For more than five years Native Future’s land tenure program has supported the Wounaan to map and title their lands, and protect their rainforests. Currently, we are helping the Wounaan learn how to articulate their territorial claims in precise latitude and longitude, as well as document incursions onto their land from ranchers or loggers. To this end, Native Future volunteer and GIS Specialist Cameron Ellis was dispatched to Panama in March 2012 to train a group of Wounaan in GPS technology and mapping. Together, Cameron and his team of Wounaan trainees collected GPS points and mapped the community of Cemaco, one of the remaining 10 Wounaan communities petitioning the government for title. The following is an abridged account of Cameron’s work. (For full account, go to www.nativefuture.org.)

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Cameron Ellis

The primary goal of Native Future’s mapping efforts is to help the Wounaan articulate their territorial claims in precise latitude and longitude, as well as any incursions onto their land from ranchers or loggers.  Our secondary goal is to train Wounaan in GPS use, so that (once we go home) they can continue documenting and groundtruthing the struggle for their land.

In March of 2012, with these goals in mind and a box full of donated GPSs and cameras, I traveled to the Wounaan community of Cemaco, in the Darien region of Panama.

Getting anywhere from Bozeman, MT usually takes a long time, and this trip rings in at about 20 hours.  All 20 of which I sweat out in five minutes of the Panamanian humidity.

I spend the first day running errands around Panama City then heading out to the Wounaan compound in Juan Diaz, a gritty residential suburb of Panama City.  Some of the faces around the compound are familiar from previous trips, others not.  I meet Donald Negria, who will be attending the mapping workshop and a few others who will be helping with logistics.

Soon it is dark, we make plans for an early morning and parts ways with those who need to get home.

I ask if there is a market nearby where i can get some food and last minute supplies for the trip.  Donald points me towards the “Los Pueblos” mega shopping mall, but he cautions against walking there after dark.  Dangerous neighborhood.  Better to take the car.  So I do.  If I go down in Central America, I don’t want it to be in the parking lot of a supermall.  Please.  Let it be on a canoe deep in the mangroves, or in the flickering light of a volcano.  Not a mall.  But, the mall is enormous and has what I need.

Daylight breaks and we are on the road, heading east towards the Darien and Cemaco.

20 minutes down the road we get a call from Leo asking if we had picked up Jose, another one of the GPS workshop attendees.  I thought he was meeting us at the boat, but apparently he was supposed to meet us at the compound.  Unfortunately, he missed his bus.  Turning around to get Jose now will add an hour to our travel time.  This makes me nervous for two reasons:

Reason one – A week prior to my trip I spoke with Jose Vargas, a biologist colleague of mine who works frequently in the Darien.  When I mentioned that I was planning a trip to Cemaco he hesitated, and began to ask more about my trip.

It turns out that he has a field site in the monte above Cemaco, monitoring some Harpy eagle nests, and he was supposed to be in Cemaco at the same time as me.  But, he received a note from his field crew in Cemaco saying that maybe it would best if Jose stayed away for a little while.  The community of Cemaco had just had a run in with a band of narcotraficantes who were using the monte around Cemaco to hike their drug cargo to the shore, where it was picked up by other narcos posing as fishermen.  From there, the cargo was transported up the coast.  The narcos warned the people of Cemaco that there would be ‘repercussions’ for any Wounaan who alerted the military to their presence.

Jose is cautious by nature, but he said that he would not go back to Cemaco until the rainy season, when the ground turned to mush and the narcos couldn’t use the forest to transport goods anymore.  He advised me to cancel my trip.  He said: these are not loggers or ranchers, they are not afraid of hurting a gringo.

Reason two – Should I roll the dice and visit Cemaco, he advised that I be EXTREMELY punctual, arriving there at the highest daytime tide (the narcos preferred the night tides) and under no circumstances should I miss it.  Like many coastal communities, Cemaco’s port (a very small Afro-panamanian town called Taimati) was only accessible during the half-hour surrounding high tide.  If we missed that window, we would be stranded a mile from firm ground.

