Monday, July 5th, 2010
Costa Rica will be the site of the 2013 Juegos Centroamericanos, an athletic competition similar to the Olympics. The announcement came Saturday from the Organización Deportiva Centroamericana, which sent a team to check out facilities here last month.
The decision brought praise from Casa Presidencial and also officials in San José. The regional sports organization is running the XXI Central American and Caribbean Games that take place later this month in the Puerto Rican city of Mayagüez.
To house the 2.500 participants Costa Rica will have to invest in remodelling gyms, pools, tennis courts, stadiums and the creation of an “olypmic” village. The funds are expected to come from the coffers of the central government.
The games kick off on Marh 3, 2013
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
The Organization of American States (OAS), through its Department of Public Security (DPS), began the program, “Capacity Building of Security Forces, Immigration Officials, Prosecutors and Judges in Central America to Prevent and Combat Human Trafficking, especially that Involving Women and Children,” today, July 1st, in Costa Rica.
The two-day program seeks to broaden knowledge in the crime of human trafficking among police authorities; to strengthen the role of police, prosecutors and courts in their capacity to apply the laws against trafficking; to increase the exchange of information between the organizations involved in the fight against human trafficking in the Central American region; and to strengthen the capacity of law enforcement to protect victims.
With these goals, the program directed by OAS experts will train law enforcement officials in subjects such as the distinction between human trafficking and smuggling, management of a crime scene, victim identification, assistance and protection of victims, and standardized operating procedures for immigration control. It is hoped to be able to train at least 40 police officials, prosecutors and judges. The training course is supported with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The crime of human trafficking is a modern form of slavery and a violation of human rights that involves not only sexual exploitation but also hard labor, involuntary servitude and the use of children in armed conflicts, among other forms of exploitation.
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
Costa Rica has allowed 46 US warships and 7,000 Marines to enter the country despite objection by the opposition parties, which describe the move as “illegal.”
Costa Rican opposition parties denounced the decision of the Legislative Assembly, describing it as “illegal” and “in violation of national sovereignty,” Presna Latina reported Saturday.
The decision grants US troops permission to stay in Costa Rica from July 1 to December 31 to fight drug trafficking.
The Costa Rican government, however, argues that the combat capability of the US warships, helicopters and marines is disproportionate to the threat caused by drug trafficking.
The permission is tantamount “to giving a blank check” to the US forces, Luis Fishman, deputy of the Unidad Social Cristiana said.
“We cannot support an illegal act, we won’t allow the Constitution to be broken,” Fishman added.
Frente Amplio legislator Jose Maria Villalta expressed his opposition to the decision, saying it allows US troops to “enjoy freedom of movement and the right to carry out the activities needed to fulfill their mission.”
The legislator also said Washington views the region part of its sphere of influence where it seeks to adopt a “strategy of complete dominance.”
Opposition parties have not ruled out the possibility of taking action against the decision as they say it violates an agreement reached a decade ago with Washington that only allows the entry of coast guard vessels — not warships — into the country.
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
Costa Rica opened the first Central American Skin Bank, an initiative that will benefit children with burns and severe injuries. The modern bank is located in the Hospital Nacional de Niños (Children’s hospital) in San José, where experts save the lives of about 30 infants every year by using dead people’s skin, the Bank’s coordinator Patricia Venegas said.
According to the specialist, children with burns in half of their body will recover from aggravated injuries due to the loss of water, protein and electrolytes.
The skin comes from the bodies of those who died violently and have no infectious diseases such as HIV, hepatitis, neurodegenerative or skin problems.
At least 1.4 square meters of skin will be removed from the back and sides of the bodies, never from the face or chest, explained Venegas.
For this procedure, permission of the victim’s relatives is needed. So, an information campaign to families has begun in the judicial morgue of the country.
This facility, the sixth of its kind in Latin America, is part of the initiative “Consolidation of Tissue Banks in Latin America and Tissue Radium-sterilization”, funded by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
An official major league baseball is marked with three stamps: the MLB emblem, the Rawlings logo and a replica signature of Commissioner Allan H. Selig. One piece of information that’s missing? Its country of origin.
Made in Costa Rica.
On the eastern side of downtown Turrialba, a small, heavily forested mountain town about an hour and a half from the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, the production plant of Rawlings, the official maker of the major league baseball, sits in a long, white-paneled, 80,000 square-foot facility.
There, pink-colored combinations of rubber and cork are transformed into the red-stitched leather balls that fly around ballparks every night, including Angel Stadium, the site of Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Anaheim, Calif.
