Staying Safe as a Conservationist

Costa Rica's reputation as an environmental paradise rests not only on government policies, but on countless individuals who defend forests, rivers, and wildlife from destructive development. Yet being an environmental advocate carries real risks—from legal harassment and intimidation to violence. In 2024 alone, 120 environmental defenders were killed or disappeared in Latin America, and Costa Rica has witnessed its own share of attacks against Indigenous leaders and conservationists.

This guide provides tactical, clear-eyed advice for protecting yourself and your community while doing conservation work. Understanding the risks doesn't mean living in fear—it means operating strategically. When you know what warning signs to watch for, how to document violations safely, and how to build strong community networks, you can be more effective while minimizing personal risk.

Understanding the Landscape: Who's Behind Development Pressure?

You might get lucky and find yourself opposing a developer who responds professionally to community concerns and backs down when faced with legitimate legal issues. But there are too many stories of intimidation to ignore the reality: environmental defenders in Costa Rica frequently face retaliation. Conservation work may bring you into contact with actors who use aggressive tactics to silence opposition—from baseless lawsuits and surveillance to direct threats—and in some cases, connections to organized crime or corrupt officials. Understanding these dynamics helps you assess risk and choose your tactics wisely. It's wise to know the species of hornet before poking the nest with a stick.

The Organized Crime Connection

Costa Rica's construction, real estate, and hotel industries have become major vehicles for money laundering by international criminal organizations. Drug cartels—including the Sinaloa Cartel from Mexico, the 'Ndrangheta from Italy, and former FARC members from Colombia—purchase properties and invest in development projects to mask ownership or inflate values. This isn't conspiracy theory; it's documented by Costa Rican authorities and international organizations.

When you oppose a development project, you typically don't know who the ultimate beneficiaries are. That luxury condo development marketed as "eco-friendly" could be backed by shell companies with hidden ownership. This doesn't mean every developer is a criminal—but it does mean you should treat any significant development project as potentially connected to serious money and serious people.

Corruption in Government Agencies

Costa Rica has one of the lowest bribery rates in Latin America (7%), but corruption persists—particularly in environmental permitting. When corruption exists within the very agencies meant to protect the environment, it undermines legal protections and exposes defenders to risk. Understanding these patterns helps you navigate systems more strategically and know when to escalate beyond compromised institutions.

SETENA: The Permitting Bottleneck and Corruption Hub

SETENA (Secretaría Técnica Nacional Ambiental), Costa Rica's National Environmental Technical Secretariat, controls environmental impact assessments and permits for all significant development projects. This centralized power creates both a critical gatekeeper function—and a target for corruption. The agency has been plagued by scandals demonstrating how environmental protection systems can be subverted from within.

Caso Comején (Termite Case) - June 2024: Costa Rica's Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (FAPTA) arrested four people, including three high-ranking SETENA officials: Ulises Gerardo Álvares Acosta (SETENA's General Secretary), Kenner Gerardo Quirós Brenes (Technical Director), and Magda Gutiérrez Durán (IT Director from MINAE), along with a businessman. The arrests followed 14 simultaneous raids on June 18, 2024. According to investigators, these officials actively collaborated to expedite environmental permits for construction projects in exchange for payments, committing crimes including bribery, influence peddling, and corruption. The case is named "Comején" (Termite) because, as the OIJ director explained, "termites eat or destroy wood"—symbolizing how corruption hollows out institutions from within.

The 2008 Bribery Allegations: Years earlier, an American developer (Harken Energy) publicly alleged that SETENA officials demanded bribes to expedite environmental permits for an oil exploration project. When the developer refused to pay, their project was shut down and they faced criminal charges. The developer stated bluntly: "A bribe can get you a permit right away. But if you submit your environmental impact study, you can wait for a year or more." This case revealed the corrupt bargain: pay for speed, or face indefinite delays and potential persecution.

Systemic delays create corruption pressure: SETENA's normal permit approval process takes 2-4 years for complex projects. These delays—whether caused by bureaucratic inefficiency, understaffing, or deliberate obstruction—create enormous financial pressure on developers. Every month of delay costs money, making bribes economically rational for those willing to pay. This system inevitably advantages wealthy, connected developers over smaller projects and creates opportunities for officials to extract payments.

What this means for conservationists: When filing environmental complaints or opposing developments, understand that SETENA itself may be compromised. If you submit evidence of violations and nothing happens, or if obviously destructive projects get approved quickly while legitimate concerns are ignored, corruption may be involved. Document your interactions with SETENA officials, keep copies of all submissions with timestamps, and be prepared to escalate to the Fiscalía, Contraloría, or international organizations. A bill has even been proposed to shut down SETENA entirely and transfer environmental assessment functions to municipalities—a recognition that the current system is fundamentally broken.

