What the Auditors Found

On the morning of June 18, 2024, a Tuesday, vehicles from the Organismo de Investigacion Judicial (the country's criminal investigation agency) pulled into the lot outside a government office building in Calle Blancos, a commercial district on the eastern edge of San Jose. Agents from the Anti-Corruption Section stepped out carrying search warrants. Across the capital, at thirteen other addresses, other teams were arriving simultaneously.

The building housed the Secretaria Tecnica Nacional Ambiental. SETENA. It is the agency that decides whether construction and development projects in Costa Rica are environmentally viable. Every hotel on the coast, every road cut through a forest, every residential subdivision that requires an environmental impact assessment passes through this office. On a normal Tuesday morning, the staff inside would be processing applications, reviewing environmental studies, issuing the permits that determine what gets built and where.

The agents moved through the offices. Computers were disconnected and tagged. USB drives and external hard drives pulled from desk drawers. Cell phones collected. Filing cabinets opened, documentary records boxed. The operation had been coordinated between the OIJ's Anti-Corruption Section and FAPTA, the special prosecutor's office for government transparency. They were following a trail between permits and payments.

They arrested the secretary general, Ulises Alvarez Acosta. They arrested Kenner Quiros Brenes from the technical directorate. They arrested Magda Gutierrez Duran from the information technology directorate. They arrested a businessman named Murillo Martinez. Nine people in total were placed under investigation. The OIJ called the operation Caso Comejen, after the termite that eats away at wood from the inside.

Sixteen months later, the Contraloria General de la Republica published two audits: one on SINAC, the agency that manages forests, and one on SETENA, the agency where the arrests had taken place. The Contraloria is Costa Rica's independent watchdog over public institutions, and it opened these reviews on its own oversight authority, separate from the OIJ operation. Where the criminal investigation targeted the individual officials who allegedly took money, the audits examined the systems that made the corruption possible. What each one found is worth working through in detail.

What the Forest Audit Found

On August 4, 2025, the Contraloria released audit DFOE-SOS-IAD-00004-2025, a review of forestry permit management across three of SINAC's regional conservation areas: ACOSA, ACOPAC, and ACLAC. The auditors examined 147 permit files from 2024. These were permits to cut trees. A licensed forestry regent is supposed to oversee the work and file a closing report when the permit's term ends, recording what was actually cut. For 49 permits that report was already overdue; 32 had none on file. Without it, there was no record of what had been cut and no way to trace the wood, so SINAC could not confirm the cutting matched what it had authorized. The agency was approving tree removal it could not afterward account for.

The tracking system itself was broken. Only 10% of forestry procedures were digitized. The national forestry information system, SIREFOR, was described by the auditors as "obsoleto, ineficiente y dependiente de terceros," and the audit titled its entire section on the system "Inoperancia del Sistema" (inoperability of the system). The system could not integrate modules or manage current data. In 2024, SINAC allocated $325,000 to modernize SIREFOR. The money was redirected to other institutional expenses.

The auditors also documented permits SINAC had issued inside a zone the courts placed off-limits. It occupied little of the report, a single finding among the eight in its section on permit controls, though the auditors singled the zone out in the map that opens the document. Adjacent to the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge on the Caribbean coast, a 188-hectare area was put under judicial precautionary measures by a resolution of March 7, 2025, grounded in two Sala Constitucional rulings (sentences 2024-026300 and 2019-012745). ACLAC, the conservation area responsible, was barred from issuing forestry permits of any kind in that zone. It instructed its subregional office to stop and closed every permit it had granted there since 2023.

By 2026, that finding had become a criminal case. On April 23, 2026, the Juzgado Penal del II Circuito Judicial granted precautionary measures in the Gandoca-Manzanillo investigation, after the Ministerio Publico appealed a July 2024 hearing that had rejected them. The court suspended the forestry harvests, ordered SINAC to close an internal road through the fincas so the forest could regenerate, instructed the Municipalidad de Talamanca to halt all permit processing, and annotated the criminal proceeding against the properties. Five people are charged: Pacheco Dent, three SINAC officials, and a private forestry regent, on alleged crimes including prevaricato, illegal land-use change, and ideological falsehood. According to the investigation, the land had first been classified as forest and wetland, a status that barred its exploitation, and was then reclassified as a supposed agroforestry system, which let the cutting permits be issued.

