Panama's Darien Gap | Outside Online

Outside Magazine September 2004

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


	The jungle near Cana, site of an abandoned gold mine (Alex Webb)

TWELVE MILES UP the Chucunaque River from Yaviza, continuing my December 2003 journey from there by dugout, the owner of the boat drops me in El Real, a weirdly inert village where a smiling pig's head, bobbing in the river, greets me as I step on dry land. Eight miles west of the park boundary, El Real is the headquarters for 14 dedicated but pathetically underequipped guards charged with patrolling an area the size of Puerto Rico.

At the ranger office—a wooden building with several basketball-size holes in the floor and a network of old PCs, none of them working—I meet Jorge Vásquez, 38, a Kuna Indian and senior park ranger. Vásquez is sinewy like a high school wrestler, and endearingly oblivious to how odd it may seem that one's desk sits next to a hole in the floor. Initially he tries to be upbeat about the park's troubles. "We're doing great!" he tells me, though some of the rangers have gone months without paychecks, and their gasless speedboat sits on blocks outside the station.

Later, though, after a few beers at a cantina in El Real, Vásquez confesses his frustration. "We can't do our jobs," he says. "We don't have the resources or the security. You can't protect a park if you can't get around in it."

I tell him about the satellite images, and he says he has a pretty good idea where the deforestation is happening. Back at headquarters, he shows me a faded wall map. "See here?" he says, waving his hand over virtually the entire border. "This belongs to the guerrillas. It's too dangerous to patrol." He points at a different region. "This belongs to drug traffickers. We can't go here, either."

Sometimes war isn't so good for the environment. Before the guerrillas invaded the park, the rangers maintained three monitoring stations; now they have only one, a mountain retreat called Rancho Frío. The others, abandoned to poachers and contrabandistas, "haven't been visited in almost a decade," says Vásquez.

Meanwhile, refugees from Colombia have been pouring across the border. According to the Vicariato Apostólico del Darién, a local charitable affiliate of the Catholic Church, about 5,000 Colombians have immigrated to Panama over the past seven years, more than 300 of whom currently live inside or near Darién National Park. Those inside form clandestine communities that the church has tried to protect, because there's a high risk that they'll be killed if the Panamanian authorities send them back to Colombia. Manuel Acevedo, a human-rights activist at the vicariato, concedes that the refugees are among those burning forest, and that during the dry season "the amount of smoke coming from the park is tremendous."

Vásquez and I decide to hike into the park; miraculously, the El Real police give us permission. "I'm going to show you what an amazing place this is," Vásquez promises.

The Gap's resilience seems infinite, but it is not. Sometime in this decade or the next, a milestone will be reached. The last trees will go down and the first breach between North and South America will open.

We leave El Real on a dirt road that cuts through farmland and rows of spiny cedar, take a shortcut beneath some barbed wire enclosing a herd of cattle, and walk through several miles of scrubby undergrowth. Then we enter the park, and suddenly, dramatically, everything changes. The trees are bigger, of course: We see several specimens of roble, a prized hardwood, that might be a few centuries old. The atmosphere is dark, wet, even chilly; Vásquez points out the footprint of a puma. It's like walking into a dark room and realizing, when the lights come on, that you've stumbled into a cathedral. There's practically no need for trails, because the ground appears to have been swept clean. We are in one of the rarest of all jungle settings, a true triple-tiered canopy. "What do you think?" Vásquez asks.

"It looks like God's greenhouse," I say.

An hour after sunset we finally reach Rancho Frío. We'll have to camp here, because the police at a local checkpoint have threatened to arrest us if we keep hiking. "How much farther to where the deforestation shows up in the satellite images?" I ask Vásquez.

"A lot," he says. Vásquez is dour, and at first I think it's because of the station, which is dirty and abandoned. But, as I soon find out, he has something much worse on his mind. Last year, just a day's walk away from here, the paramilitaries invaded Púcuro, a hamlet on the park's boundary, where he grew up. During that raid they brutally killed his father, Gilberto Vásquez, 58, a village chief.

The incident began on January 26, 2003, during a coming-of-age ceremony in Paya, a Kuna village inside the park. The paramilitaries, disguised as guerrillas, entered the village and requested a meeting with the chiefs. At the meeting they turned their guns on the hosts and said they were going to punish the Kuna for helping the FARC. Two chiefs and an unarmed Kuna policeman were executed. Afterwards, the paramilitaries stole the village's livestock, killed its dogs, and mined its paths so nobody could get in or out. Then they started marching toward Púcuro, forcing Gilberto Vásquez to serve as their guide. Someone had already alerted Púcuro, however, and the village was empty. So the paramilitaries shot Vasquéz in the head inside his own house.

No Panamanian police officers were in Púcuro or Paya the weekend of the massacre. Since then, however, security has greatly improved—in Púcuro and Paya alone, the police have added 100 officers—a development that Vásquez calls "the one good thing to come out of the killings."

Yet many find the changes disturbing. "Panama used to be neutral regarding Colombia," says Eric Jackson, the 51-year-old publisher of a muckraking paper called The Panama News, in Panama City. "Now it seems it is starting to take sides with the paramilitaries." Villages thought to be guerrilla resting and staging areas have been ransacked and burned—not only by the paramilitaries but also by the Panamanian police.

"The government doesn't want people to know what's going on," says Manuel Acevedo. "And so no one does."

Vásquez and I leave Rancho Frío and return to El Real. Along the way, we pass through a few hamlets and chat with the remaining residents. "Most people got scared and left," says one resident. In one community, the only inhabitant is a toothless old woman tending chickens.

Soon, though, we come across an abandoned village that is starting to fill up again. "Who are these people?" I ask Vásquez.

"Colombians," he says. "Refugees." One of the residents waves at us. He's wearing rubber boots and holding a Stihl chain saw. In his backyard, a little pile of brush is already burning.

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