Between 2019 and 2023 in Abangares, medical visits for respiratory conditions exceeded the national average by 250%, and the rate of significant accommodations in elementary schools and high schools in Abangares is the highest in Guanacaste, nearly double that of the rest of the country.
At first glance, the natural beauty of Abangares lies in the green and lush mountains that surround the community. However, today they are more like cheeses full of holes due to the deep tunnels and caves created by the use of dynamite and the continuous excavation by miners.
“This place is hollowed out everywhere,” says miner Pedro in front of a rock face he started digging a few weeks ago. Some black streaks in the limestone signal to him that there’s gold there, and it’s a good spot to explore.
That dark trace is not Pedro’s only guide for using dynamite. Without helmets or protective gear, the miners rely solely on the “engineering of common sense” provided by more than 130 years of “gold mining history,” as they call it in the area.
“Just so you get an idea, that road up there, everything underneath is hollowed out. It’s like saying the road is passing right above us,” explains Pedro during a tour with The Voice of Guanacaste and Interferencia de Radios UCR to investigate the effects of mining on people’s health in Abangares.
The tunnels are gradually depleting the mountain, running alongside each other, below, above… a miscalculation could cause the rocks to collapse, with fatal consequences.
That’s how a miner died in 2023 after falling into a mine. In 2021, Paulino Gerardo Arguedas also lost his life after falling into one of the tunnels. Two other miners died in the tragic February of 2020 while working in the same mine.
In Abangares, death does not faze the miners. They have no other choice because most of the community relies on this activity. Pedro himself normalizes the accidents, commenting that “thank God” it has been a long time since anyone has died.
Beyond the falling rocks, the collapsing ladders, the dynamite, and falls into hundreds of meters deep tunnels, the mining community is exposed daily to the fumes of one of the most toxic elements in nature: mercury. They handle it in their homes, amid their families, without gloves, without masks, and guided by the same common sense with which they risk their lives in the tunnels.
The school of chemistry at the National University of Mexico describes mercury as a silvery, heavy, and slightly volatile liquid metal at room temperature. According to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), human contact with this metal is toxic to the nervous and immune systems, as well as to the digestive system, skin, lungs, kidneys, and eyes.
In Abangares, they buy mercury on the illegal market and mix it with the material extracted from the mines in a type of mill called a rastra. This process produces an amalgam, which is then burned in artisanal retorts, closed containers that function like a furnace. The heat causes the mercury to change from liquid to gas, separating the gold from the rock. The substance is invisible when it evaporates, and there is no way for the miners to be certain how much mercury they are inhaling.
Due to the high cost of mercury, about ¢75,000 per pound (453 grams) (around $145), as confirmed by The Voice at the mines, the mining community has methods to recover it once the gold extraction process is completed. According to an action plan for artisanal gold extraction presented by the Ministry of Environment and Energy (Spanish acronym: Minae) in January 2023, with that pound of mercury, the mining population can process about 2.5 tons of material. In each process, they lose approximately 16.7% of the mercury used: 0.4% evaporates into the air, and the rest remains as sediments.
A 2017 thesis by Dr. Nathalie Verónica Fernández warned that they do not recover mercury entirely and noted that exposure to this element during the burning process is 2.5 times higher than the limit set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
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In Abangares, there is a hypothesis that, during the investigation, is repeatedly mentioned: mercury in the environment is making the population sick. This is suspected by Ricardo Díaz Cajina, the director of the Health Area Directorate of Abangares; a doctor and researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Horacio Chamizo, and miner Tomás.
They think so, but none can confirm it, not necessarily because they are unaware of the health consequences of prolonged exposure to mercury fumes, but because there are no studies on the presence of this chemical in the air of Abangares. Additionally, health authorities have not conducted the necessary blood and urine tests to detect the amount of mercury in the population.
Some mining families process the material in their yards, including the stage where mercury turns into a gaseous state. Photo: César Arroyo Castro.
But for Dr. Chamizo, the high incidence of certain conditions related to the nervous and cardiovascular systems, respiratory infections, and the significant number of curriculum accommodations requested by students in Abangares are red flags that reveal the urgent need to understand mercury concentrations.
Pie de foto: Some mining families process the material in their yards, including the stage where mercury turns into a gaseous state. Photo: César Arroyo Castro.
The population of Abangares, for example, shows a higher number of cardiovascular or respiratory problems compared to the rest of the country, according to an analysis conducted by The Voice using data from the Ministry of Health, the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (Spanish acronym: CCSS), and the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Costa Rica (Spanish acronym: INEC).
The Voice calculated the incidence rates of these diseases in Abangares and compared them with the national averages.
Between 2019 and 2023, in this canton of Guanacaste, the CCSS recorded an annual average that exceeds by 250% the medical visits for respiratory infections per 100 inhabitants compared to the rest of the country.
The norm in Costa Rica is that 20 out of every 100 people seek medical attention for respiratory conditions, while in Abangares, 55 out of every 100 patients are treated for respiratory problems.
Similarly, an alarming 50% increase is documented in the number of people in Abangares seeking medical attention for blood pressure issues. The national average for hypertensive patients is 32 out of every 100 treated by the CCSS, but in this mining region of Guanacaste, the number of patients treated for high blood pressure rises to 49 out of every 100.
Although there is not enough evidence—since neither the CCSS nor the Ministry of Health has conducted specific measurements to determine whether these diseases in Abangares are a result of mercury exposure—these conditions align with health issues associated with inhaling the element.
“We are talking about one of the most powerful neurotoxic agents known (…) The [Abangares] community has been working with mercury for many years, so it’s to be expected that the long-term effects may already be starting to show,” comments Dr. Chamizo.
