1. Introduction
This work explores the ethical, ecological, and epistemological implications of gentrification in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Caribbean region of Costa Rica, focusing on the intersecting tensions between environmental policy, Indigenous sovereignty, and capitalist development. It does so by critically revisiting La Loca de Gandoca, the emblematic novel by Anacristina Rossi, not merely as a literary artifact but as a political-philosophical testimony that remains uncannily relevant decades after its publication. The novel’s protagonist, once dismissed as “mad” or “Loca”, now appears prophetic in light of the systemic neglect, silencing, and dispossession faced by coastal and Indigenous communities today.
Under the international narrative of Costa Rica as a green and peaceful nation, ecotourism and sustainable development have been deployed as legitimizing frameworks for the large-scale transformation of biologically and culturally sensitive territories (Rozzi et al., 2010). However, behind this image lies a growing disconnect between policy and lived experience. As the Caribbean coast, particularly the Limón province, becomes increasingly attractive to international investors, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities report forced displacement, unaffordable living conditions, and escalating threats to local ecosystems; all rooted in rising gentrification (Castilla, 2024; Robledo, 2023; Rodríguez Núñez, 2023).
This work approaches the case of Gandoca not simply as an environmental issue, but as an ethical crisis: one that demands an interrogation of the logics that determine who has the right to land, to speak, and to resist. By integrating the concept of body-territory, a key feminist Indigenous epistemology, alongside the precautionary principle and epistemic injustice through the lens of decolonial ethics, the project critically examines how gentrification operates not only on the physical terrain but also on the epistemic and symbolic planes. To frame this analysis, this work draws on a definition of decolonial bioethics understood as an ethical approach that challenges the Eurocentric foundations of traditional bioethics and centers the lived experiences, epistemologies, and political struggles of communities historically marginalized by coloniality, emphasizing relationality, territoriality, and the structural dimensions of power, aiming to expose and transform the colonial patterns that shape whose lives, knowledges, and environments are protected or sacrificed (Escobar, 2018; Dussel, 2013; Wynter, 2003; Quijano, 2000). In this sense, it questions the moral permissibility of development models that systematically silence, displace, or pathologize the voices that oppose them.
Although Costa Rica is celebrated internationally for its biodiversity and environmental commitments, this work argues that such recognition often masks deeper contradictions, especially in the current political context of the country. In regions like Gandoca-Manzanillo, environmental defenders are criminalized, traditional knowledge systems are ignored, and public institutions frequently fail to protect either the communities or the ecosystems they claim to serve, sometimes even serving as tools to facilitate their exploitation (Robyn, 2002). The lack of official documentation, data transparency, or institutional memory regarding these conflicts underlines the urgency of ethical academic intervention, particularly one that acknowledges the limits of Western epistemology and centers marginalized narratives as valid sources of knowledge.
By bridging environmental ethics, critical bioethics, and Latin American political philosophy, this paper seeks to create a space for ethical reflection and political responsibility. It positions La Loca de Gandoca not as a story of the past, but as a critical mirror of the present. In doing so, it asks: What does it mean to call a land “protected” when its people are not? What is the cost of green development when it uproots those who have historically acted as stewards of biodiversity? And finally, what role must philosophy, and particularly bioethics, play in exposing and resisting these forms of contemporary ecological violence?
2. Sources & Methods
This work draws from a rich and interdisciplinary methodological base, combining philosophical texts, bioethical frameworks, political declarations, and narrative testimonies. Central to this approach is the recognition of marginalized voices like those of activists, journalists, community leaders, and authors, whose insights are often excluded from academic and political discourses. By critically engaging with these sources alongside established theories, I aim to reconstruct an ethical narrative that gives equal weight to lived experience and theoretical reflection. Special attention will be given to alternative media, public speeches, parliamentary records, and activist declarations that illuminate both the silencing mechanisms and the resistance strategies deployed in Gandoca and beyond. Analytically, the material is examined through a hermeneutic-critical and discourse-analytic framework, allowing for the systematic interpretation of narratives, power structures, and epistemic dynamics across both textual and non-textual sources.
The primary literary reference is La Loca de Gandoca by Rossi (1992), a novel that has become an environmental and political symbol in Costa Rica. This work serves both as a literary testimony and as a hermeneutic tool through which contemporary ecological conflicts can be interpreted. It is complemented by theoretical writings from Latin American ecofeminism, decolonial thought, and bioethics, including the concepts of body-territory, epistemic injustice, and the precautionary principle in environmental ethics.
The chosen concepts—epistemic injustice, body-territory, decolonial ethics, precautionary principle, and marginalization—were selected because they directly illuminate the intersection of ethics, power, and ecology in Latin America. Each concept provides a lens to examine how gentrification operates not only as an economic or urban phenomenon but also as a form of biopolitical control over marginalized communities and ecological systems.
Secondary sources include journalistic investigations, independent media (e.g., La Voz de Guanacaste, La Hora Tica), and testimonies of environmental defenders and people from the community that document the silencing, threats, and struggles of local and Indigenous communities. These sources are essential in capturing voices that are systematically excluded from official state and academic narratives. This stance responds to the problem of epistemic injustice: ignoring these sources would reproduce the same structures of silencing and marginalization that this study critiques.
In addition, parliamentary debates, public interventions, and official statements by Costa Rican deputies were examined as key indicators of the ongoing political contestation surrounding environmental policy, land rights, and coastal gentrification. Proposed laws and legislative reforms related to land tenure, conservation, and tourism development were also reviewed to situate the philosophical discussion within the practical realities of governance and policy-making.
Thus, the methodology acknowledges that knowledge is not neutral, and that ethical responsibility demands the inclusion of narratives that are frequently erased in the name of “objectivity” or “development”. By bringing philosophy into dialogue with literature, journalism, and political discourse, this work constructs a multidisciplinary and ethically committed framework for understanding the ecological and social stakes of gentrification in Gandoca-Manzanillo and beyond.
