Loopholes You Could Drive a Resort Through

Article 19 of Ley 7575 opens with a blanket prohibition: On forested land, changing land use is not permitted. "En terrenos cubiertos de bosque, no se permitirá cambiar el uso del suelo." It then lists four narrow exceptions where the State Forest Administration may grant permits.

Article 19(a): Houses, offices, stables, corrals, nurseries, roads, bridges, and installations for recreation, ecotourism, and other analogous improvements.

Article 19(b): National convenience. State or private infrastructure deemed nationally important, such as highways, transmission lines, and public works. Requires an executive decree declaring the project to be in the national interest.

Article 19(c): Cutting trees that pose human safety risks, and sample collection for scientific research.

Article 19(d): Fire and disaster prevention: firebreaks and brush clearing for infrastructure protection.

The statute adds a critical qualifier: all forest intervention under these exceptions must be limited, proportional, and reasonable.

Simple, right? What could possibly be misinterpreted?

The Ambiguity Nobody Litigated

Article 19(a) is where the duendes dwell. The statutory text permits "construcción de casas de habitación, oficinas, establos, corrales, viveros, caminos, puentes e instalaciones destinadas a la recreación, el ecoturismo y otras mejoras análogas." Read one way, houses and stables are independent categories. Read another way, every structure must serve ecotourism. Grammatically, both readings are defensible. The question has never been definitively resolved in court.

The case for the narrow reading begins with what the 1996 Forestry Law was trying to accomplish. Costa Rica had just emerged from decades of catastrophic deforestation. The country had lost more than half its forest cover. The new law was designed to stop the bleeding. During the legislative debates, Diputado Garrón Figuls articulated the core principle: "Me parece fundamental el no cambio de uso, los bosques que hay seguirán siendo bosques, eso me parece básico." No change of use. The forests that exist will continue to be forests. That seems basic to me. The law was not creating a permission structure for development. It was creating a conservation framework with narrow, carefully limited exceptions.

Under the narrow reading, the Article 19(a) exceptions exist because forests need some infrastructure to function as protected spaces. A biological research station needs an office. An ecotourism operation needs a lodge. A reforestation project needs a nursery. Rangers need housing. These structures serve the forest. A private vacation home for a foreign investor does not. The narrow reading says: if your structure does not serve forest-compatible recreation or ecotourism, you cannot build it on forested land, period. This interpretation treats the entire list of permitted structures as examples of what "instalaciones destinadas a la recreación, ecoturismo y otros afines" might look like, not as independent permissions.

The Constitutional Chamber has paraphrased Article 19(a) in exactly this way. In Voto No. 3923-2007, the Sala Constitucional described the permitted activities as "construcción de casas, oficinas, establos, corrales, viveros, caminos, puentes y otras instalaciones dedicadas a la recreación, ecoturismo y otros afines." The court's language groups the entire list under "otras instalaciones dedicadas." This may or may not have been a deliberate interpretive choice, but it is how the country's highest constitutional authority has characterized the law.

The Procuraduría has been more explicit on the tourism side. In OJ-065-2009, reviewing proposed amendments to Article 19, the Attorney General's office described the current law's scope: "the current wording of subsection a) limits it to facilities intended for ecotourism." The PGR was warning that a proposed expansion to general "tourism development" would broaden what the existing statute restricts. That expansion was not approved. The opinion shows the PGR reading the tourism component of Article 19(a) narrowly — ecotourism installations only, not general tourist development. But the PGR analyzed the housing and tourism categories separately and never addressed whether "casas de habitación" require ecotourism purpose. That question remains open.

Constitutional principles reinforce the narrow reading. Costa Rica's courts have developed what they call the pro natura principle: when environmental law is ambiguous, the ambiguity must be resolved in favor of protection. The Constitutional Chamber has written that environmental law "traverses and permeates the entirety of the legal spectrum, greenifying all other branches of law." There is something almost theological about this formulation. The forest, in Costa Rican constitutional jurisprudence, is not just an economic resource to be balanced against other interests. It is a constitutional value that shapes how all other laws are read.

The courts have also developed the principle of forest irreducibility: "el espacio ocupado por los bosques es irreductible." You cannot shrink a forest's legal footprint. Set fire to a forest to clear land for development, and you still cannot develop it. The space remains forest in law, even if the trees are gone. The state is obligated to restore it. This principle reveals how seriously Costa Rican courts take the "no cambio de uso" commitment. Forest land does not become developable land through destruction. It remains forest land forever.

