In Costa Rica, the word “mining” quickly raises the temperature of a conversation. Just mentioning it is enough for positions to settle at opposing extremes. But what is happening today in Crucitas should lead us to reflect beyond the old debate between a “yes” or “no” to mining.
It is necessary to stop the damage that continues to occur in that territory. For years, informal gold extraction has removed soils, diverted riverbeds, and fragmented forests. Mercury remains one of the main environmental concerns in Crucitas and surrounding areas. However, there is still a lack of a comprehensive study that allows us to fully understand the distribution and risks associated with substances used in gold extraction, including cyanide.
At the same time, high gold prices generate economic incentives that are very difficult to ignore. This leaves an uncomfortable lesson: prohibiting an activity also requires having the real capacity to control and monitor it in a sustained manner. When economic incentives are so significant and territorial monitoring capacities are limited, maintaining a ban alone will hardly stop environmental deterioration.
In this context, legislative bill 24,717 emerges, which seeks to enable industrial metallic mining in Crucitas. Given the political support behind it, everything indicates that the initiative could move forward. Therefore, it is worth discussing from now on some aspects that would be important to strengthen in order to ensure better conditions for remediation, monitoring, and environmental control in the area.
The first has to do with the scope of environmental recovery. The bill establishes rehabilitation obligations for the concessionaire, but it leaves open a fundamental question: how far should this recovery go in light of the deterioration accumulated over years of informal mining? Stabilizing an exploited area is not the same as restoring a territory that already shows contamination, hydrological alterations, and loss of ecological functions.
The second discussion relates to the territory that could remain outside the concession. There is still a lack of clarity about the real extent of areas impacted by informal mining in Crucitas, and some of the most degraded areas may not coincide with those of interest for eventual industrial exploitation. The bill assigns the National Mining Directorate (MINAE) the task of preparing diagnostics and recovery plans for these areas, raising questions about the technical capacities and financial resources required to sustain remediation efforts for years or even decades.
The third issue is linked to environmental standards and the real capacity to enforce them. The bill refers to “international best practices,” but leaves open the discussion about which ones should be adopted and how compliance will be ensured. There are widely recognized frameworks in international mining—such as IFC performance standards, IRMA, or global tailings management standards—that provide clear references. As important as adopting them is having the institutional capacity to apply and supervise them effectively.
If the country decides to move forward with metallic mining in Crucitas, the discussion should focus on how to turn that decision into a real opportunity for territorial recovery and for generating lasting benefits for the region and the country. This would imply taking advantage of this process to restore a profoundly degraded territory and strengthen environmental and institutional capacities.
Precisely for that reason, the way in which concession mechanisms are defined will be especially important. The bill contemplates a public mining tender in which the percentage of royalties offered to the State would play a central role in evaluating proposals, provided that technical, legal, and environmental requirements are met. The challenge will be to ensure that territorial recovery occupies as visible and demanding a place as the economic variables used to select the concessionaire.
If these issues are addressed clearly from the outset, mining in Crucitas could become something more than an extractive activity. It could become an opportunity for territorial restoration to stop being a secondary objective and instead become the central axis around which decisions about Crucitas are articulated.