3. Theoretical Framework
This section outlines the conceptual and philosophical constructs that inform the ethical, political, and epistemological analysis of gentrification and ecological conflict in Costa Rica’s Gandoca-Manzanillo region, particularly those rooted in Latin American critical thought and decolonial bioethics. By engaging with notions such as epistemic injustice, the precautionary principle, body-territory, decolonial ethics, and the politics of marginalization, this section situates the Gandoca-Manzanillo case within a broader field of bioethical and philosophical debates. The aim is not only to provide definitions but to weave a critical lens through which the literary, political, and ecological realities of Gandoca can be interpreted.
3.1. Epistemic Injustice, Oppression, and Exclusion
The concept of epistemic injustice, coined by Miranda Fricker (2007), names those injustices that are “distinctively epistemic” in nature: wrongs done to a person in their capacity as a knower, rather than simply as a social or political agent. From a philosophical standpoint, epistemic injustice matters not only because it violates principles of fairness but because it distorts the moral and political epistemic landscape itself. By silencing certain forms of knowledge, institutions skew public deliberation toward narrow technocratic or economic logics, while disqualifying relational, experiential, and territorial epistemologies. Fricker distinguishes two primary forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice.
Testimonial injustice arises when a speaker’s credibility is unjustly deflated due to prejudicial stereotypes about their social identity (Fricker, 2007). In such cases, the hearer’s negative assumptions affect their evaluation of the speaker’s testimony. For instance, women, Indigenous peoples, or Afro-descendant communities may be deemed “irrational”, “overly emotional”, or “unscientific”, leading to an unjust credibility deficit that undermines their ability to participate in knowledge practices (Fricker, 2007).
Hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, occurs when a social group lacks the conceptual resources needed to adequately interpret and articulate aspects of its lived experience (Fricker, 2007). This deficit is not neutral: it emerges within unjust social arrangements that disproportionately disadvantage marginalized groups. When a society fails to generate or recognize interpretive tools that would make oppression visible—for example, categories to describe environmental dispossession or gendered forms of land violence—individuals from subordinated communities are epistemically wronged because they cannot render their situation intelligible within the dominant discourse (Fricker, 2007).
Building on Fricker, Kristie Dotson (2014) introduces the concept of epistemic oppression, which she defines as the “persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s ability to contribute to knowledge production” (p. 115). Epistemic oppression emphasizes the structural dimension of injustice: it is not only about isolated credibility deficits but about systematic, entrenched patterns of exclusion that shape who is heard and who is silenced within the broader epistemic community. In environmental contexts, this framework highlights how institutional procedures, bureaucratic hurdles, and the privileging of “official” technical expertise create barriers that delegitimize Indigenous and local ecological knowledge (Dotson, 2014).
Complementary to this, Scully (2020) develops the notion of epistemic exclusion, which names the privileging of dominant sources, such as scientific reports, governmental archives, or corporate-sponsored research, over the lived knowledge of marginalized groups. In cases such as Gandoca-Manzanillo, the heavy reliance on state-sanctioned environmental assessments or international conservation metrics systematically erases the testimonies of coastal Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous communities, even though these communities have centuries of situated ecological wisdom. By excluding these voices, decision-making processes become epistemically impoverished and ethically compromised, producing outcomes that reinforce injustice rather than resolve it.
Thus, analyzing epistemic injustice in this project is not merely descriptive; it is normatively and politically necessary. It reveals why reliance on official archives or state-sanctioned expertise cannot suffice in contexts like Gandoca-Manzanillo. Instead, it justifies the ethical legitimacy of engaging community testimonies, activist journalism, and silenced voices as central sources of knowledge.
3.2. Precautionary Principle
The precautionary principle, a cornerstone of contemporary environmental ethics and international policy, asserts that when there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm, the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing preventive action (Steel, 2015). In other words, precaution demands ethical responsibility in the face of uncertainty. Resnik (2021) reframes precautionary reasoning as a mode of responsible risk management. Rather than paralyzing action, it orients decision-making toward minimizing potentially catastrophic harm, even when probabilistic evidence is incomplete (Resnik, 2021; Steel, 2015). This is particularly relevant in environmental bioethics, where decisions often involve complex systems with uncertain thresholds and nonlinear feedbacks. Waiting for conclusive evidence can itself become an ethically culpable act, since by the time risks are “proven”, damage may already be irreversible (Resnik, 2021; 2003).
Resnik (2003) acknowledges that critics often dismiss the precautionary principle as unscientific or paralyzing, since it seems to demand action without definitive proof of harm. However, he argues that such critiques misunderstand its normative scope. The principle is not about abandoning scientific rigor but about recognizing that scientific uncertainty does not entail moral neutrality (Resnik, 2003). In cases where the stakes involve irreversible ecological degradation or threats to public health, ethical reasoning requires erring on the side of caution (Steel, 2015; Resnik, 2003).
In the context of Gandoca-Manzanillo, the precautionary principle acquires heightened urgency in light of the questionable permits to exploit the land. The region has seen irregularly granted construction and deforestation permits, some later revoked, and environmental assessments that were either incomplete, methodologically flawed, or conducted by consultants with potential conflicts of interest. These assessments often omitted long-term or cumulative impacts on wetlands, mangroves, and biological corridors, despite the area’s legal status as a protected refuge. For example, the authorization of tree-cutting permits under questionable circumstances, later scrutinized by both journalists and parliamentary representatives, reflects a systematic pattern of approving interventions before environmental risks have been adequately assessed.
This stands in direct tension with Costa Rica’s own legal framework, where the precautionary principle is implicitly embedded in multiple norms. For instance, Article 50 of the Costa Rican Constitution recognizes the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, which the Sala Constitucional (Constitutional Chamber) has repeatedly interpreted as requiring preventive and precautionary state action. Likewise, the General Environmental Law (Ley Orgánica del Ambiente, No. 7554), particularly Articles 2 and 17, mandates preventive environmental protection and explicitly requires that in cases of uncertainty, environmental integrity must be prioritized.