I knew about missing high tides in coastal Panama.  I missed one once while mapping the community of Platanares.  We had waited too long on a military escort, and were forced to climb off the boat halfway up the Platanares river and hike the last mile at dusk through the coastal mangrove.  No place for a human.  Waist deep in water and mud, crabs skittered down mangrove vines to stare at us on their long stalky eyes.  Mud sucked the meat off our thighs.  Bugs swarming through the thick air, thickening it only more with atomized blood from our necks.

Jose informed me that missing hightide in Cemaco invoked the additional risk of stingrays.

…so, when I look at my watch, and ponder returning to Panama City to pick up Jose.  I calculate the tradeoff in a currency of stingrays and narcos.  We turn around at the next intersection and step on it.

We pick up Jose, and an hour later we are breaking new trail towards the Darien.

We descend into a grassy floodplain and approached a modest looking bridge.  Humberto points out piles of burnt rocks and tires on either side.  This is the bridge that the indigenous groups of eastern Panama have been closing down, in solidarity with Ngobe of western Panama, as they protest construction of a dam. The bridge is hardly an hour outside of Panama City on the Panamerican highway.  By closing this one bridge they are been shutting out a third of the country.  Great work.

15 minutes later we pull into Chepo.  Chepo is a launching point for trips to the Wounaan communities of Rio Hondo and Platanares, via Puerto Coquira.  I mapped those two places four years prior, but due to an apathetic Panamanian government, the conflicts there continue to escalate.  Now rosewood is being cleaved from these watersheds with impunity.  Unbeknownst to us, at that very moment, standoffs with loggers were occurring in both Rio Hondo and Platanares, one would turn deadly before the dry season was over.

Driving through Chepo, the first thing we spot is a logging truck, bursting at its cables with cocobolo.  I reach for my video camera, but not quickly enough, and Chepo is behind us.

We cross into Kuna country, over Lake Bayano, and past a few villages that had been destroyed in the massive floods of 2010.  The roads are only now being repaired from these floods, so we face a good 20 miles of slow going.  My optimistic illusions about arriving at high tide dissolve.  I resolve to be at peace with either narcos or stingrays, or both.

We see another cocobolo truck parked on the side of the road.  This time I am determined to get footage.  I jump out of the car with my video camera.  Cars honk.  I wonder if this is a good idea, or is it going to get me in trouble?  A big pickup truck screeches to a stop and the driver yells at me from the highway “what are you doing!?”  I reply “photo-ing the wood!”  Obviously.  Then, wondering if this is the owner of the wood, a bad hombre who is going to pull a gun on me and crush my camera, I add “its very pretty!”  Which it is.  Even without polish the cocobolo grain looks more like red liquid than wood.  He says: “It is cocobolo.  Very expensive wood.  All illegal.”  Then he adds: “I am a legitimate forester, and this is criminal.”  We talk for about 10 minutes.  He tells us where the wood is being processed and some of the details of the local black market in cocobolo.  We exchange numbers and continue on our way.

Next, we enter Darien and begin the process of passing military checkpoints.  The first checkpoint is a few concrete structures at the border of Darien province.  The roadside is plastered with signs about the dangers of Darien.  Billboards announce rewards for anyone who divulges the location of secret weapons and ammunition stashes.  Nothing like massive pictures of bullets, grenades and automatic weapons to make you feel safe.  I don’t see any pictures of stingrays though.

The officers scrutinize my passport and a letter that Leo drafted authorizing my passage.  The letter also requests a military escort for our mapping team, which they don’t comment on.

The next checkpoint, in the town of Meteti is a little more robust.  They have a fortified compound, razor wire and shooting perches.  We are ushered in, and answer a similar battery of questions.  They chuckle at the request for a military escort.  Eventually they let us through, and we arrive at puerto quimba in good time.  The boat captain is waiting for us snapping his hands in the universal latin american sign for “prisa.”

