Lauded as Green Model, Costa Rica Faces Unrest in Its Forests

For nearly half a century, Costa Rica has had laws requiring the state to take back Indigenous territories grabbed by ranchers many years before and return them to their traditional owners. But theory and practice have proved very different. Political and legal stasis have left the Indigenous Law enacted in 1977 largely unimplemented.

Up to now decade, Indigenous communities have grown impatient, taking the law into their very own hands. The result has been escalating disputes and repeated violent clashes deep within the forests. Since 2019, two Indigenous leaders have been assassinated for attempting to reclaim their traditional lands, and others have barely escaped with their lives.

After visiting Costa Rica in late 2021 to interview all of the parties involved, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, Guatemalan diplomat José Francisco Cali Tzay, sided with those attempting to reclaim their lands. He attacked the “40 years of non-compliance by the State of Costa Rica with the Indigenous Law,” and in a report back to the UN’s Human Rights Council last July, criticized the “structural racism that pervades the judiciary, especially on the local level,” in Costa Rica, “and the impunity for crimes committed against land defenders.”

Last month, a Costa Rican court finally convicted one in every of the assassins, bringing hopes of an end to that impunity. But many fear that the election last April of a latest populist president, supported by the farming community, could scuttle efforts to resolve the disputes. That may threaten to set back to the reason behind reforestation too, as there may be a growing international recognition that the very best forest stewards are typically the Indigenous communities that live in them.

Costa Rica’s forests have seen a dramatic turnaround in recent times. Between 1960 and the late Eighties, the country — which is somewhat smaller than West Virginia and has just over 5 million inhabitants — suffered from one in every of the fastest rates of forest loss on the planet, at times approaching 4 percent annually. The rapid deforestation was driven largely by the rising international demand for beef. The U.S. government offered Costa Rican ranchers soft loans to clear forest and sustain with demand. At one point, the country reportedly sold 60 percent of its beef to Burger King.

Historical deforestation data for the country is poor, but under this onslaught it’s reckoned that tree cover declined from as much as 75 percent in 1940 to below 40 percent — and by some measures as little as 17 percent — within the Eighties.

But as denuded hillsides led to landslides, droughts, and flooding, Rafael Calderón, the country’s then-president, turned the policy ship around. Inspired by the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, he arrange a system of incentives, often known as Payment for Environmental Services. The proceeds of a latest fuel tax paid landowners and Indigenous communities to guard existing forests and nurture latest ones, whether by planting or allowing natural regrowth on abandoned pastures.

The move went down well with ranchers, who were then being hit by falling international beef prices, and the policy and payments persevered through successive governments. So far, says Elena M. Florian-Rivero of the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Turrialba, Costa Rica, around a fifth of the country’s land area has benefitted from the payments, which have totaled some $500 million. They underpin the vast majority of the reforestation.

And landholders found latest ways to earn cash from this land. Cashing in on a growing international interest in ecotourism, many ranchers replaced cattle with lodges within the greenery of their regrowing forests. With an extra quarter of the country, including half its forests, inside a network of 30 national parks and nature reserves, visitors have had loads of nature to savor.

Ecotourism has made Costa Rica essentially the most visited country in Central America, with tourism revenues tripling to $3.3 billion per 12 months within the twenty years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile international funding for conserving the forests to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide has also increased. Last 12 months, Costa Rica became the primary Latin American country to learn from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, receiving $16.4 million in 2018 and 2019.

In the course of the UN climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, then-president Carlos Alvarado, basking in celebrity status unusual for the leader of such a small country, unveiled further funding from LEAF, a coalition of the USA, Britain, Norway, and personal corporations geared toward raising money for projects to avoid deforestation. Forests now again cover around 60 percent of the country, stabilizing ecosystems and river flows.

But not all has gone well. By some estimates, around a 3rd of the country stays cattle pasture. Some areas where reforestation received financial support have since suffered a latest round of deforestation. J. Leighton Reid, a restoration ecologist now at Virginia Tech, found in 2018 that in Coto Brus county in Puntarenas province, half of regenerated forest patches had been cleared again inside 20 years . Elsewhere, pasture and forests alike have been replaced by pineapple plantations, turning Costa Rica into the world’s biggest exporter of the fruit.

And there may be growing concern in regards to the rights of Indigenous communities living within the forests. Particularly, the federal government has did not make good on its promise to permit traditional forest custodians to reclaim their lands.

Many imagine that, while financial incentives for conservation by non-Indigenous landowners may come and go, only Costa Rica’s Indigenous communities with their cultural and spiritual links to the forests can guarantee their future. Internationally, a review of 130 local studies in 14 countries, conducted by the World Resources Institute in 2014, found that community-owned forests suffer less deforestation and fewer fires, while storing more carbon than other forests.

Costa Rica passed its landmark Indigenous Law in 1977, declaring all Indigenous territories to be “inalienable” and “exclusive for the Indigenous communities that inhabit them.” Twenty-four territories, covering some 7 percent of the country, were formally declared as Indigenous land, and theoretically put aside for restoration to their rightful owners.

But practice has proved fairly different. Cattle ranching by non-Indigenous people still covers around a half of the formally-titled Indigenous lands, leaving most of the country’s 100,000-plus Indigenous inhabitants landless. So far, says Florian-Rivero, only two of the 24 territories have been fully restored to their rightful owners; and in seven territories lower than 1 / 4 of the land has been returned.