The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that mercury exposure also influences cognitive disorders.
Data from the Ministry of Public Education (Spanish acronym: MEP) shows that students in Abangares are also more likely to require accommodations compared to the rest of the country.
Between 2019 and 2022, the incidence rate of significant accommodations in schools and high schools in Abangares was the highest in Guanacaste and nearly doubled compared to the rest of the country. Significant accommodations occur when the curriculum requires changes to meet the individual needs of students.
Artisanal mining is only permitted in Abangares; however, most miners in the canton work illegally, and as a result, they hide their occupation when they seek emergency care.
Although the Abangares Clinic received approximately eight calls per month in 2021 for accidents caused by mining activities, the Dr. Enrique Baltodano Briceño Hospital, which serves the population of the canton, has no record of having treated any miners, according to the book “Gold Mining from a Public Health Perspective” by Chamizo and researcher Mónica Jiménez.
Amidst the uncertainty surrounding mining activities, Chamizo provides three reasons to explain why the hospital has no record of treating miners: they were stabilized at the clinic, they died, or the patients hide their occupation from authorities because mining is involved in various levels of illegality.
“By not identifying themselves as such, this information is lost in the patient’s record.” What Chamizo explains is just one of the layers complicating the response to his hypothesis.
Another obstacle in identifying the root of the problems is that most miners lack insurance. This allows them to access only emergency medical care, where they are stabilized but do not have access to medical services that provide follow-up on their conditions and help determine the origin of the illness.
“Experience has shown us that they will not seek consultation because they will be billed [for not having insurance]. Obviously, any condition will go unreported in the CCSS. And since they do not use the care, they will likely continue to accumulate their condition,” explains Cajina.
In July 2023, the Ministry of Health published the National Guidelines for Mercury Poisoning Surveillance. This protocol requires health authorities to conduct blood and urine tests to measure mercury levels in anyone suspected of having contact with the chemical. The mining population and residents of Abangares fall into this category of suspects.
Chamizo and Cajina view the protocol positively. For them, it addresses a historical debt regarding access to healthcare for the mining population, and it will finally allow them to determine whether mining activities are making the population of Abangares ill.
However, a year since the protocol was activated, Cajina has not received any results. This means that, to date, health authorities still do not have data.
The medical director of the Abangares Health Area, Huberth Hidalgo, says they cannot test every suspected person. “If we were to send (the test) for all patients who come in with high fever, tremors, or muscle pain to the San Juan de Dios laboratory, they would come back and say, ‘Well… what happened?'”
Hidalgo is critical: if the miners do not come in, we need to go to them.
“The miner does not seek consultation, and without insurance, it becomes almost impossible for us to capture them here. Of course, if this Ministry of Health guideline stated that in mining areas, the Caja could go to the mines to find patients and collect samples, then things would be different. But the guideline does not say that,” he expresses.
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Tomás has been working in the Abangares mines since he was 12 years old and, at 35, speaks with the expertise of a chemist when explaining how mercury enters his body and that of his family.
“When mercury returns to its gaseous state, you absorb it, and it affects your nervous system. It is in its gaseous form that it breaks down into microparticles, which you inhale, and from there, it reaches the bloodstream.”
Neither for the miners nor for the authorities is it a secret that most of the gold is processed in the yards of their homes. They use artisanal rastras. The waste, referred to as lamas, is left in small excavations beside the rastras, some of them in the yards of houses. “It’s like seeing a pool; they simply arrive, make a pool with bags, put plastic over it, and then place it there,” says Tomás. The plastic he mentions is the only filter separating the mercury remnants from the environment.
Mining is a family-involved occupation; the women are responsible for grinding the material in the rastras. This makes them a population continuously exposed to the toxic mercury fumes.
Next to Tomás, his mother Querencia shows one of the three rastras the family owns in their yard; the other two are at her son’s house. As described by Tomás, a plastic sheet covers the waste from the burning process.
In that rastra, Querencia and her daughter process the material brought by the rest of the family. “It has always been this way, family-based. They do the digging, and us women do the processing. And not only here; it’s almost the same in most families,” explains Querencia.
“Around the yard, the little one is playing, the rastra is turning, the mercury container is right there, the child’s toy cart is right next to the mercury, it goes around and falls here and there. There’s another one with the retorta, and the family is playing while the retorta is releasing mercury vapor into the air to burn off or extract the mercury from the gold, and it’s all falling everywhere,” a miner told Chamizo during his research.
While the protocol is being implemented, miners will continue to work in the tunnels every day. Their wives will burn mercury in their yards, and their children will play around the rastras. The hypothesis in Abangares will also persist while health authorities still lack the research to answer: Is mercury making the population of Abangares ill?
Editor’s note: Pedro, Querencia and Tomás are fictitious names used in order to protect the security of the real sources.
Read also the two other investigations:
- Abangares: Washing the illegal gold from Crucitas
- Gold bars worth more than $152 million left Costa Rica
Journalists: Noelia Esquivel Solano, José Pablo Román Barzuna, Ernesto Rivera, Mercedes Agüero, David Chavarría y Hulda Miranda Picado
Photography: Rubén F. Román y César Arroyo Castro
Design: Carolina Corrales y Miguel Méndez
Data architect: Rigoberto Carvajal
Mined Countries is a collaborative investigation by The Voice of Guanacaste and Interferencia by Radios UCR (Costa Rica), Concolón Magazine (Panama), and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), which takes an in-depth look at gold mining and its consequences in Costa Rica and Panama. Supported by the Cross Border Investigative Journalism Fund (FOPIT, in Spanish).
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