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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/23\/magazine\/darien-gap-road-panama-colombia.html?emc=edit_na_20260924&nl=breaking-news&segment_id=226981",
    "parsed_content": "They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change. The Guna people in Panama inhabit what may be the most pristine jungle in all of Latin America, and for centuries they have been successful at keeping intruders at bay. They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change. - The New York Times\n \n Supported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTThey Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change.My father dedicated his life to studying the Guna people of Panama, and they may soon allow unprecedented development through their land. I went on a trek through the jungle to find out why.Listen \u00b7 46:43 min Share full articleBy Ben Ryder HowePhotographs by Federico RiosSept. 23, 2026In 1970, my father, a shaggy 25-year-old from the Chicago suburbs finishing his Ph.D. in anthropology, traveled with my mother to the Gunayala region of northeast Panama to ask its inhabitants, the Guna people, for permission to study them. The Guna lived on an archipelago of sandy, palm-covered islets along the Caribbean coast and had a reputation as prickly and disagreeable.My parents went from village to village as my father, James, introduced himself in Spanish. He was not the first anthropologist the group had seen. The Guna had a long history of interacting with wagas, as they called non-Guna. Wagas tended to be struck by Guna independence. According to a U.S. government report in 1964, the Guna\u2019s \u201cchief characteristic has been and continues to be a persistent determination to preserve their cultural and racial structure against pressures from the outside.\u201d That had been evident when, just a few years before my father arrived, an American businessman named W.D. Barton built a resort on one of Gunayala\u2019s more than 350 uninhabited islands. The Guna burned it down. And when Barton tried to rebuild it, they burned it down again.My father spent much of the 1970s regularly traveling to live with the Guna, joined for several months at a time by my mother, June, and then by me. Digandiggi, our home, was a village of 200 thatched-roof homes built on a coral reef, half a mile from the mainland jungle and the hulking silhouette of the Serran\u00eda de San Blas, a mountain range that is an extension of the Continental Divide.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen I think of Digandiggi, I hear the thud of breakers and smell the burning of coconut husks in cooking fires. Our dirt-floored home, which we shared with a village chief, had a roof of palm fronds that crackled and popped in the afternoon heat. There was a fist-size hole in the corner leading to the lair of some nocturnal creature; afraid of snakes, I dared not ask what it might be. We had no privacy. The neighbors, whose roof almost touched ours, could hear every whisper through the cane walls. The only place on the entire island where I could find solitude was the communal outhouse, which stood over shallow water at the end of a narrow plank. I would hide there for hours, studying the mountains as clouds tumbled over the peaks.\n \n \n \n Archival photos of the author, his mother and his anthropologist father, James, visiting the Guna people. From Ben Ryder Howe. \n \n Guna villages, hives of activity with dizzyingly high population density, tended to overheat my social circuits. But my father could be out all day and night making house calls, having his ear bent, hearing stories he\u2019d already heard dozens of times. There was chemistry between him and the Guna. They liked to tell him their stories, especially the old shamans, who were running out of apprentices.And my father liked to listen. Within a year, to the Guna\u2019s astonishment, he became fluent in their language and a natural with their customs. \u201cIf you want to work with the Guna,\u201d Dad says, \u201cyou have to spend a lot of time traveling around and explaining yourself.\u201d This involved what I regard as heroic self-discipline, for as with human beings everywhere, the Guna currency of trust is food: If they offer it, you better eat it. And the Guna staple, proffered upon arrival in every household, is dulemasi (literally \u201cpeople food\u201d), a thin gray soup larded with plantains, fish and sometimes river snails. Thanks to dulemasi, I decided early on not to become an anthropologist. My father, as far as I can tell, doesn\u2019t particularly enjoy the dish, either, but he won\u2019t say. To insult it, even in private, would be to insult the Guna.There were other reasons the Guna liked my father. He was an ally, not only agreeable but also loyal, returning decade after decade. He belonged to a wave of American anthropologists who, in the wake of the 1960s, saw themselves as not simply studying their subjects but standing with them against imperialism and colonialism. They were not simply detached observers; they were advocates and intermediaries, atoning for their predecessors\u2019 misdeeds, if not their countries\u2019.A Guna woman walked between houses carrying buckets of water, while another prepares for a chicha, a traditional ceremony marking female puberty.