A State of Nature
Life,
death, and tourism in the Darién Gap.
The Pan-American Highway runs sixteen thousand
miles, from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego, with one significant interruption:
an expanse of rain forest along the border of Colombia and Panama. The road
ends abruptly on the Panama side, just north of a national park, and picks up
again as a dirt path, sixty miles southeast, in Colombia, in the floodplain of
the enormous Atrato River. The region in between, which spans two coasts with
jungles and mountains and a confounding web of rivers, is known locally as the Tapón
del Darién—the Darién Plug—for its seeming impassability.
In
English, it’s called the Darién Gap, the legacy of a nineteenth-century
scramble to cut a seafaring channel from the Caribbean to the Pacific. The
Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt speculated that the Darién isthmus
harbored a river passage that need only be expanded to be navigable. In 1850,
an Irish physician named Edward Cullen claimed to have walked such a passage
without trouble, and his fraudulent assertion—supported by detailed phony
maps—sparked a series of expeditions. Four years later, a twenty-seven-man
team, led by Lieutenant Isaac Strain, of the United States Navy, set off to
find Cullen’s mythical east-west passage. The team got lost within days and was
forced to divide; seven men ultimately died. Strain refused to believe the
indigenous Kuna who told him that he was going the wrong way, and months later
he was found naked and sick, reduced to seventy-five pounds. He deemed Darién
“utterly impracticable” for a canal, and engineers looked north to Panama City.
A
century later, work stalled on the Darién link of the Pan-American Highway, and
the gap came to mean something else: a breach in a road running north to south.
American tourists arrived eager to hike it, and backpacking guides offered
routes through the Serranía del Darién, the mountain range on the
Colombia-Panama border. To automobile companies, the gap became an irresistible
venue for publicity stunts. In 1961, a caravan of three red Chevrolet Corvairs
took on “the world’s worst roadblock on the world’s greatest highway,” with
support teams hacking trails and building bridges. Two of the cars managed to
cross the gap; one was left to rust under a ceiba tree.
Scientists
were equally attracted to the Darién. For millions of years, the isthmus has
filtered the exchange of plants and animals between the Americas, and, as sea
levels rose and fell, its mountains isolated populations, resulting in an
extraordinary number of unique species. A fifth of its plants occur nowhere
else. In 1981, after decades of intense study, the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature declared that “thousands of species remain to be
discovered.”
But
in the late nineteen-nineties the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, began
fighting right-wing paramilitaries for control of the area. The only people to
cross the gap with any frequency were combatants, illegal migrants, and drug
gangs. Missionaries and orchid collectors were kidnapped, and, as the gap
became synonymous with danger, science and tourism dried up. Los Katíos
National Park, on the Colombian side, has been closed for years, owing to
clashes among armed groups, who have seeded land mines there.
For
a certain type of person, this is all very appealing. In 2003, Robert Young
Pelton, the author of “The World’s Most Dangerous Places,” prepared for his own
hike through the gap by e-mailing the FARC guerrillas and the region’s dominant paramilitary faction. He got no
responses, but he was undeterred. At the last minute, he invited two young
backpackers to come along, and all three ended up being kidnapped, when they
stumbled on Colombian paramilitaries ambushing a small town. The fighters,
armed with guns and machetes, killed four Kuna men, but after ten days they
released Pelton and his companions unharmed. Pelton credited his wits for their
survival. “It’s not really luck,” he told National Geographic News.
“You’re in a certain mind-set when you’re kidnapped. You want to win the
respect of your captors, so they drop their guard.”
Travel
conditions in Colombia have improved since then. Demobilization of
paramilitaries, waning FARC influence in the countryside, and better Army control of highways have
made opportunistic roadblocks rare; kidnappings have decreased dramatically. In
2007, the government began advertising Colombia’s cultural and ecological
wonders with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Birders were among
the first to take up the challenge, keen on adding the country’s seventy-six
endemic species to their “life lists” of birds spotted. But even the promise of
sooty-capped puffbirds and Tacarcuna wood quails has not enticed them into the
roadless Darién Gap.
