Caught in Cross-Fire in Panama

This is the end of the road, the place where nature defeated technology.

The mid-20th century vision of a thoroughfare linking the Americas, from Alaska to southern Chile, foundered here in the mud, mountains and dense jungle of Panama’s Darien province 35 years ago. The final 67-mile segment of the Pan-American Highway was never built, leaving a wilderness where the rivers are the highways.

Halting the road preserved this remnant of the lush tropical rain forest that once covered Panama and northern Colombia. But today, the Darien faces threats that don’t stop at the pavement.

The remoteness that once protected the area now makes it vulnerable. Because firefighters couldn’t reach the area, flames recently swept away 20,000 acres of forest. In addition, because the Panamanian border patrol can’t move rapidly through the jungle paths and rivers, the region has become a target for foreign invasion. And some of those invaders may have destructive designs on the wild land, analysts warn.

Colombia’s 34-year civil war has boiled over into the Darien, bringing violence as destructive as fire to this fragile environment where dispersed populations have developed lifestyles in balance with nature. The rain forest and the people who live here are caught in the cross-fire between Colombian guerrillas, drug traffickers and illegal private armies.

“Paramilitaries and guerrillas are bringing their war--a war that is not ours--into our country, and we do not accept that,” said Romulo Emiliani Sanchez, the Roman Catholic bishop of the Darien. “Panama is a sovereign country, and they have no right to come here and fight.”

Experts on Colombia’s warring factions fear that the threat may be even more serious. They see a repetition of the paramilitary land grabs that have occurred in northern Colombia. Thus, they worry that the ranchers who finance the mercenaries--originally, at least, as a defense against rebel attacks--have long-range plans for the land that would destroy the Darien as a nature reserve.

The Darien is a wildernessroughly the size of Connecticut divided into three regions: the western mountain ranges, where nearly five centuries ago the Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first European to see the Pacific Ocean; the basins of the Chucunaque and Tuira rivers, where the Embara Indians fish from hollowed-out canoes; and, across the Darien Mountain Range, the Caribbean coast and keys that are Kuna Indian lands.

North and South American animals and plants converge here in an array that attracts adventurers of all stripes. Bird-watchers eager to see rare species share the territory with small-time gold miners.

Paradise at End of Road

Ecologists had thought that by stopping the road here at Yaviza and creating a nature reserve, they could save the Darien from the worst effects of slash-and-burn agriculture, the practice of cutting down trees and burning away undergrowth to clear fields for crops.

Farmers usually stay close to the highway so that they can get their crops to market. Viewed from a small plane flying toward the Darien, the outcome is obvious: Trees are cleared from a strip several miles wide bordering the highway. Where the road stops, so does the destruction.

Just past Yaviza, the spreading canopies of trees hundreds of years old cool and moisten air that is scorchingly unbearable a few miles away, along the road. Here, aquatic plants and coconut trees replace cornfields. Blue herons are easier to spot than cattle.

Even the people change. Multiethnic Panama gives way to tattooed Embara and Kuna Indians with strings of beads wrapped around their forearms and ankles.

The same phenomenon occurs 67 miles south in Colombia, where the bottom portion of the Pan-American Highway, coming up from Chile, halts.

But the prolonged drought caused by El Nino weather conditions this year extended far beyond the highway. So when peasants at the edge of the Darien set fires to clear the fields last spring, the flames spread across the parched land, engulfing the thousands of acres of forest.

Firefighters could not reach the most remote areas that the fire burned. Environmental officials barely had a chance to rescue fleeing animals.

“It is nearly impossible to keep people from using slash-and-burn agriculture,” said Mirei E. Endara, general director of the National Natural Resources Institute, the Panamanian government’s environmental agency. “This is the result.”

Further, the government’s authority in environmental matters has been undermined by its inability to provide public safety in the region, a failing that has become painfully evident in recent years.

Colombia’s civil war has spilled across national boundaries “and created security emergencies for each of the five nations with which Colombia shares a common border,” Lt. Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, recently told Congress.

Arguably, the worst of those emergencies is in the Darien. Over the past two years, nearly a dozen Colombian refugees and a Panamanian police officer have been killed. More than 100 people from a population of about 50,000 have been driven from their homes, and coastal villages have been subjected to a boycott enforced by illegal private armies.

“There is an invasion of Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries in our territory,” said Leonides Valdez, the deputy chief of the Kuna. “And it is not just our territory, it is the whole Darien.”

Chaos Falls on the Darien

That complaint is heard all across the province, from Embara villages on the tributaries of the Chucunaque River to border towns such as Puerto Obaldia.

“We are terrified,” said a shopkeeper who fled Pirre, a town upriver from here, when people with Colombian accents broke into her home and threatened to kill her husband unless he gave them all their money and inventory. “Chaos has fallen on the Darien.”