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMy father, arriving in Gunayala on the cusp of this change, intended to study kinship, a staple of old-school anthropology. But he soon switched to the study of Guna exorcisms and puberty rituals, as well as their town-hall-style democracy. Above all, my father wanted to understand \u2014 and bolster, to whatever extent possible \u2014 the aspect of the Guna that has long fascinated outsiders: their resistance to external pressure.Over the last 500-some years, the Guna have proved uniquely successful at keeping intruders at bay, at times through violence. Since fighting a brief war of independence in 1925, the Guna have enjoyed virtual autonomy, even after pledging nominal allegiance to the Republic of Panama. But Panama\u2019s government has never stopped pressing for access to Guna land. Gunayala contains what may be the most pristine jungle in all of Latin America, and it includes hundreds of uninhabited islands that have been likened to remote parts of the Bahamas before tourism. Most valuable of all, perhaps, it controls land near the Panama-Colombia border, which includes vital access to a potential transit route for migration and commerce of all kinds.ImageMulatupu, a small, dense Guna community connected to the mainland by a single bridge, has relied on an airstrip for travel. But in recent years, the planes have stopped coming. A road could change that.That route goes through the Panama-Colombia border, which is also the border between North and South America \u2014 the only continents on Earth connected by land but not a single road. The frontier between the two countries is considered impassable because of the Dari\u00e9n Gap, a notorious wilderness spread across much of the boundary. The gap presents many natural obstacles to development, including the wettest rainforest on Earth, as well as man-made ones, since Panama, Colombia and the United States have historically preferred the way it can deter the spread of disease and unchecked migration.Not everyone would like the border to remain closed, however, especially people who could benefit from pipelines or electrical wires. And on the edge of the gap sits Gunayala \u2014 a sliver of land with one of the few viable transit routes. In 2007, a Panamanian-Colombian commission approached the Guna with a proposal to build high-voltage transmission lines connecting the two countries\u2019 power grids. While the lines themselves would snake underwater off the Caribbean coast, the project would require building a giant penetration road with dozens of bridges to haul in construction equipment straight through Gunayala \u2014 a disruption of unprecedented magnitude. The resulting linkage, known as the Interconexi\u00f3n, could integrate countries as distant as Guatemala and Ecuador. It could also bring the world crashing into Gunayala.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Guna can block the Interconexi\u00f3n \u2014 and they have, multiple times, going back more than a decade. The Guna are known as savvy political operators, and I assumed they would slow-walk the project to death. Which is why I was shocked to hear last year that the Guna were giving it real consideration. In fact, members of the community were already building a road themselves \u2014 hacking their way through the jungle with machetes, creating a corridor that they hoped the Interconexi\u00f3n would facilitate.ImageThe road extending from Mort\u00ed toward Mulatupu is already pushing its way through the jungle.I asked my father what he thought of the proposed project. He said it was hard to predict what effect a highway would have, but he imagined that it would accelerate changes that the Guna have long worried about, like out-migration and deforestation. It was clear, though, that if the Guna wanted the Interconexi\u00f3n, he would support them.Like a good academic, my father found ways to undermine anything that seemed like moral certainty. Deep down, what both he and the Guna felt was still hard to know. \u201cDon\u2019t treat the Guna monolithically,\u201d he warned.\u201cSo are you in favor of the Interconexi\u00f3n or not?\u201d I asked.\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he replied. \u201cWhat do the Guna want?\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cDidn\u2019t you say not to treat them monolithically?