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Number 18, Winter 1997

Panamá Update Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean 2017 Mission St. #305, San Francisco, CA 94110 Tel: (415) 495-6334, Fax: (415) 495-5628, E-mail: forlatam@igc.apc.org

The Ngobe-Buglés at the Crossroads
by Andrés Mares Muro

On October 12, 1996, a group of approximately 300 Ngobe-Buglé Indian men and women began a protest march from their homeland in the western province of Chiriquí to the capital city of Panama. Sixteen days and 250 miles later, the marchers were greeted at the Bridge of the Americas in Panama City by church groups, unionists, urban Ngobe-Buglés and student supporters. The chief demand of the Ngobe-Buglés was government recognition of an autonomous reservation (comarca). According to Marcelino Montezuma, president of the General Congress of the Ngobe-Buglé, "our fight for the comarca didn't start 20 years ago, it's a historic struggle which began with the birth of the [Panamanian] republic."

The issue prompting the most recent protests was mining concessions granted by Panama to the Canada-based Panacobre copper mining company. The mining will take place at the Cerro Colorado site in the heart of Ngobe-Buglé territory and will be the ninth largest mining project in the world. According to the Ngobe-Buglés the Panamanian government struck a deal with Panacobre behind closed doors and against the wishes of the indigenous people, effectively leaving them out of the decision-making affecting mineral extraction. In the words of Montezuma, "The exploitation of the mines, besides the ecological damage they cause, can never benefit our people because the area used will be ruined and the people will be removed from those lands, even as those lands are converted into the private property of the company owners."

The march was one of a series of actions taken by hundreds of Ngobe-Buglés and their supporters in Panama City and throughout the country. On November 24, Fifty indigenous protesters occupied the steps leading up to the Legislative Assembly. Two days later, five Ngobe-Buglés and one Kuna Indian began a hunger strike in front of a museum near the Assembly building, calling on the lawmakers to ratify Ngobe-Buglé land claims; on the same day some 1,200 Ngobe-Buglés demonstrated in the city of David against the government's watered-down version of the comarca law, threatening to paralyze the agricultural zones and resort to arms. Meanwhile, 200 indigenous protesters in Boquete City chanted outside of the home of President Pérez Balladares and indigenous representatives in the capital lobbied with assembly representatives, asking that they ratify the comarca.

The draft law submitted by the government and opposed by the Ngobe-Buglés has gone from the first assembly debate into the second round. Three debates are required before the bill is approved and passed to the president for his signature. But territorial claims and provisions for indigenous control over resources have been whittled down by the government version of the law. The Assembly ignored the Ngobe-Buglé demand of 1.3 million hectares of sovereign land, and is now set to ratify half of that amount, some 694,406 hectares. The promise of Ngobe-Buglé autonomy is dissipating, as government representatives give way to powerful economic interests.

History of Organizing for Autonomy

Of the six indigenous groups in Panama, the Ngobe-Buglé (also known as Guaymí) are the largest (126,626 members in 1990). The community is poor and beset with harsh social conditions; 50% of Ngobe-Buglés over ten years old are illiterate.

Ngobe-Buglé resistance to outsider invasion is an ancestral struggle. In this century the road towards autonomy has had many twists and turns. The 1960s saw the spread of a religious-millenarian-utopian movement known as Mamachí, which re-kindled the hopes for a reprieve from poverty and social discrimination long endured. "We were free in the past and will again be free," were the words of Delia Bejerano, recognized by the Ngobe-Buglés as a prophet.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, with the formation of a National Indigenous Association that unified the different Indian groups, and the political opportunities opened up by the government of Omar Torrijos, Ngobe-Buglé leaders laid out serious proposals for an autonomous reservation.

On October 12, 1982, the indigenous Ngobe-Buglés, Kunas, Emberás, and other popular sectors held the first unified march in Panama City. The groups called on the government to honor indigenous land claims; officials literally closed the doors on them. Unswayed, the Ngobe-Buglés held a march from Chiriquí to the capital the following year, reiterating their demand for a comarca.

In 1984 comarca negotiations with the government came to a standstill; this would be the last time the issue would be considered seriously by the government for 10 years.

The year 1986 was perhaps the low point of the modern Ngobe-Buglé movement because of splits within the community brought on by a government campaign of discrediting leadership, co-optation, counter-comarca proposals, and the recruitment of the large landholders by the state against the Ngobe-Buglés. Landowners, cattle ranchers, large corporations, and the state prevailed against the Ngobe-Buglé's land claims: the scenario of these formidable entities from the conservative regions of Bocas del Toro, Chiriquí and Veraguas, set against a poor Indian community, exists to the present day. In December of 1995 the Central America Human Rights Bulletin reported that in the province of Chiriquí "pillories are being used to punish Ngobe-Buglé people who challenge cattle ranchers and farmers, who the indigenous people accuse of occupying their lands."