The Contraloria issued eight mandatory dispositions, with compliance deadlines extending through November 2027. The directives included updating the forestry permit decree, designing a new technology platform, implementing integrity governance, and improving the complaints system.

The Environmental Gatekeeper

On October 30, 2025, the Contraloria released the second audit: DFOE-SOS-IAD-00008-2025, an examination of corruption risk management in SETENA's environmental impact assessment process. If SINAC manages forests, SETENA manages the permits that allow development near them.

The auditors examined 59 environmental permit files, all from coastal zone projects, covering January 2024 through April 2025. 90% of the projects reviewed had been approved without a field inspection.

Environmental lawyer Alvaro Sagot placed this in legal context. Article 84 of the Ley Organica del Ambiente mandates field inspections before permit issuance. "It is not by simple regulation that inspections are ordered before issuing licenses," Sagot told Semanario Universidad. "It is by law, and the law is above any regulatory provision." The 90% figure is a legal violation at institutional scale.

The auditors found at least one control failure in 44 of the 59 files, 74%: undated technical reports, missing inspection records, even studies that belonged to a different project. 25% of the environmental impact studies were never published on SETENA's website, as the law requires, and monitoring was "reactive and limited," triggered only when a developer filed something or an outside party complained. Of the field inspections SETENA had planned for 2024, 60% went unexecuted; for 2025 it drew up no inspection plan at all, the same year its inspection budget was cut by 73%.

The audit illustrated the danger with a single file. For a project in Portalon de Quepos, SETENA's own geospatial analysis flagged the site as forest and asked the developer to prove otherwise. The developer produced a forestry certification stating there was none, signed by the same consultant who had written the project's environmental studies, this time acting as its forestry regent. SETENA accepted the certification, ran no inspection, and granted the viability. Only after a separate criminal case did SINAC visit the site, confirm that forest and fragile ecosystems were there, and prompt a SETENA inspection that recorded 16 breaches by the developer and that same consultant.

The auditors' central conclusion: corruption risk management at SETENA "incumple en aspectos significativos, es debil e inoportuna" (fails in significant aspects, is weak and untimely). The controls designed to ensure quality, veracity, and traceability of technical information "no son efectivos" (are not effective).

What makes this a corruption-risk finding sits in the structure. SETENA's integrity controls, its ethics code, risk matrix, and training, apply inside the agency and stop at its door; they never reach the outside consultants and forestry regents whose information its decisions rest on. The analysts who study each file and recommend approval or rejection are not required to file sworn asset declarations. Follow-up officers are not rotated: two of thirteen changed assignments in two years, and the rest held the same cantons for at least five. And SETENA could not say how many environmental viabilities it currently has active, with files still open from as far back as 1995.

The Contraloria issued nine binding dispositions, with deadlines from December 2025 through May 2027: fix the consultant registry, define real corruption controls, plan and execute inspections, integrate the digital logbook into the public file, and publish a complete list of projects. They bind the Minister of Environment "or whoever holds the office" for the first two, and SETENA's secretary general for the rest. The deadlines straddle the change of government.

The Arrest Before the Audit

The charges against the three officials arrested at SETENA in June 2024, alongside a businessman, included traffic of influence, bribery, and corruption. OIJ Director Randall Zuniga told reporters that the suspects had "actively collaborated" in obtaining environmental permits to favor specific companies, providing "all the necessary means and inputs" for permits to be processed in exchange for money.

By November 2025, the case was surfacing in other proceedings. A petitioner before the Sala Constitucional cited the Caso Comejen in an amparo challenging development permits in Brasilito, Guanacaste, arguing that Quiros Brenes and Alvarez Acosta had granted the environmental viability permit for a coastal project called Cantomar in the same area. A second project in the locality, Azulera Resort, had previously been stopped for permit irregularities (Res. 38435-2025). As of early 2026, the criminal case remains in the preparatory stage, with no formal accusation or trial date.

The Contraloria had warned SETENA before. A 2022 audit, DFOE-SOS-IF-00008-2022, found that the agency had never evaluated its own exposure to corruption. Two years later, three of its officials were arrested in Caso Comejen. In 2025 the auditor came back and found the gap still open.

SETENA responded to the 2025 audit by stating that the Contraloria "no encontro ningun acto de corrupcion en la Evaluacion de Impacto Ambiental." The auditor found no acts of corruption. This is technically accurate. The audit documented systemic vulnerability.

