Want to know the price of vegetables this week? Click here to get the 'official' market prices. Today's Stories: • Child Smuggling Ring Broken Up • New Road To San Carlos • Costa Rica Native Sets Sights High • Exports Increase • Unique IBM Center in Costa Rica • Panamanian elections to cost over 32 million US dollars • US expects to participate in enlargement of Panama Canal • Colombia to receive 50 million dollars from the US The Tambor will be the only ferry service between Puntarenas and Paquera. The new contract was awared to the Tambor, who will recondition the existing ferry and add a new one, that will provide service for the next 10 years. The ferry service is a main route to the beach areas of Playa Tambor, Montezuma and Mal Pais.

The group moved children from Ecuador to Costa Rica with a final destination point in the Unite States.

Yesterday's police action rescued three Ecuadorian children, aged 5, 7 and 9, who were being kept in various houses in Alajuelita and San Sebastian, south of San José.

According to a police report, the children were supposedly snatched from their mothers in Ecuador at the request of the their fathers, who live in the United States.

The children were handed over to the Patronato Nacional de la Infancia (PANI) - the child welfare agency who will be making arrangement to return the children to their homes.

Fanny Corder, press agent for PANI, says that the Ecuadorian consulate had been contacted and the children would be returned to their mothers.
According to Jorge Rojas, director of the Organismo de Investigación Judicial (OIJ), the group first took the children to Colombia, then Panamá and then entered Costa Rican territory by land.

In Costa Rica, the group took their time to prepare false documentation for the intended trip to the U.S.

Rojas said that they had been watching the movements of the group for some time.

Two of the foreigners were Dominicans, while the other four were Ecuadorians. The Tica was the wife of one of the Ecuadorians. Apparently this group was responsible for the children in Costa Rica and to get them to the United Stated.

The two Dominicans will spend the next four months in preventative detention, while for the others, the prosecutor is asking for up to one year.

If convicted, they each face from 10-15 years in prison.

New Road To San Carlos
The green light was given to build the new road to San Carlos, which will be built and financed mainly by the Goverment of Taiwan.

The Contraloría General de la República - the Comptroller's office - yesteday authorized the MOPT - the Ministry of Public Works and Transport - for the construction of a new road that would reduce the trip from San José to Cuiadad Quesada to 81km from the current 95km.

The new road will be 30 kilometers and will take about four years to build. It will included nine bridges and two overpasses and a total cost of $61 Million Dollars.

The costs will be financed with a loan of $35 Million Dollars from the Government of Taiwan, which will also donate another $15 Million Dollars to the project and the balance coming from the Consejo Nacional de Vialidad (Conavi).

The Comptroller's office, in it's authorization, ordered the MOPT to award the contract to the Taiwanese firm RSEA, the same firm who built the bridge over the Tempisque river.

Costa Rica Native Sets Sights High
By Mary Ann Lopez
 
As a girl in Costa Rica, Seydie Coronado loved school, but most of her family never earned a high school diploma, let alone considered attending college.

When Coronado told her mother, Xinia Quesada, that she wanted to finish high school and earn a secretarial certificate, her mother willingly sacrificed her paychecks so her daughter could continue her education.

On Saturday, Coronado, 37, will graduate from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado,  with a 4.0 grade-point average. She will serve as a student marshal during the morning ceremony.

While graduation is a time of cheering and celebration, her special day will be missing her mother and her family, who are still in Costa Rica.

"I feel like I have to do this for my mom," Coronado said. "She was the one who sacrificed everything."

In 1991, Coronado moved to Durango after meeting her husband, Robert Gregorio, while he was participating in a bicycle tour in Costa Rica. The couple fell in love and married. When she arrived in Durango, Coronado said she barely spoke English.

When her children, Rafael Angel, now 16, and Linda, now 14, were in elementary school, she began going to Park Elementary School to help out. She began working with the English Language Learners program and was told by others that she should consider going back to school. She said, "I was intimidated."

Over time, her interest in returning to school grew, as did her English proficiency. Eventually she began to seriously consider a return to college. At the urging of Jennifer Trujillo and Farren Webb, education teachers at Fort Lewis College, Coronado enrolled.

Though she graduates Saturday, like other education students, Coronado will not receive her diploma until she completes her student teaching. She will student teach this fall. At some point, she plans to take a vacation to visit her family in Costa Rica and hopes to find a local teaching job.

Saturday's graduation will be bittersweet. Friends and family will be supporting her, but Coronado wishes her family could be here.

Exports Increase
The exports of Costa Rica increased 4.2 percent this year's first quarter, when they went from $1,527 million to $1,592 million, as compared to the same period in 2003, the Central Bank reported.

Imports also increased 1.2 percent, since they went from $1,939 million to $1,963 million in the same period. The deficit of the trade balance was $371 million, lower than the $411.5 million registered in 2003.

Unique IBM Center in Costa Rica
IBM will establish in Costa Rica its Business Transformation Center for the Americas, in which it will offer accounting and financing services, human resources, and purchasing processes, among others, to customers that include international corporations.

According to official Government of Costa Rica sources, this will be the only such center in Latin America and that, in its first stage, will mean 300 new jobs.

US expects to participate in enlargement of Panama Canal
The United States expects to participate in the enlargement of the Panama Canal, although Panamanian officials ruled out that possibility days ago, the US authorities said Friday.

The possible US participation was analyzed at the first round of negotiations on a free trade agreement (FTA) with Panama, which ended Friday in Panama's capital after a week of work.

"We would not be global traders if we were not interested in participating" in the expansion of the aquatic road, said Regina Vargo, who heads the US negotiating delegation.

At a press conference, Vargo and Panamanian Trade and Industry Minister Joaquin Jacome announced the end of the first round of FTA negotiations, which included a meeting with the general manager of the Panama's Canal Authority (ACP), Alberto Aleman.

The meeting with Aleman was "important" for "our joint vision of the future" of the canal, Vargo said. Jacome said the "vision of the future" of the canal should facilitate world maritime navigation.

Vargo's declaration on the US interest to participate in the enlargement of the canal through the FTA was made five days after Aleman, Canal Affairs Minister Jerry Salazar and Panama's chief negotiator, Romel Adames, said the matter was excluded from the negotiation.
 

Colombia to receive 50 million dollars from the US
Colombia will receive 50 million US dollars from the US government to support the "institutional strengthening," government sources said Friday.

The announcement was made after the US Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and the US South Command chief, Gen. James Hill, visited the South American nation.

According to the sources, the visiting officials announced the economic support and also voiced the support of the United States to the "peace policy" of the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's government.

Grossman and Hill expressed recognition over the advances reported in the anti-drug struggle and ratified the will to maintain the cooperation with Colombia, the sources were quoted by the press as saying.

Colombia, the third largest recipient of US military assistance after Israel and Egypt over the past three years, has received more than 2 billion dollars in aid through Plan Colombia.

Colombia has been locked in a four-decade civil war, the longest in Latin America, in which government forces, leftist guerrillas and far-right paramilitaries fight one another. The conflicts kill more than 3,000 people every year.