As the strike in Costa Rica's Caribbean port city of Limón stretched into its tenth day, importers and exporters are struggling to meet their obligations to customers, according to several sources consulted by The Tico Times. Despite the port remaining open, the ongoing strike has created an administrative backlog that has delayed some shipments by as much as 72 hours.
Authorities in Costa Rica have opened active criminal investigations to determine who organized the ongoing acts of violence and vandalism that began last week and continued through Monday during a dockworkers strike that briefly paralyzed the country's most important commercial port in the Caribbean province of Limón.
A solid majority of Limón residents say that a $1 billion APM Terminals port project will be a positive thing for the impoverished region, according to a survey from Borges y Asociados. The poll results came out soon before the government announced it would restart negotiations with striking dockworkers on Thursday morning.
LIMÓN – Costa Rica's Labor Minister Victor Morales announced that negotiations with the dockworkers union SINTRAJAP would be suspended until its leaders issued a public statement denouncing the burning of President Luis Guillermo Solís' image outside union headquarters in the Caribbean port of Limón on Monday. Negotiations were originally scheduled to continue at the Labor Ministry on Wednesday in San José.
A Tico Times reporter takes a stroll down Limón's main boulevard and asks local residents what they think about a proposed $1 billion Moín Port expansion project at the center of the ongoing controversy.
The president has a difficult backdrop to the pro-business narrative he planed to tell on this trip as the longshoremen strike enters its sixth day and seven former public officials go on trial for corruption in a canceled gold mining concession to a Canadian company Monday.
Both President Luis Guillermo Solís' administration and the Atlantic Port Authority union, SINTRAJAP, dug in their heels after negotiations at Casa Presidencial ended in an impasse Thursday.
Public Security Minister Celso Gamboa announced that police had removed striking stevedores from the docks in Moín and Limón, which handle 80 percent of Costa Rica’s international trade, Wednesday evening with the support of Casa Presidencial.
Costa Rica’s proposed $1 billion Moín port expansion is facing another potential setback as the Atlantic Port Authority’s union began a strike in Limón on Wednesday. SINTRAJAP leaders and some lawmakers believe a provision of the concession grants AMP Terminals a monopoly on handling containers, and therefore threatens stevedores’ jobs.
The Supreme Court’s Civil and Administrative Law Branch recently rejected the final pending appeal against a port renovation and expansion project by APM Terminal, a Maersk subsidiary based in the Netherlands. The lawsuit attempted to block the $1 billion project on the country's Caribbean coast by claiming that APM's exclusive 33-year concession to operate the container terminal is an illegal monopoly.