A grammatical argument for the broad reading does exist, at least on paper. Here is how it would go: "destinadas" is feminine plural. Spanish grammar requires agreement between adjectives and the nouns they modify. The structure list includes masculine nouns like "establos," "corrales," "caminos," "puentes," and "viveros" between the feminine "casas" and "oficinas" at the beginning and "instalaciones" at the end. If "destinadas" were meant to modify the entire list, the masculine nouns would break the agreement chain. Therefore, "destinadas a la recreación, ecoturismo y otros afines" modifies only "instalaciones," and the earlier items are independent categories.

This is a defensible reading, and it may have more support than the narrow reading's proponents acknowledge. While no litigant has formally raised the grammatical argument in court, the implementing regulation suggests a different framework entirely. Decreto 25721-MINAE, Article 36, establishes the real control mechanism: any forest intervention must be "limitada, razonable y proporcional," capped at 10% of the property's forest area. The regulation treats all "edificaciones" generically without distinguishing houses from tourism infrastructure. SINAC processes construction permits through impact assessment, not by verifying ecotourism purpose. The question authorities actually ask is not "does this structure serve ecotourism?" but "does this intervention exceed the impact limits?" The grammatical question remains formally unresolved, but the administrative machinery may have answered it by ignoring it.

Adjacent Precedents

The closest precedents address related issues. Sentencia 16975 struck down a decree permitting commercial tourism on protected lands with the declaration "la legislación es conservacionista," but that case addressed Article 18 (state lands), not Article 19 (private forests). Voto 3923-2007 ordered precautionary measures for forest enforcement but did not parse the structure list. Voto 16975-2008 used the phrase "limitada, razonable y proporcional" to describe permissible forest cutting - language focused on magnitude, not purpose. No ruling we found requires a landowner to prove their house serves ecotourism. The pro natura principle remains powerful, but it operates alongside administrative criteria that the grammar debate does not capture.

Dictamen C-200-2009 is often cited, but it addresses a different problem. (The Procuraduría General de la República, mentioned earlier, issues binding legal opinions—dictámenes—to government agencies.) In 2009, a municipality asked the PGR: what happens when a developer buys a large forested property, subdivides it into many small parcels, and sells them separately? The concern was obvious. Under Costa Rican environmental law, projects affecting less than two hectares of forest can use a simplified environmental review instead of a full impact assessment. If you own 50 hectares of forest and want to build a resort, you need serious environmental scrutiny. But if you slice that forest into 30 separate lots and sell each one to a different buyer, each buyer might claim their project is too small to require full review. The aggregate impact is the same. The forest still gets destroyed. But no single project triggers the threshold.

The PGR's response was forceful. Municipalities, it said, must treat the forest "como una unidad" (as a unit) regardless of how many times it has been subdivided. The phrase everyone quotes comes from this context: authorities must prevent "la burla a las tutelas del artículo 19," the circumvention or mockery of Article 19's protections. "Burla" is a strong word in Spanish. It means making a fool of someone, treating something sacred as a joke. The PGR was telling municipalities: do not let developers make fools of you by playing subdivision games. Add up the total forested area. Evaluate the cumulative impact. Do not pretend that 30 small projects are not really one big one. The remainder of the dictamen discusses proportional cutting, ecosystem principles, and historical forest cover, but never parses the grammar of the structure list. It's a powerful opinion about subdivision games—just not about whether your house needs to serve ecotourism.

What about the implementing regulation? Decreto 25721-MINAE was issued alongside the 1996 law to spell out how Article 19 works in practice, and has gone through multiple revisions since in an attempt to clarify loose aspects of the law. It establishes the 10% cap on forest intervention. It requires title annotations. It blocks subdivided parcels from claiming fresh 10% allocations. It refers generically to "edificaciones" and "infraestructura." But it never requires proof that a house serves ecotourism before a permit issues. The grammatical question goes unanswered while the administrative process proceeds on different criteria.

Sentencia 16975 might appear relevant at first glance. It addresses ecotourism infrastructure in forested areas, and the Constitutional Chamber took a restrictive view of what counts as legitimate ecotourism. In 2004, the government issued Decreto 31750-MINAE-TUR, which permitted three-story hotel construction and 15-25% forest cutting for tourism development in coastal forest zones. The court unanimously struck it down in 2008, holding that such commercial development was incompatible with forest protection. If the court said ecotourism must be low-impact and conservation-oriented, doesn't that suggest Article 19's houses and offices must serve that same restricted ecotourism purpose?

