The angry clash between Costa Rica and Nicaragua over a dredging project on the eastern end of the two countries’ border has raised broader questions about future, binational management of a resource precious to both nations: fresh water.

The recent friction erupted Oct. 22, when Costa Rica complained Nicaraguan soldiers had occupied and harmed some of its protected land, removing trees and dumping sediment as part of Nicaragua’s river-dredging effort along 28 kilometers (17 miles) of the San Juan River.

“They are cutting down our forests, draining our wetlands and doing serious damage to the regional ecosystem,” Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla said last month at an Ibero-American presidential summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina. “This is nothing less that ecocide, which we are denouncing to international environmental organizations.”

Nicaragua insists it hasn’t violated Costa Rican space and has a right to dredge the river, which forms the easternmost portion of the two nations’ boundary and flows into the Caribbean Sea. Nicaragua also claims the right to “reopen” water channels that it says have become clogged over the years by sedimentation. Says Edén Pastora, a former Nicaraguan guerrilla leader who is directing the dredging operation: “I have the responsibility to the people of Nicaragua, to the government and to the [Sandinista] Party to clean the river and rescue it.”

Diplomatic jousting over the project already has prompted a resolution by the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS). The matter is now before the International Court of Justice at The Hague, where a preliminary hearing was held this month.

The tensions are rooted in a more than century-old struggle for control of the San Juan that over the years has touched off political, legal and military maneuvers. In 2009, the International Court of Justice confirmed Nicaraguan control of the river while upholding limited navigation rights on it for Costa Rica.

In an immediate sense, the new dispute concerns Costa Rican complaints about the location and impact of Nicaraguan dredging work; but the larger issue is control over the San Juan River basin. At over four million hectares (10 million acres), the watershed is Central America’s largest.

Conservationists argue the river and its watershed must be protected to preserve what many consider the future source of much of Central America’s drinking water as well as the rich biodiversity it supports. Numerous environmentalists worry the conflict between Nicaragua and Costa Rica is being driven by larger economic interests and murky development agendas—for instance, a trans-isthmus canal, an oil pipeline and a hydroelectric plant—that have yet to be made public.

Nicaragua accuses Costa Rica of instigating a border dispute in order to appropriate Nicaragua’s natural resources. “Nicaragua’s large water resources—the Great Lake of Nicaragua [Lake Cocibolca] and the San Juan River—are the ultimate goal of Costa Rica’s expansionist strategy,” reads a white paper issued by the Nicaraguan government on Nov. 26.

Costa Rica denies the charge, arguing its chief concern is preventing Nicaragua’s dredging project from causing environmental damage on the Costa Rican side of the border.

As the owner of the 8,264-square-kilometer (3,191-sq-mile) Lake Cocibolca and the San Juan River, which flows from the lake 238 kilometers (148 miles) to the Caribbean Sea, Nicaragua controls Central America’s—and one of Latin America’s—most important freshwater resources. Yet due to the country’s long history of poverty, war and political turmoil, Nicaragua’s impressive aquatic resources have remained mostly untapped and underdeveloped.

Costa Rica, on the other hand, has taken advantage of its navigation rights on the San Juan River to develop tourism. Costa Rican tour vessels brimming with birdwatchers, sight-seers and sport fishermen ply the lower half of the San Juan River on day excursions, returning to Costa Rican eco-lodges for the night.

“We Nicaraguans have sovereignty over the river, but don’t know how to take advantage of it. Most of the tourism on the river is Costa Rica’s,” says Yaro Ch-Praslin, owner of the Sabalos Lodge, upriver on the Nicaraguan side.

On a seasonal basis, Costa Rica also is tapping the flow of the river itself. The final 28 kilometers of the San Juan River dries to a virtual muddy stream in the summer months of December through May, as most of the water flows south to a Costa Rican river called the Río Colorado.

In the 1950s, Costa Rica dredged the Colorado River from its junction with the San Juan all the way to the Caribbean Sea, diverting 90% of the San Juan’s water flow into Costa Rican territory, according to the Nicaraguan government. The delta of the San Juan River, meanwhile, has filled with silt and become unnavigable in the dry-season months.

