Unresolved rights and state crime: the struggle for indigenous land/territory in Costa Rica, 2010-2019
Berta Cáceres Award Fellows CLACSO
(Eva María Carazo, Francisca Osorio, Lucila Cruz, María Medina, Tanya García Fonseca) as well as Juan Antonio Gutiérrez Sloan and Luis Paulino Vargas Solís (CICDE-UNED)
Due to the inability of state institutions to guarantee that Indigenous territories, these ancestral lands, remain exclusively in the hands of Indigenous people, the struggle for land recovery has been waged in recent years, as is the case in the Salitre territory. This has been a sustained process that intensified after 2010, following the forced removal of a group of Indigenous people from the eight Indigenous groups of Costa Rica from the Legislative Assembly on the night and early morning of August 9 and 10. This act against Indigenous people motivated them to return to their territories and assert their land rights directly through land reclamation.
This process (2010-2019) has involved the recovery of more than 1300 hectares in more than 40 land recovery processes by families of the Bribri people of Salitre, who have assumed the commitment to territorial defense, based on the national and international regulations to which the country is a signatory. However, this struggle has been devalued by various government and state entities, which, through weak and insufficient actions, have allowed the proliferation of violence by non-indigenous landowners and groups that support them, against the physical and patrimonial integrity of the indigenous inhabitants of Salitre, totaling more than 115 violent events, including the cold-blooded murder of leader Sergio Rojas Ortiz of the Uniwäk clan on March 18, 2019.
This deplorable situation violates several security guarantees for the Bribri people, and their actions are condemned. An urgent call is made to all state and governmental bodies to get to the bottom of the crime and work on the fundamental issue: guaranteeing the indigenous people's ancestral lands.
Sources for further information
Statement from the Center for Research in Culture and Development regarding the assassination of Indigenous leader Sergio Rojas. We denounce the violence against Indigenous peoples and demand immediate action from the government.
April 2019
Berta Cáceres Award Fellows
Eva María Carazo
Francisca Osorio
Lucila Cruz
Maria Medina
Tanya García Fonseca
Juan Antonio Gutiérrez Sloan
Luis Paulino Vargas Solís
This statement expresses the position of the aforementioned scholarship recipients and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