Flaws in the unique laws created a yawning gap between policy and reality on the bottom. The federal government made available few funds for the promised compensation to people giving up their land. And the authorities have did not legally recognize traditional representatives of the Indigenous communities.

Somewhat, the federal government imposed a network of development associations to receive the land, creating internal conflicts amongst Indigenous communities. Local officials say this has exacerbated disputes over who’s and who will not be genuinely Indigenous, and who has the suitable to determine. Some groups, being traditionally matrilineal, require proof of an Indigenous mother, as an example, while others accept ancestry from either gender.

In 2010, faced with this impasse, the leaders of two Indigenous communities, the Bribri and the Brörán, began a campaign of unilateral recovery of their titled lands. These campaigns have typically involved giving those they regard as squatters a deadline to quit and take away their livestock, after which Indigenous people arrive en masse to take over.

The Bribri of Salitre claim to have recovered 49 farms covering as much as 80 percent of their ancestral territory. Brörán leader Pablo Sibar says that a complete of about 30,000 acres have to date been recovered in five territories: Salitre, Cabagra, Térraba, China Kichá, and Guatuso.

However it has been a sometimes bloody process, with each side accused of violent attacks and two Indigenous leaders shot dead.

Faced with increasing lawlessness in its forests, the federal government has tried to intervene. In 2016, it launched a National Plan for the Recovery of Indigenous Territories, aimed for completion inside six years. But this too has proved ineffective, says Cali Tzay, the UN special rapporteur. Indeed, removed from speeding up recovery of Indigenous lands, he concluded last 12 months, the plan’s complex procedures threaten to turn into “an instrument for postponing restitution.”

Tensions have escalated for the reason that plan’s inception. One evening in March 2019, longtime Bribri leader Sergio Rojas was assassinated in his home within the distant village of Yeri in Puntarenas province on the Pacific coast, hours after lodging a proper criticism about land grabs. Police found him with seven bullet wounds in his back.

Eleven months later, Brörán leader Jehry Rivera was also shot dead as an organized mob of greater than 100 local farmers confronted his individuals who were reoccupying land within the Térraba Indigenous territory.

Last month, the person convicted of shooting Rivera was sentenced to 22 years in prison. “The conviction is a definite positive message against impunity,” says Nathalia Ulloa, a human rights lawyer and national coordinator for the U.K.-based Forest Peoples Programme. “However it has also aroused more hate from those that support the murder.” She says the home of the one direct witness, who lives alone along with her baby and is seven months pregnant, has been attacked.

Meanwhile, the slayer of Rojas continues to be at large.

In 2018, leaders of the Cabécar people followed the Bribri and Brörán and attempted to reoccupy their China Kichá territory. The 18,500 acres, in San José province, has been disputed ever since its titling.

Its Indigenous status was repealed in 1982, then reinstated for a part of it in 2001. But by then, a lot of the forest had been converted to coffee plantations and cattle pastures. Despite the reinstatement, a study by the Forest Peoples Programme in 2014 found that 97 percent remained within the hands of outsiders, leaving the Indigenous China Kichá community as “impoverished day laborers working on their very own lands.”

Under a latest leader Doris Rios, the Cabécar community subsequently recovered two-thirds of its territory, which it’s attempting to reforest. However it has faced a campaign of arson targeting its crops and community buildings. Thirteen members were injured during a confrontation with farmers in February 2022. And two months later, Rios’s teenage son Dario was knifed in the top. “The police say it was a fight, but this was an assassination attempt,” she says.

Rios is proving an icon for supporters of the movement to revive Indigenous lands and protect forests. Last 12 months, she received an award from the National University of Costa Rica. The top of the varsity of anthropology praised the “earth-colored women who look after the forests … discuss with the plants, know their pain and healing mysteries.”

And earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made Rios one in every of 11 recipients of the 2023 International Women of Courage Award during a ceremony on the White House, citing her work on recovering Indigenous land.

But plaudits don’t deliver land or protect forests, and the political landscape in Costa Rica could also be changing, to the detriment of each environmental concerns and land rights. In April last 12 months, the country voted in a latest right-wing populist president, Rodrigo Chaves, who counts farmers as a part of his political base. He has installed a former farmers’ leader as CEO of the Rural Development Institute, which oversees the National Plan for the Recovery of Indigenous Territories.

Chaves has also backtracked on his predecessor’s support for open environmental governance. He has shelved plans to ratify the 2018 Escazú Agreement, under which Latin American and Caribbean nations promised to boost public participation in environmental decision-making.

This step compounds existing long-standing policies of stopping Indigenous communities from using their traditional expertise to assist manage the country’s protected forests. Cali Tzay, the UN special rapporteur, identified frequent conflicts where state-protected forests and Indigenous territories overlap, with Indigenous people prevented from accessing sacred places or carrying out traditional hunting or fishing activities. “Although the Indigenous peoples have been caring for the forests for hundreds of years,” he says, “they usually are not taken under consideration within the management of protected areas.”

Costa Rica is thought for its peaceful outlook on the surface world. It has had no armed forces for greater than 70 years. Yet it now risks stumbling right into a rising tide of conflict that threatens to unravel the country’s impressive green gains of recent years.