This
March, I travelled with Sergio Tamayo, one of a very few guides offering tours
in the gap. He began four years ago, when he was a twenty-four-year-old
backpacker—“not a European-style backpacker but a Colombian-style backpacker,”
he said, meaning that he worked as he travelled. He cut wood, mostly, and slept
in a hammock. One day in San Francisco, a town on the Gulf of Urabá that its
residents call San Pacho, Sergio heard some Medellín accents on the beach, and
offered to take the visitors to an outlying island. He wrote up an itinerary,
charged them twelve dollars apiece, and scrambled to find a boat.
Back in Medellín, he founded his own
firm, Ecoaventurax, in an alcove of his mother’s apartment, and designed
posters, T-shirts, and cell-phone charms with its logo. He got his chest
tattooed with Maori-style designs and recruited customers on Facebook. He
prefers people attracted to the gap despite, rather than because of, its
dangers, but danger-seekers find him anyway. Two German men recently demanded
that he take them to “where the guerrillas are,” and he said that he would take
them close enough. The men painted their faces with jagua-fruit ink and posed
for photographs in the woods. The majority of his clients, though, are, like
him, young Colombians from modest backgrounds eager to experience parts of the
country that have long been off limits.
Sergio
has no politics to speak of—he was perhaps the only person in Colombia with no
opinion about the death of Hugo Chávez—but he seems to have tapped into a
broader strain of patriotism; last year’s ad campaign for Suzuki showed urban
adventurers driving into the Colombian countryside, maps spread. Our itinerary
included all the stops in Sergio’s weeklong gap tour, which he offers twelve
times a year. The gap’s highlands remain under guerrilla control, so he takes
visitors instead to the jungles and rivers that surround its few settlements:
frontier towns, with varying degrees of lawlessness. We would travel northward
along the Caribbean coast, through the clustered towns of San Pacho, Triganá,
and Acandí, making our way to Capurganá and Sapzurro, at the border.
We started in an open boat
from the port town of Turbo, crossing the Gulf of Urabá and heading west over
the wide brown mouth of the Atrato River. Turbo is, for commercial purposes,
Colombia’s last stop on the Pan-American Highway, and giant banana plantations
and cattle ranches flank the road. Police and Army stations are everywhere, a
legacy of clashes between paramilitaries and guerrillas. Billboards advertise
shopping malls and model homes.
As we approached the
western side of the gulf, our boat heaved and smacked along a shoreline
probably little changed from when Vasco Nuñez de Balboa first saw it, in 1501:
waves exploding against basalt boulders, a drab green curtain of forest broken
up by the pink of guayacan trees in bloom. At our first stop, the town of
Titumate, there was no dock, and men waded out to collect parcels. Three
teen-age girls in tight sparkly tops—prostitutes—were being delivered in a
fishing boat, and the men slung them over their shoulders like bags of cement.
San Pacho, where we arrived twenty minutes later, did have a dock, and from it
the town looked as though it had been built by pirates. Wooden houses jutted
erratically from the hills, some of them shaped like ships and bearing tattered
flags. Men and boys rode horses along the beach, waving up at Ruthie Laguado
Zafra, the owner of a general store whose porch overlooked the sea.
Ruthie, elegant in a satin
tunic and sandals, made us tree-tomato juice in a blender powered by a
stationary bicycle, churning up a peachy-yellow slush. She dismounted, strained
the juice, and served it in glasses. On the shelf behind her bicycle blender
sat a pile of books by the Peruvian-American mystic Carlos Castañeda, which she
encouraged customers to borrow. Ruthie had arrived here in 2002, with her six
children, from a suburb of Medellín. San Pacho, she told me, was only as old as
she was—forty-five. It had been colonized by Colombians from the interior,
attracted by the forests and the isolation. “We had a dream of our own land,” she
said. Now she owned a few acres.
The town had never
prospered, she said, only survived. Its hundred and fifty families grew yucca
and fished and waited for mangoes to ripen in the trees; some smuggled drugs.
“We are so isolated,” she said. “But it’s miraculous to live here. The most amazing
things happen.” One day, she was desperate for groceries, about to send one of
her boys off with a list of foods to borrow, when a young man arrived leading a
burro laden with “the very same items that were on my list!” It was a gift from
a friend living over the mountain.