The problem is that Sentencia 16975 dealt with Article 18, not Article 19. Article 18 governs state-owned protected lands in the maritime-terrestrial zone—public patrimony with stricter conservation standards. Article 19 governs private forest lands with a different set of rules and permitted uses. The two regimes operate independently. What the court said about permissible ecotourism infrastructure on public lands does not determine whether the structure list in Article 19(a) requires houses and offices to serve ecotourism or allows them as independent categories. The grammatical question about how to read the list remains unanswered.

What is clear, regardless, is that a single "casa de habitación" is not the same as a "proyecto habitacional." In OJ-065-2009, the PGR warned that building a single home on forest land "differs fundamentally from constructing an entire residential development; environmental impact could be extremely harmful in the latter case." Even under the broad reading, developers cannot build ten houses and claim each is an independent exception. A caretaker's cabin for the property owner is one thing. A gated community marketed to foreign retirees is another. Megaprojects must seek the Article 19(b) "national convenience" declaration, which requires an executive decree and full environmental review. When the legislature considered an amendment in 2009 that would have permitted housing developments and tourist megaprojects in forests, the PGR called the potential impact "sumamente nocivo." The amendment did not pass.

Also clear: enforcement is broken regardless of how the law is interpreted. Article 28 of the Forestry Law is supposed to be the enforcement mechanism. It establishes penalties for illegal cutting and land-use violations. But the Constitutional Chamber found a fatal gap: the article contains no precautionary measures. If someone starts illegally clearing forest, there is no statutory mechanism to stop them while the case is being investigated. By the time the legal process runs its course, the trees are gone. In Voto 3923-2007, the court declared this omission unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to fix it, giving them eighteen months. That was eighteen years ago. The legislature has done nothing. In Sentencia 04619-2013, the same court returned to the problem and acknowledged that the forest definition itself is "insuficiente y tutela en forma deficitaria los bosques de nuestro país." Insufficient, providing deficient protection to our country's forests.

"Recreación": The Word Nobody Bothered to Define

You thought we were done with ambiguity? We're just warming up. Strap in. The word "recreación" appears exactly once in the entire Forestry Law: in the Article 19(a) list of permitted works. It is never defined. Article 3 of Ley 7575 takes care to define "aprovechamiento maderable," "ecosistema boscoso," "bosque," "plan de manejo," and a dozen other technical terms. "Recreación" is not among them. The implementing regulation, Decreto 25721, is no more helpful. Its Article 2 defines over twenty terms, from "acreditación" through "valor de transferencia de madera," and even provides a detailed definition of "ecoturismo." But "recreación"? Absent. The 2004 ecotourism decree that the Constitutional Chamber later annulled also never defined it. A search of Decreto 31750-MINAE-TUR returns zero occurrences of the word.

The closest the regulation comes is descriptive. Article 11 of Decreto 25721 catalogs what ecotourism activities may occur on Patrimonio Natural del Estado lands: rustic trails, canopy tours, camping areas, kayaking, "ciclismo recreativo." The word appears as an adjective, not a defined category. This list reveals what the regulators had in mind: low-impact nature enjoyment, not golf courses or theme parks. But it stops short of providing a formal definition that could be imported into Article 19(a) for private forests. The result is that "recreación" defaults to ordinary meaning, constrained only by the statute's conservation purpose and the 10% cap. Anyone claiming "recreación" carries some special technical sense that permits large commercial recreation complexes would need new legislation or jurisprudence. The current sources simply do not supply one.

"Ecoturismo": Not What the Brochures Say

Ecotourism, on the other hand, has significant definition in legal literature. Sentencia 16975, mentioned earlier, provides the Constitutional Chamber's definitive statement on what counts as ecotourism in protected forests. The case consolidated three separate legal challenges (expedients 04-005607-0007-CO, 04-006157-0007-CO, and 04-006409-0007-CO) to Decreto 31750-MINAE-TUR (the 2004 decree permitting three-story hotels and 15-25% forest cutting in coastal zones). The court unanimously annulled it, finding it violated Article 50's environmental rights guarantee.