Distracted by poverty, war and a history of bad governance, Nicaragua has not dredged the San Juan since the days of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. At that time, U.S. industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt briefly made the river part of a transit route to the Pacific. More than 52,000 people traveled by boat up the river, across Lake Nicaragua and then overland across the narrow spit of land to the Pacific port town of San Juan del Sur.

Since then, the river hasn’t seen much action. The once-thriving Caribbean river port of Greytown, today home to only 2,000 residents, became a virtual ghost town and was all but consumed by the jungle.

But that’s about to change. Emboldened by a 2009 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which upheld Nicaragua’s ownership of the river and its right to dredge the waterway to maintain year round navigation, the Nicaraguan government is dredging the delta. The government’s goal is to restore the river’s historic flow as it existed in 1858, when the border treaty was originally penned. That means ensuring the river’s waters flow the entire length of the San Juan rather than hitching into Costa Rican territory as they approach the sea.

“We [Nicaraguans] are proud because we are the owners of the Río San Juan, which in part is true but it’s also a lie because the last 28 kilometers of the river [were rerouted via the Colorado to] go through Costa Rica,” says Nicaragua’s Pastora. “The Costa Ricans feel like they are the owners of the front door. And the owners of the front door of a house are the owners of the house. So they are the owners of our Río San Juan.”

Costa Rica, however, claims that Pastora, in his enthusiasm and lack of preparation for the job, has crossed the border into Costa Rican territory and done environmental harm to wetlands earmarked for protection since 1996 under The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, better known as the Ramsar Convention.

On Nov. 16, Costa Rica asked the Ramsar secretariat to issue a report and recommendations in defense of its wetlands. Three days later, the country filed a complaint against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. It charged that the digging of an 800-meter canal from the San Juan to a lagoon on the Caribbean coast as part of the larger river dredging project was causing environmental damage. The two nations disagree on whether the channel passes through Costa Rican land.

An advisory mission representing the Ramsar secretariat responded with a report this month backing Costa Rica’s claims of environmental damage and signaling the potential for additional harm if the river dredging continues. The report cites “changes to the ecological characteristics” of 225 hectares (556 acres) of the Northeast Caribbean Wetland, a 75,310-hectare (186,095-acre) swath of marine and coastal wetlands designated as a Ramsar site in 1996. It concludes that if the dredging persists, “the aquatic system’s water quality, flora and fauna and resident and migrating bird populations will be seriously affected.”

Nicaraguan conservationists formed an ad-hoc coalition to refute the Ramsar report, calling the findings unilateral, unscientific and invalid. The Nicaraguan group dismisses the report as irrelevant, arguing it was based on information provided by the Costa Rican government, and not verified in situ.

“The [Ramsar] report was very superficial because they didn’t conduct any site inspection,” says renowned Nicaraguan conservationist and presidential advisor Jaime Incer. “The report has no validity, and Nicaragua has asked Ramsar to come and visit the area to see how things really are, rather than unilaterally responding to the positions of one country.”

But concern over the dredging is not confined to the Costa Rican government and Ramsar. Costa Rican fishermen, among others, worry what a newly dredged San Juan River will mean for coastal-marshland fish habitat.

“My main concern is that the marshes and lagoons in the area are nursing areas for baby tarpon and if [the Nicaraguan government] starts to dredge that river mouth, the river will flood the saltwater marsh and destroy the breeding grounds of the saltwater fish,” says Dan Wise, owner of the Río Colorado Lodge on the Costa Rican side of the border. “Currently the marshes around the river mouth of the Río San Juan stay salty because the curves of the river keep the water flowing slowly. If they dredge the river and open up the flow, it could potentially change all fish breeding that is happening in the area.”

Nicaragua, however, insists it is Costa Rica that poses the true environmental threat. Incer says Costa Rica, which controls over 30% of the San Juan River watershed, is responsible for “80% of the contamination and sedimentation in the Río San Juan and Lake Cocibolca.”

