The president of Costa Rica, Laura Fernández, expressed on Friday, June 19, 2026, her concern about an eventual “invasion” of illegal miners from Nicaragua, due to the mining concessions that the country has granted to Chinese companies in sites near the bilateral border.
“I am extremely concerned about what is going to happen with Indio Maíz in Nicaragua. Indio Maíz has already been granted concessions to Chinese companies and it is estimated that there are 1,500 or 1,800 coligalleros (artisanal miners) there. When that company takes control of that mining company in Nicaragua, where do you think those coligalleros are going to come,” Fernández declared, after a field trip to the town of Las Crucitas, a site near the border between both countries that is taken over by illegal gold mining.
The president added that her concern is that “a problem of invasion of this number of people here” would occur, which she described as “a time bomb for Costa Rica that urgently needs an immediate solution.”
“This is a gold rush. The gold is not going to leave here and more and more people are going to continue getting involved, better financed by organized crime to continue exploiting irrationally and with a security problem where we are not going to be able to cope,” Fernández added.
The Government of Nicaragua has transferred mining concessions in 84 lots between 2021 and 2026 to nineteen Chinese companies that occupy 1,274,908.33 hectares, which represents more than 8.5% of the Nicaraguan territory and that include protected, indigenous and/or Afro-descendant areas, according to records from the environmental NGO Fundación del Río, in a report titled ‘Chinese mining invasion in Nicaragua’.
In mid-April 2026, The US sanctioned two sons of the Nicaraguan co-presidentsDaniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, a vice minister, four other citizens and seven mining companies, all of them involved in the extraction and marketing of gold in the country.
Gold mining in Costa Rica, close to being reactivated
The Government of Costa Rica is promoting a bill in Congress to reactivate gold mining and grant concessions to companies in Las Crucitas, where police authorities constantly detain illegal miners, many of them Nicaraguan, and seize material and equipment used to extract gold in an artisanal way, which environmentalists claim has harmful effects on the environment.
The president, who was evacuated on the morning of Friday, June 19, 2026, from the tour in Las Crucitas after an explosion was heard in the distance, urged the deputies to approve the bill for a company to exploit gold in the area and avoid environmental damage derived from illegal mining, in addition to stopping spending nearly 1.3 million dollars per month on security operations in the region.
An open pit gold mine was going to operate in Las Crucitas under concession to the Canadian mining company Infinito Gold, but after an extensive legal battle the company lost the concession in 2010 without having begun to build the mine and from then on the site was used by illegal artisanal miners who use techniques that use mercury and cyanide.
President Fernández said that there are records of illegal Nicaraguan miners who have been deported more than 35 times, which is why she will promote a bill to tighten controls.
Costa Rican government officials have also said several times that the gold extracted in Las Crucitas ends up in Nicaragua.
