health Organization (WHO) and research by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, which did its own study.
Both calculate the rate of traffic fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants. Road conditions, traffic rules, law enforcement, pedestrians’ behavior, and social stability have all been taken into consideration.
The list was first published on Msn.com.
Eritrea
Eritrea is on the list due to its rate of 48.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, making it one of the deadliest places to drive, according to the World Health Organization’s figures. Main roads are often in bad condition with many potholes. Signs and safety guard rails are often non-existent. Risks involved in driving are due to the presence of animals, pedestrians and cyclists on the road. Road rules are generally ignored.
Dominican Republic
The road fatality rate is 32, according to UMTRI. Each year, 29 out of every 100,000 people in this Caribbean nation die in road accidents, according to the 2015 Global Status Report on Road Safety. Drunk driving, exceeding speed limits, making sudden lane changes without signaling properly, and not paying attention to stop signs are some of the contributing factors to car accidents in the country.
Libya
The rate of traffic fatalities in Libya is 73.4 per 100,000 people. More than 3,606 deaths were reported in 2013 alone, even though WHO estimates the actual number was above 4,500. Speeding is a big problem. Intense fighting continues in a many regions, and a high threat throughout the country of terrorist attacks and kidnappings remains, according to the U.K. government.
Thailand
Thailand’s fatality rate is in the upper 30s per 100,000 inhabitants, according to all sources. There are no formal audits required for new road construction projects, according to WHO, and there are no regular inspections of existing road infrastructure. Speeding, drunk driving and barely enforcing road laws are some of the most common reasons for the high number of accidents.
Venezuela
UMTRI calculated the road deaths rate to be 35 per 100,000 people. Many roads are in good condition, but there are also gravel and dirt roads with pot holes and landslips, according to TripAdvisor. The rainy months of May and October are the most dangerous for pedestrians and drivers. Also, pedestrians don’t have the right of way as they do in many other countries, so if you slow down or stop at a crosswalk, you could cause an accident with unsuspecting motorists.
Sao Tome and Principe
The fatality rate is 31.1, according to WHO statistics. Major roads are paved, for the most part, but pot holes and pedestrians who don’t follow basic rules and walk in the middle of the road continue to be a problem. There are no sidewalks or shoulders outside of São Tomé, so bicyclists and animals on the roads can be a major hazard, according to U.S. State Department.
Iraq
Iraq is the 10th most dangerous country to drive in, according to UMTRI, with 32 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Transportation Research Initiative. Travel within Iraq remains very dangerous given the security situation. The drivers here are impatient, rude, and drive anywhere they can, according to VirtualTourist.
Iran
Iran is the third most dangerous county to drive in, as per data by the Transportation Research Initiative, with 38 road fatalities per 100,000 residents. Traffic is generally busy and chaotic. Close to 20,000 people die from vehicle accidents each year in Iran, according to local officials. This is the second highest cause of mortality in the country, according to the U.S. State Department. Drivers ignore traffic lights, traffic signs, and lane markers. Urban streets are not well lit and sidewalks exist only on main roads and are usually blocked by parked cars.
Swaziland
The road fatality rate in Swaziland is also 36 per 100,000, according to UMTRI’ s study. WHO put that number at 24.2. Cattle and pedestrians can very often be seen on roads between cities. Too many pot holes, ramshackle settlements, and wandering livestock make driving a dangerous task. There are no policies to encourage investment in public transport or restrictions on children sitting in front seat.
Syria
Few would disagree that Syria is currently the most dangerous country in the world due to the civil war. Government forces and various rebel groups have ruined the infrastructure of big parts of the country and even residential areas with bombs. There is a serious risk for kidnappings, bombings, murder, and terrorism. Interestingly, by law, only the passengers of hire cars need to wear seat belts.
Namibia
The highest fatality rate from road crashes is in Namibia (45 per 100,000), according to UMTRI’s study. Most of the roads are gravel. They are also very wide, straight and quiet. All of these tend to make drivers too relaxed which, as a result causes them to speed up too much, increasing the risk for crashes. In terms of post-crash care, there are no emergency access telephone numbers, according to WHO.
Togo
WHO estimates the fatality rate per 100,000 population to be 31.1. About 70 per cent of the crashes involve motorized 2- and three-wheelers. No formal audits are required for new road construction projects. Also, regular inspections of existing road infrastructure and policies to promote walking or cycling are non-existent. The lack of pavement on many major roads and most secondary is a problem whenever it rains.