\u201dI kept wondering whether it was possible the tribe had been duped, or that only a faction truly supported the Interconexi\u00f3n and its supposed benefits. In the end, wouldn\u2019t it undo everything they had fought for? It was hard to say. Roads are, after all, one of the most uncontrollable forms of technology humans have ever invented. In a sense, they are autonomous machines, with appetites and minds of their own. They colonize and spread despite efforts at containment, all but impossible to unbuild. And roads want to connect with other roads. The nearest ones to the path of the Interconexi\u00f3n do not lie in Panama but in Colombia, on the other side of the Dari\u00e9n Gap. All you need to do is look at Google Earth to see the lines of orange dirt tracing the edges of rivers and cattle fields. The roads are already there, waiting to connect.Citizens of Mord\u00ed and Mulatupu, respectively. The road between the communities that the Guna have started hacking with machetes would take another 20-30 years to finish on their own. They could get help from the government, but it may require more development.Last February I flew to Panama City and met up with Federico Rios, a frequent photographer for The Times. It was near the end of the dry season, the optimal time for a hike through the jungle. A few days after we arrived at our hotel, my father\u2019s former research assistant helped arrange a meeting with proponents of the Interconexi\u00f3n, or el megaproyecto, as many Guna have begun to call it. The next morning, he picked us up and drove us to a low concrete building in the congested center of the city. I had expected to meet with just a few people; instead I walked into a windowless room with more than a dozen men sitting in a circle. It was an ambush, but a friendly one.The men belonged to a commission appointed by the Gunayala General Congress, the supreme political authority. They had heard that I was in Panama to write about the Interconexi\u00f3n, to visit the communities that would be transformed by it and to understand why many Guna had embraced the project. They had decided not to wait for me to seek them out.One of the commission members, a high school teacher and historian named Sim\u00f3n Herrera, shook my hand.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cWelcome,\u201d Herrera said in English, smiling. Like many Guna, he had attended college, including a semester at Tulane. He was married to a non-Guna and lived in Panama City. He invited the other men to introduce themselves while a technician with a camera started filming \u2014 within hours, pictures of the gathering would be all over tribal social media. It was all very Guna, from the boldness with which they seized the narrative to the insistence on having a meeting, face to face, and talking things through.In the early 2000s, Mord\u00ed residents would hike through the jungle for days to reach Mulatupu, where some dropped off their children at the school and others traded smoked iguana and peccary for sacks of rice and sugar.The men in the room were hardly na\u00efve \u2014 the Guna had dealt with a road before. While for decades their communities had played host to occasional cruise ships, whose economic impact never spread beyond a few islands, things changed in the 1970s when an offshoot of the Pan-American Highway penetrated the edge of their reserve for the first time, connecting it with Panama City. The zigzagging 19-mile dirt road was all but undrivable; in my 20s, I walked it with several young Guna, a two-day journey that brought me to my knees. In 2011, it was finally paved, and while it remains a light-duty, low-volume road, Gunayala was forever changed. Backpacking gringos and road-tripping Panamanians surged over the Continental Divide, transforming some islands into party spots with pounding reggaeton and bikini-clad influencers posing on white-sand beaches.Still, the Pan-American Highway\u2019s puncturing of their sanctuary did not modernize the Guna into oblivion. Most of the men in the room were from Sasardi Muladub (population roughly 2,000), a farming and fishing community near the Colombian border. For decades, Mulatupu, as it\u2019s known, had the advantage of a rudimentary airstrip connecting it to Panama City \u2014 which enabled residents to travel outside the region for medical treatment, attend university or export products, such as spiny lobster and octopus. However, the planes had stopped coming in recent years, in part thanks to the pandemic. Many Guna had to return to traveling by sea, and accidents were common; emergency services often struggled to reach the boats.Other communities are even less connected. Urbano Gonz\u00e1lez, a school principal sitting in the room, started telling me about Mord\u00ed, one of the most isolated villages in Panama. In the 2000s, Mord\u00ed residents would hike through the jungle for days to reach Mulatupu, where some would drop off their children at the school and others would exchange smoked iguana and peccary for sacks of rice and sugar.