The town had no medical
care, phone lines, or Internet. Education was bad, and electricity ran only in
the evenings, if it ran at all. Ruthie spent much of her time agitating for
elected officials to help San Pacho, or prodding its residents to help one
another. She was organizing a bingo fund-raiser for an eight-month-old boy with
a kidney tumor.
There were never any police
in San Pacho, and Army boats passed its dock without stopping. The local
authority was an organized group of drug traffickers, many of them former
members of right-wing paramilitaries, who had wrested the coast from FARC control in the mid-nineties. When the paramilitaries demobilized, a
decade later, their lower ranks regrouped to form mafias. The government gave
them a new, apolitical name—bacrim, for bandas criminales emergentes—but
everyone in San Pacho still called them paramilitaries.
Ruthie insisted that there
were few conflicts. “We don’t hear bullets,” she said firmly. “If there’s a
monopoly of one armed group, it’s not a problem. Here, as a single woman, I can
walk around any hour of the night without being bothered. I am free.” I asked
her why, then, she didn’t go to the paramilitaries for what the town needed.
She said that some of her neighbors suggested asking for help for the boy with
the tumor, but the child’s father forbade it. When she arrived in San Pacho, it
was governed by a paramilitary chief called El Alemán, who was approachable:
“Everyone went to him when they were sick.” El Alemán was in jail now. As for
the current group, she did not want to owe them any favors.
Advocates of the
Pan-American Highway have claimed that it would bring order and prosperity to
towns like San Pacho, and, even though Panama and the U.S. long ago lost
interest, Colombia has never given up on completing the road. Its government
has studied thirteen proposed routes to close the Darién Gap, the most direct
of which would tear audaciously through Los Katíos National Park and a park on
the Panama side. More likely routes would skirt the parks, running just west of
San Pacho. Ruthie didn’t want anything to do with a road. “It would ruin our
way of life,” she said.
Sergio and I collected our
backpacks and followed a horse path to the concrete-block cabins we were
renting for sixteen dollars a night. He felt the way Ruthie did about San
Pacho. “It’s like the beginning of life here,” he said, after darkness fell and
the cooking fires started. That night, we could hear, over the crashing sea, a
hollow popping sound: the hulls of drug boats hitting waves at high speed. I
later learned that one of Ruthie’s daughters had been murdered. An
investigation turned up no suspects, but people in town said it was the
paramilitaries.
The shoreline connecting
San Pacho to the small cove town of Triganá was heavily eroded, and as we
walked a fragile path above the sea we saw families digging for gold in the
exposed cliffs. One man clutched a toucan to his breast as he dug. The miners
looked up at us warily; no one is friendly when digging for gold.
Approaching town, we met a
fluffy-haired, bare-chested man reclining in an old wooden boat that he’d
transformed into a thatched-roof bar. His name was Juan Guillermo Pérez, or
Juangui, and Ruthie regarded him as one of the area’s most desirable bachelors.
Juangui designed houses and hotels, of which there were several fine examples
in Triganá. Some of them were owned by paramilitaries, who were unmistakable
once I learned to recognize them. In San Pacho, there were always one or two by
the dock, mounted on good horses, keeping an eye on things. In Triganá, they
lay in hammocks under mango trees, wearing bright new Nike and Adidas clothes,
with cell phones and two-way radios on their chests. Their hair was invariably
close-cropped, in contrast to the shipwrecked look of nearly everyone else, and
their bodies were different: thicker, better fed.
Sergio introduced Juangui
to me as someone who’d crossed the Darién Gap, but Juangui corrected him—he’d
tried to cross and failed. He started his journey in 2008 with four friends
from Triganá, including a twelve-year-old boy. “We were just doing it for the
experience,” he said. They’d left from Panama City and followed the
Pan-American Highway to a town called Santa Fe. A Kuna friend had told them how
to cross from there, travelling east and south, and they provisioned for three
days. In a place called Mortí, they met more Kuna, who were rougher than the
Kuna he’d known; there was garbage surrounding their settlement.
