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security minister reports By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Lawmakers are considering a bill that would protect witnesses to crime, and the security minister showed up Wednesday to point out that this is a very expensive undertaking. The minister, Janina del Vecchio, estimated that a skilled personal security guard could cost up to 800,000 colons a month, nearly $1,500. And for the average witness, four such persons would be needed to cover three eight-hour shifts and days off during the week. And, she pointed out, close family of witnesses would have to be protected. The minister was appearing before the Comisión Especial de Seguridad Ciudadana, which is studying a litany of proposed laws designed to stiffle a crime wave. The murder or intimidation of witnesses is rampant in Costa Rica. Lately even close family members of witnesses have been murdered. The result is that violent criminals are not punished for their crimes and witnesses to many crimes are hard to find. Because many Latin criminals are members of extended families, even if the suspect is in jail, family members can approach witnesses. A proposal by the executive branch would provide protection for certain witnesses, but Ms. Del Vecchio was outlining the need for her ministry to have a lot more money if the job fell to her. She suggested that perhaps another police force not within the Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública might do the job. The same day she appeared before the budget committee, Comisión Permanente de Asuntos Hacendarios, to explain why the government has proposed a 30.5 percent increase in her ministry's budget for fiscal year 2009. The proposed budget is for 105 billion colones or about $192.8 million. Among other improvements, the budget calls for hiring 1,300 new policemen. The basic salary for a Fuerza Pública officer is 250,000 colons a month, some $455. Ms. Del Vecchio pointed out that even if street patrolmen were used to guard witnesses, the cost would rise to at least 1 million colons a month, some $1,825. And she pointed out to the security commission that this would not include moving witnesses from place to place or other costs associated with protecting witnesses. The Comisión Especial de Seguridad Ciudadana will have to specify in any approved bill from where the money will come.  Ministerio Gobernación,
Policía
Fuerza Pública officers inspect metal scrap and other
items seeking evidence of crime or places for mosquitoes to breed.y Seguridad Pública/Guillermo Solano Scrap yards and pawn shops get once-over by police By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Law officers made a sweep of Pococí and Guácimo Tuesday, not only seeking illegalities but also places where the dengue mosquito could breed. They found two illegal workers, closed junk yards where water gathered in pools and closed a number of pawn shops and salvage locations because they were not licensed, they reported. Dozens of these types of businesses were inspected, according to the Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública. Fuerza Pública officers from communities in the Provincia de Limón received support from the Unidad de Intervención Policial, the Dirección de Investigaciones Especializadas and the Policía Especial de Migración. Also participating were tax police, health inspectors and inspectors from the local municipalities. It was in Pococí where two Nicaraguans were found working illegally in a junk yard. They were processed for deportation, the ministry said. Officers said they found the most irregularities in Guácimo and closed three junk yards which did not have permits to operate. There, too, they found many pieces of metal in the open air where rain could provide breeding places for dengue mosquitoes. Officers also closed a motorcycle shop in that community because it did not have the proper licenses, they said.