Other Environmental Agency Corruption

SETENA isn't alone. In 2024, a corruption scandal in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge involved illegal logging permits and implicated the mayor of Talamanca, directors of the Amistad Caribe Conservation Area (ACLAC), and officials from SINAC, MINAE, and INDER. The coordinating prosecutor stated: "There is environmental criminality backed by a phenomenon of corruption." This case demonstrated how corruption networks can span from local government through national conservation agencies—making it difficult to find clean channels for reporting violations.

Understanding Intimidation: Purpose, Tactics, and How to Respond

Intimidation is a tool designed to make you stop opposing a project—not through legal victory, but through fear, isolation, and exhaustion. Understanding how intimidation works helps you recognize it as a tactic rather than evidence that you're wrong or that giving up is your only option. When you can name what's happening and respond strategically, you're far more likely to continue the fight effectively.

What Intimidation Reveals

Here's something worth remembering: aggressive intimidation often signals a weak legal position. If a developer has all their permits in order, proper environmental approvals, and is operating completely within the law, they typically respond to complaints by calmly producing documentation. "Here are our SETENA permits. Here's our forestry clearance from SINAC. Everything is legal." When instead you face immediate threats, surveillance, or expensive lawsuits designed to drain your resources, it suggests they're trying to prevent scrutiny rather than inviting it. Intimidation is often a sign you've hit something they need to keep hidden.

Assessing Threat Seriousness: Posturing vs. Genuine Danger

Not all intimidation carries the same level of risk. Most intimidation is designed to scare you into stopping, not to actually harm you—because violence brings media attention, police investigation, and public sympathy for activists, which developers typically want to avoid. However, some situations do carry genuine danger, and learning to assess threat levels helps you respond appropriately without being paralyzed by fear or reckless in the face of real risk.

Common Intimidation Tactics and Their Purpose

How to Respond Strategically to Intimidation

The most powerful response to intimidation is to refuse to be isolated and to document everything. Intimidation loses much of its power when it becomes public knowledge and when you have a support network that knows what's happening.

• Document the intimidation itself: Screenshot threats, photograph surveillance, record dates and times of incidents. This documentation can become evidence in criminal complaints or civil suits
• Tell your network immediately: Share what's happening with your community group, environmental organizations, and trusted contacts. When many people know, you're safer and the intimidation is less effective
• Report intimidation to authorities: File police reports for threats or surveillance. Even if nothing immediate happens, you're creating an official record. If violence eventually occurs, this documentation proves a pattern
• Don't change your behavior to become invisible: While you should take reasonable safety precautions, continuing your work (with support) sends the message that intimidation won't work. Giving up is exactly what they want
• Use the intimidation as evidence: In some cases, patterns of intimidation can strengthen your legal case or trigger investigations into the developers themselves. Aggressive intimidation can backfire when it becomes public

Protecting Yourself While Taking Action

Filing Denuncias: Using Legal Channels Safely

Costa Rica provides multiple official channels for reporting environmental violations. Understanding how these systems work—and their limitations—helps you use them effectively while protecting your identity when necessary.

Anonymous vs. Identified Complaints: What to Consider

You can file anonymous environmental complaints in Costa Rica—but there are important limitations and trade-offs to understand.

Anonymous complaints are accepted by most agencies, including SITADA and the Fiscalía. However, if your anonymity limits investigators' ability to gather information or follow up, your complaint may be archived without action. Authorities may request additional details, and if you cannot provide them anonymously, the case can stall. Confidentiality will be maintained if there is danger to your moral or physical integrity—you can request this explicitly.

Best approach: If you're concerned about retaliation, file through an established environmental organization that can serve as the formal complainant while protecting individual members' identities. Organizations like FECON, AIDA (Asociación Interamericana para la Defensa del Ambiente), or local conservation groups have legal standing and experience navigating these systems. This gives you collective protection while maintaining investigative credibility.

Documentation is critical: Whether you file anonymously or through an organization, strong evidence makes cases more likely to proceed. Photos with GPS coordinates and timestamps, videos, witness statements, and property records from the National Registry all strengthen complaints. Document repeatedly over time to show patterns—a single photo may be dismissed as an isolated incident, but documentation spanning weeks or months proves ongoing violations.

Digital Security: Protecting Your Online Activism

Social media can amplify your conservation message—but it also exposes you to surveillance, harassment, and doxxing (public exposure of personal information). Costa Rica has strong internet freedom compared to other Latin American countries, but activists have still faced online threats, particularly women defending territories against developments like pineapple plantations.

Building Strong, Safe Communities

Individual activists are vulnerable. Organized communities are powerful. The most effective—and safest—conservation work happens when communities act collectively, pool resources, and create systems of mutual support. This section outlines strategies for building resilient conservation networks that protect members while maximizing impact.

Strength in Numbers: Why Collective Action Works

Research shows that combining preventive mobilization, protest diversification, and litigation increases conservation success rates to 27%—more than double the 11% baseline for individual efforts. But collective action isn't just more effective; it's also safer. When you act as part of a group, it's harder to single out individuals for retaliation. Legal threats, intimidation attempts, and surveillance campaigns become more difficult and expensive when facing organized communities rather than isolated activists.