Ostensibly, a private war against Colombia’s guerrillas is behind the chaos.

One of the oldest rebel fronts--the Fifth Front--of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, known by the initials FARC, has been crossing the border since the 1960s, said Alfredo Molano, a Colombia guerrilla expert. The rebels, who operate in northeastern Colombia, have used the Darien as a sort of rear-guard supply area, he said.

Then, in the 1980s, as paramilitary groups began to run suspected rebel supporters off their lands in Colombia, exiles fled across the border.

About three years ago, police realized that coca bushes--the raw material for cocaine--were growing in the southwestern Darien, around Jaque, long an area of FARC influence. In Colombia, the FARC regulates production of illegal drugs in territory it controls, setting prices and charging “taxes.”

That rebel presence gave the paramilitary groups justification for going into the Darien after the insurgents. But wiping out the guerrillas is hardly their only motive, analysts warn.

“They have military and political objectives, but they are clearly backed by long-term economic interests,” guerrilla expert Molano said.

In Colombia, paramilitary chief Carlos Castano and his financial supporters have taken control of vast tracts of land by driving out rebels and peasants they accuse of supporting insurgents. Now, they plan to do the same in the Darien, analysts predicted.

“The Pan-American Highway is one of the keys for understanding the incursions,” Molano said.

The concern is that the paramilitary groups are trying to create security fears that will force the Panamanian government and international financial agencies to reconsider finishing the road as a way to quickly move troops to protect the border.

With large tracts of land near the point where the road ends on the Colombian side, the paramilitary leaders would benefit from completion of the highway, Molano said--giving them easier access to markets. Techniques now exist to finish the highway, although a recent U.S. study concluded that construction is not economically justified.

“They want to get rid of the reserve,” he warned, “so that they can expand their cattle ranches.”

Residents Face Constant Attacks

Panama can do little to stop them. A border patrol officer, whose unit is in charge of protecting 20 towns upriver from Yaviza, complained, “The Colombian army has not been able to finish this war, but they send us to confront these people.”

Because Panama disbanded its own army eight years ago, after U.S. troops invaded, the country is in no shape to fight off the Colombians. “We cannot do it because of the laws and because we do not have the equipment,” he said. A year ago, when police tried to stop armed men who were harassing people, the invaders responded with gunfire that killed one officer.

Their superior firepower has left the paramilitary groups free to terrorize the people of the Darien, destroying rich cultures centuries old that have protected the reserve.

For the past year, witnesses say, Colombian criminal bands have moved down the rivers, attacking farms, robbing travelers and looting the tiny stores that people stock in a corner of their modest homes.

In El Comun, a hamlet of 278 Embaras on the Chico River, a few residents gathered outside Sava Bacurizo’s store to share their stories and fears as youngsters played basketball with a net tied to a tree.

Bacurizo was coming home with supplies a few months ago when he saw seven armed people along the riverbank. “Four or five went out to the shore and ordered, ‘Stop, stop,’ but I kept going,” he recalled. “A woman fired three shots at me. I kept going.”

Because of the increased violence, women are afraid to go out in the fields and work alongside men as they always have, said Elsa, 37, whose family owns an eight-acre plot of plantains, corn and rice.

“When a family does not go out to the field together, we are being alienated from our culture and traditions,” she said. “We are used to working groups. Now people are abandoning their fields.”

Bacurizo added angrily, “The newspapers all say that the Darien is protected now and that there is nothing strange going on.” He snorted derisively. “You cannot sleep. You cannot work in the fields. The children do not sleep at night from fear.”

On the Caribbean side of the Darien, the Kuna’s fear is turning to anger.

A fiercely independent people, the Kuna have maintained close ties to their counterparts in Colombia and Costa Rica, cultural exchanges that cynics suspect are a facade for coastal smuggling rings.

The women still sew molas, intricately cut rectangles of multicolored cloth for decorating clothing. Community decisions are still reached after days-long discussions in the log ceremonial house as women serve glass after glass of traditional drinks.

Fear Turning to Anger

Lately, the main topic at community meetings in Anachucuna, the Kuna town nearest the Colombian border, has been the paramilitary boycott. The private armies have cut off the town’s supplies because they accuse villagers of selling goods to the rebels, said Fidel Martinez, the town’s saila, or mayor.

The boycott was not lifted, even though the Kuna promised not to sell any more supplies to Colombian refugees in the area, Martinez said.

Straddling a hammock in the dirt-floored ceremonial house, Martinez noted: “These people should know what happened in 1925 when the Panamanians tried to conquer us. We rose up in arms.”

Molano shook his head sadly when told of Martinez’s comments. “This is not an anthropological exercise,” he said. “The paramilitaries are ruthless and well armed. If the Kuna try to fight them, they will be destroyed.”