By ROBERT J. BRODEY Special to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - Page T3

SAN JOSÉ, COSTA RICA -- Through my bedroom window, the orange glow of morning illuminates the mist. An exotic quetzal lands on the windowsill, while a record plays an adagio for strings. This is what it will be like living in Costa Rica, I think. But as the clouds rise from the tropical slopes, the record needle dances and skips, and I tumble back to earth.

Even in the sexy Central American country of Costa Rica, toilets don't always flush and paradise sometimes seems lost.

Not so long ago, Costa Rica was a backpacker's hideaway, a stunning and inexpensive travel destination. But secrets are rarely kept for long. Every year, about 50,000 Canadians come to the country to enjoy its bounty: Surf lessons in Jaco by day, pina coladas and warm breezes by night. Hikes through the intoxicating rainforest of Braulio Carrillo and perhaps a rare glimpse of a jaguar or a long and lethal bushmaster snake.

With all these natural wonders, it's easy to see why so many tourists might dream of returning to Costa Rica to live. And some actually do. Ted MacKay, first secretary of public relations for the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica, estimates that close to 6,000 Canadians live in Costa Rica on a permanent basis.

There are many reasons people pack up and move away from the familiar and familial. Some are simply in pursuit of work opportunities or a warmer climate. For others, it's an almost spiritual calling to move abroad and explore the different ways life can be lived.

Russell Maier, a Yukon native, worked for eight months in the West Bank town of Ramallah. After the intifada of September, 2000, Maier sought peace and moved to Costa Rica, a country that has no standing army.

In a less dramatic case, my girlfriend was hired by a child rights organization in the capital, San José, and I came down with her in search of new experiences.

Soon after we arrived in January, we realized that living abroad isn't always easy. Leaving behind friends and family in Toronto and building a life from the ground up is a challenge. Words such as alienation, exaltation and depression have entered my daily lexicon. At times, my mood swings -- with their high peaks and deep valleys -- resemble the Himalayas. And yet my senses still tingle with the unexpected: A conversation with a neighbour or finding my way home through a maze of unfamiliar streets can suddenly seem like a coup.

Making a new life is a delicate process of integrating what's familiar from home -- music, sports, food (maple syrup!) -- with novel elements of an adopted community. It's a mysterious alchemy with no set recipe for success.

Depending on whether you see the glass half-empty or half-full, the list of pros and cons around life in an unfamiliar country will probably look lopsided in the beginning. In San José, for instance, health and safety seem gravely undervalued. I battle the searing pollution and the maniacal driving, which takes two lives a day in this tiny country. The pitted sidewalks and open sewers can swallow a human whole.

In bank doorways, security guards dressed in bad suits, with shotguns pressed against their chests, pose like B-movie cops with fingers always on the trigger. It's a bit overwhelming, coming from a relatively unarmed country.

It's a massive adjustment, one that can easily shatter the fantasy of living abroad. A broken water pipe in Canada may be viewed as a nuisance, but in an unfamiliar, less developed country it can be seen as evidence of incompetence or backwardness. How a person confronts these comparisons and prejudices is an indication of how he or she will adjust.

Several Canadian-run organizations offer support for new residents in Costa Rica to lessen the shock of starting over. The Association of Residents of Costa Rica disseminates legal and health information, while the Canadian embassy has a "meet and greet" every month to give newcomers and veteran residents a chance to interact.

The tourist industry in Costa Rica is a well-oiled machine. A typical visitor will spend a few blissful days in Manuel Antonio sunbathing, while squirrel monkeys play in the trees and iguanas roam the underbrush. But living in Costa Rica, one deals with the same bureaucracy as every other Costa Rican. And being Canadian provides no immunity from the headaches of daily life -- noisy neighbours, hampers filled with dirty laundry, health and financial concerns.

Locals and expats do head out on the weekends, however, for the beaches and parks that have made the country famous.

Jason Alexander Cunliffe, president of the Chamber of Commerce for Costa Rica/Canada, is optimistic about his life in Costa Rica. After five years, he has no plans to move. "Once you transcend certain language and cultural differences," he says, "Canadians and Costa Ricans have a lot in common. They're peaceful and easygoing, like us."

Francis James Pacheco, Cunliffe's associate, adds that unlike Costa Rica, living in places such as "Venezuela or Cuba can feel like you're on skates for the first time."