The decree had transferred administrative authority from the environment ministry to municipalities, creating jurisdictional confusion about who could authorize forest cutting. It also repealed existing requirements that structures in protected areas be "rustic"—simple, low-impact buildings compatible with conservation. By removing that standard and allowing up to three-story construction, the decree invited commercial hotel development under the guise of ecotourism. The court's reasoning was direct: permitting deforestation for commercial tourism fundamentally altered land use contrary to the Forestry Law's absolute prohibition on cutting in protected areas. The court emphasized that protected forests "comprise fragile ecosystems of great biodiversity whose damages may produce irreversible consequences."

The court rejected the notion that tourism development justified environmental compromise. It held that ecotourism, properly understood, protects rather than exploits natural resources. The fundamental conflict was irreconcilable: true ecotourism requires low-impact visitation preserving biodiversity, while the decree authorized infrastructure development destroying forest cover for private commercial benefit. The court emphasized that state guardianship demands precautionary evaluation of environmental costs before any development. These ecosystems are fragile, and damages "may produce irreversible consequences." State obligation extends to preserving natural patrimony for present and future generations, prioritizing long-term resource preservation over short-term economic gain.

Sentencia 16975 established what ecotourism cannot mean on state-protected lands under Article 18. The question of whether private landowners under Article 19 can build houses, offices, and stables independent of ecotourism purpose remains separate—though the court's insistence that real ecotourism requires low-impact preservation rather than infrastructure development provides conceptual framing.

The Procuraduría has fleshed out what that "rustic" standard means. In Dictamen C-339-2004, analyzing ecotourism on state lands, the PGR established that facilities must be "minimal, rustic, and adapted to the landscape," using local materials like wood, stone, and bamboo, with eco-techniques such as solar energy and rainwater harvesting. The architecture must signal integration with the forest, not dominance over it. In OJ-065-2009, reviewing a proposed expansion of Article 19, the PGR quoted extensively from C-339-2004 and doubled down. The definition, they noted, traces to World Wildlife Fund and IUCN programs of the 1980s, rooted in a philosophy of "observación sin destrucción"—observation without destruction. Facilities must be "modestas, aunque cómodas, y sin pretensiones." Natural ventilation, "no por aire acondicionado." Local materials, no bright colors, native plants preserved. Most critically: "relativamente a pocos turistas debe permitírseles visitar el sitio"—relatively few tourists should be allowed to visit. Ecotourism "se distingue del turismo de masas por... requerir menos desarrollo infraestructural." It requires less infrastructure than mass tourism, not more. A 50-room hotel with a pool, restaurant, and air-conditioned suites is not ecotourism. It is mass tourism with a green label.

In C-200-2009, addressing municipal construction permits in forested areas, the PGR went further still: a constitutional interpretation of Articles 50 and 89 requires that any permitted construction occur "sin afectación sensible de los recursos, resguardando los ecosistemas frágiles, adaptadas al paisaje, que no impliquen devastación de la cobertura boscosa y modificando lo menos posible el medio natural." Without appreciable harm to resources, safeguarding fragile ecosystems, adapted to the landscape, not implying devastation of forest cover, and modifying the natural environment as little as possible. This is the constitutional standard against which Article 19 permits must be measured.

With Decreto 31750 annulled, the binding definition of ecotourism comes from Decreto 25721, the 1996 implementing regulation of the Forestry Law. Article 2(n) defines ecotourism as tourism that maintains the natural environment with emphasis on biological, physical, and cultural features; guarantees minimum environmental impact through controlled processes; is ecologically sustainable; involves low-impact tourism activities; and is locally beneficial. The gap between this legal standard and common practice is enormous. Large hotel developments, vacation rental complexes, and most commercial tourism operations struggle to meet these criteria. Yet permits continue to be sought and granted under the "ecotourism" label.

"Otras Mejoras Análogas": The Catch-All Clause

At the end of Article 19(a)'s list of permitted structures comes a phrase that opens a door: "otras mejoras análogas," or "other analogous improvements." The law permits houses, offices, stables, corrals, nurseries, roads, bridges, and installations for recreation and ecotourism. Then it adds: and other things like those. This is the catch-all, the statutory wildcard. If your project does not fit neatly into the enumerated categories, you might still squeeze through by arguing it is "analogous" to something that does.

The phrase has no judicial definition. No publicly available court decision addresses what "analogous" means in this context, and the regulatory framework offers no published guidance. This creates an obvious problem: who decides whether a proposed structure is similar enough to the listed examples? The permit applicant will argue yes. An underfunded reviewer with fifty applications on their desk may not have time to argue no. The ambiguity is not neutral. It favors whoever has the resources to press a creative interpretation.

