Top 10 Costa Rica

According to the Lonely Planet phrasebook Costa Rican Spanish, the phrase ¡Pura vida! “embodies Costa Rican life. Meaning literally ‘pure life,’ it is really a more profound concept encompassing well being, positivity and harmony. It can variously be translated as ‘great,’ ‘cool,’ ‘right on,’ etc.”

“Pura vida” has become Costa Rica’s informal motto, a sort of Latin American version of “hakuna matata” (which was a real Swahili phrase long before “The Lion King”). You see it in advertising, on souvenirs, and you hear it in casual conversation.

Pura vida

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias denied any knowledge of a 1.5 million dollar donation from Taiwan for his country’s poor, but which allegedly was diverted for pet projects elsewhere in the government.

“I had no knowledge of this help from the government of Taiwan which I learned about from the press just recently,” he said in remarks published Saturday in the La Nacion newspaper.

La Nacion earlier this month alleged that the office of Arias’ brother and chief of staff, Rodriguez Arias, paid scores of government consultants with two million dollars that had been donated by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE).

Funds were sent by Taiwan to BCIE at the request of Costa Rican Housing Minister Fernando Zumbado, according to press reports, which have said the sum of the wire transfer was 2.5 million dollars.

Zumbado admits to having received only 1.5 million. The minister has been suspended from his post pending a congressional investigation.

News reports said donations made by Taiwan in 2006 were destined for the construction of housing for the poor, but never got to the intended recipients.

Costa Rica in June 2007 broke its ties with Taiwan, and instead established relations with the Chinese government in Beijing.

Global Crossing (Nasdaq:GLBC), a global IP solutions provider, reported (18 July) that a ceremony has been held today in the Costa Rican city of Esterillos to celebrate the inauguration of a new submarine fibre optic telecomms cable connecting the Pacific coast of Costa Rica to the Pan American cable (PAC).

The PAC connects the west coast of the US, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and the Virgin Islands. The new submarine cable, constructed and operated by Global Crossing will provide the state-run Costa Rican national telecomms body Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) and Radiografica Costarricense SA (RASCA), a Costa Rican Internet access provider, with increased international capacity and additional connection resilience. Read the rest of this entry »

Standard & Poor’s, a global leader in credit ratings and credit risk analysis, has adjusted its assessment of Costa Rica from stable to positive.

Costa Rica currently has a BB qualification for long-range debt in foreign currency, which means the country is less vulnerable in the short-term than other issue markets, the Minister of the Treasury, Guillermo Zúñiga, said of the assessment.

The Standard and Poor’s rating places Costa Rica in a situation equitable to that of Guatemala, but below El Salvador.

Countries with the best assessments in Latin America are Chile, México and Brazil, which together make up nations with “investment grade ratings”, and had the best results — as did the Caribbean nations of Aruba, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and the Bahamas.

The improved rating came as the Costa Rican colon took a pounding on Tuesday, losing more than two percent of its value in just a few hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Costa Rican farmhand Elbert Perez cuts bunches of unripe bananas in the blazing sun and prepares them for their long journey from the world’s No. 2 banana exporter to the European Union.

One of the few farms in Costa Rica that exports exclusively to Europe, owner Eduardo Gomez says European Union import tariffs on Latin American bananas mean lower wages for his workers and a barrier to creating jobs and expanding trade.

“Without tariffs, all the workers would benefit, we could pay better salaries, improve cultivation. We have a great advantage in quality and productivity that we are not able to develop,” said Gomez at the lush Bananera El Esfuerzo farm, where wages are about $95 a week. Read the rest of this entry »

Costa Rica’s Legislative assembly on Thursday started discussing the 2008 second extraordinary budget of 30 billion Costa Rican Colones (57.9 million U.S. dollars) which includes the money to finance the Food National Plan.

