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(506) 2223-1327               Published Friday, Feb. 19, 2010,  in Vol. 10, No. 35      E-mail us
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New law will tighten up on those perpetual tourists
By Manuel Avendaño Arce
and the A.M. Costa Rica staff


When the new immigration law goes into effect March 1 tourists here will still be able to renew their visa by going to and returning from a nearby country. But the rules are changing.

Mario Zamora, the director general de Migración y Extranjería, said Thursday that a tourist will not be able to go to the same country twice and that after two trips to renew a visa a tourist will have to stay out of Costa Rica for a minimum of 15 days.

The new law seeks to crack down on perpetual tourists. What Zamora said is not in the law. These new rules are in the regulations that soon will be published in the La Gaceta official newspaper.

In lieu of going to another country to renew a tourist visa, a foreigner also can show up at any immigration location and renew the right to stay here for 90 more days for $100, Zamora noted. That procedure is in the law, but the new information from Zamora is that the renewal process will be available at immigration offices at international airports, at border posts, ports, marinas and any other location where immigration officers work. There had been concern that the renewals could only be done in San José.

In order to renew a visa that way, the tourist will have to establish financial responsibility and show that they have the means to support themselves for 90 more days. For those who do not have the money, such as students, a procedure is being set up so that the $100 can be waived by the Ministerio de Hacienda, said Zamora.

The rule that a tourist cannot renew a visa by traveling to the same adjacent country twice is a new concept. That means a perpetual tourist living near the Nicaraguan border can visit that country once. But the next visa renewal will have to be at some other country.

And after two visa renewals the tourist will have to leave Costa Rica for a minimum of 15 days, according to Zamora. The idea is to encourage perpetual tourists to seek another form of residency.

Tourists are not supposed to work in Costa Rica, but many do. They run the risk of losing their
possessions and holdings if they are grabbed and expelled by immigration police.

Zamora was among other officials who met to discuss the new immigration law at the Hotel Radisson in Barrio Tournon Thursday afternoon. The new law was outlined in general terms. The law was reported in depth when it was passed last Sept. 1 and signed into law. HERE!

The major changes for expats are:

• They need to join the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social. Still unclear is if membership in a similar program in another country would be sufficient for the Costa Rican requirement. The exact system to enroll expats has not been made clear but they will have to show that they have Caja membership when they renew their cédulas..

• Tourists who overstay their visas will pay a larger fine when leaving, and they will be prohibited from reentering Costa Rica for three times the period that they were illegally in the country.

• Many more categories are created for persons who seek to work or stay in Costa Rica. Work permits traditionally have been difficult to get here unless the applicant is a large company.

• Pensionados approved under the new law must show a monthly income from a certified pension of at least $1,000 a month, up from $600. That amount also covers foreign spouses and minor children. Rentistas have to show that they have a continuing monthly income of at least $2,500, up from $1,000.

• Innkeepers and hotel operators will have to keep a registry of persons staying in their facilities for inspection by the immigration police.

The broad law creates an immigration police that is composed of Fuerza Pública officers. It criminalizes trafficking in persons. It creates an immigration council to issue visas to citizens of restricted countries and takes that job away from the immigration director.

The measure also gives the president the power to grant residency by decree. A.M. Costa Rica has reported that this creates the possibility of immigration amnesties of the type that were mandated twice in the 1990s.


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San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, Vol. 10, No. 35

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Environmental panel seeks
$546,486 in compensation


By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

The Tribunal Ambiental Administrativo held a private session Thursday on alleged environmental damage at Residencial Turístico y Comercial Cabo Caletas.

There was no report on the outcome, but a spokesperson for the tribune said that the government wanted $546,486, for environmental damage.

This is the biggest project that was involved in the first sweep that members of the tribunal did along the central Pacific Coast in March 2008.

The project has 180 hectares with 800 condos, houses, a golf course and two artificial lakes. Owners are Silvercat Investments S.R.L and Costa Rica Land Corp S.A. The managing partner is U.S. citizen Aaron Dowd.  The project is in Esterillos Oeste de Parrita.

Environmental workers for the tribunal claim that some waterways and drainage ditches have been blocked, trees have been cut, a canal has been created and the mangroves have been affected by being filled in.

