KNOW NOW:
Panama’s Darién Gap
Trafficking through Tribal Life
This is Panama, where armed traffickers will move over 750,000 migrants through the Darién Gap in 2024, trampling one of earth’s most critically endangered ecosystems. This is Sara Omi, an indigenous Emberá community leader in its Choco region, where sixty percent of her people have fled the human and environmental disaster. Daily intrusions drive out indigenous, long protecting and sustaining one of the globe’s most important old growth forests. The species-rich tropics has plant life known only to Panama (twenty percent of what grows here only grows here), all under an enormous mature canopy called the “natural lung” of the Americas, where Omi’s Emberá have thrived with Mother Nature for centuries.
The constant crush of humanity through its delicate rainforest hasn’t generated much response from Panama’s government, but scientists worldwide are bracing for the fallout. Among them, the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum with its only home outside the US in Panama. Here, it has a century drawing world class specialists to study local fauna and flora, the oceans and paleontology. Today, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is frantic to protect the unparalleled biodiversity from human destruction. It puts a premium on the Emberá’s natural restoration of the forest, as intruders trample and recklessly poach logs, illegal mines and clearcut.
The invasive attack on humans and nature unfolds in a 100-mile long, 30-mile wide stretch between Colombia and Panama, an undeveloped, lush green density, interrupting the otherwise paved Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Patagonia. There are no roads in the Darién, just mountainous jungle punctuated by rivers, swamps and wetlands that often become deadly human sinkholes. Impossible to penetrate without skilled guidance, travelers fall victim to cartels of vicious crossers who navigate, but also beat, rob and rape them en route. Eyewitnesses contend the savage behavior is worse on the Panamanian side. Violently controlled, the entire forest has given way to a “transnational criminal economy” that Insight Crime tracks with vigor.
Largely ignored by Panamanian and Colombian authorities, the criminality keeps pace with migration. Roving gangs and paramilitary groups leading refugees run roughshod through this rich ecosystem and poison a once pristine environment for the Emberá, Wounaan and other native communities along the water’s edge. Distinct, isolated peoples who speak different languages, they live in open stilt houses along banks of rivers that flow to the Pacific ocean. In the past two years, indigenous have seen their ancestral grounds overrun by refugees from every corner of the world. The back stories of Venezuelans, Haitians, Sub Saharan Africans, Chinese and more fleeing repression, poverty and conflict – these are documented, data-rich “push factors” driving people to embark on a terror-filled journey to reach safety. Last year’s wave of 535,000 people doubled the number in 2022; the sheer volume soiled the land, the water, and the essentials of indigenous life.
Omi is President of the Emberá Congress in the Darién Gap (last year Forbes Magazine once again named her among the 100 most influential women in Central America). She wants to stop flows of smuggled humans who “make their necessities everywhere'' defecating all over the forest floor. She frowns: “They pollute everything. Dead bodies of drowned migrants float in rivers and contaminate the water for drinking and fishing. Tribal people are getting sick.”
Everyone is at risk. Emberá men disappear as hunters, soil tillers, and palm leaf slashers, now drawn to fast money as forest guides or worse. Women, overrun by migrant demands for meals, have no time to distill natural color and weave the intricate designs that have set the standard for the region's finest folk art. Indigenous hunger is a new problem and likely to worsen as natives stop growing and collecting food. Forest protection's future looks dim as do the prospects for indigenous youth. Parents pulling children from school to help serve migrants is what most concerns Omi. “In our community the greatest value has been on access to education,” She laments losing that, and even civility, with some indigenous men joining local Panamanian gangs to rob and sexually assault migrants crossing from Colombia. It is wiping out their way of life. Just over a third of Omi’s own community remains. Cartels and savage treatment of females and children in this jungle threaten to destroy what’s left, as detailed in the International Crisis Group’s sobering account.
The daughter of the Emberá first female chief, Omi resists, as she was taught to do. Giving voice to local women comes naturally, but her political rise grates against the ingrained machismo culture that sees female leaders “as menacing” she says, and the entire gender as prey.
She looks out for her people and for those passing through. "It's all local,” explains Omi, the sexual violence “increasing against migrant women and children,” impacts natives, too. Human Rights Watch asserts the government’s stance allows “crimes against migrants and sexual violence against women” to occur with impunity. Indeed, the Panamanian government has yet to step in. It simply lacks the resources to hear from victims: Panama’s National Migration Service’s appointed prosecutor has no staff interpreters to translate for Haitians, Africans, and other non-Spanish speakers who have been attacked.
Deeply disturbed by the sharp increase in brutal sexual assaults and government inaction, the organization with special expertise in treating victims of Darién’s sexual violence, Médicins Sans Frontiers, recently publicly prodded Panama to do more, Government officials did act; they summarily shut MSF down. Now there is no accountability, no security and no careful treatment for those brutalized, while daily, often deadly intrusions through here go unchecked.
DO NOW:
Just where is the Darién Gap? For more context, examine the Darien Gap’s strategic role and its volatile recent history as a human transport corridor. See this latest IOM global perspective on the survival rate of those fleeing conflict. Do you have languages, expertise in trauma, or the ability to address mental and physical health needs? Plug your skills into regional work through the Pan American Development Fund and other groups operating on the periphery and inside the jungle. Here’s a way to directly affect indigenous as caretakers of the rainforest, while beating back the effects of climate change and human destruction. Just starting out or changing course in the working world? Consider a career with impact.
Amy Kaslow