In the last decade the Ngobe-Buglés have gone through leadership crises and division, internal dialogue, and reconstitution. A dialogue mediated by the church resulted in a reunification Congress in 1989; the renewed leadership stepped up the comarca ratification effort. In 1990 the Ngobe-Buglé caciques (traditional leaders) condemned the U.S. invasion.

In 1991 the community helped form the Coordinating Organization for Indigenous People in Panama (COONAPIP), an umbrella group of all indigenous communities. In 1993 the Ngobe-Buglés presented a draft law for the comarca to the Assembly. That same year police killed Ngobe-Buglé Saturnino Aguirre during a protest. A demonstration in April of 1995 was suppressed with tear gas, buckshot, and police gun fire (see Pananamá Update #13). Last October, two Ngobe-Buglés were wounded by police in Chiriquí. This incident and the government's refusal to renounce its contract with the Panacobre Mining Company precipitated the latest protests in Panama City and elsewhere.

A Millenarian Outlook

The struggle of the Ngobe-Buglés to establish their comarca has much to teach those of us in peace and social justice movements.

The Ngobe-Buglé vision of reality directly challenges the mind-set not only of the Panamanian economic powers-that-be, but also the basic values of most Western societies. The majority of governments - certainly in Latin America - see "modernity and progress" as defined by the private sector. The government/corporate sector pact, and especially the current trend of privatization of national resources, is at loggerheads with the idea of communal possession held by indigenous peoples.

"Private property is a concept alien to the indigenous mind," according to Hermelindo Ortega, Executive Secretary of COONAPIP, "which is why it is difficult to understand the need for [private] property land titles, since we consider the earth as integral part of our identity... The indigenous person does not place title on the land, a fact which the government takes advantage of by declaring the land we occupy to be 'state land,' without considering how long we've possessed it and worked it."

In the case of Panama, Western-oriented elites have opted to promote mining, commercial forestry, hydroelectric power, and tourism in ancestral Ngobe-Buglé lands over indigenous claims for control. Still, the Ngobe-Buglés affirm their traditional views, culturally and spirtitually opposing the imperatives of powerful economic interests

In a talk given to an indigenous community center last April, economist Juan Jované pointed out that the mines have a limited life-line, and once exhausted they leave nothing except ruins for the affected areas. The struggle is ultimately one between an indigenous "millenarian culture," sensitive to the ecology, and an earth-damaging Western market model.

Indigenous people "do not think in terms of the mine lasting ten years," Jované said. "You think in cosmic terms, on a long term basis...What's expressed in the marketplace is solely the will of he who is alive now, and especially he who has the power to acquire. The market system does not take into account future generations because these haven't yet been born. This question is clear to you, but it's not for the Western world. There are cultures which are in harmony with the environment but are outside of the market. Once the market is introduced, culture is destroyed."

The tone of desperation heard in the talk of the indigenous leadership betrays the justifiable fear of a people whose culture and environment will be destroyed if the government and the private sector win the day. The mining will bring with it manifold social problems for the community, a tip of the iceberg of violations of indigenous life. "The problem of Cerro Colorado isn't whether or not the concession is cancelled, but rather whether in the long run the mining generates violence, discontent, removal of people from their land, division within the indigenous society (which has already begun to happen), drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution and disrespect for our culture," says legal advisor Julio Dixon.

Instructive for us, too, is the cohesiveness of the indigenous groups. Their model of organizing relies on consensus process: leadership acts only with consultation of the group, not in an elitist fashion. In the recent negotiations between indigenous leaders and the government, 29-year old Gabriela Caballero, the first elected woman cacique (tribal leader) of her community, reported that the Panamanian President requested private meetings with select indigenous leaders. "He must know that the [Ngobe-Buglé] Congress would never permit me to accept such an invitation", as it surely would be a divisive trap. This type of leadership has helped to sustain the community's involvement and participation.

Sources: La Lucha del Pueblo Ngobe, SERPAJ-Panamá and CIDPA, 1990; Boletín, Congreso General Emberá Wounaan, 8/94; Premisas 5/95, 5/96, 7/96; SERPAJ Boletin, 10-12/92, 5-6/93, 7-9/96; La Prensa 10/26-12/7/96, 1/14/97; El Panamá América, 9/28, 10/31, 11/29, 12/16/96; El Siglo 12/26/96.