Democratic Republic of Congo
The road traffic fatalities rate in the 11th largest country on Earth is 33.2. The Transportation Research Initiative puts the number at 34. Roads are in very bad condition, and most of them are unpaved or unmaintained. Transportation infrastructure throughout the country and security conditions are “very poor,” according to the U.S. State Department.
Rwanda
As in Iran, Rwanda’s road fatality rate is 32.1 per 100,000 people. Traffic moves on the right-hand side of the road, but there is an abundance of right-hand drive vehicles that create risks. Traffic circles are especially perilous. Frequent grenade attacks have damaged of lot of the infrastructure. There is no national law on mobile phone use while driving.
Sudan
There are 36 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, according to UMTRI. That averages about three deaths a day. Driving there is chaotic, but the country made the list mostly because of their overall security situation. Parts of the country are unstable due to high levels of violent crime and armed conflict, according to the Canadian government.
Malawi
There are 35 road deaths per 100,000 people, as per WHO statistics (32, according to UMTRI). Even though audits are being done when new projects are started, officials don’t inspect existing roads and there are no policies to promote walking or cycling, or to encourage investment in public transportation.
Liberia
Liberia’s (the country in West Africa and not the city in Costa Rica) death rate from car accidents is 33.7 per 100,000 people. Laws against drunk driving and regulating speed exist, but there are none that require motorcyclists to put helmets on, drivers to wear seat belts, or put restrictions on children sitting in the front. Road conditions are poor; potholes are common. Approach intersections with extreme caution, the U.S. State Department says. Cars are often overloaded with people and goods, and make frequent stops without signaling.
Tanzania
Tanzania’s fatality rate as a result of car accidents is 32.9. Roads are in bad condition, especially in the western part of the country. There is dust everywhere, which doesn’t go away easily because the weather is usually hot and dry, this increases the risk of crashes.
Central African Republic
CAR’s road fatalities rate is 32.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to WHO numbers. Existing infrastructure is poor and the government doesn’t inspect it on a regular basis. Many roads have large holes and degraded areas that prevent the normal flow of traffic. Only few roads, including in the capital, are paved.
Mozambique
The road fatality rate in Mozambique is 31.6 as per WHO data and 36 according to the Transportation Research Initiative. There are no formal audits required for new road construction projects, no checkups of existing road infrastructure, no policies to promote walking or cycling, no policies to encourage investment in public transport, and no policies to separate road users and protect vulnerable road users (VRU).
To promote the country’s coffee, an overprint of a coffee bag was added, in various ink colors, to five denominations of existing Costa Rica issues in 1922.
A stamp issued in June 1921 marked a century of coffee production in Costa Rica, and might also have provided funding for a celebratory festival for the milestone.
Q24N via Classic Stamps of the World – Costa Rica, in Central America next to Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, and the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, was visited by Christopher Columbus in 1502. The explorer supposedly gave the country its name — “Rich Coast” in Spanish — because he believed, or wishfully thought, that it was full of precious metals.
Centuries later, in 1796, a true treasure arrived in Costa Rica: neither gold nor silver, but the coffee plant, imported from its discovery spot in the mountainous rainforests of Ethiopia by way of a Spaniard living in Havana, Cuba. The transplant began to thrive in the soil and climate of its new home.
By the 19th century, the government was fully encouraging coffee production, and exported coffee became a major source of revenue for the nation’s economy, exceeding cacao, sugar, and tobacco by 1829. England became an excellent market for Costa Rican coffee beginning in 1843, despite its national affection for tea.
Bananas, cotton, and some other crops for export eventually became important in Costa Rica, but coffee — the country’s first export and its only one until 1890 — continued to fuel the country’s economy, as it still does today.
To promote the country’s coffee, an overprint of a coffee bag was added, in various ink colors, to five denominations of existing Costa Rica issues in 1922.
Almost 52 percent of the country’s coffee is exported to the United States, where the National Coffee Association estimates that 54 percent of Americans over the age of 18 drink coffee every day, for a daily average of 3.1 nine-ounce cups, and a nationwide coffee expenditure of $40 billion a year.