It is the distinction between proving a house was robbed and proving the doors were left unlocked. Three SETENA officials had been arrested for walking through those doors. The audit confirmed that the locks were still broken.

MINAE, for its part, attributed SETENA's weak oversight to the previous government. A 2021 executive decree had eliminated mandatory pre-approval inspections, and MINAE argued that this framework, inherited from the prior administration, was responsible for the deficiencies the auditors documented. The 2022 audit predates the current government. The problems persisted through the transition.

On December 8, 2025, the Procuraduria General de la Republica issued opinion PGR-OJ-213-2025 on a bill to reform Article 18 of the Ley Organica del Ambiente and guarantee impartiality in environmental impact assessments (filed as Expediente 25034; the opinion refers to it by the number 25073). Procuradora Elizabeth Leon Rodriguez did something unusual. She cited the Contraloria's SETENA audit verbatim:

The PGR then recommended that legislators consider "si existen otras deficiencias de la institucion que deben ser corregidas" (whether there are other institutional deficiencies that must be corrected). The bill before them, it was saying, did not go far enough.

The Ground the Audits Landed On

The institutions these audits examined had been the target of a steady effort to centralize control. From its first months, the Chaves administration sought to pull MINAE's technical agencies closer to the minister's office, a trajectory the XXXI Informe Estado de la Nacion called a trend toward centralization. Three measures between 2022 and 2025 mark it: a restructuring bill, a directive routing the agencies' communications with the auditor and the PGR through the minister, and a decree consolidating their legal advice in a single office. None was a reaction to the audits: two predate the Caso Comejen arrests, and all three predate the 2025 findings. This is the institutional ground the findings landed on, and on which the audits' mandatory dispositions now have to be carried out.

The Centralization Bill (23.213)

On June 29, 2022, less than two months after taking office, President Rodrigo Chaves proposed a restructuring of the Environment Ministry at a press conference following a Cabinet meeting. The executive branch filed it as Bill 23.213, "Fortalecimiento de las Competencias del Ministerio de Ambiente y Energia." It would convert SINAC, SETENA, and CONAGEBIO from maximum deconcentration to minimum deconcentration. In administrative law, this is a transfer of institutional autonomy. Under maximum deconcentration, these agencies make final technical decisions. Under minimum deconcentration, the minister becomes the final authority.

The bill would eliminate SETENA's Comision Plenaria, the multi-member technical body that currently reviews environmental impact assessments. It would leave the secretary general as sole authority, advised by a technical committee whose opinions are explicitly non-binding: "sus criterios no tendran caracter vinculante." It would eliminate SINAC's Consejo Nacional de Areas de Conservacion and the regional and local conservation councils that provide community participation in protected area governance. The minister would recover control over approximately 77% of the institutional budget. Eleven organs of MINAE would be affected.

The government's stated case was efficiency and coordination. Signing the bill, Chaves said it would clear "the bottlenecks that slow development and have hurt the country's investment and competitiveness." Tattenbach called it a re-engineering to restore the ministry's rectoria, its steering authority over the sector, so that decisions on environment and development would not stall in middle management. The bill's exposicion de motivos invoked an OECD assessment that Costa Rica's public administration is fragmented, with a large deconcentrated sector and limited mechanisms of accountability and direction, and it aligned the reform with the 2018 budget-control law that folds deconcentrated agencies' budgets into the national budget. Both the MINAE employees' union and the Camara Costarricense de la Construccion backed it, the union to stop "middle directors" from obstructing the country's progress, the chamber to eliminate duplication and use public resources more efficiently. Pilar Cisneros, the governing bloc's legislative leader, defended it as "an administrative restructuring, not a technical one," insisting SETENA, CONAGEBIO and SINAC would remain "absolutely intact, as independent entities."

The PGR formally objected. In its written opinion (PGR-OJ-181-2022), the PGR found that the bill omits the constitutional requirement that hierarchical environmental decisions be grounded in technical criteria. The bill allows the minister to override technical decisions without providing technical justification. Costa Rica's Sala Constitucional has established extensive jurisprudence requiring that environmental decisions be based on technical rather than political authority. The bill, as the PGR noted, removes that safeguard.