Costa Rica's biological corridor system itself demonstrates this principle. Decree 40043-MINAE requires citizen participation in corridor management through Local Biological Corridor Committees (CLCB), which must include SINAC representatives, local government, NGOs, community groups, the productive sector, and private landowners. This mandatory collective structure provides legal standing and legitimacy—making it one of the world's most democratic conservation systems.

Building Your Conservation Network

Learning from Costa Rica's Indigenous Communities

Indigenous communities in Costa Rica have defended territories for generations and have developed sophisticated collective security practices. After the 2020 killings of Jerhy Rivera and Sergio Rojas, Indigenous leaders intensified community patrols, established rapid communication networks, and secured precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for those facing acute threats.

These practices translate to non-Indigenous conservation groups: maintain physical presence in threatened areas, establish check-in systems so people notice immediately if someone goes missing, document everything for legal and historical record, demand government protection when threats escalate, and leverage international attention when national systems fail. The Inter-American human rights system specifically protects environmental defenders—use it.

When Things Go Wrong: Responding to Threats

Despite precautions, you may face harassment, threats, or violence. Having a clear response protocol makes the difference between effective action and panicked reaction.

Avoiding Libel: Speaking Truth Without Legal Liability

One of the most common tactics used to silence environmental advocates is the threat—or actual filing—of defamation lawsuits. Costa Rica's legal system includes both civil and criminal penalties for defamation (difamación, calumnia, injuria), and while the law protects free speech, it also allows those who feel wronged by public statements to seek legal remedies. Understanding these boundaries helps you speak forcefully about environmental violations without exposing yourself to successful lawsuits.

Understanding SLAPP Suits

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP suits) are legal actions designed not to win in court, but to intimidate critics into silence through the burden of legal defense costs, time, and stress. Developers or other powerful entities file defamation suits against activists making them spend months or years defending themselves, even when the claims ultimately fail. FECON's documentation shows this pattern repeatedly in Costa Rica—environmental defenders facing criminal defamation charges simply for speaking about observable violations.

Safe Speech Practices

What to Do If You Face Defamation Claims

If you receive a defamation threat or lawsuit, don't panic—but do take it seriously. Immediately contact a lawyer experienced in freedom of expression cases. Organizations like the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) or local press freedom organizations can provide guidance or referrals. Do not delete or modify any documentation you have—preserve everything. Do not communicate directly with the party making the accusation. Let your lawyer handle all responses. And critically: do not back down from true statements. If what you said was factually accurate and in the public interest, you have strong legal defenses.

Financial assistance for legal defense: Legal defense can be expensive, and SLAPP suits deliberately exploit this to silence critics. However, you are not alone. Local conservation groups—including Coalición Floresta and organizations like FECON—may be able to provide funding or connect you with resources to help cover legal defense costs. Environmental defenders facing retaliatory lawsuits for speaking truth about violations should not be bankrupted into silence. Reach out for assistance—these cases affect the entire conservation community, and collective defense is part of mutual protection. International organizations like the Environmental Defenders Collaborative also provide rapid response grants specifically for legal defense needs.

Many SLAPP suits are never filed—they exist as threats designed to create fear. Others are filed but abandoned when defendants refuse to be intimidated and demonstrate they have evidence supporting their statements. The key is preparation: document thoroughly, speak carefully but forcefully, and have legal support ready before you need it.

Conclusion: Strategic Action, Long-Term Victory

Conservation work in Costa Rica exists in tension: remarkable environmental laws and engaged citizens—yet also corruption, organized crime, and violence against defenders. This isn't reason for despair. It's context for strategic action.

You are on the right side of this fight. When developers illegally clear protected forests or officials accept bribes, you're standing against actual criminality. Your advocacy is legal, legitimate, and desperately needed.

But being right doesn't make you invulnerable. Pragmatism is not cowardice. Working through organizations rather than alone is strategic thinking. Using legal channels is building a defensible position. Protecting your identity when facing powerful adversaries is basic operational security. Environmental protection is a marathon, not a sprint.

Your family's safety matters more than any single campaign. There is no environmental victory worth your life, your freedom, or the security of those you love. You cannot defend forests from a hospital bed, a jail cell, or a grave. Strategic retreat when facing overwhelming danger is tactical wisdom that allows you to return stronger, with more allies.

Costa Rica reversed deforestation not through individual heroics but through sustained, strategic pressure from organized communities. The biological corridor network exists because conservationists built institutions, not just campaigns. Developers who get stopped are stopped by paper trails, legal cases, public pressure, and international attention—not dramatic confrontations. Strategy beats bravado. Documentation beats accusation. Networks beat individuals. Long-term thinking beats short-term courage.

Protect yourself. Be smart. Build alliances. Document everything. Use the law. And keep fighting—not recklessly, but strategically. Not alone, but together. Not just for today's forest, but for the forests your children and grandchildren will inherit. You're doing work that matters. Do it in a way that lets you continue for decades to come.

Resources & Further Reading