Costa Rica's green halo slips as leader toys with oil and gas

More than a century ago, the American oil company Sinclair drilled an exploratory well on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

- Thomas Graham

An exploratory oil well from 1910, now abandoned, in Costa Rica's Cahuita national park.

(Alamy)

That well is still there a square pond in the jungle, slick and bubbling a monument to the oil industry's absence from Latin America's greenest country. But there are signs that could change. Costa Rica's president, Rodrigo Chaves, is toying with new oil and gas exploration - just one way he's redirecting a country that has often led the world on climate change.

“Neoliberals, conservatives, progressives, they all kept to the same environmental line,” said Adrián Martínez, director of La Ruta del Clima, an environmental NGO. “But now there's a new line of thought that breaks with tradition.”

For decades, Costa Rica had a green consensus. It placed a moratorium on oil and gas exploration. It banned open-pit mining. It stopped, then reversed, deforestation. And it made a big bet on tourism, which now provides 8.2% of GDP.

But Costa Rica was never quite the paradise imagined by its visitors. Away from the beaches and parks, there was inequality, corruption and violence. Public services were in decay and the political class short of ideas.

Then in 2022 a political outsider appeared, a Trumpian figure who walked and talked unlike a typical Tico, as Costa Ricans call themselves.