After a quick negotiation,
three Kuna men agreed to take them into Colombia for a hundred and fifty
dollars. The next morning, Juangui’s group was surprised to be met by three
different men, who spent the day guiding them through “pure jungle,” Juangui
said. The guides then pointed them to a settlement called Mulatupo, told them
it was a two-hour walk, and left. This was the same route, albeit in reverse,
that Isaac Strain and his men had taken in 1854, and Juangui fared only
slightly better. “Mulatupo was actually more than a day away,” he said. “They had
tricked us.” The group got lost, and Juangui used his compass to try to get
them out, following rivers. They encountered jaguar tracks and a tapir and were
chased by peccaries. The boy fished, and they cooked and ate what he caught,
but it wasn’t much, and they began to starve. Finally, a Kuna passing by in a
boat rescued them. They had never made it out of Panama.
Juangui laughed, and told
me that he’d never do it again. He had a friend in Acandí, though, just a kid,
who guided Cubans across the gap all the time. Everyone—paramilitaries,
guerrillas—was paid off in advance. “You have to be careful talking about that,
though,” he added, looking around.
Back in San Pacho, the taps
had run dry. This was one of the wettest parts of the world, and yet the town depended
on a fickle creek for water. People used kiddie pools as cisterns, dumping
bleach in them as a nod to mosquito control, but within a day they were
depleted. The weekly merchant boat had yet to arrive with its cases of water
and soda, so there was little to drink. We had to find a river if we wanted to
bathe, and so we hiked to the closest, fifteen minutes into the jungle.
“On my
home planet, I was a deity."
In a clearing near the
banks stood five thatched-roof cabins that looked a good deal posher than the
ones we were staying in. They cost sixty dollars a night, Sergio told me, and
had been constructed with a United Nations grant to promote ecotourism. They
looked vacant. The river beyond them was low, full of tadpoles in isolated
pools. Green-and-black poison dart frogs hopped about in the litter, and
leaf-cutter ants carried tiny flowers. As we walked, we noticed at a bend far
ahead some impish forms disturbing the surface of the water: cotton-top
tamarins. Only six thousand of these dainty primates are said to remain in the
world, and here a dozen of them had descended from the trees to drink. We edged
closer, causing them to steal further upriver. An older male, his splendid,
wiglike white crest framing a dubious black face, hung back to assess us.
An hour
later, as we left the forest the same way we’d come, we were met by a thickset
man with a two-way radio, demanding to know where we’d been. Sergio told him,
he nodded, and we passed. A pair of toucans flew by.
How do you promote
ecotourism, I asked, when you’ve got thugs standing fifty feet from the
eco-cabins? Sergio, usually relaxed and gregarious, grew taciturn. With his
clients, he sought to characterize the paramilitaries as you might a snake in
your path: harmless unless molested. He knew them, and they left him alone. But
he discouraged taking photographs of them, looking at them, or even discussing
them. “How incredible were those tamarins!” he said, when he finally spoke.
We left with our packs and
climbed twelve mountainous miles toward Balboa, in the interior. The peaks of
the Serranía del Darién were shrouded by clouds as we walked along cattle
trails, passing into jungle full of dangling heliconia flowers and the macabre
calls of howler monkeys. The plan was to follow a river called the Tolo, but on
the slick and rocky trail a couple heading the other way warned us that the
Tolo had risen and that it was impassable. Though it had barely rained in
Balboa, the topography of the region is so varied, and the rainfall so
localized, that you can’t predict the state of a river only a few miles away.
We changed course and came
to an Emberá settlement, which consisted of a round, thatched, elevated common
house, surrounded by rectangular wooden homes with metal roofs. The indigenous
Emberá, along with the Kuna and Wounaan, have historically lived on both sides
of the border; for centuries they have shared the gap’s rivers and forests with
the descendants of Africans who escaped from Spanish slave ships. An Emberá man
named Luis Ángel Chavarrí, dressed in jogging clothes, greeted us and invited
us to climb up a notched log to his house. There, Sergio stood, his bare chest
covered in Maori tattoos, and announced that he had always felt a “particular
closeness” with indigenous peoples. Luis Ángel received this politely. He did
not mind visitors, he said, as long as they weren’t paramilitaries or
guerrillas.