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| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
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| Bulldozer rips out plants and
grass within sight of the surf. |
 Photo by Toby Cleaver
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Beach destruction on the Osa
clouded by lack of information
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By Elise Sonray
of the A.M. Costa Rica staff Residents on the Osa Peninsula said that municipal officials destroyed some of the most beautiful beaches in the area and have failed to say why. At best, the events leading up to the destruction are murky. Early this month nearly a dozen armed Fuerza Pública officers, construction workers, and municipality officials entered Playa Platanares and began to bulldoze the trees and plants to build a road, said Toby Cleaver, who owns an ecolodge with his wife, Lauren, near the beach. According to Cleaver, when he asked to see documents showing permissions for the operation, officials said they had orders from the Contraloría General de la República and that they didn't need to show any documents. The bulldozers worked for three days straight, said Cleaver. They pushed over palm and almond trees and tore up beach grass near a turtle nesting area. Cleaver said when some local Costa Ricans saw the beach after the destruction they began to cry. After those three days, Sept. 4 through Sept. 6, the bulldozing suddenly stopped said Cleaver. What was left was more than 500 meters of damage and few explanations, he said. Later Jimmy Cubillo, the mayor of Golfito, apologized profusely to Ms. Cleaver saying the whole thing was an embarrassing mistake, according to Cleaver. Cubillo said the municipality had received bad information about the permissions, according to Cleaver. The mayor did not respond to a reporter's message on his cell phone Tuesday and was reported to be out of the office Wednesday. Elian Arburola, an engineer for the municipality of Golfito, said he was not very familiar with the road project and that Mayor Cubillo had all the details. Arbulo did say however that from what he understood the Sala IV constitutional court and the Contraloría General de la |
República had ruled that the
old beachfront road be reopened in order to give the public access to
the beach. Arburolo said in his opinion North Americans and other foreigners in the area are mad because they want the beaches all to themselves. “The foreigners don't permit access to the beaches,” said Arburola, “but the beaches are for everyone. The foreign owners of beachfront properties and hotels don't want anyone to enter.” Cleaver said this was untrue and that there is already a beach access road further away from the shore. He and his wife are in agreement with the reopening of the old road, which has not been in use for 10 years, but do not like the way it was being constructed, he said. “We are all about the public,” said Cleaver, who added that Iguana Lodge has public showers a beach hut and even parking for all public visitors. Cleaver said he knew about plans for the new beach road since late last year. He and his wife have been in contact with the municipality and believed that they would be properly notified and that the road construction would be ecologically friendly, said the hotel owner. Cleaver said he would prefer the road be used as a bike and walking path. “But if the government says it needs to be a road, it needs to be a road,” he said. As for the municipal engineer's mention of a Sala Constitucional order to open the beach road, there is none, said a court spokeswoman Wednesday. The only pending order for a public access road is in Guanacaste, said court spokeswoman Andrea Marín Mena after making some calls about the Golfito issue. In an e-mail to friends and locals, Ms. Cleaver said she contacted Gerardo Marín, a representative from the Contraloría in San José and that the representative told her the institution had no knowledge of the event nor had they authorized it. However two of the men at the beach during the bulldozing said they were representatives of the Contraloría, according to the Cleavers. |
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U.S. ambassador pays a call
on once unhappy Dall'Anese
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
There was some fence mending at the Ministerio Público Wednesday. The U.S. ambassador called on the fiscal general. The Poder Judicial confirmed the meeting but did not say in detail what was discussed. However, one of the general topics was extradition. The fiscal general, Francisco Dall´Anese Ruiz, was the Costa Rican official who became upset last April when he arrived in Miami. He said he received shabby treatment by U.S. officials. Dall'Anese, who does not speak English, said he was detained for at least an hour and 30 minutes and deprived of his liberty. He sent a scathing letter to the foreign ministry demanding action against the U.S. officials concerned. A subsequent visit to Miami by a reporter and interviews with employees there suggested that Dall'Anese might have overstated his case. Still, the foreign ministry filed a formal protest with the U.S. Embassy without investigating further. Dall'Anese was in Miami to talk with Christian Sapsizian, a former Alcatel executive who has admitted a year ago to paying more than $2.5 million to Costa Rican politicians |
on behalf of his former telecommunications
