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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Panama's Darién Gap
An Impossible Place To Be (Cont.)


	End of the Road: a bar in the lawless frontier of Yaviza (Alex Webb)

AN "ABYSS AND HORROR of mountains, rivers, and marshes," in the words of one 16th-century traveler, the Darién Gap is Panama's Bermuda Triangle: a place where things seem to go wrong more often than everywhere else. As an old saying goes, the Spanish conquistadores defeated the Andes, the deserts, and the Amazon, but not the Gap, which foiled their advances.

The Gap is small compared with tropical wildernesses like the Amazon and the Congo. Yet it feels huge, with its slight population—roughly 100,000 people, half afro-Caribbean and half native Panamanian—mainly concentrated in isolated bush villages like Yaviza. In Panama and Colombia, it is known as El Tapón ("The Plug"), because it blocks the flow of human exploration. The Spaniards discovered it in 1502, founded their first mainland colony there, and then set the tone for centuries to come with a staggering atrocity: the murders, over an eight-year period starting in 1513, of tens of thousands of natives, many of them killed by vicious war dogs that attacked their villages.

By the late 18th century, the Spaniards, repulsed by the Gap's inhospitable environment, had left the region to rot in peace. Nourished by one of the wettest climates on earth—up to an inch of rain per day during the rainy season—Darién's jungle flourished unchecked, providing an ideal refuge for outlaws, pirates, runaway slaves, and fiercely territorial Kuna Indians. Over time the "myth of Darién" would arise from a series of spectacular tragedies, including the deaths, in 1699, of 2,000 Scottish colonists (from shipwreck, malaria, and starvation) and, in 1856, of seven explorers who became hopelessly lost on a U.S. Navy survey expedition. Canals were planned for the Gap, which is approximately 50 miles wide at its narrowest sea-to-sea point, but none were executed.

Today, having resisted five centuries of encroachment, the Gap may finally be running out of time. As environmentalists have stood by, helpless to get involved on the ground, a multitude of unseen enemies—poachers, poor farmers, refugees, small-scale timber companies—have been whittling away at its forests.

"We let the jungle protect our border," says Stanley Heckadon, a leading Panamanian environmental authority. "It requires very little investment. And in the past, it has actually tended to work."

The question is, how did the situation suddenly get so precarious? Hoping to find out, and ignoring a U.S. State Department advisory emphatically discouraging travel to eastern Panama, I first visited the Gap in the summer of 2003, spent three weeks unsuccessfully trying to get inside Darién National Park, and returned twice in subsequent months. On each occasion I ran into the problem that has bedeviled outsiders from the start: access. Though not impenetrable, the Gap remains a formidable challenge to navigate. From Panama City there is only one road, the Pan-American Highway, which dead-ends in Yaviza. From there until Guapá, Colombia, some 90 miles away, there are nothing but mud tracks and footpaths.

The Gap is still a refuge for outlaws—only today, instead of pirates, there are the guerrillas and their ultra-rightist enemies, the United Self-Defense Forces, who are generally known as the paramilitaries. The guerrillas belong to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); they come to neighboring Panama not only for the nightlife in villages like Yaviza but to buy and stockpile weapons. (According to a recent report by the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan California think tank, Panama has become "the single largest trans-shipment point" for the majority of small arms flowing into Colombia, "mostly across the densely forested Darién Gap.") The paramilitaries, who are funded by Colombia's wealthiest landowners, come for the same reason, as well as to fight over a tremendously lucrative drug pipeline. The violent contest between these two groups constitutes the most urgent threat to the Gap today; the chaos they create prevents government and conservation watchdogs from doing their jobs.

Indirectly, their fight is also a threat to the United States. For decades the Gap has kept South American problems from spreading—not just illegal immigration but contraband and diseases that, while not exclusively South American, don't exist in the north.

"We let the jungle protect our border," says Stanley Heckadon, 60, a Panamanian anthropologist and former head of INRENADE, the precursor to ANAM, the national government's top environmental authority. Since the 1989 U.S. invasion to topple General Manuel Noriega, Panama has been without an army, and until recently its police forces have had an unspoken policy of not confronting the Colombian militants.

Letting the Gap serve as a natural barrier "requires very little investment," Heckadon adds. "And in the past, it has actually tended to work."

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