By ignoring precaution, state institutions effectively normalize uncertainty as an acceptable basis for development, an ethically indefensible stance when projects threaten fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of coastal and Indigenous communities. In this sense, the sidelining of precaution is not merely a technical oversight but a manifestation of what Resnik (2003) calls epistemic arrogance: the presumption that incomplete or biased scientific data is sufficient to justify actions with irreversible consequences. This arrogance is further compounded when policymakers privilege narrow expert reports aligned with economic interests while dismissing the long-standing ecological knowledge of residents, fishers, and Indigenous communities who understand the fragility of their environments (Resnik, 2003). It reflects a failure to recognize the profound asymmetry between those who benefit from development and those who bear its risks. To ignore precaution in such contexts perpetuates environmental injustice and accelerates ecological dispossession.
3.3. Cuerpo-Territorio (Body-Territory)
The concept of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) has emerged from Latin American ecofeminist movements as a critical philosophical and political framework to understand the interlinkages between gender, colonialism, and environmental exploitation. First introduced by the Maya-Xinka territorial communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnal (Cabnal, 2010), this concept argues that the capitalist, colonial matrix that extracts value from land is the same system that objectifies and controls women’s bodies. The invasion of Indigenous territories through tourism and gentrification is mirrored in the disciplining of female bodies, both enacted through state policies, militarization, or symbolic silencing (Tania et al., 2019; Cabnal, 2010).
As developed by Tania et al. (2019) in their compilation of Latin American feminist theories and practices, cuerpo-territorio refers to the ontological and epistemological continuity between the human body and the land. Both are understood not as separate entities but as co-constituted spaces of life, resistance, and exploitation (Tania et al., 2019; Cabnal, 2010). The violence inflicted upon one, whether through extractivist projects, tourism, or state policies, is mirrored in the other; thus, the protection of territory becomes an embodied act of resistance, where defending the land is simultaneously a defense of life, autonomy, and dignity (Tania et al., 2019; Cabnal, 2010).
This framing draws deeply from Indigenous cosmologies and feminist epistemologies, which refuse to reduce territory to a juridical or geographical category (Rodríguez Castro, 2020). Instead, territory is affective, spiritual, embodied, and political (Tania et al., 2019; Cabnal, 2010). Furthermore, García Alarcón (2012) situates bioethics in the Latin American context by arguing that bioethics in the region cannot remain abstract or universalist but must engage with the lived realities of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples whose bodily and territorial integrity is systematically threatened. In this sense, cuerpo-territorio becomes a central ethical category: the violence of deforestation, displacement, or contamination is not only environmental harm but a direct assault on bodies, cultures, and community continuity.
As Haesbaert (2020) has noted, cuerpo-territorio and territorio-cuerpo (territory-body) encapsulate a dialectical relationship: the land shapes bodies, and bodies, in turn, inscribe meaning and resistance into the land (Tania et al., 2019). Additionally, Cabnal (Patiño Niño, 2023) insists that one cannot defend the territory-land without defending the bodies of all women and girls, underscoring that territorial defense is inseparable from the defense of bodily autonomy. This intertwining generates an ethics of resistance in which ecological struggles are simultaneously struggles against femicide, sexual exploitation, and systemic silencing (Patiño Niño, 2023; Haesbaert, 2020; Tania et al., 2019). Therefore, to occupy and defend territory is also to defend the integrity of bodies, particularly women’s bodies, against patriarchal and colonial systems of control.
Applied to the case of Gandoca-Manzanillo, the framework of cuerpo-territorio reveals how tourism-driven gentrification is not merely an environmental issue but also a biopolitical project that disproportionately affects women defenders and local communities. Development projects not only dispossess communities of their land but also delegitimize their voices, often portraying women activists as “irrational”, “emotional”, or “hysterical”, echoing colonial stereotypes of credibility deficits (Fricker, 2007). Such delegitimization compounds epistemic injustice with bodily vulnerability, placing women on the front line of both ecological and gendered violence.
Thus, cuerpo-territorio in the Latin American philosophical horizon demands a radical rethinking of ethics. It challenges Western dualisms between body and land, nature and culture, subject and object, by showing their mutual imbrication. It calls for bioethics to center embodied, relational, and situated epistemologies—a move that not only honors the struggles of Indigenous and Afro-descendant women but also provides a more truthful account of the ethical stakes of environmental and social justice in the region.
3.4. Decolonial Ethics
The development of decolonial ethics emerges as a response to the ongoing legacies of coloniality, the enduring structures of domination that persist even decades after formal colonialism. Aníbal Quijano (1998) provided the foundational concept of the coloniality of power, which describes how modernity itself was built upon racial hierarchies, epistemic domination, and the dispossession of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples (Quijano, 2000). From this perspective, ethics cannot be abstracted from history: it must acknowledge how colonial violence continues to shape present political, ecological, and epistemological arrangements (Quijano, 2024, 2000, 1998). In Gandoca-Manzanillo, the commodification of nature under tourism and “green” development exemplifies this coloniality of power, where ecosystems and local communities are subordinated to global capital and elite interests.
Building on Quijano, Walter Mignolo & Arturo Escobar (2010) argue for a decolonial option, which entails delinking from Western epistemic frameworks and affirming pluriversality, the recognition of multiple ways of knowing and being in the world. Escobar (2018) emphasizes the necessity of moving beyond “one-world world” thinking, which assumes a universal model of development, toward a “pluriverse” in which Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local ecological epistemologies are given equal legitimacy. In this sense, decolonial ethics entails epistemic humility: the recognition that Western technoscientific rationality cannot be the sole arbiter of truth in environmental governance.
Sylvia Wynter (2003) extends this critique by showing how coloniality is not only material but ontological: the modern/colonial order constructed the category of “Man” as a universal subject while rendering racialized, gendered, and colonized bodies as “other” and less-than-human. Decolonial ethics thus demands the rehumanization of those excluded from the category of the fully human, acknowledging the interrelation between ecological destruction and the denial of humanity to colonized peoples (Wynter, 2003). Dussel (2013) situates this within his ethics of liberation, which critiques Eurocentric ethics for universalizing categories while ignoring the voices of the oppressed. For Dussel, ethics must begin with the “face of the Other”, a Levinasian notion he radicalizes to include the structurally excluded (Dussel, 2013). Ethics, therefore, is praxis; it requires listening to those who suffer under systems of domination and transforming unjust structures accordingly (Dussel, 2013).