In 1987, Rawlings came to Costa Rica when political strife in Haiti prompted the company to consider relocation. After shopping around Central America, Rawlings chose Costa Rica, whose president at the time, Oscar Arias, had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts in the Central American region during the Cold War.
“At that time, in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, Rawlings saw that Costa Rica had a committed workforce, a growing economy and an educated population,” said Alejandro Cotter, the general manager of the Rawlings plant in Costa Rica. “Rawlings studied Central America, the Caribbean region and Latin America, and after doing so, decided on Costa Rica.”
Since the arrival of Rawlings, this soccer-first nation has embraced the creation of the baseball, a game played hundreds of miles away that its residents know little about. Each weekday, more than 700 employees gather at the factory to create the intricate dimensions of the ball, as well as other Rawlings apparel, such as pants and jerseys.
The production of the ball is the heart of the plant. In a warehouse with a high ceiling, rows of employees sit in small iron desks with cushioned backs and furiously stitch two pre-cut slabs of leather onto the strung raw core of the ball.
With headphones jammed into their ears, their fingers whir as they use needles to draw the red thread through the ball 108 times. To tighten the stitches, they pull the thread tight by throwing their arms back to shoulder height, resembling a quick single flap of a bird’s wings.
The process is blurring and constant, as the employees assemble the ball with a feverish precision and efficiency that resembles something out of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. According to Cotter, approximately 50,000 balls are made each week, with an individual employee averaging about 150 per week, an output of 30 each day.
“We’ve had employees that have worked here for over 20 years,” Cotter said. “They know and have worked on every part of the making of the ball. Making the ball is an art form.”
But stitching is only one piece of the rigorous tests and steps required in the ball’s creation. The ball begins in a small room where a cork is coated by pink rubber. It is then wrapped by conditioned yarn and a latex adhesive that allows the leather to stick to the core.
In a room across the plant, the cover of the ball is created from large white sheets of smoothed leather that are cut into two small slabs resembling elongated versions of the number eight. If the thin cuts of leather have smudges or small deficiencies, they will be used as practice balls. If they are flawless, they will make the majors, so to speak.
“You can look at a sheet of the cowhide and find the good leather from the bad leather,” said Melania Garbanzo, the manufacturing manager at the plant, as she scanned a cut of the thin leather hide. “We try to cut around any scuffs or marks or small cuts, but if we find a ball that is imperfect, it could be used for practice. Only the good eggs are used as game balls.”
After the leather cuts are sewn to the core, the ball is sent to a lab for durability testing. With a double-wheel pitching machine common to batting practice, the newly stitched 5- to 5.25-ounce ball is shot out at 90 mph into pieces of wood and steel. While the strength of the ball is tested by the impact, so too is the length of the rebound, which simulates the contact of a bat.
After the balls pass the durability test, they are taken to the sorting room. There they are stamped and sent to the port city of Limón.
The balls are shipped to Florida, driven to Rawlings headquarters in Washington, Mo., and distributed to the 30 major league ballclubs. From a small Costa Rican mountain town to the hand of a major league pitcher, the process could average just more than 21 days.
“Teams always have a demand for the balls,” Cotter said. “We are the ones trusted to provide them in top quality.”
In its 23 years in Costa Rica, maybe the most interesting year of the plant was during the home run boom of 1999, when almost 500 more home runs were hit (5,528) than in any previous season, including the combined 136 by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. In response to the homer surge, MLB officials came to the plant to ensure the dramatic spike in round-trippers wasn’t because of imprecise ball production.
“The first thought was that the ball itself had changed,” Cotter said. “They came here and put the ball through many rigorous tests to assure that the ball was still being produced in the same way. They never thought that maybe it was the players’ size that had changed.”
In its 23 years at the Rawlings plant in Turrialba, production has been constant and reliable, providing all the official balls for the regular season, All-Star Game and World Series.
The plant, in a free-trade zone where tariffs are reduced, brings in about $21 million for Costa Rica annually. It appears Costa Rica is happy to be the source of the most vital element of America’s Pastime.
“Costa Rica has been a positive environment for Rawlings since the late 1980s,” said Mike York, the director of operations for Rawlings. “It is our intentions to remain in Costa Rica for many years to come.”
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A constitutional court in Costa Rica halted the referendum process that was supposed to put same-sex marriage on December’s voter ballot, acting on an appeal “presented by an individual identified only by the last names, Quirós Salazar, alleging that the referendum violates the rights and freedoms of individuals. The referendum was to have let the population decide the fate of a proposal for law that would allow same sex marriages in Costa Rica. Opponents to the referendum have argued that leaving the allowing the majority of the population (93%) which is heterosexual would be a constitutional violation of the 7% of the homosexual population.”