After three months in Costa Rica, I still feel as if I'm on skates, but my list of pros continues to grow. I do miss Toronto's multiculturalism, but Costa Rica is catching up. Fourteen years ago, when I was first here, rice and beans was pretty much the only game in town. Now, sushi, Jamaican and Asian-fusion cuisine and French crèpes are all part of the culinary landscape.

Adding to my list of pros is living near the vibrant university campus, which provides a great point of entry into Costa Rican life. I've discovered cool joints in which to hang out and sip iced cappuccinos while watching the streets buzz with activity. After only a handful of months, I no longer feel like a ghost in a foreign land. My girlfriend and I have made friends with the neighbours, the parking attendant and some expats.

Former Vancouverite Joanne Loewen, a graphic designer who now lives in Puerto Rico, says that with the right attitude you can flourish abroad. If, however, you are unwilling to understand or integrate into your new environment, always referring to locals as "these people," you won't last more than two years, she predicts.

There are many stories of Canadians moving to Costa Rica or other tropical locales after only one vacation. Not being prepared for the drastic change in language and culture can be overwhelming. Some simply flee back north.

The most important things to bring when moving don't weigh anything: learning to bend like a tree in a storm and a willingness to meet people. After all, paradise is a state of mind. Everywhere else, there will always be leaky pipes in need of fixing and potholes to be hurdled.

For more information, visit the following Web sites: The Canadian Club: www.canadianclubcr.org; The Association of Residents of Costa Rica: www.casacanada.net; Canadian embassy, Costa Rica: www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca

The New Herald Posted on Thu, May. 29, 2003 BY RICHARD BRAND rbrand@herald.com

BACK ONLINE: The El Palito oil refinery in Venezuela is running again, loading tankers with gasoline, jet fuel and kerosene destined for foreign and Venezuelan pumps. The refinery is run by Asdrubal Chavez, a cousing of president Hugo Chavez. KIMBERLY WHITE/BLOOMBERG NEWS

EL PALITO, Venezuela - When President Hugo Chávez put his first-cousin Asdrúbal in charge of the El Palito oil refinery here in December during the height of a national strike, opponents cried nepotism and promised the move would backfire as reports of accidents mounted while a skeleton crew tried to resurrect Venezuela's third-largest refinery.

Four months later, El Palito is back online, loading tankers with gasoline, jet fuel and kerosene destined for foreign and Venezuelan pumps. The quick turnaround, accomplished with only 950 workers at a facility that once employed 2,200, has stunned many oil industry analysts who believed the process would take far longer.

The recovery at El Palito under Chávez has been mirrored across Venezuela's petroleum industry, at refineries, shipping centers and oil wells that are the lifeline of this oil-rich but politically divided nation.

Yet the extent of the recovery is in dispute. Officials at Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-run oil monopoly, say crude output has returned to prestrike levels of 3.2 million barrels per day. Analysts put that figure at closer to 2.6 million, a discrepancy worth billions of dollars a year.

''What is clear is that they have been able to materially increase their production,'' said Bruce Schwartz, an oil industry analyst at Standard & Poor's in New York. ``We were surprised at how fast PDVSA was able to restore production.''

Sitting in his new office overlooking a massive seaside complex of metal pipes, spires and choking clouds of sulfur smoke, Asdrúbal Chávez is triumphant.

``They said we would take six months, a year to recover. We did it in two and a half months.''

El Palito's two piers can accommodate four tankers between them. On a recent Saturday, workers loaded 300,000 barrels of jet fuel onto the Maltese-flagged Trogin, carrying a Russian crew. The load was worth an estimated $7.2 million and the refinery's most valuable shipment since the strike, said El Palito spokesman David Palm. The contents were bound for Canada's eastern coast.

Venezuelan national guard troops provide security over operations at El Palito.

''They said I wasn't qualified to run the refinery,'' Chávez said. ``But that was all a campaign of lies.''

For a president pitted against striking workers seeking a referendum on his rule and a divided military that had attempted to oust him months earlier, placing a trusted cousin at the helm of the El Palito, which provides gasoline to 10 critical states, seemed a smart strategic choice. After all, Asdrúbal, whose uncle is the president's father, had worked as a chemical engineer at El Palito for 21 years.

The two are apparently close. Asdrúbal boasted of playing pick-up baseball games with the president when they were young. Asdrúbal also said the president, who enjoys painting nature scenes on paper -- not canvas -- recently gave him several paintings as a present, and he displays them at home.

