Costa Rica likes to think of itself as the exception. A small, peaceful republic nestled between two oceans, crowned with universal healthcare, no army since 1948, and a democratic tradition so stable that political scientists have called it the “Switzerland of Central America.” This flattering self-image — what scholars have long called the “White Legend” (Leyenda Blanca) — is one of the most durable stories in Latin American politics. It is also, according to a meticulous new study by Costa Rican economist José Mauricio Gómez Julián, profoundly misleading.

Published in the Revista de Historia (University of Costa Rica, No. 93, 2026), the article sets out to do something ambitious: not merely to describe the well-documented inequality in Costa Rican land ownership — earlier scholars had already done that — but to explain why a formally democratic state produces, protects, and reproduces extreme agrarian concentration, generation after generation, and why the systematic violation of indigenous territorial rights is not an unfortunate glitch in the system but one of its operating mechanisms.

The answer, the author argues, lies in understanding land dispossession not as a historical accident but as a structural feature of capital accumulation — a process that began with Spanish colonialism, was formalized by the liberal republic, was turbocharged by coffee and banana exports, and continues today under the twin guises of “conservation” and legal impunity.

The Numbers Behind the Myth

Before we get to history, let’s sit with some uncomfortable statistics — the kind that rarely appear in Costa Rica’s tourism brochures.

The Gini coefficient — the standard measure of inequality, where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is total concentration — tells a stark story. In Costa Rica’s southern region, land concentration reaches 0.7258. In Guanacaste’s cattle ranches, it climbs as high as 0.9. Nationally, the figure hovers around 0.796. For perspective: the top 1% of farms holds more than 37% of all agricultural land, while the bottom 39% of farms collectively own just 0.2%.

And the people who work the land? Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Costa Rica’s agricultural workforce is landless — a proportion higher than anywhere else in Central America. In some regions like Coto Brus, more than 90% of farms lack legal titles.

These figures are not from a radical pamphlet. They come from rigorous academic work by scholars like Mitchell Seligson, Marc Edelman, Charles Brockett, Jeffery Paige, and James Dunkerley — researchers who compared census data with actual property records and found that the state’s own statistics systematically underestimate the degree of concentration. Gómez Julián builds on their empirical foundation but adds a layer they largely did not: a categorical political-economic explanation of why this pattern persists within a formally democratic state.

A Timeline of Dispossession: From Encomienda to Enclave

The article reconstructs the history of indigenous land loss in Costa Rica across five major phases. Each one reveals a different mechanism, but all serve the same structural function: clearing land and resources for capital accumulation.

1. Colonial Foundations (pre-1821)

Spanish conquest introduced three key instruments of dispossession: encomiendas (assigning indigenous labor to settlers), reducciones (forced resettlement into concentrated villages), and composiciones fraudulentas (legal maneuvers to convert indigenous land into colonial property). Roman law justified the entire operation by declaring indigenous lands to be property of the Spanish Crown. Though later laws like the Leyes Nuevas of 1542 formally attempted to protect indigenous peoples, the legislation on “vacant lands” (baldíos) declared as empty the very territories where indigenous communities lived, making them available for non-indigenous appropriation. By the end of the colonial period, a fragile but real legal recognition of “indigenous property” still existed through reducciones and “indigenous neighborhoods.” This legal floor is precisely what the post-colonial liberal state would systematically dismantle.

2. The Liberal Republic Strikes (1821–1880)

Independence did not bring recognition — it accelerated dispossession. In 1841, under the dictatorship of Braulio Carrillo, the Código General formally abolished the communal indigenous land regime as a protected legal category. Then, in 1882, Presidential Decree No. XIV declared vast stretches of northern territory — including the homeland of the Maleku people (historically called “Guatuso”) — to be baldíos: vacant state land open to appropriation by non-indigenous settlers and ranchers. The Maleku suffered what the article describes as one of the most intense proportional territorial and demographic reductions in Costa Rican indigenous history.

3. Coffee, the Beneficio, and Silent Proletarianization (1830–1930)

The coffee boom created Costa Rica’s agrarian structure — and its contradictions. Unlike Guatemala or El Salvador, Costa Rica did not develop enormous haciendas. The largest farm was 604 hectares; the average was 41. By 1963, 58.5% of cultivated land was in units smaller than 35 hectares. This is the image the “White Legend” celebrates: a nation of smallholders.