The Food National Plan, focusing on issues such as increasing the production of staples like rice, reactivating crop insurance and providing better credit conditions to food producers, was among the government’s measures to cope with the world crisis of rising food prices.

Half of the budget would be used as food tokens to 16,000 poor families with children under 12, and scholarships for 43,000 children.

Guillermo Zuliga, the finance minister, told Xinhua that the budget also included a certain amount of money for state universities to handle salary increases.

The country would also seek to increase its capacity of storing grain.

The budget, however, encountered strong opposition at the Congress on Thursday.

The Costa Rican government on Wednesday voiced discontent with a recent U.S. anti-drug aid package, saying the money is far less than what the country needs to combat drug trafficking.

The 4.2-million-U.S. dollar-aid, provided by the United States under the anti-drug initiative called “Merida,” is not even enough to buy an anti-drug vessel, said Public Security Minister Janina del Vecchio.

“I don’t understand why the United States gave us so less money to fight drug traffickers,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

Property investors interested in buy-to-let in Costa Rica should be encouraged by the latest tourist figures which show a healthy increase in the first half of this year.

According to the Ministry of Tourism in San José foreign arrivals increased 16% from the same period last year. That amounted to an additional 133,000 visitors.

The research also shows that most tourists came from the US indicating that this is the market to target in terms of holiday rental yields. A total of 54% were Americans and 17% were Europeans.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Tourism said they were pleased with the figures as there had been concerns that the economic downturn would dent the number of visitors from the US. Fears that increased airline prices because of the higher cost of fuel would similarly dent the European market have also not materialised.

A new marina development near Limon is also being hailed as an opportunity to attract more investment and visitors. It will be the first large scale yacht-friendly resort on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica. Read the rest of this entry »

Climate change could have a major impact on the environment of Costa Rica, upsetting delicate mountain cloud forests, and causing a decrease in plant and animal species in a region famous for its biodiversity. Regional climate models predict that the area will become warmer and drier as climate change accelerates.

While melting Arctic sea ice and glaciers have become a symbol of climate change, new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst indicates that highland forests in Costa Rica could also be seriously affected by future changes in climate, reducing the number of species in a region famous for its biodiversity.

“Central America is a major, emerging “hot spot” in the tropics where climate change impacts on the environment will be pronounced, and the loss of species associated with climate has already been identified,” says doctoral candidate Ambarish Karmalkar of the UMass Amherst Climate System Research Center. He recently attended the first conference organized in Costa Rica to study this issue. “We have completed a regional climate model showing that many areas of Costa Rica will become warmer and drier as climate change accelerates, and these changes will be amplified at higher elevations.”

Additional members of the research team include Raymond Bradley, a professor of geosciences at UMass Amherst, and Henry Diaz of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a thought: Rig all the stationary bikes in fitness centers across San joe to generate wattage from their drive-trains and feed it into the grid. Exercisers burn calories, loose weight, generate electrical power. Wattage produced can be monitored by magnetic-strip cards issued that the user puts in card reader at the bike station.

Then, get a leader board that keeps track of high-wattage producers. Recognize with accolades, gifts, whatever, the top wattage generator of the session, day, week, month, year.

Wattage created can be sold by exercisers to offset gym costs, and even could be credited to the exerciser’s home address, or donated.

What are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands of stationary bikes in gyms across the country? Every day that would amount to a lot of generated electrical power, day after day.

Someone ought to invent a conversion pack to retrofit on the stationary bikes, and we’d be cookin’.

Mexican sailors ride on top of a seized drug smuggling submarine off the coast of the Pacific resort city of Huatulco.
Mexico’s navy seized a homemade submarine carrying a drug shipment off the Pacific coast on Wednesday and arrested its four-man crew.

Similar vessels carrying cocaine have been discovered off Colombia and Central America, but navy spokesman Capt. Benjamin Mar said the seizure is a first for Mexico.

The 30-foot (10-meter) makeshift submarine was detected heading north about 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the southern state of Oaxaca, Mar said.

