A
bird watching trip 16-23 June, 2018 took me to
Darién province in Panama where the one major
road has been recently renewed. There is a
significant “border patrol” presence, several
“check points” on the road in the province, and
I saw a sizeable number and range of
nationalities of migrants together with
migration facilities at one river landing point.
Darién
is the province that contains the end of the
Trans American highway, highway 1 in Panama. The
highway ends at the large river Chucunaque in
the town of Yaviza. There is a river landing for
dug out “canoes.” The town has only a small
footbridge to the rest of the town across the
river. Darién province extends through the
jungle to Colombia at the southern end of
Panama.
The
Panamanian birding guide told me Darién used to
consist mainly of indigenous settlements. They
farmed. I was told they do business with the
wider community in produce like yams – as well
as with the guide’s birding company. The highway
has enabled people from the north of Panama to
buy land adjacent to the road and clear it for
cattle ranching. Visibly, that’s what one sees –
roadside cattle ranches and jungle and mountains
beyond.
Visiting
birding areas near one indigenous settlement, I
also walked through a banana plantation across
the river from the settlement. I presume
indigenous workers worked it. I saw a school in
the indigenous settlement run by the central
government and I could hear that the teaching
was in Spanish. I was told the government also
maintains roads to the settlement, but that
these are viable only in the dry season. In the
wet season a dugout canoe with an outboard motor
on the river was the only transportation. I
learned that Panamanians have subsidized medical
costs, public transportation in new buses as the
colourful old buses are phased out, a Metro
being built in Panama City, and a pension system
that will benefit the indigenous as well as
other Panamanians.
Into
this developing Darién province in Panama,
migrants come. The birding guide told me they
fly to Brazil, then travel overland through
jungle hoping to reach the US and the American
Dream. The countries listed on a display board
at the riverside landing Puerto Peñita included
Pakistan, Chad, Congo, Cameroon, Ethiopia,
Somalia, Nepal. I
saw two migrants wearing turbans and a number of
others. I presume the migrants come up through
Colombia to the Pacific side of the continental
divide then cross the Chuchunaque river at a
point like Puerto Peñita with a rudimentary road
link to highway #1. One needs some
infrastructure like a path or dirt road in this
area. The river is swift, but it is swimmable to
cross. The jungle really is pretty impassable.
From Puerto Peñita we went on by boat to the
indigenous village of Nuevo Vigia.
On an
earlier trip up the river Tuira to the
indigenous village Vista Alegre, we went on
jungle trails looking for birds, with indigenous
people who cleaned the trail with machetes as we
walked. They said this trail went on all the way
to Colombia. The trail passed through a banana
plantation where bananas had been harvested and
the old trees cut down after the harvest leaving
open areas. New banana tree sprouts grow to
waist high in two to three weeks according to
the locals. There are many mosquitoes. And it is
very hot. Jungle travel is not very attractive.
I
have no idea what migrants are supposed to do in
Darién after the jungle and rivers are crossed.
In theory, highway #1 has various types of buses
up to Panama City. But everything on highway #1
passes through several Border Patrol checkpoints
where our guide had to present documentation
about his company, himself and us. Mercifully,
he was well prepared. While he was presenting
documents for inspection in the border patrol
building, I could see one SUV swarmed by a team
of border guards seemingly taking it apart.
Beyond
Panama City one can in theory get buses up
through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Guatemala then on to Chiapas and Tabasco in
Southern Mexico. I recall that Costa Rica has
police at bus stations, although buses will pick
up people and drop off people along the way. I
was told Panama is beginning to send back the
migrants found
– whatever that means.
Of
course there are other reasons than migrants for
the fleet of new border patrol vans, the renewed
and newly paved road, and the highly visible
uniformed border guards along the road in Darién
and at river points. Some drugs from Colombia
likely flow along this route too. All the
borders in this region of the world go across
inhospitable terrain. But until now even road
crossing points have been poorly monitored. Not
surprisingly, countries with outreach to the
wider world like Brazil attract refugees and
migrants who have presumably been told they can
walk through the jungles to Mexico and the US.
In the middle of the last century there were
seasonal crop pickers who walked into Southern
Mexico from Guatemala for harvest. These older
trails are now used by migrants. Birding
areas tend to be remote jungle where the border
runs. These areas now attract the border guard
infrastructure – whether the Rio Grande in
Texas, or Chiapas in Mexico or, it seems, Darién
in Panama.