Luis
Ángel was in his early thirties, with a calm and earnest manner. His
open-sided, single-room house was empty but for two tables and a hammock. From
it, we could see the river dragging whole trees along with its force.
Twenty-two families lived in this community, he told us. In the
nineteen-nineties, all but four had been displaced by guerrillas. In recent
years, no armed groups had approached them, except the Army, which they could
deal with.
I asked about the
Pan-American Highway, whether he thought it would ever be built. His eyes
widened. “It’s supposed to go right here!” he said, pointing toward the back
aperture of his house. I looked outside and saw only two small thatched-roof
sheds. The Emberá didn’t want the road, Luis Ángel said, because their kids,
who played on the grassy riverbank, could get hurt or killed. The cattle
ranches would expand, and his community would have to move farther into the
forest. I’d often heard it argued that a road would help curb drug trafficking;
Luis Ángel believed that it would bring the traffic straight to them.
The last overt push for the
highway’s construction had come from Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe, who
left office in 2010. The following year, representatives from UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational, scientific, and cultural arm, came to
check on Los Katíos National Park, and reported that even they could not
discern whether Colombia intended to build. But the Emberá saw surveyors
working. When the government claimed that it was improving an existing road to
Acandí, lawyers for Luis Ángel’s community pointed out that there was no
existing road to improve; the highway project was being carried out
surreptitiously, they argued, in order to evade environmental-impact studies
and consultations with indigenous groups. Luis Ángel showed me a lengthy legal
document, its pages spotted from the jungle air. It was a writ for protection
of constitutional rights. In May, 2011, a court in Bogotá ruled in favor of the
Emberá and ordered the plans halted. Luis Ángel received threats. No one
believed that this was the last of the road, he said—all the cattlemen wanted
it, and the larger towns did, too.
We bought jewelry from the
Emberá women, who use tiny glass beads to create delicate collars that lie flat
on the skin. One prodded Sergio to bring beads with him on his next trip from
Medellín. She tied a string around his wrist with samples of the colors she
needed. They had to be Czech beads, not Chinese beads; she was adamant about
that.
The high river forced us to
backtrack to the coast, and from there we went on to Turbo. We were going to
visit the offices of Los Katíos, two hours across the gulf from the park
itself, which was off limits. Passing east over the Atrato, we spotted northern
screamers, rare marsh birds with goose-like bodies and curved beaks, sitting
atop the labyrinthine mangroves. Northern screamers were first recorded here
last year, by a friend of Sergio’s, an ecology student from Medellín. The
Colombian conflict has kept most international research institutions away from
both sides of the gap, leaving intrepid young people to carry out field studies
and surveys. Biologists who braved the gap in recent years have made remarkable
findings. Some six thousand leatherback-sea-turtle nests—from a huge and
previously unknown nesting population—were discovered on a stretch of coast
from Acandí into Panama. Researchers in the highlands of Tacarcuna, west of
Balboa, discovered nine frogs new to science, including one with orange legs
and spikes all over its body.
This year, Juan Sebastián
Mejía, a twenty-nine-year-old mammalogist from Bogotá, published results from
the first major wildlife study in Los Katíos since 1990. Mejía slept in the
park for seven months, using camera traps to track the highly endangered
Baird’s tapir. “It’s a beautiful place,” he told me. “When I went to collect my
data, I could see spider monkeys, cougars. Every day I saw tracks of jaguars,
birds of every kind.” He avoided a section known to be mined. “Obviously, we
came in contact with armed groups,” he told me. “But being a Colombian
researcher helps—they don’t see you as a target. Someone from the outside, they
think there could be money.”
It turned out that the
tapirs were thriving in Los Katíos. Photos of the animals, looking stunned by
Mejía’s flashbulbs, hung in the park’s offices. Outside, a faded road sign
advertised jaguars and waterfalls to a public that hadn’t been allowed inside
the park for a decade and a half. Los Katíos, created in 1974 under a joint
agreement between Colombia and the United States Department of Agriculture, was
originally intended as a kind of barricade. A completed highway, the U.S.D.A.
scientists said, would help turn the jungle into a continuous chain of cattle
farms—an ideal conduit for foot-and-mouth disease. Breaking the chain would
prevent its northward spread. The U.S.D.A. hired biologists to investigate the
park’s ecology, and their surveys found more than four hundred species of birds
living there. Los Katíos’s human inhabitants, meanwhile, were exiled beyond its
borders.