Gandhi (2018) expands this critique through postcolonial theory, arguing that coloniality operates not only through the domination of land and bodies but also through the control of narratives. By monopolizing whose voices are deemed legitimate in public discourse, states perpetuate epistemic neocolonialism that erases local histories and delegitimizes subaltern knowledge (Gandhi, 2018). Therefore, defending ontologies is not only about what we argue, but the language through which we argue it, especially in the context of Latin America. When language becomes a site of decolonial struggle, the decision to preserve the term cuerpo-territorio in Spanish, even within an English-language academic text, is itself a form of epistemic and political resistance.
Applied to Gandoca-Manzanillo, decolonial ethics reveals that the conflict is not reducible to administrative failure or tourism mismanagement but is instead a continuation of colonial logics that commodify land, silence Indigenous and Afro-descendant voices, and privilege technocratic solutions over situated knowledges. A decolonial bioethics calls for epistemic justice, ecological humility, and the recognition of plural ways of inhabiting and defending the world (Quijano, 2014; Escobar, 2018; Quijano, 1998). It is not only an academic exercise but a political and ethical imperative to resist historical erasures and foster alternative futures rooted in dignity, ecology, and community. To let cuerpo-territorio remain in Spanish is to honor this pluriversality, acknowledging that some concepts must remain untranslatable if philosophy is to take seriously the plurality of worlds and ways of knowing.
4. La Loca De Gandoca and Costa Rica
The literary dimension of this study is anchored in Anacristina Rossi (1992)’s novel La Loca de Gandoca, which serves as a cultural and epistemic artifact through which broader ethical and political questions are explored. The novel is presented not only as fiction, but as testimony of the author herself, a Latin American literary genre that blurs the boundaries between personal experience, collective memory, and political denunciation. Through the lens of the protagonist, a woman labeled as “crazy” for defending a coastal wetland against illegal development, Rossi offers a sharp critique of Costa Rica’s environmental hypocrisy and the social cost of progress.
The novel then becomes more than a literary work; it is a literary-political archive that documents environmental degradation, institutional corruption, and the marginalization of Indigenous and coastal voices long before these issues entered public discourse. As such, I will argue that La Loca de Gandoca is a foundational text for any ethical-philosophical inquiry into gentrification, ecological justice, and the epistemologies of resistance in Costa Rica, especially when discussing Gandoca-Manzanillo.
To situate La Loca de Gandoca within the present, it is essential to move beyond a purely literary analysis and contextualize the novel in Costa Rica’s shifting political and ecological landscape. Contemporary parliamentary debates reveal the contradictions of a nation internationally celebrated as “green”, while simultaneously advancing development models that threaten fragile ecosystems and marginalize coastal and Indigenous communities, with some currently investigated for influence peddling involving several members of the government. Yet, understanding these tensions requires more than official records; it demands listening to the silenced or disregarded sources that academic discourse often neglects: investigative journalism, independent podcasts, testimonies of environmental defenders, and the lived experiences of Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous populations.
4.1. The Book: La Loca de Gandoca
In the Latin American tradition, literature is not merely a form of artistic expression; it functions as a socio-political intervention. La Loca de Gandoca (Rossi, 1992)—“The Mad Woman of Gandoca”—by Costa Rican author Anacristina Rossi stands as one of the most powerful examples of this tradition. A hybrid of autobiographical narrative, testimonial literature, and eco-political denunciation, the novel fictionalizes real environmental struggles in the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge, a biodiversity hotspot on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast.
Anacristina Rossi is one of Costa Rica’s most influential contemporary authors, known for her feminist, ecological, and anti-colonial literary voice. A scholar and polyglot with training in literature and translation, Rossi has consistently used fiction as a vehicle for social commentary, addressing the ethical contradictions of Costa Rica’s self-image as a “green” and “peaceful” country. Her commitment to environmental activism is not symbolic. Rossi personally witnessed and investigated the illegal activities around Gandoca, engaging with local communities, journalists, and environmental NGOs. When traditional legal and institutional routes failed to stop ecological damage, and despite receiving death threats for her involvement, she turned to fiction as a form of literary resistance, resulting in the novel La Loca de Gandoca.
Her position as both insider and dissenter, as a privileged urban intellectual who sides with marginalized coastal communities, allowed Rossi to embody a complex positionality. She represents a bridge between formal institutions and grassroots resistance, giving voice to the “silenced knowledge” of those dismissed as “irrational”, “hysterical”, or “mad”. Hence, the “Loca”—“Mad Woman”—of the title is not merely a character, but a literary-political figure who questions whose voices are granted authority in defining ecological truth.
The novel’s protagonist, whose name is never revealed, embarks on a seemingly simple trip to the Gandoca-Manzanillo reserve for ecological tourism and rest. What she finds, however, is far from paradise: illegal construction projects, private appropriation of mangroves and beaches, and the clear collusion of governmental institutions with corporate interests. As she investigates further, she is met with disbelief, bureaucratic gaslighting, and even threats to her life. Her descent into what others perceive as “madness” mirrors her increasing clarity about the moral rot behind Costa Rica’s green facade. Through hallucinatory images, intense emotional registers, and confrontations with nature itself, the narrative blurs the line between ecological devastation and psychological unraveling, suggesting that to see clearly in a corrupt world is itself a form of madness.
She begins to identify with the land, feeling its pain, absorbing its wounds, and defending it as one would a violated body. This is a literary articulation of the cuerpo-territorio epistemology long before the term entered academic discourse. Her madness is, in fact, a lucid ethical stance, a refusal to normalize destruction masked as development. Through the voice of its protagonist, who is dismissed as “la loca” (the madwoman), Rossi denounces the illegal appropriation of protected lands, the complicity of governmental institutions, and the silencing of local resistance.