But the fine print tells a different story. Over 70% of the rural population was landless — a higher proportion than anywhere else in Central America. Power concentrated not through land-grabbing alone but through the beneficio (coffee-processing mill): in 1850, just sixteen beneficios controlled 85% of coffee exports, and access to the beneficio determined a small producer’s ability to finance and sell their crop. Credit systems tied small producers to merchant-landowners in relationships of dependency. Land prices inflated roughly twenty-fold in thirty years, incentivizing small producers to sell their parcels and then sell their labor.

Critically, the Huetar people of Orosí resisted the coffee frontier around 1860 — an episode largely absent from standard histories of the coffee cycle. The “virtual absence of indigenous population” in the Central Valley during the great coffee expansion, which Dunkerley cited as one factor explaining Costa Rica’s distinct political development, was not a pre-existing geographic condition. It was, the article argues, the result of colonial epidemics (severe die-offs between 1576 and 1581), the legal dissolution of communal landholding in the 19th century, and physical displacement in the face of the advancing coffee frontier.

4. Bananas, the Atlantic Enclave, and the Displacement of the Bribri and Cabécar (1870–1940)

On Costa Rica’s Caribbean side, a parallel story unfolded — this one driven by foreign capital. The Soto-Keith Contract of 1883 granted Minor Keith 800,000 acres of state land, a 99-year railway lease, and sweeping tax exemptions. By 1890, his operation was the largest banana producer on Earth. The standard narrative presents this as development on “vacant land.”

It was not. The Bribri and Cabécar peoples who inhabited the Talamanca valley were forced to move inland, deeper into their ancestral territory, because the banana concession included a significant portion of indigenous lands along the Sixaola river basin. The article calls this one of the key regional mediations of the dispossession process: the banana enclave was not merely a deal between a state and a transnational — it was a concrete mechanism of indigenous dispossession, legally articulated through the fiction of the baldío and materially executed through corporate control of Caribbean space.

The United Fruit Company (UFCO) would later reduce its Atlantic plantations, face a major strike in 1934, and eventually shift production to the Pacific after the sigatoka disease devastated crops in 1938. But the damage was done: the “absence of indigenous population” in banana-region analyses reproduces, with different words, the same ideological device that operates in the coffee narrative — it naturalizes absence by hiding the dispossession that produced it.

5. Limited Reform, Titulación, and the Persistence of Inequality (1957–1990)

Costa Rica did attempt reform. International Convention 107 of the ILO (approved domestically in 1959) recognized indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights. Law 2825 of 1961 repealed the baldíos framework and declared such lands “state property” grounded in the social function of ownership. The Indigenous Law of 1977 (Law 6172) reserved portions of territory for indigenous peoples and granted full legal capacity to their communities through Asociaciones de Desarrollo Integral (ADIs).

Yet the contradictions were glaring. The 1961 law allowed expropriation of idle land but required cash payment at market value — a provision that severely limited implementation. By 1970, only 1,272 families had been settled on roughly 35,400 hectares. The titling program backed by USAID reached a partial result of about 20,462 titles (some 339,761 hectares) by September 1979, at a rate of 425 titles per month against a theoretical capacity of 900–1,000.

The results were telling. After receiving a title, the proportion of beneficiaries with access to credit rose from 18% to 31.7% — but the Gini coefficient for titled land was about 0.708, and when all land possessed by beneficiaries (titled plus other holdings) was included, it rose to nearly 0.781, almost identical to the national figure. Titling did not correct structural inequality — it potentially consolidated it. As the article puts it: these programs reached only a fraction of landless families while maintaining the fundamental structures of concentration.

Conservation as Dispossession: The Modern Face of an Old Story

One of the most striking arguments in the article is that the Costa Rican state itself — not just private ranchers or transnational corporations — has become a primary agent of indigenous dispossession, and it has done so wearing the respectable clothes of environmentalism.

In 1982, Costa Rica created the Parque Internacional La Amistad (PILA), which was recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve that same year and as a World Heritage Site in 1983. What the celebratory narrative omits is that the park appropriated, as state-managed protected area, significant extensions of ancestral territory claimed by the Bribri and Cabécar peoples — without prior, free, and informed consultation. Its buffer zone includes the indigenous territories of Ujarrás, Salitre, and Cabagra. Inside the Biosphere Reserve, sixteen indigenous territories of five different peoples are situated. The state thus re-emerged, in this phase, as the principal agent of dispossession, this time through the legal figure of conservation.