Shortly after the tribunal inspected the project and issued a report listing violations, Dowd said  "Cabo Caletas is one of the most environmentally-friendly projects in Costa Rica, and the owners and employees are very conscientious of the environmental laws and regulations of Costa Rica.  We pride ourselves on being a positive example for responsible development in Costa Rica."

He wrote a letter to this newspaper.

The tribunal reported that it had received 462 complaints in 2009, up slightly from the 451 in 2008. In January there were 65 complaints that came in, and 35 cases were opened.

The bulk of the complaints involve contamination of rivers or development near a water source. Another large group of complaints involved illegal logging, the tribunal said.


Caribbean lobsters get
a break from harvesting

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

Costa Rica will prohibit the taking of lobsters in the Caribbean starting March 1 for four months. This year, other Central American nations and Belize will do the same thing.

The period of the prohibition is the peak time for reproduction of the Caribbean lobster, said the Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería.

Lobster fishing is a $1.6 million-a-year enterprise in Costa Rica and some 900 persons are employed in the catching and preparing for market, the ministry said. The annual catch is about 150 tons of the sea creatures.

El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Belize all have agreed to enforce the ban.  The peak lobster season in the Caribbean is from November to February, the ministry said.


Top U.N.  climate official
resigns his position


Special to A.M. Costa Rica

The top United Nations climate change official said Thursday that he has made the difficult decision to step down from his position, citing his desire to pursue new opportunities to advance progress on the issue in both the private sector and academia.

The announcement comes just two months after the Copenhagen Accord was reached at December’s U.N. conference in the Danish capital.

The accord aims to jump-start immediate action on climate change and guide negotiations on long-term action, pledging to raise $100 billion annually by 2020. It also includes an agreement to working towards curbing global temperature rise to below 2 degrees C. and efforts to reduce or limit emissions.

Yvo de Boer, who heads the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said he will stay onboard in his current position until July 1, before joining the consultancy group KPMG as a global adviser on climate and sustainability and working with several universities.

Countries did not reach a clear legal agreement in Copenhagen, but, he noted, “the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.”

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that to stave off the worst effects of climate change, industrialized countries must slash emissions by 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, and that global emissions must be halved by 2050.

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A.M. Costa Rica guide

This is a brief users guide to A.M. Costa Rica.

Old pages
Each day someone complains via e-mail that the newspages are from yesterday or the day before. A.M. Costa Rica staffers check every page and every link when the newspaper is made available at 2 a.m. each weekday.

So the problem is with the browser in each reader's computer. Particularly when the connection with the  server is slow, a computer will look to the latest page in its internal memory and serve up that page.

Readers should refresh the page and, if necessary, dump the cache of their computer, if this problem persists. Readers in Costa Rica have this problem frequently because the local Internet provider has continual problems.

Searching
The A.M. Costa Rica search page has a list of all previous editions by date and a space to search for specific words and phrases. The search will return links to archived pages.

Newspages
A typical edition will consist of a front page and four other newspages. Each of these pages can be reached by links near the top and bottom of the pages.

Classifieds
Five classified pages are updated daily. Employment listings are free, as are listings for accommodations wanted, articles for sale and articles wanted. The tourism page and the real estate sales and real estate rentals are updated daily.

Advertising information
A summary of advertising rates and sizes are available for display and classifieds.

Contacting us
Both the main telephone number and the editor's e-mail address are listed on the front page near the date.

Visiting us
Directions to our office and other data, like bank account numbers are on the about us page.


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San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, Vol. 10, No. 35

    
Check out the printed version of the Top Story news feed and see what  you  missed.
Enjoy Incredible Beach Sunsets and  Sunrises. With the Pacific Ocean and the awesome mountains.
Video security and alarm.  View your home from any computer anywhere.  24/7 monitoring and recording.

Battle brewing over use of spectrum by radio and TV
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

The new telecom regulator is heading into a major battle with radio and television stations because of a plan to charge users for the electromagnetic spectrum.

The agency, the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones, was about to present its proposals to do that at a hearing Thursday. But the event was called off at the last minute, supposedly because the notice of the session had not been published correctly.