La Loca de Gandoca is considered to be the first Costa Rican narrative to directly expose the mechanisms of institutional betrayal, gendered silencing, and the criminalization of dissent that continue to characterize environmental struggles in Costa Rica today (Ray, 2012). Ray (2012) states that La Loca de Gandoca is a testimonial ecofeminist/decolonial critique of state–corporate alliances in Costa Rica that sacrifice nature and local communities in the name of “progress” and “ecotourism”. The figure of the “madwoman” is deeply symbolic, invoking the archetype of women who, by defying dominant narratives, are pathologized and excluded. In a country globally celebrated for its environmental policies, Rossi’s novel reveals a parallel reality: one in which legality is selectively enforced, ecological zones are sacrificed for private interest, and whistleblowers are dismissed or persecuted. A reality that is not only pertinent but painfully urgent today, over three decades later.
The enduring relevance of this narrative lies in its capacity to forecast a pattern now visible across Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, functioning both as an archive of history and a prophetic call for the future: a warning. Its protagonist’s battle, once seen as exceptional, has become emblematic of the broader experience of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and rural communities facing the encroachment of tourist resorts, gated communities, and “eco-luxury” developments. The novel thus refuses to be confined to literary history; it resurfaces as a mirror that reflects the hypocrisy of current policies, where environmental discourse is co-opted by political elites even as development projects threaten the very ecosystems they claim to protect. This book functions not only as a call to remember but as a call to action today, demanding an ethical reckoning with the costs of economic growth that erode both nature and the communities that have historically protected it.
By positioning La Loca de Gandoca within this project’s philosophical inquiry, the narrative becomes a site of epistemic resistance: an articulation of knowledges often excluded from institutional discourse. It embodies a situated, affective, and ethically committed form of knowledge production that is central to both feminist philosophy and environmental ethics. Rather than a secondary source, the novel is treated here as a legitimate voice in the philosophical archive, one that demands to be read, heard, and responded to. In revisiting this text, this project seeks not to monumentalize the past, but to reanimate its call: that true ecological ethics must come from below, from the margins, from the voices declared too emotional, too radical, too mad to be credible. For in this madness lies truth. In these literary voices lies resistance. And in Gandoca, as Rossi knew, the future of ethical development in Costa Rica remains an open, urgent question.
4.2. Political Context and Silencing
The silencing of marginalized voices has long shaped Costa Rica’s environmental and political discourse, and the case of Gandoca-Manzanillo makes this violence particularly visible. As Dotson (2011) explains, testimonial quieting occurs when members of oppressed groups are dismissed as incapable of producing valid knowledge, while testimonial smothering arises when they self-censor because their testimony is deemed “unsafe”, unlikely to be taken seriously, or even dangerous to share. Both forms are visible in Costa Rica’s treatment of Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and coastal communities, whose ecological knowledge and testimonies of dispossession are consistently disregarded in development debates. This dynamic mirrors the silencing exposed in Rossi’s La Loca de Gandoca, where the warnings of local communities were ignored in favor of extractive, short-term economic interests.
That silencing, however, has only deepened in recent years. The Gandoca-Manzanillo case exemplifies how even laws declared unconstitutional in 2019 continue to be ignored, with more than 122,000 m2 of protected land remaining in private hands despite judicial rulings. Allegations of corruption, including suspicious tree-cutting permits and irregular concessions granted to Alan Pacheco Dent, a friend and neighbor of President Rodrigo Chaves, have sparked national outrage, exposing a system where environmental law is selectively applied. Here, epistemic injustice becomes institutional: communities and deputies who call attention to these irregularities are painted as irrational troublemakers rather than legitimate political actors.
The hypocrisy of Costa Rica’s political leadership is laid bare in the president’s own words. In an August 2024 press conference, Rodrigo Chaves directly invoked La Loca de Gandoca not as a literary or ecological warning, but as a tool of ridicule against those defending Gandoca-Manzanillo, specifically alluding in a mocking way to the sexuality of one of the parliament deputies defending Gandoca-Manzanillo. With derision, he cast environmental defenders as “Locas”, reducing decades of community struggle to hysteria and spectacle. This was not an offhand joke: it was an official gesture of state-sanctioned trivialization, turning a novel that denounced ecological and political corruption into a weapon of mockery against parliamentarians and grassroots resistance. By labeling deputy Ariel Robles a communist and then stating that “communists lie when they speak, hide when they are silent, and steal when they govern”, the president revealed the extent to which childish insults and ideological scapegoating are deployed to silence critical voices. Such rhetoric is not only offensive; it exposes the ethical bankruptcy of a government that claims global leadership in sustainability while actively discrediting those who demand accountability at home. The deliberate use of Rossi’s novel in this context underscores its enduring relevance and highlights the dangerous strategy of trivialization as a form of biopolitical control, where the defense of life and territory is delegitimized through ridicule.
Parliamentary debates have amplified these contradictions. Deputy Ariel Robles has insisted: “We want tourism with rights, not tourism that swallows the coasts and expels fishing communities”, defending a vision of community-led tourism over extractive development. Deputy Jonathan Acuña has denounced death threats to environmental leaders in Talamanca, threats that the Minister of Environment and Energy, Franz Tattenbach Capra, publicly minimized, epitomizing testimonial injustice by dismissing life-threatening testimonies as unverified. Deputy Rocío Alfaro likewise warned, “We cannot keep calling sustainable a model that expels native people and communities from their territory”, pointing to the contradiction between Costa Rica’s “green” image and the dispossession embedded in its policies.
Furthermore, Deputy Kattia Cambronero has highlighted the Minister, Franz Tattenbach’s, failure to enforce the 2019 ruling that required the restitution of illegally privatized land. Cambronero exposes how state institutions themselves have become complicit in dispossession. Her interventions underscore that environmental governance in Costa Rica is not only a matter of technical mismanagement, but of deliberate political choices that privilege private capital over the public and ecological good. All these parliamentary, public record interventions and the responses of the people in charge reveal how systemic silencing operates not only at the level of marginalized communities but also within the very institutions meant to safeguard democratic participation.
Independent journalism has emerged as a counterforce to this silencing. Outlets like La Hora Tica by David Barrientos have documented the irregular permits tied to Pacheco Dent, the Ministry of Environment, and its alleged connections to the President, offering transcripts and testimonies that the state refuses to acknowledge. La Voz de Guanacaste, on the other coast, has provided hyperlocal accounts of gentrification and dispossession, publishing testimonies highlighting how coastal residents can no longer afford to live or even buy food in their communities: “They tell us it is progress, but for whom? We can no longer live here, nor buy food in the supermarket.” These voices remind us that silencing is never total; resistance finds cracks in the system through podcasts, grassroots organizing, and local media that insist on recording truths deemed inconvenient for the state.
