Costa Rican Social Security System (Caja) officials closed Ricardo Saprissa Stadium Wednesday, claiming the San José soccer team owes a ₡ 720 million (more than $1.2 million) debt, just hours before Saprissa was set to play neighboring rival Liga Deportiva Alajuelense.
The time of closure was not accidental. Manuel Ugarte, the Caja’s finance director, explained that [...]

Traffic crawled along Wednesday morning – in some places it stood still – as private transportation companies tried to drive home a point about a bill before Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly.
Blocking key avenues into the city from Escazú, La Uruca, Heredia and Cartago and disrupting traffic in other parts of the country on Wednesday morning, [...]

TURRUBARES, Costa Rica – The collapse of a bridge last week that resulted in the death of five people could have been avoided had the government taken heed of an engineer’s report carried out in 2006, the report’s commissioner has claimed.
The report, complete with photographs, highlighted a series of structural problems and warned of a [...]

BROWNSVILLE – A murder suspect on the run for two years will soon face a judge.
U.S. Marshals caught 55-year-old Dennis Wayne Capps in Nicaragua. He was wanted for the June 2006 murder of Bryan Aldrich on South Padre Island.
Aldrich was found stabbed to death in his RV near Beach Access 5.
In October 2007, a Cameron [...]

MANAGUA – The Nicaraguan government granted the Amayo energy consortium a license to build, operate and maintain a wind farm in the southern part of the country, the Energy and Mines Ministry said Tuesday.
The permit, approved last Friday by government energy authorities, was awarded to execute the second phase of the wind farm, where the [...]

Vancouver, British Columbia, October 28, 2009 — Magma Energy Corp. and Ram Power Corp.’s unit, Polaris Geothermal Inc., have jointly won an international bid for two geothermal concessions known as Volcan Mombacho and Caldera de Apoyo in Nicaragua.
Future exploration of the concessions will be made pursuant to a joint venture agreement, where PGI will be [...]

Nicaragua (MNN) ― Grace Ministries International is looking to expand their ministry into a new country: Nicaragua.
Recently, Jeremy Clark, a GMI missionary to Costa Rica, led a team of 11 individuals into Costa Rica’s neighboring country, Nicaragua, for a total of nine days. There they saw God work as they shared the Gospel.
“A number of [...]

The figures by the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (TSE) reveals that more Nicaraguan men are more likely to marry Costa Rican women than Nicaraguan women to marry Costa Rican men when the arrive in Costa Rica, with a total of 12.515 Nicaraguan men marrying “ticas”, while only 934 Nicaraguan women married “ticos” between 1950 and [...]

MANAGUA, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) — Nicaraguan parliament member Jacinto Suarez Wednesday assumed the one-year presidency of the Central American Parliament (Parlacen) at a ceremony held in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Suarez said he would give continuity to the integration policies of the regional forum from a global and not purely commercial reality, according to information reaching here.
Suarez, [...]

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The Nicaraguan Congress on Wednesday narrowly rejected an initiative to force a debate on whether to annul a hotly disputed court ruling allowing President Daniel Ortega to seek re-election.
The vote in the National Assembly’s controlling commission went along party lines with congressional leader Rene Nunez — a member of Ortega’s leftist Sandinista [...]

WASHINGTON — The United States is “very concerned” by a Nicaraguan court’s decision not to stop that country’s leftist president, Daniel Ortega, from seeking re-election, the State Department said.
“We share the concern of many Nicaraguans that this situation is part of a larger pattern of questionable and irregular governmental actions,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly [...]

LA UNIÓN, El Salvador – The political crisis in Honduras, which has cost Central American exporters millions in economic losses since last June, is forcing neighboring countries in the region to seek alternative shipping solutions.
Although temporary border closings in Honduras and military curfews in June and September caused only brief disruptions in trade, they have [...]

WORLD TRAVEL WATCH is a weekly report to help you make informed judgments about travel. Conditions can change overnight, so always make your own inquiries before you leave home. In the United States, contact the State Department via phone (888-407-4747; 317-472-2328; 202-647-5225), fax (202-647-3000), or website (travel.state.gov); abroad, check with the nearest American embassy or consulate.
Canada: [...]

The government of Nicaragua is rejecting what it calls U.S. “meddling” in its internal affairs, after the U.S. State Department released a statement Thursday saying it is “very concerned” about last week’s controversial ruling by Sandinista judges to overturn a constitutional ban on presidential re-election.
In a letter to José Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the [...]

Florida judge has said a $97 million judgment against U.S. food giant Dole and Dow Chemical Co. cannot be enforced because the Nicaraguan court that issued it neither had jurisdiction nor met international legal standards.
A trial court in Chinandega, Nicaragua, had awarded the money in 2005 to 150 Nicaraguan citizens who said they worked on [...]

Hand-in-hand with renovating Limón’s tired infrastructure, authorities are looking to revive the Costa Rican Caribbean port city’s tranquillity.
President Oscar Arias on Thursday celebrated some small successes in the initiative, including a drop in rates of homicides, property damage and domestic violence in a part of the country that traditionally reports higher crime rates.
From 2008 to [...]

The rain stopped just in time for Costa Rican singer-songwriters Mal País to take the stage Saturday night at the environmental awareness event Festival 350.
Hundreds of University of Costa Rica (UCR) students gathered in San Pedro, in eastern San José, at the UCR engineering parking lot to see the beloved Tico band during an activity [...]

ADRIAN — Next month, 15 Adrian College students plan to head for Nicaragua to help provide medical and dental services in the impoverished Central American nation.
The students from the college about 60 miles southwest of Detroit are participants in a program sponsored by International Service Learning. They’re holding a fund-raising dinner Tuesday at JR’s Hometown [...]

MANAGUA – Nicaraguans are undergoing a tense situation, after threats to President Daniel Ortega’s government by opposition sectors of turning to violence to try to reverse a Supreme Court of Justicedecision.
A group of unknown people attacked Constitutional Court President, Judge Francisco Rosales on Thursday, throwing eggs against him, when he was entering the Canal 100% Noticias television [...]

WASHINGTON: The United States yesterday expressed concern about a Nicaraguan court ruling that opens the way for leftist President Daniel Ortega to seek re-election in the 2011 election.
Nicaragua’s Supreme Court on Monday issued a ruling that helped to clear the way for Ortega to run for another term, following a petition from him and a [...]