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President Torrijos in Darien province. Photo courtesy of the Presidencia

The "yes" campaign's indigenous problem

by Eric Jackson

President Torrijos is spending a lot of time in Panama's indigenous communities lately, handing out goodies and dishing out strident rhetoric. For example, in an August 3 campaign swing through Darien province, Martín passed out zinc to people whose homes had been damaged in floods, envelopes with $35 in cash to needy families, generators, boats, motors, sports equipment and promises to build or repair schools, roads and aqueducts. His stump speech that day urged voters not to be "left confused by hidden political agendas and projects that may be behind some groups that oppose the canal." He attacked the "no" campaign as "those for whom the welfare of Panamanians doesn't matter."

"I'm sure that the Panamanian people won't be left deceived," the president opined. "The days of the lie, of works that exist on paper but you never see are behind," he promised.

So what's this all about?

Ronaldo Ortíz, an urban Kuna who's active with the Revolutionary Student Front (FER-29) at the University of Panama, is just the sort of person whom Torrijos meant to vilify. Speaking about the supporters of the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan to expand the Panama Canal, Ortíz said that "they're trying to promote a scheme," and to do so "they need the indigenous vote." But the young albino leftist doesn't think those votes are to be had. He said that the "yes" campaign is in trouble throughout the country, and nowhere more than in its indigenous communities. "There are about 20,000 votes in Kuna Yala alone, and those people are all going to vote" --- mostly for the "no" side, Ortíz thinks, although he expresses a concern about fraud.

Well, yes, you'd expect a campus radical to say things like that. But his is not an isolated voice. Pedro Rodríguez, the president of the Ngobe - Bugle General Congress, told El Panama America that he expects 80 percent of the Ngobe vote to go against the canal expansion proposal. He referred to promises made by President Torrijos's father, the late General Omar Torrijos, about how there would be jobs for Ngobe communities when Panama gained control over the canal, and noted that this never happened.

On the same day that Rodríguez was making these declarations, the cacique of the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca's Nedrini region, Rogelio Moreno, joined a hunger strike and chained himself to a government office in San Felix, accusing the government of dragging its feet on promises to provide gynaecological and pediatric services to his constituents. Before that hunger strike ended a few days later, the coordinator of the comarca's Anti-Corruption Council, Orlando Hooper, was leading protests about moves to seize indigenous lands in Rio Caña on the Bocas del Toro coast and on Escudo de Veraguas Island, to be developed into fenced-off upscale residential communities for foreigners. The Torrijos administration responded that the lands had not yet been sold and that anybody who objects to these proposed concessions can file papers and they will be considered.

While the protests in the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca were underway, the 200 of so delegates to the General Congress of the Embera - Wounaan Collective Lands Organization (OITCEW) that had been held two weeks earlier were holding meetings in their 38 scattered communities in Darien and Panama provinces. The group represents communities left outside of the Embera - Wounaan Comarca when that was set up in the 1970s, and which have many times over the years been assured of their rights in the lands they hold collectively.

However, those promises have been consistently broken, sometimes even to the extent that the national government has given loans to subsidize the invasion of these indigenous lands by outsiders.

"The position of the General Congress is to vote 'no' [on the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan] because agreements on collective lands have not been honored by the government," said Alberto Membache, a delegate from Arimae. Moreover, he complained, "indigenous people are not taken into account in development plans," either in their formation or as beneficiaries. Membache predicted a strong rejection of the canal expansion plan in Embera communities both inside and outside of the comarca.

At the July meeting of the Embera - Wounaan General Congress, which represents the communities in the comarca, representatives from the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) came ready to make a rehearsed presentation, but were told that they had only 10 minutes to speak. When the presentation began in Spanish, there were complaints that some of the people didn't speak that language very well and that the ACP should have had the consideration to provide speakers and literature in the Embera language. The abbreviated "yes" campaign presentation was followed by speeches from the floor by caciques urging a "no" vote, among other reasons because to date indigenous communities have never gained and usually lost from the goverment's mega-projects over the years.

Among the Embera and Kuna peoples, there is the collective memory of the 1970s Bayano Dam project in eastern Panama province, in which entire communities of these ethnic groups were displaced with very little compensation and left in worse poverty than they had known before. The lessons of Bayano are often cited in Ngobe and Naso communities --- and in some non-indigenous areas --- where the Torrijos administration is backing plans to build new hydroelectric dams that resident fear will displace them by flooding their lands or by the private appropriation of public water supplies upon which they depend.

Thus the canal expansion project can be and often is fitted into a litany of indigenous grievances. Take, for example, the October 12, 2004 declaration of the Kuna Youth Movement (emphasis added by The Panama News):

...The youth only encounter indolence, abandonment, intolerance, discrimination, idleness and violence.

These social problems, added to globalization and the implementation of economic and military programs in Panama's indigenous territories, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Free Trade Agreement, Plan Colombia, Plan Puebla - Panama, the Meso-American Biological Corridor, the expansion of the Panama Canal, the construction of hydroelectric dams in Naso and Ngobe territories, electrical towers in Kuna Yala, oil pipelines and the railroad, the opening of a highway between Panama and Colombia and the displacement of hundreds of indigenous communities, among other plans, go against indigenous principles and values and all of the indigenous, black and popular resistance struggles in defense of Mother Earth over these 512 years.

So there is a general and long-standing indigenous discontent, a set of grievances that now goes well beyond complaints about the grinding extreme poverty that grips most people in most of Panama's indigenous communities, and it turns out that precisely those who have broken with part of this syndrome to get themselves educated are the people most likely to be urging their families, friends and neighbors not to believe the government's promises.

Sure, there are divisions that can be played. The "yes" campaign has already done this, to the extent that all of the indigenous legislators voted for the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan. But the people with whom The Panama News spoke all discounted the effectiveness of that. "Everyone knows that the legislators were representing business interests when they did that," Ortíz opined, "but those aren't indigenous interests."

Depending on whether one counts the Bokota as one with the Bugle, Panama has seven or eight distinct indigenous nations, with their own languages and customs. Some, like the Kuna and the Embera, have been traditional enemies. In the Embera - Wounaan and Ngobe - Bugle comarcas, the Wounaan and Bugle both want self-rule rather than inclusion as minorities within political institutions controlled by distinct ethnic groups to which they don't belong.

However, on a number of levels, and particularly among the younger and better educated among the various communities, there are unifying movements.

Arimae, for example, was the specific target of a call for ethnic cleansing by former legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay, who advocated the expulsion of the members of this community on the Pan-American Highway and the distrubution of their land to black and cholo settlers. But the pressure on that community's land existed before the woman who popularized the slogan "Indigenous to the Comarca" was elected to the legislature and has continued since the voters kicked her out. In its many long struggles Arimae has sometimes been defended by Kuna lawyers.

Now there is El Plan del Sol, a new movement among younger indigenous activists, largely based in the substantial and growing urban communities, to pull the different groups together into a common indigenous political project. Whether it will resonate in the comarcas and the collective lands remains to be seen, but one of the movement's activists, a young Ngobe named Eladio Miranda, told The Panama News that he expects both urban and rural indigenous communities to turn thumbs down on the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan. "Jobs? This is a lie," he said. "We don't get any benefit --- nothing."

"We have been forgotten, we have been offended, and we are voting no," Miranda concluded.

And so it has come to pass that although no specifically indigenous campaign committee has registered with the Electoral Tribunal, a "no" campaign that's mostly not visible to outsiders is already working to spread its message person to person in most indigenous communities. And how can you gauge the strength of such an "under the radar" movement? One good indication is President Torrijos's calculation that he needs to go to indigenous country to attack that movement, as he has done.