The Superintendencia is supposed to regulate businesses
that use telecommunications, according to the law that created it.  But even the agency experts are unsure just how far this power goes. The session Thursday was supposed to clarify the position, the agency said.

The proposal calls for payments by the various radio and television stations to go to the Superintendencia instead of the country's general treasury. The agency said this would
pay for planning, administration and control.

Carlos Raúl Gutiérrez, the president of the telecom agency, said that the session was necessary to clarify the legal situation. There are some conflicting laws still on the books carried over from a previous radio law. The session Thursday also was supposed to discuss the methodology that the agency would use to calculate the amount stations would have to pay.

In addition, the agency has scheduled another hearing Monday to hear from Luis Enrique Ortiz, president of the Cámera Nacional de Radio. He has expressed concerns.

Radio and television stations wield real political power, and they now are engaged in another battle with music producers. The stations want to play copyrighted music without paying for the use of the material. President Óscar Arias Sánchez quietly issued a decree that would let them do that by changing Costa Rica's requirements under an international treaty.


Picking a new name for the column tests creativity
What is that saying?  Beware of what you ask for.  Thank you, everybody for your suggestions; I have over 40 from which to choose – actually too many.  I think having to decide which one I should use has caused all of this hyperventilating lately.  But by next week I will have a name for my column.

Meanwhile I am having fun looking them over. One reader likes alliteration so he has offered “Jo’s Jaunty Jabber” and “Rohrmoser Ramblings,” among them.  I’m glad he stopped short of offering “Nattering Nabob from Sabana Norte.”  Reflections and musings were popular, as in “Reflections from an Expat Gringa,” and  “Musings of a Broad Abroad.”  Ruminations and emanations reminded too much of cows  to look at each week.  “Inside Costa Rica and Inside my Mind” is a good description, but “Inside Costa Rica” has been used, my editor tells me. 

There are some, like “My Thoughts” and “My Column” that are short and descriptive and remind me of the name of the little restaurant I visited this week.  It is not so little anymore.  When I first tried “Aqui Es!” it had seven tables in a cozy little room on the corner a block south of the Paseo Colon Subway. The small kitchen was at one end of the room. People were waiting in the street for seats.  They have since expanded, adding a larger room next door that contains another 14 tables and the kitchen is no longer visible.  The cuisine is a variety of Argentinean and Italian, tasty and reasonable. It has a pleasant atmosphere and the waiters are very attentive. The diners seem to be an interesting lot, too.

Also interesting, in the United States, are the people in the Tea Party Movement.  These people fear the current government is trashing the Constitution, going beyond its limits, taking away their freedoms and turning the country into a socialist state.  One of their complaints is what they call the government take-over of health care.

I decided to reread my Constitution to find where this last subject was dealt with.  I didn’t have to go far.  In the
Living in Costa Rica

. . .Where the living is good

By Jo Stuart
jostuart@amcostarica.com


Preamble it reads “We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…..”
 
We all know that the U.S. courts are still striving to establish justice for all.  Insure tranquility?  There has been big concern about that over the years, most recently in the 60s when the Uppity Blacks rioted for what they figured were their rights since they were “created equal.”  As for the common defense; this is often mentioned as the prime duty of the federal government, including evidently, invading a country that might invade us if they had the means and the desire.  And there is never a complaint about the amount of money spent on this protection.  Then we have the “general welfare.” 

I looked up welfare in my trusty Webster’s dictionary.  It says:  “The state of being or doing well, condition of health, happiness and comfort, well-being, prosperity.”  Whew!  That covers as lot of responsibility for the government.  It doesn’t mention handing this responsibility to insurance companies. I must confess, my dictionary is old enough to keep the original meaning of the word, but not new enough to contain the word, ‘incentivize,” the word I have been hearing over and over in interviews on the news, as in ‘incentivize business.’ 

I could end this column with another suggested title: “There you have it.”  But I sense the ghost of Walter Cronkite shaking his head. So I’ll just say, that’s “My Point of View.”

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San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, Vol. 10, No. 35

Kids seem to enjoy cavorting with the clown on stilts. This is from a previous edition of  ' La Calle de los Titeres' in Alajuela.

stilt walker
Municipalidad de Alajuela photo


Puppets and other performers will be stars Sunday

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

Alajuela will host the fourth and final presentation there of "La Calle de los Titeres" Saturday in the municipality's Parque Central.