On June 15, 1921, a decree from President Julio Acosta Garcia announced “a fete” organized by the faculty of the Escuela Normal (the Normal School, a teacher-training institution) of Costa Rica, “with the object of commemorating the Centenary of the Introduction of Coffee into the country.”
To fund the celebration, the decree explained, “an issue of twenty-five thousand postage stamps of the value of five centimos each” would be available “during the eight days before and the eight days after the twenty-ninth of the present month in which the festivities are to be inaugurated.” The issuing and circulation of the stamps “shall extend only to the period aforesaid.”
Writing in the Congress Book of 1953, H.D. Mitchell questioned the legitimacy of this stamp (Scott 103, issued June 17, 1921), as it was supposedly valid for only 17 days and the profits went not to the government but to the Escuela Normal, making it more of a semipostal stamp than a regular issue.
Another question regarding the stamp is nonphilatelic: Namely, why was 1921 considered the centenary of coffee production in Costa Rica? As mentioned earlier, records indicate that the plant arrived in 1796 and was cultivated immediately, albeit not on a commercial level.
The significance of 1821 in Costa Rican history is related to its coffee crops, but as the year of its declaration of independence from Spain.
It is true that in 1821, coffee plants and land to grow them were made available to the people, greatly expanding the potential for economic growth and prosperity in the country. Perhaps that milestone, when coffee growing was officially encouraged on a wide scale, was considered the true beginning of Costa Rican coffee.
Because the June 1921 stamp had bypassed the usual procedures for producing a new issue, the Post Office Department might have felt deprived of its chance to mark the centennial, or perhaps the higher officials felt that other opportunities remained for coffee postal propaganda.
A presidential decree of Jan. 4, 1922, beginning with the line, “At the request of the Postmaster General,” stated that a “Surcharge with a design which represents a sack with the legend ‘Cafe de Costa Rica’” would be added to six existing regular postage stamps, in specified quantities of each denomination.
The “sack” on the overprint resembles a pillow, but so does an actual coffee bag. The overprint design does include some shading to indicate the rough surface of a burlap bag.
The stamps to be overprinted were from the five lowest denominations of the eight-stamp set of 1910 honoring national public figures, plus the 1921 stamp (Scott 110) depicting Simon Bolivar. The overprints were typographically added by the Imprenta Nacional (national printing works).
The details of the stamps are as follows, including the Scott number of the original issue and that of the overprinted stamp, the denomination, the quantity surcharged, and the ink color of the overprint.
In an article titled “Recognizing the Counterfeits of the ‘Coffee-bag’ Overprints” in the June 1955 American Philatelist, H.D. Mitchell states that full 100-subject plates were prepared for each denomination of the overprinted stamps with “1921” as the first line of the surcharge.
The samples were presented to the secretary for government, Aquiles Acosta, whose department included postal affairs, and Acosta “rejected the idea of a dated overprint for the logical reason that Costa Rican coffee was excellent in any year,” wrote Mitchell. Plus, the coffee promotion program was intended to be indefinite, not just a 1921 commemoration.
Essays exist for all denominations with the “1921” first line, which was erased from the plate before the overprinting was done. The overprinted stamps were released in spring 1922 (the Costa Rica Postal Catalogue by Hector R. Mena lists the release date as Jan. 11, 1922), so the 1921 reference would have made even less sense.
In his 1953 Congress Book article, H.D. Mitchell mentions an anecdotal tale (he heard it third-hand) of a single coffee-bag overprinted stamp, denomination unstated, displaying traces of the erased “1921.”
The alleged traces could have been merely part of a clumsily forged stamp, of which there are many. The Scott Classic Specialized Catalogue of Stamps and Covers 1840-1940 adds a footnote to the Scott 111C-111H listings: “Inverted overprints exist on all values. Value, set $20. Counterfeits predominate.”
Mitchell points out that large quantities of demonetized stamps of the 1910 regular series were disposed of by the Costa Rican government in 1924, providing ample supplies for counterfeiters to augment with coffee-bag overprints.
Ironically, 1922 was not a very good year for Costa Rica’s coffee production. A U.S. consular report from San Jose in October 1922 to the Foreign and Agricultural Service of the U.S. Dairy Association stated that the crop “was expected to be between 46,300,000 pounds and 50,700,000 pounds, which is considerably below the production of last year.” The report added, “The quality, however, is unusually good.”