Deputy Rocio Alfaro of the Frente Amplio voted against the bill, stating that it moves toward "greater verticality, and less participation." The bill was approved 7-1 by the State Reform Commission on February 27, 2023, and then stalled. The Chaves government held no plenario majority, and for most of each year the opposition controlled the legislative agenda; with the public universities, the environmental sector, and the Assembly's own technical staff opposed, and the PGR's constitutional objection available as grounds for a later challenge, it never reached a floor vote. Under the four-year deadline for legislative bills, it expires on June 30, 2026.

The Gag Order (August 2023)

By mid-2023, both the Contraloria and the PGR were actively requesting information from SINAC about permits in Gandoca-Manzanillo, where the PGR had issued opinions requiring the refuge to remain under state control. Environment Minister Franz Tattenbach had already required his personal approval, that May, before SINAC staff could speak to journalists.

In August he widened that control to the country's constitutional oversight bodies. On August 10, 2023, Tattenbach issued directive DM-621-2023, addressed to Sandra Jimenez, acting executive director of SINAC, requiring that all SINAC communications to the Contraloria General de la Republica and the Procuraduria General de la Republica be routed through the executive director with approval from SINAC's legal advisory department. The regional official who issued a permit, the conservation area director who managed a budget, the technician who conducted a field inspection: none of them could answer the auditor's questions directly anymore. Every response to either oversight body would first pass through the executive director's desk and the legal department's review.

On October 5, 2023, SINAC director David Chavarria Morales distributed implementation guidelines (SINAC-SE-DE-1320-2023) to all staff. The circular established "technical meetings" to "filter which inquiries" warranted the protocol. The stated purpose was to "uniformize procedures" and "homogenize SINAC's actions." The directive preceded both Contraloria audits by two years.

The Legal Opinion Funnel (2025)

On December 18, 2024, President Rodrigo Chaves and Minister Franz Tattenbach signed Decreto Ejecutivo 44859-MINAE, published in La Gaceta on January 28, 2025. The decree created the Direccion de Asesoria Juridica, a centralized legal advisory office that consolidated the legal services of MINAE's attached institutions and decentralized organs, including SETENA, SINAC, DIGECA, CONAGEBIO and the Direccion de Aguas, into a single dependency.

Under the previous structure, SINAC, SETENA, CONAGEBIO, and other agencies issued their own legal and technical opinions through their own legal departments. Under the new decree, those opinions now pass through a single desk. The office is composed of a director and four units covering public contracting, technical-legal advisory, legal management, and labor proceedings. It integrates legal advisories spanning forestry, wildlife, protected areas, environmental assessment, biodiversity, coastal management, climate change, and water.

The XXXI Informe Estado de la Nacion flagged this as part of a "trend toward centralization," a shift of power from technical expertise toward political authority.

Read in order, the three measures trace a single direction. The centralization bill (2022) would strip the agencies of institutional independence. The gag order (2023) routed their communications with the Contraloria and the PGR through the minister's structure, filtering what the two bodies then auditing those agencies could be told. The legal opinion funnel (2025) channeled their legal and technical advice through one office.

The Doors Are Still Unlocked

The SINAC audit issued eight dispositions, with deadlines through November 2027. The SETENA audit issued nine, with deadlines through May 2027. The 2022 audit found that SETENA had never evaluated its own corruption risks. The 2025 audit found the same vulnerabilities. Between those two audits, three SETENA officials were arrested for corruption.

The XXXI Informe Estado de la Nacion called this "a point of inflection in environmental matters" after more than thirty years of conservation leadership. The auditors described the situation. The PGR confirmed it. The courts have been ordering fixes for a decade. Through these same years, the government pressed to concentrate authority in the minister's office, filtered communications with the oversight agencies, and moved to make technical opinions non-binding.

In February 2026, that government won again. Laura Fernandez, the official candidate, took the presidency in the first round on a platform of continuity, and was sworn in on May 8. She named the outgoing president, Rodrigo Chaves, as her Minister of the Presidency and of Hacienda at once; from those two offices he manages the legislative agenda and the national budget. The new Minister of Environment is Monica Navarro del Valle, an environmental lawyer who had advised SETENA on streamlining its permitting instruments and had represented the real-estate and infrastructure sector, including a seat on the national concessions board. The centralization bill lapses unvoted, and the dispositions from both audits still run into 2027. The administration that filed the centralization bill and built the legal-opinion funnel did not leave power. It changed offices.