Legal analysis suggests that "analogous" should require a commonality of essence with the preceding items. The essence of recreation and ecotourism is that they are non-extractive and depend on the forest remaining intact. Under this logic, analogous improvements would include fire observation towers, scientific research stations, environmental education centers, and small-scale nurseries for native species reforestation. These structures serve the forest. Conversely, improvements typical of urban or industrial settings would not qualify. Shopping centers, factories, general-purpose warehouses, residential subdivisions: none of these are analogous to ecotourism or forest management. They fail the analogy test because they neither depend on nor protect the forest ecosystem.

"Proporcional": To What, Exactly?

The law requires all forest cutting to be limited, proportional, and reasonable. But proportional to what? The statute does not say. And for fourteen years, neither did the implementing regulation. It was not until 2010 that Decreto 35883 amended Decreto 25721-MINAE to add explicit definitions: a "proportionality criterion" capping forest intervention at 10% of the property's forested area, and a "reasonableness criterion" requiring that intervention prioritize less sensitive areas and minimize edge effects. Before 2010, each Área de Conservación decided for itself what these terms meant.

That 10% includes everything: roads, trails, viewpoints, buildings, parking areas, terraces. In rugged terrain requiring access roads, the 10% allocation is often consumed before any structure is built. The limit is cumulative, not per-project. A property that uses 5% for one project has only 5% remaining for all future development.

The regulation makes this limit irrevocable. The 10% constraint must be annotated on the property title. It travels with the land permanently. If a property uses its 10% allocation and is later subdivided, the new parcels cannot claim new 10% allocations: "si una propiedad que ha usado su asignación del 10% se subdivide, no se autorizarán nuevas intervenciones en las parcelas resultantes." Once consumed, the decision is permanent.

How Developers Game the System

The legal ambiguities and gaps documented above do not exist in a vacuum. They create opportunities that organized interests systematically exploit. The law establishes a dual-approval regime. SINAC (the Sistema Nacional de Áreas de Conservación) must approve the forestry permit. SETENA (the Secretaría Técnica Nacional Ambiental) must approve environmental viability. Both authorizations are required before any forest change can occur. For projects involving less than 2 hectares, SETENA allows a simplified questionnaire instead of a full environmental impact assessment. This procedural shortcut has become the primary vector for exploitation.

The 2-Hectare Loophole

Under SETENA's environmental categorization system (Decreto 31849), forest interventions affecting smaller areas score lower on the environmental significance form and are routed to simplified review instruments: a brief questionnaire rather than a full environmental impact assessment. The system was designed so that genuinely small ecotourism projects would not face disproportionate review requirements.

But the 2-hectare number does double duty in Costa Rican forest law, and the second use is more insidious. Under Article 3d of Ley 7575, land must have at least 2 hectares of trees to legally qualify as "forest." A 15-hectare property with 12 hectares of forest can clear 1.2 hectares under the 10% rule. But a 25-hectare property with only 3 hectares of forest can clear that forest down to 2.7 hectares, and it still qualifies as forest. Clear a bit more through "maintenance" or gradual encroachment, drop below 2 hectares of trees, and the land no longer meets the legal definition. The protection evaporates. What was forest becomes, legally, something else.

The citizens who challenged Decreto 35883 in 2011 explicitly warned about this. They argued that 10% clearing on small properties could leave "terrenos con menos de dos hectáreas," land with less than two hectares of trees. The Procuraduría acknowledged the concern. The Constitutional Chamber dismissed it as hypothetical. But the mechanism is real: the same regulation that permits clearing also defines the threshold below which protection disappears. The law creates the conditions for its own circumvention.

Conservation groups have documented systematic exploitation of both thresholds. The August 2025 Contraloría audit, which found 81% of forestry permits violated mandatory requirements, mandated updating the decree that regulates forest permits, with compliance deadlines extending to November 2027.

The Puzzle-Piecemeal Tactic

Developers split large projects into multiple sub-2-hectare permit applications. Each permit is evaluated individually rather than cumulatively. Each phase receives simplified review. The total project may exceed thresholds that would require full environmental impact assessment if submitted as a single application, but the aggregate impact goes unassessed.

Authorities have challenged these tactics, but catching them requires the kind of vigilance that understaffed agencies cannot maintain. Critics observe that fragmented permits for single projects "do not consider the environmental impact as a whole." This pattern has been documented at developments including Crocodile Bay/Botánika in Puerto Jiménez.

