Blog
Mapping a Cave
After four hours on the road, the professor announced that we had arrived. The university bus stopped in front of a few pastures in the middle of the countryside. We looked around, trying to guess...
In praise of doors
In the early nineties, I was an apprentice projectionist at a small university cinema. The job had an obvious reward—the student scholarship—and others such as learning to thread film, watching the...
When Solving One Risk Creates Another: AI, Automation, and Jobs
In May 2026, when the Costa Rican government authorized Align Technology to reduce the minimum number of workers it had to keep under the Free Trade Zone Regime from 4,992 to 2,500, the decision...
Chlorine Gas: Hero and Villain
Recently, a Netflix series about a tragic lead poisoning disaster in Brazil caught many people’s attention and reminded us of how negligence in chemical management could have devastating...
Crucitas: Mining and Territorial Restoration
In Costa Rica, the word mining can quickly raise the temperature of any conversation. Merely mentioning it is enough to push people into opposing camps. Yet what is happening in Crucitas today...
The Witches
The road to the house was long and steep. In front of me, the mountain; behind, an abyss that revealed, through the mist, the back of the water. My grandfather Ramón had never seen the sea, and yet...
A Malachite Gazebo
Some nights, when I stayed over at my maternal grandmother’s house, she would recite a poem to me. She knew it by heart, never hesitating. Sometimes we would begin together and, before I noticed,...
Crucitas: The Conversation We Still Need to Have
A few days ago, Glenda Umaña and Hugo Famanía interviewed me to hear my views on the environmental situation in Crucitas, as part of a report to be broadcast by a Panamanian media outlet. We sat by...
A Promise of Relief
On Wednesday nights we play basketball as if we were still twenty. We arrive with our enthusiasm intact, we play a first warm-up game in slow motion, and for two hours we try to convince our bodies...
Milkweeds, Caterpillars, and Monarchs
Then came the warning, delivered with One Sunday, like so many others, we arrived for breakfast at my in-laws’ house. As usual, I stepped out into the garden to admire the plants growing as if all...
In praise of insomnia
One of my earliest childhood memories is marked by the battle with insomnia. On those long nights, my mother, patient and resigned, would prepare me a cup of hot milk that she would baptize with a...
Caring has a cost
The Bible relates that, before and during the crucifixion, Jesus was accompanied by three women: Mary, his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Clopas. It is not surprising that, two millennia later,...