In this sense, the political context of Gandoca-Manzanillo is not only a local crisis but a national mirror. La Voz de Guanacaste is here just an example of how these problems do not stop at Gandoca-Manzanillo; from Nosara to Talamanca, the same dynamics of dispossession, gentrification, and silencing repeat, all while Costa Rica exports its image as a global environmental leader. To confront this contradiction, philosophy and bioethics must legitimize these so-called “unofficial” sources—testimonies, journalism, community memory—as valid epistemic contributions. Only then can the epistemic oppression that sustains gentrification as a form of biopolitical control be dismantled.
4.3. Gentrification as Biopolitical Control
Gentrification in Costa Rica cannot be reduced to urban development or tourism expansion; it must be understood as a biopolitical project that reorganizes life, territory, and belonging according to the logic of neoliberal extraction. Gentrification functions as a form of governance that determines which populations are valued and which are rendered expendable. As González-Argote & Maldonado (2024) argue, displacement under the guise of neighborhood improvement is not merely an economic phenomenon but a political strategy that redefines who belongs in the urban landscape. Drawing from Foucault (2008)’s theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, gentrification functions as a form of governance that determines which populations are deemed valuable and which are rendered expendable. However, because Foucault theorized biopolitics from within European modernity, this paper adopts the concept through a decolonial lens that foregrounds its racial–colonial foundations. Following Quijano (2000, 2024), the coloniality of power predates and structures biopolitical governance in Latin America, meaning that decisions about whose life is protected and whose life is exposed to harm are inseparable from histories of racialization, land dispossession, and capitalist extraction. In the same vein, Golio (2025) demonstrates that gentrification profoundly affects residents’ sense of belonging and political participation, turning community spaces into arenas of social control. Together, these analyses reveal gentrification as a system of displacement that enacts power over territory and life itself, deciding who can remain and who must be removed in the name of “progress”.
In Gandoca-Manzanillo, biopolitical control manifests through irregular permits, land concessions, and selective enforcement of environmental law. As La Hora Tica reported, over 122,000 m² of protected maritime-terrestrial zone remains in private hands despite the 2019 constitutional ruling mandating its return, an issue that has also been discussed in the parliament (Sala Constitucional de la Corte Suprema de Justicia de Costa Rica, 2019). These concessions, often linked to political elites, their allies, and even friends, represent not merely legal irregularities but deliberate acts of dispossession. The people most affected are Afro-descendant fishing families, Bribri indigenous communities, and long-standing residents who embody relational and ecological ways of life that do not align with the tourism-industrial complex or private interests of the elite. When these groups raise their voices, they are subjected to epistemic violence and silencing strategies (Dotson, 2011), dismissed as hysterical, irrational, or obstacles to development.
The Gandoca case is not isolated. In Guanacaste, gentrification has reached such extremes that local people are being legally targeted for defending their territories. The recent case of Enjoy Hotels in Playa Panamá illustrates this dynamic: legal measures were taken against community advocate and influencer Juan Bautista Alfaro and other public critics. In his case, they embargoed his assets as a “precautionary measure” before any lawsuit had even been filed; his crime was openly speaking about the Enjoy Hotels project on his private social media. This tactic exemplifies how gentrification operates not just materially, but juridically and discursively, weaponizing the law to silence dissent. As Rodríguez Núñez (2023) and Robledo (2023) note in their studies on Latin American gentrification, displacement is not an accidental byproduct of development but an intentional strategy of socio-spatial control that redefines who has the right to exist in a given place.
The ethical dimension of gentrification lies in its dual erasure: ecological and cultural. On one hand, ecosystems are fragmented by luxury resorts, golf courses, and privatized lands, echoing findings by Castilla (2024) on extractivism-driven expulsions in Argentina. On the other, communities are stripped of their histories and ties to land, priced out of their homes, and rendered invisible in decision-making processes (Cordero, 2021). For Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and coastal communities, land and body are not separable entities but a co-constitutive unity (Cabnal, 2010; Rodríguez Castro, 2020). When territory is dispossessed, it is not only the loss of economic livelihood or cultural landscape, but the very wounding of the body itself, its autonomy, its memory, and its capacity for continuity (Martínez, 2023; Tania et al., 2019; Cabnal, 2010). The violence of gentrification therefore operates both on the soil and on the flesh, severing relational ways of life in order to impose extractive and commodified logics of existence (Martínez, 2023; Tania et al., 2019).
In Costa Rica, this violence is disguised under the global image of “sustainable tourism” as justification for the displacement of natives in the name of progress. Sustainability becomes a marketing tool while the structural violence of gentrification is erased from public discourse. From a bioethical standpoint, ignoring local testimony constitutes an act of epistemic injustice, depriving communities of their role as legitimate knowers in decisions that affect their survival (Fricker, 2007; Scully, 2020). To dismiss their warnings is to silence not only political claims but also embodied epistemologies rooted in cuerpo-territorio, knowledges inseparable from the lived, bodily experience of the land itself.
By treating territory as an economic asset and local communities as expendable, gentrification functions as an act of slow violence, a gradual but devastating reconfiguration of land and life that prioritizes profit over justice. Its persistence in Gandoca-Manzanillo, and beyond, underscores the need for a decolonial bioethics that recognizes grassroots testimony as epistemically valid and politically binding. To resist gentrification is therefore not only to defend land and culture, but also to reclaim epistemic agency against the silencing practices that sustain biopolitical control. These narratives, when read alongside Rossi’s novel, expose gentrification not as a neutral byproduct of globalization but as a form of biopolitical control, regulating both territory and bodies in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies (Quijano, 2024; Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). By foregrounding these non-traditional sources, this work seeks to restore epistemic legitimacy to voices that are typically erased from environmental governance, thereby offering a more realistic and ethically grounded account of the stakes of ecological struggle in Gandoca-Manzanillo.