''We're chums,'' Asdrúbal said.

Asdrúbal is not the first of the president's relatives to rise to prominence. Older brother Adan Chávez is director of the National Land Institute. Ex-wife Marisabel, before the split, was a delegate to the constituent assembly that rewrote the nation's constitution in 1999. And father Hugo Chávez de los Reyes is the governor of Barinas, the family's home state.

After the national strike that brought Venezuela's oil economy to a grinding halt ended in February after two months, most anti-Chávez oil workers were fired, leaving PDVSA with 22,924 employees compared with 40,133 in prestrike days.

Among those who left were at least 10,949 analysts, 2,024 metal workers, 3,434 technicians, 649 executives and 154 tanker crewmen, said Edith Gómez, the new director of hydrocarbons at the energy ministry.

''There was an excess of personnel at PDVSA,'' Gómez said. ``We are adjusting without them.''

Gómez's plush, wood-paneled office in the penthouse of PDVSA headquarters belonged only months ago to a PDVSA executive who left in the strike, she said. The building's lower floors hold rows of empty offices, desks cleaned out. The ministry and PDVSA headquarters now share the same downtown Caracas address.

The departure of skilled workers and managers may pose safety risks for remaining employees, analysts say. Already, reports of fires, injuries and oil spills -- many denied by PDVSA officials -- have cast a cloud over recovery efforts.

''There have been clearly difficulties restarting PDVSA's refineries in that there have been fires and outages that have occurred,'' Schwartz said. ``It may be in part due to a less skilled workforce as a number of skilled managers were dismissed.''

Many of Venezuela's two million unemployed see opportunity in PDVSA's reduced workforce. El Palito refinery alone has received 25,000 résumés from people seeking employment, though Chávez acknowledges that ''only a few hundred have the skills we are looking for: engineers, human resources, lab technicians.'' Some of those will be hired.

The rest are from men like Alexander Vargas, 30, a welder who says he has been unemployed for 17 months. Since April, Vargas has joined dozens of people who make a daily pilgrimage to the chain-link entrance of El Palito, hoping the gates will swing open and somebody inside will offer him work.

''They need people inside,'' Vargas said, ``so I will continue waiting.''

<a href=www.newindpress.com>Agencies Thursday May 29 2003 12:57 IST

VENEZUELA: A Venezuelan currency crisis almost dashed the Miss Universe '03 title hopes of Miss Venezuela ’03 Mariangel Ruiz. But intervention by a media company in the South American country will allow her to participate in the June 4 Miss Universe competition after all. The trouble erupted earlier this week, when Miss Venezuela pageant organizers had announced a cancellation of Mariangel’s trip to Panama, explaining that the $80,000 needed to pay her way could not be raised due to Venezuela’s recent restrictions on converting its bolivars into American dollars, which grew out of panic buying of the dollar in Venezuela earlier this year. At one point this week, Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso personally made pleas to Venezuelan officials to resolve the foreign-exchange snafu to allow Miss Venezuela to compete. Today, the 23-year-old Mariangel Ruiz is heading to the Miss Universe Pageant, thanks to the financing help of the Venezuelan media company with the pageant’s broadcast rights. The president of the Cisneros media group, Gustavo Cisneros, whose television channel Venevision transmits the national contest, will pay for the Venezuelan winner to take part. Based on the current exchange rate of 1,600 bolivars per dollar, the $80,000 American dollars Cisneros is putting up to make Miss Ruiz’s trip to Panama a reality amounts to a cool 128 million bolivars. The financing bailout averted what might have been a deep national embarrassment in Venezuela, which considers itself the beauty capital of the world. Beauty pageants are a matter of national passion and pride in Venezuela; the country’s contestants hold the record for winning the most titles — 12 of them — in the Miss Universe and Miss World competitions. In the U.S., NBC’s telecast of the 52nd Miss Universe competition airs live

Wednesday, May 28, 2003
(05-28) 22:45 PDT (AP) -- CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER <a href=www.sfgate.com>Associated Press Writer

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- No live coverage of political violence. Limited daytime newscasts about terror attacks. No radio stations devoted exclusively to rock or other "foreign" music.

Venezuela's news executives say all this could happen if President Hugo Chavez succeeds in enacting a law that imposes harsh restrictions on what and when Venezuelan television and radio stations can broadcast.

