Fifteen Years Without a Boundary

On April 23, 2026, a criminal court suspended two forest-use authorizations and the resolution issued by the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC) that authorized them on two properties near Manzanillo. The judge froze further permit processing for the properties, ordered the restrictions entered in the property records, and told SINAC to close an internal road so the forest could regenerate. Prosecutors first sought protective measures in 2024, but the criminal court refused the request. An appellate tribunal later overturned that refusal and sent the prosecutors' request back for a new hearing.

The criminal court issued its April 2026 order in case 24-000003-1851-PE, in which prosecutors accused the private holder of one of the permits, three SINAC officials, and a forest regent responsible for overseeing the authorized work. In a separate file, 24-000041-0033-PE, prosecutors investigated suspected influence peddling and contacts with Costa Rica's presidential office, Casa Presidencial. The public record reviewed for this article does not show how that second investigation was resolved.

The two properties had been inside the wildlife refuge created in 1985. In 2014, the Legislative Assembly removed a strip containing them from the refuge. In a 2019 judgment, the Constitutional Chamber (Sala Constitucional) restored protection to the forested part of that strip and ordered SINAC to draw its boundary. But the court did not publish a parcel-level line, and SINAC had not completed the delimitation when it approved the cutting in 2024.

Since 2011, long before the first trees fell, Costa Rica's Comptroller General, an administrative court, and the Sala Constitucional had told officials to identify the public forests and wetlands, account for private land, and adopt a management plan that met environmental-law requirements. At the same time, those institutions preserved the rights of longstanding communities and legitimate private owners. By 2024, officials had completed neither task.

One refuge, several kinds of land

Gandoca-Manzanillo protects a connected coastal system. Coral reefs and seagrass beds lie offshore. Mangroves, flooded forest, cativo forest, and lowland rainforest extend inland, while forest corridors reach toward the Talamanca highlands. Costa Rica created the refuge by executive decree in 1985. In 1995, the Ramsar Convention added it to the international register of protected wetlands as site no. 783.

The refuge is mixed, a legal category that allows State land and privately titled property within the same refuge. A deed does not free a parcel from environmental controls. Nor does inclusion in the refuge automatically transfer every private parcel to the State. The management plan and zoning rules must identify what land is public, what land remains private, and which uses are compatible with the ecology of the whole refuge.

The refuge boundary also enclosed communities that had occupied the coast for generations. Afro-Caribbean fishing communities lived along the Talamanca coast before the 1985 decree. The paved road reached Manzanillo in 2003, and by the early 2010s some residents faced eviction threats and demolition notices. Families who predated the refuge could be treated as occupants of protected land without a clear route to secure their homes.

The State could protect residents and ecosystems by determining the legal and ecological status of each parcel. Officials needed to map State Natural Heritage, including public forests and wetlands; distinguish it from fragile ecosystems on private titles and from other private land; then adopt a management and zoning plan that assigned lawful uses. But by 2011, government auditors found that this work had not been done.

The permits came before the map

A May 2011 report from the Comptroller General examined the 933.78-hectare Cocles-Manzanillo coastal plain. The refuge's 2008 zoning regulation assigned residential, tourism, agricultural, and other uses across that area without clearly separating State Natural Heritage, private forest and wetlands, and other private property. SETENA, the agency responsible for environmental review, confirmed that the zoning regulation had not passed the environmental assessment required for approval.

The Comptroller's field samples documented what the zoning regulation had failed to distinguish: forest or flooded forest, clearing and removal of understory, conditions favorable to wetlands, and soils classified mainly as class VIII, land suited to preservation, aquifer recharge, preservation of genetic resources, and scenic protection. Yet the zoning map allowed development-oriented uses before officials had determined whether each place was public land, private forest or wetland, or other private property, and what uses its ecology allowed.

The Comptroller ordered detailed field studies, a corrected management and zoning process, and environmental review by SETENA. It also told SETENA to withhold project approvals inside the refuge until the corrected management and zoning plan became official. In 2015, the Comptroller changed which agencies had to complete the studies and planning, and when they had to finish, but continued to bar those approvals until the corrected plan became official. A 2026 order covering construction permits in the Paso de la Danta corridor applied the same preventive rule at another point in the permit chain: reasonable doubt about forest, water, or a fragile ecosystem required officials to consult the responsible environmental agency before approving construction.