5. Discussion
The persistence of the Gandoca-Manzanillo conflict demonstrates a haunting truth: Costa Rica’s political machinery has not changed in substance since the publication of La Loca de Gandoca in 1992. It has only become more sophisticated, more hypocritical, and more silent. The same dynamics of land appropriation, environmental destruction, and silencing of marginalized voices continue, now dressed in the language of “green growth” and “sustainable tourism”. That this novel remains urgent more than thirty years later is not only heartbreaking; it is enraging. It reveals that the state, instead of dismantling the colonial structures of power, has perfected them. What Aníbal Quijano (2000) called the coloniality of power remains alive: racialized dispossession, epistemic marginalization, and territorial violence persist beneath the varnish of a country sold internationally as a “Pura Vida” paradise.
At the center of this crisis lies a fundamental ethical failure: epistemic injustice. Following Miranda Fricker (2007), testimonial and hermeneutical injustices occur when people are wronged in their very capacity as knowers. In Gandoca-Manzanillo, native communities and environmental defenders have been persistently discredited as irrational, emotional, or hysterical when voicing concerns about dispossession and ecological collapse. Their testimonies are not granted credibility within institutional channels, just as depicted in La Loca de Gandoca three decades ago, precisely because they emerge from socially marginalized positions. Dotson (2011)’s account of testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering deepens this diagnosis. In Costa Rica, both occur violently today; for example, when Deputy Jonathan Acuña confronted the Minister of Environment about death threats against leaders in Talamanca, the minister minimized them, refusing to “confirm” their reality. This is not mere negligence; it is epistemic oppression, the denial of life-threatening testimonies as politically irrelevant. Even more disturbingly, President Rodrigo Chaves himself invoked Rossi’s novel to mock the opposition, reducing the defense of Gandoca-Manzanillo to an “escandalillo”—“little drama”—in an attempt to ridicule Deputy Ariel Robles as “loca”, a phrase that in Costa Rican culture carries both misogynistic and homophobic connotations. This childish cruelty from the highest office illustrates the continuity of epistemic violence as governance.
The refusal to grant epistemic weight to grassroots voices has material consequences. Development, touristic, and private projects advance with partial or manipulated environmental assessments, while the testimonies of communities, who carry intergenerational ecological knowledge, are erased or diminished. The result is what Resnik (2003) calls epistemic arrogance: privileging state-sanctioned expertise over situated wisdom. The irony is devastating; those who have lived in balance with these ecosystems for centuries are deemed ignorant, while those who destroy them in the name of sustainability are celebrated as visionaries. Although La Loca de Gandoca by Anacristina Rossi offers a powerful ecofeminist critique, it too reveals the limits of the hegemonic narrative, at times speaking for rather than with Indigenous and Afro-descendant actors (Ray, 2012). This ambivalence underscores the need for a self-critical decolonial posture in academia to center silenced voices as co-producers of knowledge, rather than instrumentalizing them as literary symbols.
Here the precautionary principle must be reasserted, not as bureaucratic jargon but as ethical praxis. As Resnik (2003, 2021) reminds us, precaution is not about halting progress but about acknowledging uncertainty and protecting the vulnerable in contexts of ecological risk. In Costa Rica, however, precaution is routinely sidelined. Projects move forward with flawed or corrupted environmental impact studies, while the long-term risks, both ecological and social, are silenced. Not to mention the failure of the system to enact justice even when legal proof of wrongdoing is provided, like the unconstitutional ruling of 2019 that is to this day waiting for the restitution of the illegally privatized lands. This disregard for precaution is not only procedural irresponsibility; it is a form of temporal injustice, privileging the short-term profits of investors over the long-term survival of ecosystems and communities. La Loca de Gandoca warned us decades ago that by the time certainty arrives, the damage will be irreversible. Today, this is not fiction. It is reality.
Against this backdrop, the framework of cuerpo-territorio, articulated by Lorena Cabnal (2010), offers a profound ethical counterpoint. Cuerpo-territorio refuses the Western dualism between body and land. The body is not a metaphor for territory; it is territory (Patiño Niño, 2023; Rodríguez Castro, 2020). To dispossess land is to violate bodies; to exploit ecosystems is to reproduce violence against women and racialized communities (Rodríguez Castro, 2020; Haesbaert, 2020; Tania et al., 2019). Rossi’s protagonist embodies this connection: her anguish at the destruction of Gandoca is experienced as a wound in her own flesh, a madness born not of delusion but of ethical clarity. What makes La Loca de Gandoca politically explosive is its insistence that silenced voices—those of coastal women, Indigenous communities, fisherfolk, and subsistence farmers—are the first and most reliable witnesses of ecological collapse. To ignore the novel today is to participate in the very epistemic injustice Rossi dramatized: the dismissal of inconvenient truths spoken from the margins. In this sense, the novel anchors a critical genealogy of Costa Rican environmental politics, exposing how the machinery of gentrification and “eco-tourism” operates as a biopolitical strategy to control land, bodies, and narratives.
Gentrification and ecological destruction are not neutral planning failures but biopolitical projects that scar both soil and skin, uprooting cultural memory, dismantling livelihoods, and violating bodily autonomy. To defend Gandoca-Manzanillo is thus to defend the right to live as cuerpo-territorio in dignity. Gentrification in Costa Rica is not simply tourism expansion or urban development; it is a biopolitical weapon. Following Foucault (2008), gentrification governs populations by deciding who belongs, who must leave, and who can remain as commodified background for tourist consumption. In Gandoca-Manzanillo, irregular permits and concessions to allies of political elites, such as Alan Pacheco Dent, President Chaves’s friend, reveal how land is systematically transformed into private capital despite constitutional and legal protections. In Guanacaste, the Enjoy Hotels project has gone further: using legal measures to freeze the assets of activists like Juan Bautista Alfaro simply for voicing concerns on social media. This is not development. It is punishment, a juridical silencing of dissent. These tactics exemplify the biopolitical face of neoliberalism: communities are not only displaced but legally punished for defending themselves. Gentrification here exposes its true nature: not modernization but expulsion, not sustainability but slow violence.