This checkpoint is a little green pillbox by the banks of the slow green river.  We spend twenty minutes there, asking again for a military escort.  Ultimately, he tells us to check in at the larger military base in Palma, the capital of Darien.

We run down to the boat and before I’ve found a seat, the boat is raked back, slapping down river.

I check my watch, it is currently high tide, and we are a minimum of two hours from Cemaco.  No chance.

Our skiff slows down.  We are approaching a HUGE green skiff, similar dimensions but several times the size of ours.  It almost looks akward, a boat that size should have trawling lines and a bridge, instead it just looks like an oversized skiff, with a row of gigantic outboards lined up on the stern, as if they were on sale outside a marine store.  It is a military boat.  A floating checkpoint.

We stop alongside, the gunwales of the military boat towering over us.  A young officer peers over the side and asks for my papers.  I don’t bother asking for the military escort and we are on our way within minutes.

Beyond the military boat is the great bay of Darien.  Not open ocean, but choppier than the river.  On our right we pass a sharp point, with rocks tumbling off into the bay.  Years ago, in my previous life, which also took me to the Darien, I almost went down on this point of rocks.

We were on a public transport boat, loaded with passengers, when the captain rounded this point and misread the currents coming off the river.  The boat banked hard and the river current caught the lip of the boat, pushing it down violently.  The gunwale immediately went underwater, and the boat was so overloaded with people and stuff that it didn’t come back up.  Water rushed in, soaking bags, battering passengers and even babies on that side of the boat.  The boat tipped to what felt like 45 degrees, bags floating and people yelling water, before the engines got enough traction to dig us out.

A better place to go down than the mall parking lot, but still, not on a routine ferry trip, please…

Our next stop is Palma de Darien, the capital of Darien Province.  More posters of machine guns and grenades, no military escort.  Two more hours along the coast.

We miss the high tide by three hours.  As we hike that mile of murky knee-deep water I make SURE to shuffle my feet like a penitent and whisper soothing words to the great watery spirit below.

We reached the shore safely.  There we met Cabezon, a strong stocky man who would coordinate our stay in Cemaco.  My drybag bag of GPS equipment and gringo trappings was larger than he was, but he hoisted it on his shoulder like a book bag, and within an hour we arrived in Cemaco.

GPS training started the following day.  The students attending the workshop were Jose, from Jaque/Pidoquera, Donald from Aruza and Rogelio from Cemaco.  We set up some tables and a big chalkboard in the community structure.  I start with basics about how GPSs work, how they communicate with satellites and how that translates to the GPS interface.  Then we spend the afternoon practice-mapping around Cemaco.  We map the soccer field, the perimeter of the community and nearby fincas, helping the students get familiar with the units and take accurate notes.

The students pick up the basics of GPS use very quickly.  So quickly that we shuffle our plans around.  Rather than attempt to map the long perimeter of Cemaco’s territory as one large unit, I feel confident that we could divide up into two teams, each tackling different portions of the territorial perimeter.  If we get up early enough, and hike hard enough, Cabezon assures us that both teams, departing in opposite directions, could converge on the headwaters of the Cemaco watershed by nightfall.  It is a gamble, but worth taking.

The next morning we awake before dawn.  As I pump water from a bucket for my several water bottles, I relish the heavy humid silence in our host’s thatch house.  Those entirely empty moments before a long hard day begins.  But headlamps have a tragic flaw when used in the tropics.  They paint a big insect target on the center of your forehead.  Before I knew it, a platoon of green and black flying beetles, straight out of Avatar, the size of baseballs, legs dangling, are hurtling down the pipeline of light to the spot right between my eyeballs.  I stagger around the hut like a drunk bear, running into pots and sticks while beetles pelt my face, before wrenching the headlamp off my head and hurling it across the floor.  Jokes about that were still circulating when we returned, because, of course, those kind of beetles are totally harmless.