A second Comptroller report in June 2011 examined three temporary, revocable land-use permits that Talamanca Municipality had granted inside the refuge. The auditors concluded that the municipality lacked authority because SINAC administered the protected land. They ordered Talamanca to review those permits and the associated construction permissions, and to stop issuing more. But the report did not itself cancel the permits.

Property owners challenged the freeze. In November 2015, eight companies that owned nine Limón properties inside the refuge sued the Comptroller, the State, and SINAC. Big Tree S.A., Gualanday Limitada, Quebrada San Juan S.A., Vista Mona Uno S.A., Datapak Uno S.A., Palma Verde Socratea S.A., Once de Junio S.A., and Elopeasa S.A. asked the court to lift the restrictions, remove their land from the legal controls that protect forest, and award damages for the years in which they said their properties had been frozen.

Costa Rica's Administrative Litigation Court, the Tribunal Contencioso Administrativo, rejected the claims in October 2018. It held that land-use plans capable of affecting the environment must assess and account for their environmental effects, including a wildlife refuge's management plan and zoning. Once a private parcel had been incorporated into a mixed refuge as part of its interconnected ecosystem, an owner could not withdraw it unilaterally. Construction permits still had to conform to the refuge plan.

The court also held that environmental restrictions could require the State to compensate an owner. If restrictions deprived the owner of substantially all meaningful use of the property, the State could have to purchase or expropriate the land. Environmental planning could constrain private property, but the State could not use those restrictions to acquire the land without payment.

The tribunal also addressed the agencies' prolonged failure to finish the plan. It called the delay “preocupante” (troubling) and said it impaired owners' ability to use and dispose of their properties. The court urged the agencies to finish as soon as the law allowed but set no new deadline. It kept the permit freeze in place and denied damages because the companies had not proved a specific, measurable loss.

The court kept the permit freeze because the plan lacked the required environmental assessment, while also finding that the State's delay was harming owners. By then, the Legislative Assembly had already redrawn the refuge boundary.

Removing 406.52 hectares

Deputies Manuel Hernández and Walter Céspedes introduced the bill that became Law 9223 (Ley 9223) to address Caribbean residents' insecure land tenure. Legislative technical staff warned that reducing a protected area without adequate scientific studies would violate Article 50 of the Constitution. Even so, the Assembly passed the measure, and President Laura Chinchilla signed it in Manzanillo on March 20, 2014. By passing Law 9223, the Legislative Assembly removed 406.52 hectares from the refuge.

The law's stated purpose was to correct a boundary error and recognize the rights of local inhabitants. The Rural Development Institute (INDER) created 137 parcels in the excised territory. But a later registry review by La Nación found that legal entities or foreigners held 87 percent of them and that roughly half had changed hands after 2014.

The 205.97-hectare and 188-hectare figures measured different parts of the excised territory. The technical record prepared for Law 9223 counted 205.97 hectares of forest or forest-like cover within the 406.52 hectares. The Sala Constitucional based its order on a rounded figure of 188 hectares for the forested territory outside the longstanding urban settlements that legislators sought to preserve. The judgment gives conflicting figures for how much forest lay in the maritime-terrestrial zone, Costa Rica's legally defined coastal strip, but the Sala repeatedly ordered SINAC to delimit the 188-hectare forest zone.

On July 10, 2019, the Sala partially annulled Ley 9223. The legislature could preserve the urban quadrants occupied by longstanding settlements. But it could not remove the forested core without studies showing that the reduction would avoid environmental harm and without compensating the refuge for the lost area. Because ownership and the environmental effects of removal remained uncertain, the court applied the precautionary principle and kept the forested core protected.

SINAC received twelve months to delimit the forest. The agency and the Attorney General's office were also to defend State ownership wherever the mapping identified public land. Because SINAC first had to identify the territory, the Attorney General could not act to recover individual parcels identified as State land before the mapping was complete.

The deadline expired in July 2020. SINAC had not completed the boundary. In March 2022, a binding Attorney General's opinion reiterated that reducing any part of a mixed refuge required a law supported by the technical studies demanded by Article 38 of the Organic Environmental Law. In August 2023, Environment Minister Franz Tattenbach issued a directive that routed SINAC communications with the Comptroller and Attorney General through centralized legal and executive review. The documents reviewed show that officials issued and followed the directive, but they do not establish that the Playa Manzanillo permit case prompted it.