This is an effort to convert for a few hours a public space into an artistic, cultural and social arena, organizers said. Of course titeres, puppets, play a big role.

The idea is from Luis Olguin, an Argentinean puppet master, who works in Titeres Andariegos El Gorrión. The
idea has been adopted on a permanent basis in several Latin countries.

In addition to puppets, various other performance artists take part, including stilt walkers, acrobats and jugglers. There also is music.

An invitation from the municipality said that the event would be free and start at midday. In addition to the municipality, the Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes is promoting the event. There have been a number of such free shows around the country.


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San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, Vol. 10, No. 35

Medical vacations in Costa Rica

British plan is to take
from banks for the poor


By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services

A group of British charities has teamed up with British film actor Bill Nighy and producer Richard Curtis to campaign for what they call a "new deal between banks and society." They want to put a .05 percent tax on financial transactions between banks that don't involve the public in order to raise money for social services and to fight poverty and climate change.

The run on the British bank Northern Rock in September 2007 marked the beginning of the world banking crisis in Britain. In the end, the British and other governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars bailing out troubled financial institutions.

Now a group of charities and celebrities has launched a campaign to get some of the money back. They call it the Robin Hood Tax after the legendary English folk hero who robbed from the rich to give to the poor. Max Lawson is with the humanitarian advocacy group Oxfam.

"Basically, trillions of dollars change hands every day between the banks. What we're saying is we could take a tiny slice of that, 0.05 percent, which could raise hundreds of billions of dollars to help for poverty in rich countries, jobs in the U.S., jobs in the UK, but also for poverty in Africa as a result of people dying because of the economic crisis," Lawson said.

Brian Mairs is the spokesman for the British banking association. "It's not something that would work in the real world," he says, "Certainly not at the moment when we still have disputed trade agreements. We're indeed having cross border wars. The idea of there being a single tax which is imposed across the world is simply inconceivable."

Organizers say they want G20 countries to participate, and they're starting an online grassroots movement to pressure world leaders.  It's on Twitter and Facebook.

"You've had thousands of people sign up to support the Robin Hood Tax and talk about it on Twitter. Interestingly, they've now started tweeting to their politicians," Jonathan Tench, Oxfam's parliamentary officer said.
 
Supporters can become "merry men and women" by putting a green mask on their online photo, or printing one to wear.

If online reaction is any indicator, people are largely in favor.

Some British banks are posting record profits and giving large bonuses to executives. Observers say that's causing public outrage against bankers that could boost the campaign.

Campaigners even projected their message on the side of the Bank of England. It was one way they say to show bankers that the writing is on the wall.


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San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, Vol. 10, No. 35


Latin American news
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U.N.'s response to quake
criticize in official e-mail


By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services

The U.N.'s top humanitarian official has criticized U.N. agencies for their response to last month's devastating earthquake in Haiti.

In an e-mail sent to his colleagues, and first published Thursday by the journal Foreign Policy, U.N. humanitarian affairs chief John Holmes said that while much has been achieved, there are many unmet humanitarian needs in Haiti, particularly in terms of shelter and sanitation.

He said failure to meet those needs could lead to unrest in Haiti.

Holmes focuses his criticism on the cluster strategy for addressing humanitarian emergencies in which agencies are assigned to address specific needs such as shelter or food.  There are 12 such clusters in Haiti.

In his e-mail, he says a lack of coordination within these clusters has affected the relief response and it is beginning to hurt the U.N.'s image.

Later Thursday, Holmes was scheduled to join U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. special envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton to announce the launch of a revised financial appeal for Haiti, to see it through the rest of 2010.

Holmes' office confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail, but told a reporter it was never intended to be made public.

Wednesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised about $447 million in aid to Haiti over the next two years to help rebuild the earthquake-ravaged country.  The package includes the cancellation of about $77 million in debt.

Sarkozy's trip was the first visit by a French president to the former colony, which defeated France in a slave revolt and declared independence more than two centuries ago.

Haiti is the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.  Even before the quake, the government was struggling to recover from tropical storms that wiped out 15 percent of its economic output in 2008.





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