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageThe Corredor Norte, one of the major highways surrounding Panama City. At the time, Gunayala was changing fast: An enormous number of Guna had left the villages for work and educational opportunities in Panama City, while Gunayala still lacked pharmacies, banks and reliable electricity. Moved by the efforts of the Mord\u00ed residents, Gonz\u00e1lez urged Mulatupu\u2019s leaders to build a road connecting the communities, through a mountainous wilderness often described as impenetrable. \u201cIt seemed like a crazy dream,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez told me. Work crews began building a road from Mulatupu to Mord\u00ed with machetes \u2014 chain saws are hard to come by in Gunayala \u2014 in 2013. The road inched forward year by year, attracting increasing numbers of volunteers, who posted videos of their progress on Facebook as they bore into the jungle. Other villages that had lost air service took notice and began building their own roads.Yet the men in the room were visibly frustrated. They say they have requested Panama\u2019s support for a modern two-lane highway, estimated to cost more than $100 million, that they would design themselves; without it, their machete work is likely to take another 20 to 30 years. Panama has said it supports the Guna\u2019s road \u2014 the country\u2019s energy secretary, Rodrigo Rodr\u00edguez, said the 2027 budget includes the funding for it \u2014 but has long tried to embed it within ongoing negotiations for the Interconexi\u00f3n. In a statement, a spokesman with Panama\u2019s energy ministry said, \u201cThe state sees in this project the opportunity to settle a historic debt with communities that have lived disconnected from development.\u201d And while some Guna denounce the Interconexi\u00f3n as an unacceptable threat to sovereignty, others, especially those in the more isolated communities, welcome the promised improvements. Nothing, meanwhile, has stopped Mulatupu from building its own path.\u201cThis team will move forward, with or without anyone\u2019s support,\u201d said an albino man in dark sunglasses who had been staring at me intently. His name was Rodelick Valdes Richards, the author of multiple articles in the Panamanian press about the Interconexi\u00f3n. Richards was blunter than the other men. \u201cWe are looking for financing,\u201d he said, and it didn\u2019t matter where it came from or even whether it was approved by Guna authorities. \u201cWe have a commitment to future generations.\u201dBy the end of the meeting, the men in the room had taken control of our trip, planning out a route that would take us from Mulatupu to Mord\u00ed \u2014 along the route the Guna are carving and that the government could finish and pave. A team of guides had been put together. Permissions were being secured. Things had come together faster than expected, and the next day our trip would begin.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn the morning, Federico and I boarded a 27-year-old Cessna, a six-seater with a single propeller, duct-taped vents and a part-time pilot wearing flip-flops. Next to me sat an ancient Guna woman who still wore, as every Guna woman used to, tight, colorful bindings on her limbs and a thick gold nose ring. Beneath a veil, she talked on a cellphone the entire flight. Her husband, who was frail and had come to Panama City for chemotherapy, asked why we were going to Gunayala. \u201cTo hike over the Continental Divide,\u201d we told him. \u201cOh, you\u2019re taking the path they\u2019ve been clearing,\u201d he said. \u201cI heard about that.\u201dImageTo travel between Gunayala and Panama City, villagers must traverse peaks of the Continental Divide in six-seat prop planes.The flight looks easy on a map: Planes take off from Panama City\u2019s municipal airport, make a U-turn over the Pacific and head back across the isthmus toward Gunayala. Near the Caribbean, they encounter the Serran\u00eda de San Blas, paralleling the shore and attracting a perpetual front of thick gray clouds. The serran\u00eda is the Guna\u2019s Great Wall, steep and jungle-covered, and there is no way around it.Bush pilots are often a swashbuckling breed. Yet as a boy, I would always notice that some seemed unnerved by the flight to Gunayala. The planes were as cramped as taxis, filled with as much cargo as they could squeeze in, including live iguanas and roosters, which Guna passengers would carry in their laps. Doors were lashed shut with bungee cords. Windows were cracked.Once the plane was above the serran\u00eda, the cabin would fall silent. I caught glimpses of hidden valleys and uncoiling streams \u2014 until we hit the clouds and everything disappeared. Planes crashed frequently on the way. Some airstrips had wreckage pushed to the side. On bumpier flights, some Guna passengers would remove their shoes, preparing to swim ashore. I would press my forehead against the window and scan below. When the earth finally reappeared, there would be nothing but green in every direction, almost as disorienting as the inside of a cloud. Even after I got used to the trip, I would find myself wondering if the pilot had gotten lost.