The Procuraduría General de la República has explicitly warned against this practice. In Dictamen C-200-2009 - the same opinion often misquoted in the grammatical debate - the Attorney General's office advised municipalities that the forest is an ecosystem that qualifies as a unit, regardless of its different titleholders. Authorities must prevent the circumvention of Article 19 protections through the exclusion of areas which, divided among different properties, have a surface area less than two hectares, but which, considered together, exceed it. This is precisely the "burla" the PGR warned about: do not let developers make fools of you by playing subdivision games. The legal doctrine is clear: forests must be assessed as ecosystems, not as property parcels.

Targeting Biological Corridors

Biological corridors, the forested connections between protected areas that allow wildlife movement and genetic exchange, have fewer rangers than national park cores. Violations take months to detect. By the time enforcement arrives, trees are down and construction has begun.

The pattern is systematic: acquire forested corridor land, clear trees under a permit exemption, build structures, sell to foreign buyers. The fact that the land was part of a wildlife corridor connecting two protected areas rarely appears in marketing materials.

The "Degraded Pasture" Misclassification

Under Costa Rican law, secondary forest has the same legal protection as primary forest. A forest that regenerated over twenty years of abandonment is legally equivalent to old-growth. But some developers acquire regenerating forest and claim it's "degraded pasture" or "abandoned agricultural land" rather than protected forest.

Without on-site inspection (which the Contraloría found does not happen in 90% of SETENA cases), permits may be granted based on outdated land classification or the applicant's self-reporting. No specific case law or administrative guidance was found distinguishing secondary forest from "degraded pasture." This remains an enforcement gap exploited through misclassification.

Worse, the misclassification problem extends beyond passive opportunism. Some landowners actively degrade forest by clearing understory, removing canopy trees, and introducing cattle until the land no longer meets the legal definition of forest. Then they seek permits to "develop" what they claim was never protected in the first place.

Costa Rica's official submission to the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility documents this practice systematically. The 1996 Forestry Law created "negative incentives" where landowners would practice "socolas" (forest understory clearings) to convert managed forests into grasslands, then request permits to harvest trees in what was reclassified as non-forest land. The phenomenon became widespread enough that SINAC developed an "Illegal Logging Control Strategy" in 2002 specifically to address it, proposing GPS-based monitoring and mandatory use of forest cover maps for permit verification. A 2006 study by Navarro et al. documented the resulting "illegal woodwashing," where timber from degraded forests was laundered through the permit system. The land use change was achieved not by illegal clearing, but by obtaining legal permits after degrading forest to the point where it no longer met the legal definition.

The "Cypress Loophole": Non-Native Species

Article 3(d) of the Forestry Law defines "bosque" (forest) as a "native or indigenous" ecosystem. This technical definition creates another exploitation vector. Developers have argued that areas covered with exotic species, such as cypress plantations, eucalyptus groves, and non-native timber stands, are not legally "forest" and therefore fall outside Article 19's protections entirely. If the trees are not native, the argument goes, the land is not legally forest, and no forestry permit is required.

The Constitutional Chamber critiqued this reasoning in Voto 3923-2007. The court noted that some developers used the native-species definition to clear-cut mountainous areas for residential projects, arguing the land was not legally "forest" because the trees were exotic, even if they had existed for decades and provided ecological functions like water regulation and erosion control. The cypress loophole demonstrates that the battle over Article 19 is often a battle over definitions: if developers can argue their way out of the legal category of "forest," they escape the restrictions entirely.

Where Law Meets Reality

Costa Rica has strong forest protection law. The exceptions in Article 19 were meant to be narrow. But ambiguous terms and regulatory loopholes have transformed narrow exceptions into wide openings.

The Constitutional Chamber enforces limits when cases reach it. In late 2025, it struck down provisions of Ley 10210 that had attempted to let the Water Directorate conduct its own environmental reviews rather than requiring SETENA approval, reaffirming that environmental rights cannot be subordinated to economic interests. But 81% of Article 19 permits violate mandatory requirements. 90% are approved without field inspection. Most violations never reach the courts.

SINAC offices review permits without budgets for site visits. Understaffed agencies approve 1.9-hectare projects without inspecting them. The 1996 law promised protection for forests on private land. That protection depends on enforcement capacity that has been weakened by budget cuts and understaffing.