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Outside Magazine September 2004

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


	A Refuge for Outlaws, Animals, and Poachers: the Darién Gap's thick, inaccessible rainforest (Alex Webb)

A WEEK BEFORE MY TRIP TO YAVIZA, on my first foray into the park, I visited Jaqué, a village of a few thousand people where the guerrillas buy groceries and get their cavities filled. Jaqué lies 200 miles southeast of Panama City, just outside the national park, along a rocky section of Pacific coast marked by lengthy stretches of exquisite black cliffs. There are no roads nearby, and the government maps are covered with blank spots marked INSUFFICIENT DATA. As I flew in aboard the twice-weekly plane from the capital, I tried to keep track of our position, but all I saw was an endless span of green extending into the cloud-covered peaks of the local mountain range, Serranía de Jungurudó.

In the seat behind me was Julie Velásquez Runk, a 35-year-old graduate student from the Yale School of Forestry. A native of Detroit, Runk has spent much of the past seven years studying historical ecology in the Gap and living with the Wounaan, an indigenous tribe that dwells along its rivers. I'd asked her to accompany me so I could see the Gap through her eyes. Our plan was to find a guide with a boat, then ascend 20 miles up the Río Jaqué to the heart of the national park.

Our base was the Tropic Star Lodge, a strange outpost five miles west of Jaqué that was built in 1961 by Ray Smith, a Texas oil baron. The Tropic Star sits on secluded Piña Bay, circled by mountainous jungle. It's a Thunderball-style palace that offers prime access to what many consider the greatest sportfishing in the world. After Smith's death, in 1968, the property was sold to a series of gringos who converted it into a $1,000-a-night resort, popular with U.S. senators, John Wayne, and Saudi sheiks.

After settling in, Runk, with help from a Tropic Star employee, found a motorista to take us upriver. We'd been under way for anhour when we arrived at a police station. There, a double-chinned comandante told us, "No one without a permit goes upriver."

So we turned around and found ourselves a poacher. Carlos, an acquaintance of a Tropic Star employee, is a 37-year-old refugee who fled Colombia after, he said, "the paramilitaries started cutting off people's heads" in his village. He'd been living illegally in eastern Panama for nine years, supporting himself by hunting, also illegally, in the park. He wore a cobalt-blue tank top that read STALLION in big letters; at his waist hung a machete.

Carlos took us an hour west by speedboat to Punta Caracoles, a peninsula jutting out from the national park that teems with bush dogs, tapirs, and other tenacious wildlife. I'd been told that only the park's residents could hunt inside it, but Carlos, who lives in Jaqué, told me, "If I don't hunt here, someone else will." He grinned. "Besides, I only take a little."

Environmentalists consider poachers like Carlos, who are wiping out entire populations of peccaries, howler monkeys, and tapirs, a serious problem. "The greatest threat to the park is not some big entity like a multinational conglomerate or a development project," says Líder Sucre, the thirty-something executive director of the Asociación Nacional Para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (ANCON), Panama's largest nongovernmental conservation group. "It's the fact that the park is huge, its staff is small, and there are hundreds and hundreds of little guys whittling away at it."

After landing on a stretch of white beach, we plunged into the forest along a well-cleared path, which made me wonder how many hunters use this area. "It's not necessarily people who keep the paths clear," Runk said. "It could be white-lipped peccaries," a two-foot-tall species of wild boar weighing as much as 60 pounds.

I looked at Carlos, who was sniffing the air. "Do you hear them gnashing their tusks?" he asked. All I heard were the waves crashing on Punta Caracoles.

"It's quiet," I said.

"That's because the other animalitos are hiding," said Carlos.

"Watch out if the peccaries come our way," said Runk. "Climb a tree, do whatever you have to do. You don't want to be gored." As much as the peccaries scared her, Runk was hoping we'd see them, because, she explained, "a large herd of white-lipped peccaries is an excellent indicator of healthy forest."

"What's a 'large' herd?" I asked.

"Oh, 200 animals. You'll definitely know they're coming."

Suddenly Carlos hissed for us to be quiet. We heard a grunt from the undergrowth, then a rustle of leaves, then something pawing impatiently at the ground. Carlos yelled, "Run!" Which he and Runk did, but my legs had turned to jelly. A streak of brown fur tore out of the bush and hit me squarely on the calf.

"What was it?" I yelled, looking down and expecting to see blood. But there was no wound. The animal, which must have weighed about ten pounds, wobbled dizzily back to the bush.

"I think it was a ñeque," said Runk.

"A what?"

"A ñeque. A little mammal. Sort of like a big rat."

I looked into the forest and saw the dazed ñeque, gearing up for another charge. Then I noticed Carlos, who was laughing so hard he'd almost fallen on his machete. "I should have cut off his head," he said, gasping for air. An hour later, we came across a poacher's campsite, an empty lean-to made of palm fronds, with the hunter's underwear hanging from the roof. Next to it, a campfire smoldered, and Carlos found two burlap sacks stuffed with smoked peccary meat. "This is too much," he frowned, taking out a fist-size chunk of the meat, which he tore into strips and passed out to us.

That afternoon, as we hiked eight miles farther into the park, we saw more signs of a healthy forest: the footprints of a jaguar, one of the five species of cat that lives in the Gap; an ancient palm called a cycad; and, back on the beach, a clutch of sea turtle eggs buried arm-deep in the sand. Runk decided that the forest in and around Caracoles was "doing more than OK."

"I've seen forest that's in worse shape," she said. "A lot worse."

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