Ruling party lawmakers defend the proposed law, saying it will protect children from violence and end what they call "selective censorship" by the news media, which they accuse of supporting the opposition. The also contend it will make broadcasters accountable to citizens.

"This project is a weapon to defend us as a people and guarantee public freedoms," said Juan Barreto, a member of the committee which drafted the bill and a journalism professor at the Central University of Venezuela. It upholds "freedom of expression, which doesn't belong only to channels and journalists but also to the people," he said.

Many press rights advocates, however, disagree. They say the law, now before the Chavez-dominated Congress, will allow an increasingly authoritarian government to silence opposition ahead of a possible recall vote on Chavez's presidency.

Chavez designed the Law for Social Responsibility in Radio and Television to bring "the news media to its knees," said Victor Ferreres, president of Venevision television.

"We would have to broadcast a blank screen and ignore almost everything that is occurring in the news" to comply with the law, Ferreres claimed.

Chavez has long accused Venezuela's news media of conspiring to topple him. Most broadcasters slanted coverage of a brief 2002 coup against Chavez, and many supported an opposition general strike this year.

Among other provisions, the law would ban "rude" and "vulgar" language; prohibit images and sounds related to alcohol and drug consumption, gambling and sex; and ban "psychological" or physical violence, all between 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Similar limits would apply to early morning and evening newscasts.

Sixty percent of all programming must be produced within Venezuela, and of that, more than half must be created by "independent producers" approved by Conatel, the state media watchdog.

Broadcasters say the law will allow censors hand-picked by Chavez to crack down on the mostly opposition news media. Violators can be punished with $37,000 fines or have their broadcast licenses revoked.

Advertisers, too, can be held liable -- a provision critics say is meant to starve stations of publicity at a time when Venezuela's news media are confronting an economic crisis.

Congress is expected to pass the bill by simple majority vote within weeks. Six of nine members of a committee to enforce the law would be appointed by Chavez.

"If there is a terrorist attack this morning, I'd have to tell listeners we have to wait to inform them during the news at 11 (p.m.) because it could be labeled 'violent content,"' said Leopoldo Castillo, a talk show host with Globovision television news channel.

Deputy Willian Lara, a Chavez confidante, said the law won't stop TV and radio from broadcasting news.

"The news can be reported like it is now, only the grotesque images are restricted," he said.

Critics are wary.

The legislation "is completely incompatible with international standards" of press freedoms, said Jose Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. Definitions are so cloudy that some of Venezuela's prized daytime soap operas could be banned, he said.

Opposition groups pushing for a referendum on Chavez's presidency later this year are organizing marches against the law.

A leftist former army paratrooper, Chavez was elected in 1998 and re-elected to a six-year term in 2000.

QUESTION: Okay, another subject, yes. Mr. Gaviria is in Caracas to support the sign of an agreement between the opposition leaders of Venezuela and the government. I just want to know the importance of the U.S. -- of the -- that your government is giving to the sign of an agreement which reproduced rights of the Venezuelan constitution. What is the big deal in that?

MR. BOUCHER: Well, we think it is important that they have taken this step. We certainly welcome the agreement that the Government of Venezuela and the opposition reached this last Friday, May 23rd, to set the framework for a referendum on the tenure of President Chavez and other elected officials. I think it does reflect hard work and a commitment of Venezuelan negotiators, as well as their international supporters and the Secretary General of the OAS.

We look forward to both sides signing the accord. We will continue working with our partners to facilitate a peaceful, constitutional, democratic and electoral solution to Venezuela's political impasse.

We note that the agreement recognizes the important role the international community can still play in providing technical observation and monitoring assistance for any future electoral process.

So it is important in that the parties have agreed to implement the provisions of the Venezuelan constitution that are discussed there, and we think that is a political and constitutional way to move forward and resolve some of the tension here.

QUESTION: Richard --

QUESTION: Excuse me. To follow up, is Venezuela in any way to be worried on the current relationship between both countries, between the United States and Venezuela, needs to be worrying?

MR. BOUCHER: I think we have taken this issue by issue. We have spoken pretty loudly about some of the events in Venezuela, particularly a crackdown on freedom of the press, a crackdown on political and electoral freedoms that have taken place. And we have looked very strongly to this process led by Secretary General Gaviria of the Organization of American States to try to reestablish a sense of political balance in that country and to establish the basic rights of Venezuelan citizens. So we think this is important in that regard and I think this is a way of getting away from the tensions and the problems that have existed in the relationship with the United States.