Hi there!
Found the cause and I guess many people will be surprised. I found the
info on the JDBC 2.0 conformance tests at jdbc.postgresql.org.
It looks that recent versions of PostgreSQL, if compiled without
multi-byte characters suport (as are the RPM packages) will *allways*
respond to the JDBC driver it's working on US7_ASCII. That's why I could
not read nor write accents from Java, only from psql. Java was told to
use 7-but ASCII.
The workaround is described on the same doc: you have to append
"?charSet=ISO8859-1" to the connectionURL (or pass it as properties).
Actually the doc suggested UTF-8 but it didn't worked for me. ISO8859-1
worked fine.
Hope this helps other non-english speakers like me. :-)
[]s, Fernando Lozano