Responding to pressure from residents in Costa Rica's Northern Zone, who say they increasingly have become targets for assaults and robberies, the Public Security Ministry announced Thursday that it had conducted the first of several sweeps of the area in an effort to catch the bad guys.
The negotiation skills of Luis Guillermo Solís' administration were tested this week by protests on Tuesday in which hundreds of residents from several Costa Rican communities blocked main roads in three provinces for eight hours. But there's more to the story.
Central American coffee farmers have struggled with a ravenous fungus, drought and low prices for the last several years, but it looks like the 2014/2015 harvest might start to turn the corner, according to reports from governments across the isthmus. Higher potential production and buoying coffee prices might be the jolt the region needs to kick off its recovery.
To help us prepare for the day, Costa Rica’s National Metereological Institute (IMN) recently released its own app - a valiant effort to interpret the local troposphere for everyday people, but too full of flaws and bugs to be a worthy option.
"Anti-drug policies in Central America have not had their desired effect,” Public Security Minister Celso Gamboa said. "I can say that after 20 years experience fighting drug trafficking, ... the cases where white collar criminals are caught, those who never touch the drugs, these cases are scarce.”
Last week as I was driving through the sweltering Nicaraguan countryside in the southwestern department of Rivas, a convoy of soldiers traveling at midday on the Inter-American Highway caught my eye.