The crop has been declining again in recent years, not because of lessening demand worldwide, but due to coffee leaf disease caused by a rust fungus, Hemileia vastatrix. The disease has been around since the 19th century but is wreaking modern havoc in susceptible coffee plantations in Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico, as well as Costa Rica, where the majority of the crop has been affected.
This gloomy situation might preclude a stamp in 2021 for the bicentennial of Costa Rican coffee raising. In the meantime, a set of the 1922 coffee-bag overprinted stamps is valued at $7.75 unused and $3.55 used in the 2017 Scott Classic Specialized catalog.
Article by Kathleen Wunderly originally appeared on Linns.com
Why Did US Blacklist Most LatAm Countries for Money Laundering?
Q24N via Insightcrime.org – The United States has blacklisted nearly all Latin American countries for money laundering in 2017. InSight Crime explores why this is the case, and discusses some of the achievements and failings of regional anti-money-laundering efforts over the past year.
Of the 88 countries and territories included in the US State Department’s annual list of “Major Money Laundering Countries,” 37 are located in Latin America — 42 percent of the total. Compared to 2016, this adds 17 Latin American jurisdictions to the list, which is published in the United States’ International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), a copy of which is embedded at the end of this article. Of the Caribbean jurisdictions included on the list, 11 of them (6 of which were new in 2016) couldn’t be highlighted in the map below.
Meanwhile, the number of countries and territories outside of Latin America included on the list went from 47 to 51.
According to State Department officials consulted by InSight Crime, this does not correspond to a worsening in money laundering activities in the newly added territories — which include Cuba, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago — but rather to a changed methodology that focused more closely on the core concern of the INCSR reports: drug trafficking.
This means that countries of primary concern are selected based on their importance in the international drug trade, a process that mainly considers whether or not they are included in the first volume of the INCSR, on “Drug and Chemical Control”. This stands in contrast to the broader focus of past years, when jurisdictions were also selected for their role in laundering money from other serious crimes.
State Department officials added that the decision to modify the report was made before the new US administration came into office.
Even though the State Department’s new classifications may not have been motivated by worse results, it nonetheless doubles down on its message to Latin America in particular: that countries deeply affected by the narcotics trade must focus their efforts not only on interdiction, but on where the drug money goes. While targeting drug networks’ finances has always been crucial to law enforcement efforts, it has taken on renewed importance over the past year.
Firstly, the INCSR’s prioritization of Latin American territories is particularly conspicuous as it relates to the same year of the notorious “Panama Papers” — a huge leak of confidential documents that exposed the elites behind countless shell companies. While such schemes do not necessarily imply illegal activity, their secrecy means they lends themselves for use by criminal organizations or corrupt individuals to hide ill-gotten gains.
The scandal renewed international scrutiny on the dubious activities occurring in financial “havens.” It ultimately prompted Panama to improve its transparency procedures, namely adhering to standards on tax information exchange. However, the INCSR notes that financial corporations continue to prioritize client secrecy over cooperation with authorities, who still lack the resources needed to effectively monitor possible illegal activity.
Many Caribbean territories are considered “havens” for offshore banking, and their proximity to the United States heightens the risk of them being used to launder US currency. The 2017 INCSR’s new list has put many of these islands under the spotlight — including St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — which may add pressure to their governmentsto crack down on banking secrecy.
In Colombia, criminal finances have also been a key focus: last year, the government demanded that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) rebels turn over all of their assets if they are to benefit from a peace deal signed in late 2016. But the guerrillas will probably not offer full transparency regarding their vast wealth, and the Attorney General’s Office has taken extra measures to track and confiscate it. Among these is a new asset sharing agreement signed with the United States in November 2016, as the INCSR states. This should facilitate cooperation over Colombian assets laundered abroad; one comparable agreement between Colombia and Costa Rica led to what was reportedly the first ever seizure of FARC assets abroad in late 2016.
But the State Department’s new methodology has also led to the inclusion of some countries that do not generally appear to play a “major” role in moving illicit funds. Cuba, for example, was added to the 2017 list despite its country profile being rather favorable. “The risk of money laundering is low” in Cuba, the report reads, with tight government control making it “an unattractive location for money laundering through financial institutions.”
The US State Department’s 2017 INCSR, Volume 2:
Article originally appeared on Insightcrime.org and is republished here with permission.