The
Pan-American Highway was scheduled to be completed within two years of the
park’s creation—President Richard Nixon badly wanted the Darién link done in
time for the United States’ bicentennial—but it was dogged by fresh opposition
from conservation groups. A federal court halted the construction and demanded
impact studies, while conservationists, with the help of UNESCO, secured better protections for the forests on both sides of the
border. The United States, which had paid the bulk of the highway’s
construction expenses, ceased funding it in 1979.
In the nineties, the U.S.
stopped funding Los Katíos, too. Its staff of thirty rangers had been cut to
just a handful by 1997, the year that right-wing paramilitaries entered the Cacarica
River, on the southern border of the park. For weeks, they fought FARC guerrillas and terrorized the residents, forcing four thousand to flee.
The paramilitary leader Freddy Rendón Herrera—“El Alemán,” the patron of San
Pacho—set up an illegal logging concern on the Cacarica. The paramilitaries
occupied the park, tearing up its structures and burning its library books for
cooking fuel. For a decade, they clashed violently with guerillas there. During
the worst of the fighting, a ranger was killed by combatants, and the remaining
park staff decamped to Turbo. By last year, the paramilitaries had left, and
the FARC had retreated to one small corner, but the legacy of the fighting
remained; in February, 2012, a land mine exploded next to the most spectacular
of its waterfalls, killing a man.
Throughout all this,
remarkably, Los Katíos has remained in fairly robust ecological shape. The FARC, rather than cut its trees, made use of their cover, and recent aerial
surveys by the World Wildlife Fund found its vegetation mostly well preserved.
The park’s director, Santiago Duarte, a reedy, serious man in silver-rimmed
glasses, described for me a variety of ambitious-sounding plans. For years,
park staff ignored illegal logging and fishing. Now they were conducting catch
studies and monitoring timber extraction. The rangers moved freely in the park
again, and Mejía’s tapir study had proved that science could be done there, at
least by Colombians.
Duarte said that regional
universities were planning more field studies this year. Even though reopening
Los Katíos to the public was out of the question, he felt confident, for now,
that a highway would not run through the park. “But it could all change
tomorrow,” he said.
Acandí’s port was sleepy,
full of small fishing boats and dugout canoes, but there were soldiers at its
dock, checking papers. The land crossing from Acandí into Panama is by no means
easy, but it is relatively short. Illegal migrants on their way north arrive
here by boat; in January the drowned bodies of ten were found off Acandí’s
coast, where the leatherback turtles come to nest. The dead that could be
identified had travelled from Bangladesh, Cuba, and Ecuador. Nepalese
immigrants pass through increasingly often, and are said to be among the toughest
of the crossers, making the three-day journey without complaint, sustaining
themselves on raw rice.
Sergio and I headed into
the forest, to an intersection of two rivers that created a deep blue pool
which he liked to throw himself into. “Ecotourism” can mean a lot of things,
and to Sergio it meant taking an almost spiritual pleasure in geographical
wonders: rivers, waterfalls, peaks. We hired two teen-age boys on motorcycles
to get us down a long cow path, and they hiked with us contentedly the rest of the
way.
The boys and I sat on rocks
as Sergio hoisted himself up a cascade. It was here, they told me, that the
illegal crossings started, always at night. The migrants walked a day and a
half to the border, and another day and a half to meet the Pan-American Highway
near Yaviza. The Colombian coyotes hand the immigrants off in the middle, they
said; there are Mexicans involved on the other side. These were fast kids, with
soccer Mohawks and reggaeton videos on their BlackBerrys, but they could
identify all the jungle birds: yellow-rumped caciques, a green kingfisher.