To remain neutral in this context is to side with oppression. The silencing of Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous, and coastal community voices in Gandoca-Manzanillo, the ridicule of parliamentarians who defend them, the complicity of ministries that deny threats, and the greenwashing exported to the world all form part of a machinery of epistemic oppression that must be dismantled. Decolonial bioethics demands not only recognition but restitution: land back, epistemic justice, and the integration of community knowledge as binding in political decision-making (Escobar, 2018; Dussel, 2013; Mignolo & Escobar, 2010; Wynter, 2003). Literature, journalism, and testimony converge into a counter-archive. La Loca de Gandoca, La Hora Tica, La Voz de Guanacaste, and the voices of the communities reveal what official reports deny: that Costa Rica’s “green development” is built on silencing, displacement, and dispossession. These are not marginal anecdotes but central truths that must enter academic, legal, and political discourse.
In the path to decolonize ethics and philosophy, I believe what matters is not only what we argue, but the language through which we argue. The decision to preserve the term Cuerpo-Territorio in Spanish, even within an English-language academic text, is itself a form of epistemic and political resistance. Translation, in many academic contexts, risks becoming an act of appropriation: it domesticates non-Western concepts into categories already legible to Eurocentric philosophy, smoothing their edges so they fit into pre-established frameworks. To refuse such translation is to disrupt the colonial demand for accessibility and, instead, affirm the right of concepts to remain rooted in their own epistemic soil. It is not only an academic exercise, but a political and ethical imperative to resist historical erasures and foster alternative futures rooted in dignity, ecology, and community. It signals that philosophy must learn to listen to concepts in their own voice, even if that means accepting discomfort, opacity, or the limits of translation. In this sense, cuerpo-territorio is not simply a term, but a philosophical demand for epistemic humility and ethical recognition.
This analysis stems from an ethical urgency, as neutrality in this context enables continued harm. The fact that La Loca de Gandoca remains painfully relevant decades later means the machinery of power has not been dismantled; it has only learned to operate more quietly. This means that silence is complicity. That silence is violence. To defend Gandoca-Manzanillo, to amplify the testimonies of communities, to insist on the epistemic validity of cuerpo-territorio, is to resist colonial ethics and its biopolitical control. It is to affirm that our bodies and our lands are not for sale. It is to say that autonomy, dignity, and ecological survival are not negotiable.
The call is urgent: we must create the resources to inform, educate, and act. We cannot protect what we do not know. We cannot resist what we do not name. This project, and the voices it amplifies, aims to break that silence. To make readers angry. To move them to despair. But above all, to move them to action. Because neutrality is surrender. And in Costa Rica today, surrender means the destruction of our territory, our bodies, our democracy, our freedom, and our future.
6. Conclusion
The story of La Loca de Gandoca, the testimonies of communities in Limón and Guanacaste, and the voices emerging from independent journalism and grassroots resistance all converge on a single truth: Costa Rica’s so-called environmental paradise is built upon layers of silence. Silences in parliament, where Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities are spoken about but rarely spoken with, and the deputies who speak on their behalf are often ridiculed. Silences in academia, where testimonies and podcasts are dismissed as “unofficial” and therefore unworthy of citation. Silences in the political discourse, where even the president mocks those who defend the land, reducing their cries for action and justice to noise. These are not innocent omissions. They are mechanisms of power and oppression. They are forms of epistemic injustice.
To recognize this injustice is not enough. As Dotson (2011) reminds us, epistemic violence is not a metaphor but a lived reality: it robs communities not only of their voice but of their very capacity to exist as knowers. In Costa Rica, this violence takes shape through the criminalization of environmental defenders, the manipulation of environmental impact studies, and the slow violence of gentrification that expels people from their homes in the name of “eco-tourism”. The result is a double dispossession: of land and of knowledge, of body and of territory.
The theoretical frameworks explored illuminate the ethical depth of this conflict. They show us that what is at stake in Gandoca-Manzanillo is not just a forest, a mangrove, or a reef. What is at stake is the possibility of living differently: of organizing society around care rather than capital, of listening rather than silencing, of recognizing that the defense of land is also the defense of the body, of memory, and of autonomy. Cuerpo-territorio insists that there is no justice for ecosystems without justice for the communities that embody them (Cabnal, 2010).
Thus, the path forward requires a radical shift: the incorporation of “unofficial” voices as valid and binding sources of knowledge in both politics and academia. To exclude them is to reproduce the very colonial hierarchies we claim to resist. To include them is to practice what Dussel (2013) calls an ethics of liberation: an ethics that begins with those who suffer and that reconfigures knowledge not as domination but as dialogue. Recognizing and resisting epistemic injustice is therefore not simply a scholarly concern; it is the first step toward a decolonial bioethics, where epistemic plurality and justice are integral to ecological and social survival.
The urgency is clear. Neutrality is no longer an option. Doing nothing is to surrender to the violence of gentrification, to accept the commodification of both nature and life, and to legitimize a system that displaces, silences, and destroys. To listen, to cite, to validate, and to amplify the voices that power seeks to erase is an act of resistance. It is to refuse complicity. La Loca de Gandoca has endured for more than three decades because it names what official discourse hides. It teaches us that madness, in the eyes of the powerful, is often nothing more than the refusal to stay silent. Today, the so-called “Locas of Gandoca”—women defenders, Indigenous leaders, independent journalists, parliamentary representatives—continue to scream, and their screams must be understood not as noise but as knowledge. To hear them is to recognize that our bodies, our territories, and our futures are inseparable.
The task of philosophy, then, is not to translate their voices into acceptable terms for the academy. The task is to make space for them to be heard in their own terms, in their own languages, even when that means refusing translation itself. This project therefore calls for more than analysis. It calls for responsibility. For indignation. For courage. Because to know is to protect. To listen is to resist. And to resist is the only way we will ensure that Gandoca-Manzanillo, and all the cuerpo-territorios that sustain life, are not reduced to silence. To love Costa Rica is to speak its truths. To resist its erasures. Do not be afraid to be the next “La Loca”, from Gandoca or anywhere else. To make sure these voices are never dismissed again as madness, but heard as the most lucid voice in the room.