Incer, the father of Nicaragua’s conservation movement and the 2007 winner of the National Geographic Society’s Leadership Prize in Conservation, says Costa Rica’s Frío River, San Carlos River and Sarapiquí River—all of which flow north into the San Juan—bring Nicaragua contaminants from its neighbor to the south. These, he says, include agrochemicals from banana and citrus plantations as well as mud and sand from volcanic soil runoff being caused by “deforestation and uncontrolled development” in Costa Rica.

“Costa Rica is using the San Juan as a gutter for its contaminants,” Incer says, blaming the neighboring country’s pollutants for depleting fish life in Lake Cocibolca and the river. “They’ve been doing it for over 50 years.”

Incer asserts that using water samples from both sides of the river, Nicaragua can prove the contamination is coming from Costa Rica and provide sufficient legal basis to demand payment for damages before the ICJ. “Costa Rica calls itself eco-friendly, but they’ve completely destroyed their ecology, and they are continuing to destroy Nicaragua’s,” Incer charges.

Dueling perspectives

Costa Rica counters that its opposition to the dredging work is consistent with its reputation for environmental protection.

“More than 25% of our territory is protected areas, and we are working to ensure our development is done in a way that is sustainable so we can become one of the world’s first carbon-neutral countries,” Chinchilla, the Costa Rican president, said at last month’s Ibero-American summit.

“For these reasons, we cannot remain quiet when confronted with the environmental devastation that Nicaraguan military personnel are causing in the occupied zone in an attempt to open [the 800-meter channel] through Costa Rican territory.”

Amid the wrangling, others in government and the environmental community are exploring how conservation and ecotourism might be used to bring the two countries together.

“Tourism is a force for integration and unification between our people,” says Nicaraguan Tourism Minister Mario Salinas. “We shouldn’t be limited to a vision of the border based on the last couple of months [of conflict]. We have to have a long-term vision of development, well-being and progress in both countries.”

Evidence that Nicaragua embraces that vision is to be found in its US$14.7 million tourism-development initiative called the Water Route. Over the past three years, the initiative has prompted investment in new immigration facilities to handle tourists entering from Costa Rica, and has provided hundreds of small hotel-development loans and tourism training workshops. The goal of the Nicaraguan effort is to convert the San Juan River and surrounding area into an international tourism attraction.

Still, some critics wonder whether the Sandinista government is as interested in tourism as it claims to be, or whether there are greater economic and geopolitical interests at play. They speculate President Daniel Ortega’s real goal in dredging is to start clearing a path for an inter-oceanic canal to compete with Panama’s—a plan Nicaragua has discussed for over a century without making major advances.

Agenda questioned

Others claim Ortega hopes to install an oil pipeline that parallels the river and connects to a Venezuelan-funded refinery being built on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. The pipeline, which potentially would form part of a “dry canal” railroad line along the river, would give Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez direct access to the Pacific Ocean and Asian markets, bypassing U.S. refineries and the Panama Canal.

The canal and pipeline projects, however, thus far appear strictly speculative at best. Javier Chamorro, executive director of Nicaragua’s investment-promotion group ProNicaragua, says neither project would be “feasible right now” on account of expense and complexity. He insists the government’s top developmental priority in the region is “the environmental protection of the river.”

Chamorro does say, however, that separate plans for a 250-megawatt hydroelectric plant on the river would not necessarily endanger the environment or ecotourism.

The Brito hydroelectric project, which would be bankrolled and built by Brazil, is still undergoing feasibility and environmental-impact studies. In light of its role in the project, Brazil’s recent US$330,000 contribution to the Water Route initiative to fund a “strategic development plan for the San Juan River” has raised concerns about a conflict of interest.

“The greatest potential for the San Juan River, with all its beauty and nature, is for tourism. We have to bet on tourism,” argues Francisco Ochomogo, regional coordinator of the “Water Route” project. “It is true that they also talk about an inter-oceanic canal, but what is a canal going to mean in a zone that is a protected area? And what would the Brito power plant mean for the environment? What good would come from all the work that we have done to get ready for tourism?”