company. Dall'Anese said in a press conference that he suspected U.S. officials were protecting Sapsizian, although he did not use the man's name. The chief prosecutor did say that relations between Costa Rican officials and the U.S. Department of Justice have been deteriorating over the last few months. Perhaps in retaliation, Costa Rica's security minister, again without investigating further, granted refugee status July 23 to a U.S. fugitive hours before she was supposed to be extradited to the United States. The woman, Chere Lyn Tomayko had been on the run with her daughter for 10 years and had been indicted for parental child abduction. With the U.S. ambassador, Peter Cianchette, Wednesday was Peter Brennan, now chargé d’affaires at the embassy. Subsequently, another U.S. runaway mom has sought refugee status to avoid a criminal charge of abducting her child in the United States. An additional concern is the fact that the Costa Rican Constitution prohibits the extradition of its citizens who may have committed serious crimes elsewhere. The visit to the fiscal general follows the donation of a twin-engine airplane to the security ministry last week. |
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Blind, subterranean tropical
ant represents a new species
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By the University of Texas at Austin news
service
A new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest by a University of Texas graduate student. This new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant, Martialis heureka, was discovered in the Amazon by Christian Rabeling. It belongs to the first new subfamily of living ants discovered since 1923 and is a descendant of one of the first ant lineages to evolve more than 120 million years ago, researchers said. The new ant is named Martialis heureka, which translates roughly to "ant from Mars," because the ant has a combination of characteristics never before recorded. It is adapted for dwelling in the soil, is two to three millimeters long, pale, and has no eyes and large mandibles, which Rabeling and colleagues suspect it uses to capture prey. The ant also belongs to its own new subfamily, one of 21 subfamilies in ants. This is the first time that a new subfamily of ants with living species has been discovered since 1923. Other new subfamilies have been discovered from fossil ants. Rabeling says his discovery will help biologists better understand the biodiversity and evolution of ants, which are abundant and ecologically important insects. "This discovery hints at a wealth of species, possibly of great evolutionary importance, still hidden in the soils of the remaining rainforests," writes Rabeling and his co-authors in a paper reporting their discovery this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rabeling collected the only known specimen of the new ant species in 2003 from leaf-litter at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária in Manaus, Brazil. He and his colleagues found that the ant was a new species, genus and subfamily after morphological and genetic analysis. Analysis of DNA from the ant's legs confirmed its position at the very base of the ant evolutionary tree. Ants evolved over 120 million years ago from wasp |
 C. Rabeling and M. Verhaagh photo
This is the blind, subterranean, predatory ant.ancestors. They probably evolved quickly into many different lineages with ants specializing to live in the soil, leaf-litter or trees, or becoming generalists. "This discovery lends support to the idea that blind subterranean predator ants arose at the dawn of ant evolution," says Rabeling, a graduate student in the ecology, evolution and behavior program. Rabeling does not suggest that the ancestor to all ants was blind and subterranean, but that these adaptations arose early and have persisted over the years. "Based on our data and the fossil record, we assume that the ancestor of this ant was somewhat wasp-like, perhaps similar to the Cretaceous amber fossil Sphecomyrma, which is widely known as the evolutionary missing link between wasps and ants," says Rabeling. He speculates that the new ant species evolved adaptations over time to its subterranean habitat (for example, loss of eyes and pale body color), while retaining some of its ancestor's physical characteristics. "The new ant species is hidden in environmentally stable tropical soils with potentially less competition from other ants and in a relatively stable microclimate," he says. "It could represent a relict species that retained some ancestral morphological characteristics." |
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Ulises Odio Santos, dies By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Ulises Odio Santos, 90, former president of the Corte Suprema de Justicia and an employee of the judicial branch
Born in Puntarenas on November 25, 1917, Odio married Norma Orozco Saborío with whom he had two children. Odio studied law at the Universidad de Costa Rica and began working for Poder Judicial at 21 years of age. He served as a civil judge from 1952 to 1964. The Asamblea Legislativa later elected Odio as a magistrate in de la Sala Segunda Penal. He was designated as Presidente de la Corte Suprema de Justicia in 1980. Last March, Odio was awarded the Mérito Judicial by the Comisión Iberoamericana de Ética Judicial at a ceremony in Brazil. Services for Odio will be held today at 10 a.m. at the Iglesia Don Bosco. Cacao farms getting aid Special to A.M. Costa Rica
The Humane Society International has received a grant from the U.S. Department of State for $396,000 to continue work on wildlife habitat protection in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The grant will support the production of sustainable cacao, which is grown on small farms that also provide wildlife habitat for animals such as woodpeckers, sloths, and pumas, said the society. Cacao beans are used to make chocolate. The work will be with cooperatives whose members will be trained to conduct wildlife inventories. The cooperatives have already cataloged at least 43 mammals, 40 bird and 120 plant species living within and around the cacao farms, the society said. The society has had programs here since 2003. |
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