nature

The lemur leaf frog (Phyllomedusa lemur), one
of Chagres National Park's endangered species
Photo by ANAM

Conserving Chagres National Park
by Eric Jackson

This park has a lot to be destroyed. There are 900 or so endemic plant species there, more than scientists have been able to identify and name, let alone investigate for their medicinal or other useful properties or the roles they play in their surrounding environments. Of the 114 mammal species in Chagres National Park, four occur nowhere else in a natural habitat. Birders have identified 396 species in the park. There are 95 varieties of reptiles in the park (three endemic) and 79 kinds of amphibians (four endemic). Although it is known that you can get some very annoying insect bites in the park, and also find some beautiful and obscure arachnids there (if you're into those sorts of things like this reporter is), there are no reliable statistics on the number or insects or other arthropod species that inhabit the park. Among the park's most famous edangered species --- which are economically valuable, from the eco-tourism point of view --- one finds the harpy eagle, the jaguar and the otter.

So, with all of this threatened with destruction, Cortés rhetorically asks "What are the consequences of doing nothing?" Her fatalistic answer? "You're going to die anyway, but if you kill everything you die faster." And her practical answer to the situation? You protect and conserve our natural heritage through a variety of approaches, involving the communities that live in or near the park or who visit and enjoy it. "The foundation is promoting knowledge" as the common denominator of these activities.

But what is this Fundacion Parque Nacional Chagres (Chagres National Park Foundation in English)? They describe themselves as "a non-profit private organization" that was founded in June of 2006, and which is "oriented to the execution of programs and projects related to nature conservation and protection of the Chagres National Park."

So, is it a non-governmental organization? That's a tricky question because the park is public property, the Panamanian government has devolved some government functions to the foundation, and through mixed public and private intermediary layers, most of the foundation's funding --- a $378,000 budget in 2008 and more this year --- comes from the US and Panamanian governments. A 2007 report by the non-governmental Nature Conservancy descibes the foundation's creation as follows:

Fundacion Parque Nacional Chagres is the new NGO created in the context of the Parks in Peril Project - Chagres Site. This organization will be the long-term beneficiary of the Chagres National Park Trust Fund and is called to advance the progress of conservation actions within the park as well as to establish a co-management agreement with the National Environmental Authority (ANAM).

Considering the environmental scofflaw practices of the Moscoso and Torrijos administrations --- whatever one might think of the environmental credentials of the George W. Bush administration --- at first glance there would be reason to suspect political control by those hostile to the park. The Chagres Fund's supervisory board has one representative of the Panamanian government, one representative of the US government and a representative of the Nature Conservancy as permanent members. These three board members then choose two board members "from local non-profit organizations dedicated to conservation in Panama" to serve two-year terms. As it turns out, Panama designates someone from ANAM, the United States designates someone from USAID, and so far the two other board members from the Panama Audubon Society and the Smithsonian institution (the latter non-profit, but also a US government agency). So at second glance the Chagres Fund is dominated by governments but not by the usual collection of partisan political figures.

The foundation itself? The executive director, Rosamaría Guerra, was running the slide show that went with Camila Cortés's presentation. (It's not that Guerra doesn't speak on behalf of the foundation at similar events, but she doesn't speak English and Cortés does.) The president of the Fundacion Parque Nacional Chagres is Norita Scott-Pezet, past president of the Panama Audubon Society. Another board member is Oscar Vallarino, former director of the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON). Other members come from aristocratic or politically connected families, some of them with reasonable environmentalist credentials. None of them were among those who have stepped forward to add theirs to the public voices opposed to the Petaquilla Gold Mine, Mireya Moscoso's proposed road through Volcan Baru National Park or the hydroelectric concessions granted for virtually every river in Panama, or take a leading role in any of the important environmental controversies of the PRD years.

So, "private?" In legal form, perhaps. "Non-governmental?" You know, there's a big argument underway about "governmental NGOs" and just who the members of "civil society," as recognized by governments, really are and are not.

Does it matter? Maybe.

