The Guna people of Panama are in negotiations for one of the largest development projects they’ve ever been involved in, which would see power lines and a highway built on their land

NEED TO KNOW

• The Guna people of Panama are debating a major development project involving power lines and a highway through their land
• The project could improve access and infrastructure for remote villages but raises concerns about sovereignty and environmental impact
• The Guna have historically maintained autonomy, keeping outsiders at bay for 500 years while allowing limited visitation

An isolated indigenous Central American society is considering breaking its longstanding policy of keeping outsiders at bay by building an electrical connection — and an accompanying major road — through its land.

In a new essay for New York Times Magazine, journalist Benjamin Howe wrote about the Guna people of Panama, and a potential new project that would bring unprecedented amounts of traffic to their region.

The Gunayala archipelago, made up of more than 300 islands on the Caribbean coast of Panama, is one of several regions that have been the focus of government officials, business owners and more over the past 19 years, after a Panamanian-Colombian commission approached the Guna people in 2007 with a proposal to build high-voltage transmission lines connecting the countries’ power grids.

The power lines would be built underwater, but the construction project would require building a giant road — penetrating through the region’s dense, wet rainforest — as well as dozens of bridges to bring in construction equipment. The linkage, which would be known as the Interconexión as it would connect Gunayala with Panama City via the Pan-American Highway, could integrate countries as far apart as Guatemala and Ecuador and could benefit more than 20,000 residents, Panama’s El Siglo reported in February.

According to Howe, who wrote about his family’s connection to the Guna people as anthropologists, the power line construction — which is still in its fundraising stages — is one of the first major development projects being supported by the Guna community.

Some members of the community were so supportive of the project that they had begun building a road themselves by opening up a path in the jungle with machetes, the Times reported.

The news that many of the Guna people were so supportive of the project came as a surprise to many outsiders.

Gunayala is just one of three indigenous regions that the Guna people call home, along with Guna Madugandí and Guna de Wargandí. The community fought a brief war of independence in 1925, as the Panamanian government sought to suppress their ancestral traditions, according to Visit Panama. Though the Guna later pledged nominal allegiance to the Republic of Panama, they’ve had near-autonomy in the country since then, flying their own flags and governing their own province.

The community is overseen by caciques, or indigenous tribal leaders, known as the six Sagladummagan — three in the Gunayala General Congress and three in the General Congress of Culture, the country’s tourism board explains. The leaders play just as much of a cultural role, passing on their ancestral teachings via poetry and song, as they do a political one.

According to the Times, their society has kept intruders out as much as they’ve desired for the past 500 years, sometimes through violence. However, while the community is remote and insular, they don’t prohibit outsiders from visiting — even allowing anthropologists, such as Howe’s father — and have an economy revolving around fishing, agriculture, handicrafts and even some tourism to their Caribbean islands, per the tourism board.

Travel around Guna land has been increasingly difficult following the COVID pandemic, as planes stopped coming to the region in recent years, forcing many people to travel by boat, the Times reported. That form of travel has proved dangerous, as boating accidents were common and emergency services have struggled to reach them.

Speaking to Howe, many leaders in the community shared why they’ve decided to advocate for some development in their province, which includes some land on the Panama-Colombia border as well as the wettest rainforest on Earth.

A school principal in the indigenous community, Urbano González, spoke about how residents in some of their most remote villages, such as Mordí, previously had to hike through the jungle for days to reach their community’s island town of Mulatupu to take their children to the school. Other Mordí residents would come into town to exchange smoked iguana and peccary for sacks of rice and sugar, González said.

The Mordí residents’ efforts didn’t go unnoticed. In 2013, their travels inspired members of the Guna to volunteer to build roads to connect larger towns to remote villages, little by little, without the use of tools like chainsaws.

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Since then, Guna community leaders have advocated for the province to take development matters into their own hands. They told the Times that they requested funds and resources from the Panamanian government to support them in building a two-lane highway through the jungle, where they had already begun their work with machetes. But leaders shared that government officials have tried to embed their support for the highway — estimated to cost about $100 million — within negotiations for the Interconexión.

“The state sees in this project the opportunity to settle a historic debt with communities that have lived disconnected from development,” a spokesman with Panama’s energy ministry told the Times, noting that the country’s 2027 budget includes the funding for the highway.

Others in the community criticized the proposed development, including one Mordí resident who told the Times that some feel the project’s potential sound impact on animals and sacred sites outweighs its benefits.

The Guna have a deep cultural connection to the environment. Traditionally, they believe that the Earth was created by the mythological figures Babdummad and Nandummad (meaning Great Father and Great Mother), according to Visit Panama.

The Guna culture considers people equal to all other beings across the planet, and much of their belief system has resulted in the province maintaining some of the most undeveloped landscapes and the best conserved forests in the world, per the tourism board.

Indra Candanedo, the director of conservation group Alianza por Matusagaratí, told the Times that environmentalists worry about what the highway’s unmanageable side effects will be.

“We are beginning to see the end of the Darién Gap,” she said, referring to the only land bridge connecting North America and South America, located between Colombia and Panama and covered in dense rainforest and swampland.

“You’re not going to see the gap opened because of an official decision to build a highway from Panama to Colombia,” Candanedo continued, citing the erosion of forests of eastern Panama by loggers, speculators and others. “It will just happen, because nobody stopped it. I’m not sure you can stop it anymore.”

According to the Times, local leadership in Wargandí — the inland Guna reserve that includes Mordí — voted last month to begin a consultation and consent phase with the government, while Gunayala will see a similar agreement in October.

As Howe wrote, negotiations for the project currently seems likely to continue as planned, as many Guna people were “open to development…as long as the Guna controlled it.”

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