The two teams, meet briefly in the dark.  There are six of us in all, students, guides and me.  We check GPS units and cameras, battery supplies, then part ways silently, slipping into the forest on either side of town.

The first portion of the hike is uneventful.  We are essentially hiking to the perimeter trail.  We pass some small-scale agricultural plots and slip along riverine banks before starting a steep climb to the ridge that marks their territorial boundary, and the trocha.  The trocha is a swath of roughly cleared underbrush.  It is about three meters wide and follows Cemaco’s territorial boundary, except in places where no underbrush grows, such as rocky ridgelines.  Most of the Wounaan communities have maintained these trochas for decades.  They are cleaned by machete several times a year, for which I am grateful.

The first hours of hiking the trocha are mild.  The trocha is clean, and makes for easy walking.  Jose is comfortable with the GPS and I manage the camera, photographing points of interest and marking them in the GPS.  Cabezon warned us that there were seven lomos, or hills, along the northern route, and I counted about three thus far, so I feel pretty good about myself and my Montana legs, they are true howitzers.

Eventually we reach a stream, where I drain my water bottles and refill them.  I notice that the opposing bank of the stream is steep.  Where are we going to cross?  Our guide points straight across the stream to the nearly vertical bank on the opposite side, dirt and tangled brush rising into the green canopy for as I follow it with my eyes.  The first lomo, smiles our guide.

The rest of the day is mind-bending exertion.  Each lomo is 1,000 vertical feet of slippery dirt and dense brush, then an 800 foot drop on the other side.  Flitting leaves where I need traction and hard rocks where I fall.  Ant colonies where I paw the earth for grip, and thorns where I reach for a branch.  We reach the fifth lomo around two in the afternoon.  I am drenched in sweat, bruised, bleeding and exhausted.  I curse the state of Montana, I have peashooters for legs.  My feet feel like they’ve been chewed on by a pack of dogs.

But the agony has an upside.  We take frequent breaks, marking GPS points, taking photos and drinking in the scenery.  The forest changes with each lomo.  Dense understory and a broad bright leaves in river bottoms, giving way to darker and sharper leaves towards the top, less understory.  Many of the summits are shrouded in wet wispy fog, which comes and goes as if the mountains were breathing.  When the fogs clear and the canopy thins we have staggering views of the terrain, steep forested monte, all the way to Colombia. We even catch occasional glimpses of the Pacific Ocean, miles away to the west.  The rumble of Howler monkeys punctuates the sublime scenery.

By five in the afternoon I am staggering like a zombie through the early-to-fade equatorial light.  I secretly wish for a run-in with a band of narcos, if only it would afford us a thirty minute break from hiking.  But Jose and and our guide are anxious to rendezvous with the other team and camp together.  I am about to crumple on the trail, we hear a new type of howl filtering through the forest, the southern team!  Minutes later we stumble into camp.

I can’t bear to look at my feet as they come out of my boots, not sure if my socks are soaked in blood, sweat or river water.  I can’t look, but I see shock in the eyes of Donald.  As if I pulled an alien tentacle out of my boot.  Sangre, Donald laughs.

I check through the other team’s GPS, camera and log book, to make sure all went well.  I am very impressed with the level of detail, particularly the quality of the notes in the log book.  I am thrilled that our “divide and conquer” strategy worked.  We mapped the perimeter of an entire community in one

(looooong) day, capitalizing on Wounaan quadriceps and savvy in their own forests.