Instead of finishing the management plan, the State redrew the refuge by law. The Sala Constitucional annulled the removal of the forested area, and SINAC then missed its deadline to delimit that forest. The agency processed the Playa Manzanillo permit file before it had completed the court-ordered forest delimitation.

“Esta pasa” (“This one goes through”)

The two properties associated with Playa Manzanillo S.A. had occupied several legal positions without moving. They lay within the refuge drawn in 1985. In 2014, the Legislative Assembly redrew the refuge boundary to exclude them. After the 2019 judgment, they fell within the disputed forest strip that SINAC had to delimit. The court had restored legal protection to the forested area, but it had not drawn a parcel-by-parcel boundary identifying every protected property.

Coastal laws could restrict parts of the properties regardless of the refuge boundary. According to reporting on the Attorney General's analysis, about 20 percent of one of the two Playa Manzanillo properties lay within the part of the maritime-terrestrial zone where private use requires government authorization. Investigators later described a spring, a creek, and wetland conditions at the site. The precise overlap with Ramsar Site 783 remains contested because the public record reviewed here contains no official map plotting the property boundaries against the Ramsar boundary.

The permit record contains three related administrative acts: SINAC resolution 011-2024-ACLAC-SLT, which authorized the removal of 29 trees, and two forest-use authorizations, AC-AC03-IF-00126-2023 and AC-AC03-CO-SAF-00026-2024, which covered 122 trees in total. The April 2026 court order suspended all three acts.

Playa Manzanillo S.A. belonged to developer Allan Pacheco Dent. Visitor records showed at least twelve visits by Pacheco Dent to Casa Presidencial between May 2022 and April 2024, including five during the four months before SINAC issued resolution 011. On April 9, 2024, the log recorded his arrival at 4:15 p.m. Beside the entry, someone had written “esta pasa” (this one goes through). SINAC issued the resolution three days later. The records establish Pacheco Dent's visits and the three-day interval, but they do not prove that the visits produced the permit.

Residents reported cutting in May 2024, and images of loaded trucks leaving before dawn circulated publicly. Environmental prosecutors raided one of the two Playa Manzanillo properties on May 15. That day, Environment Minister Franz Tattenbach defended SINAC's approval to cut trees as “un permiso normal forestal” (a normal forestry permit) for agricultural land without forest and outside the refuge. But on May 31, he ordered an internal investigation.

SINAC officials soon invoked the unresolved boundary to defend the Playa Manzanillo tree-cutting approvals publicly. On June 25, regional director Maylin Mora Arias told a legislative commission that the 2019 judgment had not ordered the refuge delimited. But the Sala Constitucional issued a public clarification the next day: the court had required SINAC to delimit the forested territory within twelve months.

Authorities arrested five people in July 2024: Pacheco Dent, a SINAC biologist, the refuge administrator, a SINAC forestry engineer, and the forest regent. Prosecutors alleged offenses including breach of official duty and document fraud, and they are still pursuing those allegations in the criminal case. Prosecutors separately investigated suspected influence peddling under case 24-000041-0033-PE.

In September 2024, the Sala formally declared that SINAC had failed to comply with the 2019 judgment. In Resolution 26300-2024, the court ordered the environment minister and SINAC director to carry out the required forest delimitation immediately and file monthly progress reports. By then, SINAC had issued the Playa Manzanillo authorizations without delimiting the court-protected forest or completing the refuge's management and zoning plan.

A plan without the whole refuge

SINAC and INDER had separate duties to determine which parcels were State land, private land, or protected forest. SINAC had to identify the refuge's forest and State Natural Heritage, restore protected territory to the refuge, and adopt management rules that met environmental-law requirements. INDER had to address earlier transfers of land that might belong to the State. But the Attorney General's office could not pursue individual recovery cases until SINAC supplied the delimitation on which those claims depended.

The Attorney General's office and INDER still disagreed in 2025 over how to challenge suspect land transfers. State lawyers said INDER first had to declare the transfers harmful to the public interest. INDER's president resisted issuing those declarations, arguing that officials did not know which transfers were legally challengeable or where the affected parcels lay. No public source located through August 23, 2026, records whether INDER later issued parcel-specific declarations or whether the Attorney General filed recovery suits.