A similar dynamic operates through the Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) — Costa Rica’s flagship Payment for Environmental Services program, administered by FONAFIFO. As documented by researcher Vargas Mena, the PSA has operated inside officially recognized indigenous territories. The forest, the water, and even the air (in the form of the carbon market) are commodified as “environmental services” whose monetary yield flows out of indigenous territory or is captured through institutional mechanisms that subordinate community decisions to the timelines and requirements of external agencies. This is not, the article argues, a correction of agrarian capitalism — it is a new phase of it.

Add to this the contemporary presence of pineapple and palm oil multinationals in the southern zone, whose expansion encroaches on Bróráni, Bribri, and Cabécar territories. Their externalities — intensive water use, agrochemical contamination, pressure on adjacent lands — operate as mechanisms of environmental and economic dispossession on indigenous communities.

Recovering What Was Lost — and Dying for It (2011–Present)

Faced with the persistent failure of the state to enforce legally recognized rights, indigenous movements launched what they call recuperaciones de facto: community-led recoveries of territories formally inscribed under the ADIs but materially usurped by non-indigenous occupants. Beginning in 2011 in places like Salitre, Cabagra, and Térraba, these recoveries triggered the organized, violent reaction of ranchers determined to suppress them.

The consequences have been lethal. On March 18, 2019, Bribri leader Sergio Rojas Ortiz was assassinated. On February 24, 2020, Brórán leader Jethy Rivera was killed. Both murders occurred despite the existence of precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Measure 321-12, issued in 2015). The impunity has been near-total: the Rojas case was archived in January 2024 with no detained suspects. In the Rivera case, the material perpetrator was initially convicted in February 2023, but the appellate court in Cartago reversed that conviction in July 2023, and in a second trial in August–September 2024, the accused was acquitted — despite his confession — under the principle of in dubio pro reo.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples documented that these attacks remain unpunished, with Costa Rican authorities failing to investigate even when perpetrators are known to the community. The cycle of dispossession–resistance–repression, the article argues, reveals that the de facto recoveries are not isolated incidents but the empirical manifestation of an ongoing class struggle over the means of production, mediated by a persistent colonial condition.

A Broader Pattern: The State Always Chooses Sides

The indigenous story does not exist in isolation. The article places it within a broader pattern of how the Costa Rican state has responded to rural land conflicts throughout its modern history — and the answer is consistent: it favors capital.

The 1983 crisis is emblematic. When United Brands announced it was leaving, the state bought its land at $35,000 per hectare — a price that demonstrated the state’s weakness vis-à-vis transnationals. Standard Fruit demanded $200 million in credits and fired 700 workers. In the first eighteen months of the Monge administration alone, 185 rural conflicts were registered. In July 1983, 3,500 hectares of United Brands land were occupied by union militants and campesino federation members — and they were evicted by 600 police officers.

Land occupations surged across administrations: 70 under Trejos, 500 during the Figueres (second) and Oduber governments, 120 in Carazo’s first year alone. The “land question” was never limited to Guanacaste, where cattle-ranching concentration had always been extreme and conflictive — it was a national structural feature.

Rebuilding Political Categories from the Ground Up

Here is where the article makes its most ambitious theoretical move. Rather than importing Marxist categories as ready-made tools, Gómez Julián claims to reconstruct them inductively from the historical evidence itself. The sequence is deliberate: facts first, categories second, return to facts with new interpretive power third.

The State, in class societies, is the social organization of the political power of the economically dominant class. Law is the system of enforceable norms established by state power — it is the legal organization of that political power. Government is the administration of state institutions, and crucially, the economically dominant class is not necessarily the governing class: those who hold power are not always those who administer it, but the governing class is factually subordinate to the dominant class.

Democracy, in its most general sense, is the government of the majority over the minority. But this concept was coined in slave-owning Athens of the 5th century BC, where only adult male citizens could vote, excluding women, slaves, and foreigners. The democracy of adult male citizens was a dictatorship for everyone else — the overwhelming majority. This dialectical relationship extends to all class societies: every democracy is a dictatorship for those systematically excluded from the majority’s will, and every dictatorship preserves an internal “democracy” for the class that imposes its hegemony. The relationship is dialectical, not identical.

The Rule of Law (Estado de Derecho) is the idea that the state’s power is regulated and guaranteed by law — meaning the state creates law and then voluntarily submits to its own creation. But the article argues this is a sophism: states do not create law to submit to it; they create it as a regulatory framework founded on the interests of the politically and ideologically dominant class. As evidence, the author points to Article 105 of Costa Rica’s own Constitution, which prohibits referendums on budgetary, tax, fiscal, monetary, credit, pension, security, and administrative matters — that is, on virtually every fundamental issue of national social life. The validity of any referendum result is ultimately subject to the decision of the Legislative Assembly. The state, in other words, has structurally exempted itself from popular will on every matter that counts.