The green-topped, arrowhead-shaped vessel was intercepted when it surfaced hours later, and the crew was taken into custody without resistance.

The suspects were flown by helicopter to the city of Huatulco, where they told reporters they left the Colombian coastal town of Buenaventura a week ago.

The crew members said they were fishermen forced to make the journey by drug traffickers who threatened to harm their families.

“We didn’t know what was on board because we never saw it. It was sealed,” said one of the four, Jose Felix Enriquez.

The navy said in a statement that the sub was apparently packed with cocaine, but authorities were still determining how much was on board.

Colombia’s drug cartels have been known to use home-built submarines to smuggle large amounts of cocaine past U.S. and Colombian patrol boats to Central America en route to the United States.

Colombian authorities have discovered at least nine such vessels over the past three years. Last August, U.S. forces intercepted a submarine-like vessel packed with tons of cocaine off the coast of Guatemala.

When you think of Costa Rica, you automatically think of how beautiful the destination is. Boasting some of the most stunningly beautiful beaches, thousands of tourists flock to Costa Rica each year in order to relax and get away from it all. However, there is more to Costa Rica than its nice sandy beaches. In fact there is a whole lot of adventure to be found if you look under the surface.

You can experience horseback riding, hiking and whitewater rafting to name just a few of the activities on offer. So if you want a combined holiday of adventure and relaxation then Costa Rica just may be the destination to suit you. Read the rest of this entry »

Costa Rica is most often thought of as a country with pristine coastlines, emerald mountains, and a relaxed vibe to vacation in. What is not often thought of are paramilitaries, assassins, and rouge police officers.

In the last several decades the government of Costa Rica has sent at least 2,600 police officers to be trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). On Wednesday, May 16, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, an ’86 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that he would withdraw the current enrollees from the school that June and vowed that no more would be sent in the future. While the country has no standing army, at the time of his decision, there were reportedly three police personnel training at the school.

“We must understand that this decision does not in any way contradict our alliance with the United States in the struggle against crime and neither does it impede cooperation in security programs to professionalize our police,” Arias said. As with most Central American countries, Costa Rica does have close ties to the U.S. in its continued struggle against illegal drug smuggling and continues to be a partner in this realm.

Although Arias is considered by some in the U.S. to be a leftist, who then to try to lump his policies in with those of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, he is rather free trade minded (he has worked very hard to push DR-CAFTA in Costa Rica which he put to a popular vote in October) and can be seen as politically very centrist. However, a move such as this is not surprising given Arias’ past work on arms reduction and his attempts to unify the countries of Central America in common cause for peace and justice. Read the rest of this entry »

Costa Rica is edging ever closer to becoming the 18th member of Petrocaribe, a Venezuela-led initiative that provides Latin American and Caribbean countries with favorable financing on oil imports, according to the Foreign Ministry.

The high-level Costa Rican government delegation that visited Venezuela this weekend to take part in the fifth Petrocaribe meeting concluded that conditions are favorable for Costa Rica to join the group.

Petrocaribe as launched in 2005 by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and the presidents of several Caribbean island states. Read the rest of this entry »

From January-May 2008 foreign arrivals to Costa Rica increased 16 percent from the same period in 2007, according to the Ministry of Tourism in San Jose. The upswing represented an additional 133,000 foreign visitors over the period, taking the total to 987,000 arrivals.

The US remains the main country of origin, accounting for 54 percent of arrivals, followed by Europe with 17 percent.

The Ministry of Tourism stated that recession in the US had not affected the propensity of high and middle income earners visiting Costa Rica. Nor have increased airline prices dissuaded European travelers.

While the world economics forum has ranked Costa Rica as the number one nation in Latin America in terms of tourism - the second successive year that Costa Rica has occupied top spot. Costa Rica registered 1.9 million foreign visitors in 2007, generating US$1.92 billion in tourism receipts.