It is difficult to overemphasize the ruggedness of the terrain in the Darien, and the subtle effects it has on Wounaan struggle for land tenure.  For many decades, the steep mountain ranges and dense monte had the fortunate effect of isolating them from development in Panama.  However, now that remote logging and ranching interests are on their doorstep, well before roads and other infrastructure arrive, their isolation makes them only a vague afterthought to the Panamanian people and government.  The government is unable and often unwilling to do the travel necessary to reach to communities and address their concerns. Helicopter flights are expensive, and boat trips are long and logistically difficult.  Once there, government officials are often anxious to leave because of bugs, punishing terrain, unusual food, narco menace and/or simple things like missing their families.  All of which means that the Panamanian government has spent very minimal time in these communities, and has a comparatively poor understanding of Wounaan life.

The upshot, as far as our mapping work goes, is that when the government survey team arrives to formally delineate the boundary of a Wounaan community, they struggle and strain up one or two lomos before saying “screw this, let’s just use the points that gringo has!!”

…which is fine by me!

I cool my battered feet in the crystal clear river.  Dinner is rice and fresh water shrimp, tossed straight from the river into a boiling pot.  I sleep like a dead man.  If narcos came into our came into our camp and kidnapped us and hauled across the border to Colombia, I don’t think I would’ve noticed

The next morning I amble around on my legs, that feel more like botched amputations.  But in good humor at having completed the perimeter, and being in the company of such extremely competent field crews.  Breakfast is more freshwater shrimp in rice.

Although we are done with the perimeter, our goal today is to descend via the river, mapping land invasions along the way, ultimately arriving back in Cemaco by the afternoon.  I am grateful to be descending a river, rather than cowboying ridges like the day before.  It is the dry season, so the water is not dangerous, but it is well above my waist in parts.  I wish for a raft that would float me down, but the cold water circulating in my boots is good enough.

We exit the riverbed occasionally to map and photograph places where colonists have attempted to enter the Wounaan/s territory and stake claims to the land.  They have cleared their own mini-trochas, and marked trees with their initials, but there are few outright clearcuts, and save for one family of semi-friendly Embera indians, we do not run into anyone else on the way down.  Cemaco does not currently suffer the aggressive invasions taking place in communities like Rio Hondo and Platanares.

We arrive in Cemaco at three in the afternoon.  I go for a swim in the river and collapse in the hammock of our host’s place.

The next day we regroup in the common area and begin the process of uploading the data from the gps units and cameras to a laptop.  Given the fussy-ness of geographic data, and clunky formatting issues, this is the slowest part of the training.  My goal is teach them at a minimum how to get the data off the GPS and attached to an email.  We spend some time going over more complicated functions, and basic map production.  We are able to recharge the laptop at night with a small generator, although the final portions of the training will require internet access.

On our last day in Cemaco I send the mapping teams out to capture a few remaining pieces of the territory that we skipped on our long march.  They capture the information flawlessly, and by the afternoon we are making our rounds of Cemaco, shaking hands, settling accounts and saying goodbye to the people we’d met.

In the 4am darkness, waves break on the top of the beach.  This is high tide, almost lapping at the tropical grasses and cinderblock beachside structures.  Getting into the tossing skiff is difficult, but not as difficult as a mile of stingrays.  Within minutes we are all piled in, laying a fat green phosphorescent wake across the water.

We are all silent, blanketed in sound by the roaring engine.  Then the captain nudges me and points to some small fires burning in the forest above the steep and rocky shoreline.  He says something that I don’t understand, then he points to a handful of fishing skiffs waiting offshore, barely discernable in the hazy pre-dawn moonlight.

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Read more here in an article on The Huffington Post.

Washington, DC: A delegation of indigenous representatives and human rights specialists from Panama will be in Washington DC to participate in a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this Friday, March 23, 2012. The delegation includes  Ñgäbe leaders Adelaida Miranda from the Tabasará River, Pedro Abrego from the Changuinola District and Feliciano Santos from the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, all in Western Panama, and Leonides Quiroz, a Wounaan lawyer from Eastern Panama.”

Read the rest of this news article from The Rainforest Foundation.

Read the news article from The Rainforest Foundation.

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