And corruption? It is not an aberration. Defined as the practice in which a public official formally deviates from the functions for which they were entrusted with power, corruption “formally” (not factually) departs from stated commitments. Why is the deviation formal rather than factual? Because, within this framework, corruption is a necessary mechanism for the interests of the dominant class to impose themselves over the rest of society while electoral democracy reigns — one of several mechanisms that enable factual dictatorship through the alienation of the dominated classes.

Three Processes, Two Levels of Abstraction

The theoretical heart of the article lies in the way it reconstructs the relation among primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, and what it calls acumulación entrelazada. In this post, I translate the latter deliberately as intertwined accumulation. The choice matters because it allows us to distinguish the concrete process reconstructed in the Costa Rican case from the broader concept of entangled accumulation developed by Guilherme Leite Gonçalves and Sérgio Costa.

The distinction is not merely terminological. At the level of objective historical processes, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession can possess relative autonomy: they are distinguishable mechanisms with their own immediate forms, temporal locations, and material effects. Relative autonomy does not mean isolation. It means that one can identify each process in reality without denying that, under concrete historical conditions, they coexist, penetrate one another, and alter the conditions under which the other operates.

Relative Autonomy Does Not Mean Separation

This way of reading the historical record avoids a false choice. We do not need to say either that primitive accumulation is a closed episode belonging only to the birth of capitalism, or that every later dispossession is simply the same phenomenon under a new name. A concrete process may be identified as primitive accumulation when it restructures property relations by separating communities from the conditions of their reproduction. A contemporary process may be identified as accumulation by dispossession when already existing rights, assets, commons, or public resources are transferred into circuits of capital. And a third analytical problem appears when the effects of these processes become causally linked.

That third problem is what intertwined accumulation captures here. The relevant relation is not merely chronological succession. It is a material interaction: one process changes the conditions of possibility of another. Earlier legal destruction of communal tenure can make later private occupation easier; later occupation can normalize and reproduce the property regime created by the earlier rupture; state regulation can connect both to transnational commodity chains, tourism, conservation finance, or carbon markets. The processes remain distinguishable, but their effects are no longer additive. They become synergistic.

The Costa Rican mapping makes this visible. Carrillo’s abolition of communal tenure created a legal environment within which the Huetar coffee-frontier dispossession could advance. Decree XIV of 1882 converted Maleku territory into legally available space and enabled its appropriation by ranchers and settlers. The Soto-Keith concession connected territorial dispossession in Talamanca to transnational banana capital. PILA and the PSA later inserted ancestral territory into conservationist and environmental-value circuits, linking local territorial conflict to tourism, state administration, and global carbon capital. The post-2011 de facto recoveries reveal the contemporary collision between the collective indigenous regime and the individual capitalist regime produced through this long history.

Entangled Accumulation: The Broader Category

This is where Gonçalves and Costa’s concept of entangled accumulation becomes especially useful. Their 2019 formulation is deliberately broader. It seeks a comprehensive category for the interdependencies that have structured capitalist expansion across history: exploitation and expropriation; wage and slave or otherwise unfree labor; state power and illegal violence; capitalist and non-capitalist economies; different geographical scales; different historical periods; and intersecting social hierarchies such as class, race, ethnicity, and gender.

In that broader framework, primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, financial expropriation, superexploitation, and other forms do not follow a rigid chronology. They may coexist in the same period and space, disappear and re-emerge, and become connected through law, politics, corruption, culture, discourse, and the changing boundary between state and market. Entangled accumulation therefore operates at a higher level of abstraction: it is a general category for the historical interpenetration of multiple mechanisms and dimensions of capitalist accumulation.

The two concepts can therefore be related without collapsing them into one another. Intertwined accumulation, as used in this post to interpret the Costa Rican article, is the more concrete category: it identifies a specific process of causal articulation and synergy among distinguishable modes of accumulation inside a determinate historical formation. Entangled accumulation, in Gonçalves and Costa’s sense, is the more general category under which such concrete articulations can be theorized together with many other forms of interdependence.

This distinction also clarifies why the Costa Rican article can speak of the convergence of primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, and intertwined accumulation without reducing all three to one undifferentiated process. The first two refer to mechanisms that can be identified with relative autonomy; the third refers to their concrete articulation when they coexist and reinforce one another. At the same time, that entire configuration can be located within Gonçalves and Costa’s more encompassing theory of entangled accumulation. What looks like a terminological inconsistency at a purely abstract level thus becomes, at the level of historical reality, a useful distinction between mechanisms, their interaction, and the general category capable of containing both.