The management plan also omitted parts of the refuge and relied on an outdated account of State land. In Resolution 22181-2025, issued on July 16, 2025, the Sala Constitucional found that the 2017-2023 plan did not cover the refuge's complete territory and continued to rely on a 2017 official identification of the refuge's State Natural Heritage. Officials later identified omitted wetlands and seven forest blocks. Without an updated boundary and a complete account of public land, SINAC could not use the plan to manage the refuge as one protected area.

The court annulled the management plan and Ministerial Directive 09-2023. It declined to review the substance of the proposed Talamanca-Cahuita coastal regulatory plan because the required Indigenous consultation had not yet produced a legally effective plan. The ruling therefore did not approve the coastal plan on its merits.

To keep management rules in force while SINAC prepared a replacement, the Sala allowed the unconstitutional plan to operate for one year from publication of the full corrected judgment in the Boletín Judicial. The court later corrected its original order in subsequent resolutions because it had mistakenly named La Gaceta as the place of full publication. The public notices located for this article contain the court's orders, but not the date on which the full corrected decision appeared in the Boletín Judicial. The one-year period therefore cannot yet be calculated from the public record assembled here.

A 2025 complaint asked the Ramsar Secretariat to examine reported logging and wetland drainage at Gandoca-Manzanillo. The Ramsar report prepared for the convention's July conference listed the refuge in an annex for reported human-caused ecological changes that Costa Rica had not confirmed or rejected by the March 26 reporting cutoff. The listing recorded the damage report as unresolved; Ramsar had not found the damage proved.

No later public Ramsar file, Costa Rican response, closure notice, or advisory mission was located. No public document found for this article says how the Ramsar Article 3.2 process for reporting ecological changes ended or whether Costa Rica communicated privately with the Secretariat.

SINAC did eventually produce a new technical map. In September 2025, a team from the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) studied a 186.66-hectare strip and classified 107.92 hectares, or 57.8 percent, as forest in 2025. But the 2019 judgment continued to require SINAC to delimit a 188-hectare forest zone. The 186.66 hectares defined the team's study area; the 107.92 hectares measured forest cover present eleven years after Law 9223.

Costa Rica's Ombudsman's Office, the Defensoría de los Habitantes, objected to the team's use of 2025 as the baseline because it might exclude land that was forest in 2014 but had since been cleared, even though the court had ordered SINAC to reconstruct the earlier forest boundary. In February 2026, the office said the report substantially complied with the order but questioned its treatment of flooded forest and validation by the National Forestry Financing Fund (FONAFIFO), an agency attached to MINAE. It asked the Sala to obtain an independent review from forensic biologists at the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ). No public document located here records the Sala accepting the map as fully satisfying its order or the Executive converting it into a delimitation decree.

What the court could stop

The April 2026 criminal order addressed only the permits and protective measures for the two properties. It suspended the two forest-use authorizations and resolution 011-2024-ACLAC-SLT, froze further permit processing for the properties, entered the case in their registry records, and closed the internal road. The measures protected the site while prosecutors pursued the five-person permit case. But they did not resolve the separate influence investigation.

A separate 2026 challenge to the refuge's founding decree ended on a filing deadline rather than a ruling on the decree's validity. Hotel Suerre Punta Uva S.A. had asked the courts to annul the 1985 decree that created Gandoca-Manzanillo, arguing that the government lacked a proper administrative file and had restricted private property without compensation. On June 4, the Supreme Court's First Chamber (Sala Primera) rejected the challenge because the company had filed decades after the deadline. So the court did not decide whether the original decree was substantively valid.

By August 23, 2026, no public records found for this article documented judicial acceptance of the 2025 forest map, an executive delimitation decree, a corrected management plan, completed INDER recovery actions, resolution of the influence investigation, or closure of the Ramsar process. Agencies and courts may have continued those proceedings without producing public documents found for this article. But without later records, the article cannot report any of them as complete.

The criminal court could close the road and stop the permits while the case proceeded. Regeneration could begin behind the barrier. But preventing another permit before SINAC has mapped and classified the land requires different work: field studies, property maps, a lawful refuge plan, and decisions about which parcels belong to the State and which remain private under environmental limits. The Comptroller ordered that work in 2011. Fifteen years later, its absence continued to leave the refuge without the settled boundaries and lawful plan needed to govern private use and State protection.