COSTA Rica passed a mining law in 1992 that prohibits prospecting in national parks without a permit. The following year, the government stopped issuing permits for Corcovado National Park, claiming there was no way to adequately monitor gold panning within the Southern Zone protected area (TT, Nov. 11, 1983).
Panners continued to mine in and around the park, eking out a harsh living and damaging a delicate ecosystem. The numbers of panners swelled from a few dozen in the mid-1970s when the park was created to an estimated 2,000 by late 1985.
The reason for the explosion was a combination of rising gold prices and unemployment among banana workers after the closure of the vast Golfito-based United Banana Company in 1985. Many of the laid-off workers decided to try their hand at panning.
The presence of gold panners in the park was the subject of a wave of public resentment, culminating in late 1985 with a letter-writing campaign aimed at then-President Luis Alberto Monge and organized by the privately funded National Parks Foundation. According to the foundation, the President received more than 8,000 letters requesting the panners’ eviction from Corcovado National Park.
A court order for the eviction was issued Jan. 10, 1986. After their eviction from the park, hundreds of panners languished in makeshift shelters in Golfito, across the gulf from the Osa Peninsula where the extensive park is located, for nearly a year. Many of them marched 226 kilometers to San José in mid-1987 and camped downtown, awaiting a decision about the indemnities the government had promised them (TT, May 1, 1987).
Since that first march on San José, other groups of panners numbering from 50 to several hundred at a time marched on the capital and camped in front of the Casa Presidencial and in front of the San José Metropolitan Cathedral and the adjacent Central Park. Some reached agreements with authorities, others did not (TT, Oct. 9, 1987).
Other protests occurred in the 1990s when government officials took further action to evict delinquent oreros from the park (TT, Feb. 25, 1994). Park officials went so far as to close the park to tourism in March 1994 to flush out illegal prospectors after panners and miners using hydraulic equipment were discovered in the Los Patos area, the mountains on the park’s eastern edge (TT, March 18, 1994).
Weeks later, a group of 50 panners set up tents in front of the Casa Presidencial in San José for three days protesting the delay in the checks government officials had promised them the year before (TT, April 8, 1994).