A Timeline of Dispossession: Key Milestones

Why Land Is Not Just Land: The Question of Rent

The article introduces one more theoretical tool that deserves attention: the Marxist concept of ground rent — both natural and differential. Contemporary indigenous struggles, the author argues, cannot be explained solely by the seizure of land as a means of production. They also revolve around the natural resources those lands contain: water, forests, biodiversity, scenic beauty, carbon sequestration capacity. The yield from these resources can be converted into rent that is appropriable by various fractions of capital — agroindustrial, extractivist, touristic, conservationist (private or state-run).

The PSA inside indigenous territories, the nature tourism surrounding national parks created on ancestral lands, the monetization of environmental services in the carbon market, and adjacent agroindustry are all concrete devices through which capital captures or redistributes rents whose material base is precisely the territories that indigenous peoples have preserved through their historical struggle. Indigenous territorial defense is therefore simultaneously defense of communal use-value against capitalist exchange-value, and a material obstacle to the full realization of differential rent by capital.

What This Means — and Why It Matters Beyond Costa Rica

The article’s conclusions are blunt. The “White Legend” of Costa Rican democratic exceptionalism does not survive contact with the evidence. A country where nearly three-quarters of the peasantry is landless, where the Gini coefficient for land ownership approaches 0.8 nationally and reaches 0.9 in cattle regions, where over 90% of farms in some zones lack legal titles, and where indigenous leaders are assassinated with impunity for reclaiming territories that the state itself has legally recognized as theirs — that country is not a democratic anomaly in an unequal region. It is a case study in how formal democracy and extreme agrarian concentration coexist, and how the latter is structurally enabled by the former.

The argument is not that Costa Rica is uniquely evil. It is that the myth of its exceptionalism serves a function: it legitimizes the very regime of accumulation that makes extreme inequality possible. The “White Legend” is not a miscalculation or a public-relations excess. It is, in the article’s framework, an ideological device that is functional to the system it obscures. As long as Costa Rica believes it is democratic and equal, the structural mechanisms that produce dispossession operate without scrutiny.

And the final, perhaps most unsettling implication: the article concludes that non-indigenous civil society participation is essential to defend rights that are “fundamentally irreconcilable with the needs of accumulation.” The rights of indigenous peoples over their territories, in other words, cannot be secured within the existing accumulation regime without a political rupture that extends beyond indigenous communities alone. This is not a call for charity or solidarity in the conventional sense. It is a structural observation: the system that dispossesses indigenous peoples is the same system that produces landlessness among non-indigenous peasants, and their interests converge at the point where the logic of accumulation is challenged.

A Note on the Source

This post is primarily a reading of José Mauricio Gómez Julián, “Acumulación por despojo y el mito del excepcionalismo democrático costarricense: el despojo indígena como rasgo estructural de la concentración agraria,” Revista de Historia, No. 93 (January–June 2026), pp. 1–45, published by the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. The article is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The author is an independent researcher specializing in political economy and statistical methodology, with a degree in Economics from the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica.

The conceptual clarification developed above also engages Guilherme Leite Gonçalves and Sérgio Costa, “From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion,” European Journal of Social Theory (2019), DOI 10.1177/1368431018825064. To keep the analytical levels distinct, this post deliberately reserves entangled accumulation for Gonçalves and Costa’s broad category and uses intertwined accumulation for the more concrete process reconstructed from the Costa Rican case. That terminological distinction is an interpretive choice of this post rather than a claim that the two papers themselves explicitly establish the same hierarchy in those exact words.

The article is explicitly situated within Marxist political economy and historical materialism. It does not claim neutrality: it argues that the theoretical framework it employs has superior explanatory power for the phenomena it documents, and it reconstructs its core political categories (State, Law, Democracy, Rule of Law, Corruption) inductively from the historical evidence rather than importing them as axioms. Readers who disagree with the theoretical framework may still find the empirical documentation — drawn from census data, property records, legislation, UN reports, Inter-American Commission records, and direct indigenous testimony — valuable in its own right.

The data referenced throughout — Gini coefficients, titling statistics, acreage figures, occupation percentages — are drawn from the sources the article cites (Seligson, Edelman, Brockett, Dunkerley, Paige, Guevara and Chacón, Vargas Mena, Zúñiga et al., and others). No figures have been invented or extrapolated beyond what the article itself presents.