This reporter's first encounter with Chagres National Park was a 1990s visit along with government officials. After a piragua voyage up the Cuango River, a wade up one of its tributaries, and a slog up a muddy hillside, we arrived at a spot in the park where about 200 Colombians were washing away a hillside with powerful hoses and sifting out the gold-bearing quartz from the muddy results. The chemicals that they used to separate the gold from the ore, and the sewage from their camp, flowed down into the Colon coastal town of Cuango's water supply. The muddy sediments from their mining activity covered and thus ruined fish spawning beds. I asked Cortés if this sort of thing is still going on in the park.

These are Torrijos administration actions, on which Martinelli's people have yet to definitively pronounce a position. In September of 2008, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MICI) granted a 1,597-hectare manganese mining concession to a company called Minera Cañazas. The rectangular area is more or less parallel to the Caribbean coast in the corregimientos of Viento Frio and Nombre de Dios, a few miles inland into the foothills and overlapping the northern limits of Chagres National Park. In February of this year, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry granted a 689.49-hectare gravel mining concession to Compañía de Lefevre SA, whose secretary, Manuel José Paredes, had served as Torrijos's Vice Minister of Commerce and Industry. This concession, which encompasses parts of the Panama City corregimientos of Chilibre, Las Cumbres and Tocumen, overlaps the park's southern limits.

The foundation isn't organizing any public protests, but getting those two mining concessions revoked is important to the work of preserving Chagres National Park as far as Cortés sees things.

And what else?

The first thing Cortés mentioned in her presentation at The Talks was erosion control. Cerro Azul, the summit and northern slopes of which are within the park, she noted, used to have three meters of topsoil but now only has one meter. This is mostly from human-caused deforestation and poor farm management practices, but landslides, wind storms, forest fires and other natural phenomena can also contribute to the problem. "We need to control [erosion]. If it's a human cause, we need to change that. If it's a natural cause, we need to limit it." The foundation runs a $60,000 per year reforestation program in sensitive parts of the park, and, along with other institutions, conducts educational activities aimed at promoting better land management practices in schools and among local farm families. One of the immediate goals is to reduce the presence of paja canalera, the Vietnamese elephant grass that was imported in the 1950s to shore up the banks of Culebra Cut and has gone on to be Panama's most annoying invasive weed.

With ANAM, the USAID Canal Watershed Biodiversity Conservation Project and other institutions, the foundation campaigns against the poaching of the park's animals. It's not just a matter of teaching people that hunting is not a sustainable way to feed communities around the park, but also promoting alternatives like the raising of free-ranging chickens and iguanas, and providing new forms of livelihood like eco-tourism, more environmentally friendly farming, the raising of honey bees and the making and selling of handicrafts.

"You really want to know poor?" Cortés asked the audience of some four dozen people, most of them foreign retirees. "Go to Parque Chagres." Poor, as in not only living on a dollar a day but having to pay much higher prices for things bought on the economy due to the cost of transporting them to remote areas.

In some of the park's communities, Spanish is a second language. In the 1970s when the government flooded the Bayano River basin for a hydroelectric project, the offers that were made to the displaced indigenous residents in no way approximated the value of what had been taken away and a number of small bands of the Embera and Wounaan ethnic groups moved to set up new villages in the upper Chagres region. The park and its prohibitions and restrictions on many traditional activities came later and these semi-nomadic communities, whose economy was a little bit of hunting, a little bit of fishing, some small scale slash and burn gardening and the felling of trees for the wood and palm fronds they need for construction, had to settle down and change. In communities like Embera Drua, the foundation has joined with governmental entities of Panama and the United States and private groups and individuals to install running water, create a sustainable garbage management system and improve the infrastructures needed to attract tourists. They've helped out the schoolkids with food, books and school uniforms. They have helped to create gardens for Embera to teach outsiders about the botany of their traditional existence and for kids in and around the park to learn about new crops and new ways to grow traditional crops.

The USAID project in the area is being phased out, with the hopes that the Salamanca organic produce market, the tourism initiatives, the tree nurseries, the arts and crafts businessess, the apiaries and the other projects that they helped start will be sustained without much outside help. But the momentum toward an economically viable and naturally harmonious way of life in and around the park needs to be continued, even if a lot of the initiatives are now self-sustaining, if all that has been done is to amount to more than just another failed social experiment. The Fundacion Parque Nacional Chagres will be taking on a bit more of the work, and the latter part of Camila Cortés's presentation was a request for both monetary donations and volunteer work for its projects.