The ride
from Acandí to Capurganá, in a narrow boat with fish blood spattered on the
backs of the seats, was rough enough to make Sergio—who practiced a rare
syncretism of Catholicism and tree hugging—finger through his wallet for his
prayer card to the Archangel Raphael. Capurganá and Sapzurro, at the Panama
border, are the only towns on the Colombian side of the gap that are mentioned
in the Lonely Planet guidebook. After the violence of the nineties, Panama and
Colombia began policing them jointly, creating a pocket of safety. Now, twenty
miles from the privations of San Pacho, there were hotels with swimming pools
and mixed drinks. Bohemian girls from Bolivia and Argentina sold hemp-fibre bracelets
to keep themselves in hostel beds and weed. No one had to think twice before
taking a photo, and the town’s gaily painted merchant boat, bucking in the surf
as men unloaded beer into rowboats, seemed like evidence of the isolation that
its barefoot visitors sought, at least for the weekend.
Capurganá and Sapzurro were
linked by a forest path, which we hiked to meet a naturalist named Andrés
Upegui. He’d directed us to go over the hill and ask for el peludo, the
hairy guy. Upegui, whose gray dreadlocks reached his waist, owned a private
nature reserve of sixty acres, and had surveyed its bird and plant life
himself. In 2010, he’d led an eight-day expedition to the cold and rainy
Tacarcuna highlands with ornithologists from Bogotá. Such work required
diplomacy; Upegui informed paramilitary chiefs personally, and guerrillas
through intermediaries, before embarking. Even so, the trip had to be cut short
when guerrillas entered the area, but not before the group located two bird
species never before recorded in Colombia.
The Tacarcuna peak, the
tallest in the gap, sits just over the border in Panama. It is believed to
contain a wealth of unknown species, but, because armed groups have occupied
the mountain, it hasn’t been surveyed since the seventies, when the American
botanist Alwyn Gentry named several plants there. “I still aspire to climb it,”
Upegui said, drinking coffee on his porch, barefoot and shirtless like every
other man for miles around. His house was built in the same primitive style as
those in San Pacho, but with incongruous touches: windows made of wine bottles,
a fresco copied from Gauguin. He had arrived here from Medellín in 1988, in
part to escape the city’s escalating violence, and in part because he was
inspired by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Darién Gap, he said, had
existed as almost a myth to him—something that suited his youthful philosophy
of self-reliant anarchy, of a life that “obliges us to recognize that we are
animals, another element of the ecosystem.”
Sapzurro had no docks then,
or any commuter boats. Its two hundred inhabitants communicated with the
outside world by radio. Upegui dove for lobsters, conch, and crabs, bartering
them for yucca and plantains. He carried water from the creeks and built a
house. “We were the darlings of the gods,” he told me. Now Sapzurro had twice
as many residents, working at hotels, manicured campgrounds, a German
restaurant.
Upegui opposed building a
road, of course. The Pan-American Highway, he said, is an antiquated dream, a
relic of a time of hopeful expansion, of progress and connectedness, that had
run smack against the burgeoning environmental movement, against people like
him. “But for the people here,” he said, “the road is synonymous with quality
of life, and it can be hard for me to argue with them.” The region depended on
boats that were expensive and dangerous, sometimes running out of gas,
sometimes capsizing from heavy loads. He expected that a road would one day
just appear. “The reality of this country is that they will do it when they
find it opportune,” he said.
We humped back over the
hill to Capurganá. From its highest point, we could see La Miel, the first cove
town in Panama. We passed men panning for gold in a stream they’d dammed up,
and nobody said hello. That afternoon, we met a couple from Canada, fit
trekking types in their fifties who spoke no Spanish at all. They said that
they were going to Acandí to watch the turtles nesting, if the sea calmed down
enough for their boat to leave. They’d seen sea turtles nesting before, in
Costa Rica, and thought it was wonderful.
Sergio was taken aback:
these were real ecotourists. He gave them the business card of Acandí’s port
hotel and called on their behalf, telling the owners to expect two Canadians
and to take them to the turtles. “Speak very slowly,” he admonished them. He
called the hotel again that night, to make sure the guests had arrived, and the
next morning, to make sure they were alive. They’d seen a turtle, he was told,
and they were happy. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/22/a-state-of-nature
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