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTEventually the plane would touch down on a gravel runway, and we would voyage between islands in a dugout canoe \u2014 the taste of salt in my mouth and my father\u2019s long arms wrapped around me as the boat navigated swells the height of our house back in Boston. By the time we arrived on Tikantiki, where my father did fieldwork, it would feel as if we had entered a lost world. I would be shocked when I got older to realize how short the distance we had traveled actually was: about 75 miles.The Guna have been building a road through the jungle for 13 years. But from the air it's barely visible \u2014\u00a0the jungle is already closing in.Federico and I arrived successfully on the island on a drizzly morning. As it turned out, we had come on a big day: The village was celebrating a chicha, a female puberty ceremony, and scores of canoes from neighboring villages were pulling up to shore. Chichas are major events that require weeks of preparation and can last for days. Drinking is central: While the Guna are generally abstemious, chichas, at least the way I remembered them, were Bacchanalian eruptions of disorder. (Celebrants consume inna, a sugarcane-based beverage fermented in clay pots.) There would be chanting, wailing and utterances of dangerous, forbidden words. Shamans would flirt with malevolent spirits, provoking them; the danger the Guna felt was no joke.I assured Federico that none of this would be visible to us. \u201cYou won\u2019t be able to photograph anything,\u201d I told him. If my father, the world\u2019s leading non-Guna expert on chichas, took decades to get permission from the Guna to publish his research, I said, we shouldn\u2019t hold our breath. Federico looked crushed.Just then a man named Emigdio Robinson, who seemed to have been appointed our chaperone, knocked on the door of the house we were staying in.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cGood afternoon,\u201d he said. \u201cThe chicha is starting soon. Do you want to come?\u201dI declined at first, but eventually I joined Federico in the smoke-filled chicha house, where he was dancing and being asked to pose for selfies. The chicha was as I remembered, loud and convivial, but it was hard not to notice that phones had invaded yet another sacred space. I had always thought of the Guna as a force that could push back against such transformations \u2014 though maybe I was na\u00efve. Either way, things had changed more than I expected.ImageAfter a full day walking through the jungle and crossing rivers, the Guna guides \u2014\u00a0Arcelio Gonz\u00e1lez, Jer\u00f3nimo Dequ\u00eda and Aurelio Chiari \u2014 dry their wet socks and boots by a small fire on the riverbank.Early the next morning, our guides wanted to show us something before we started tunneling into the jungle. Robinson picked us up in a launch, and we sped down the coast toward Colombia, pounding through the heavy surf.Our destination was Puerto Suggunyaa Inabiginya, a stunningly perfect bay tucked between a jungle-covered promontory and a low point on the Continental Divide. Puerto Suggunyaa Inabiginya used to be called Puerto Escoc\u00e9s, or Scottish Harbor, after one of the most spectacular disasters in the history of colonialism. Here in 1698, the Kingdom of Scotland attempted to found its first outpost abroad. Thousands of well-armed colonists sailed to Puerto Escoc\u00e9s, which was to be the Door to the Seas, a hub of global commerce. But there was a reason it hadn\u2019t already been colonized.\u201c\u2019Tis a very wet country,\u201d wrote Lionel Wafer, an English pirate who spent four months stranded with the Guna only years before the Scots and published an account of the experience. The rain continued for weeks, Wafer said, and the prevailing winds blew directly into Puerto Escoces, preventing ships from exiting for weeks at a time. Furthermore, the seemingly low nearby mountains concealed taller ones further in. The Scottish colonists faced the same troubles, and within two years, more than half of them would be dead, killed by fever and starvation. The calamity, which had been financed by private investors, helped cause an economic crash and forced Scotland to join the United Kingdom.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Guna avoided the area for centuries afterward, believing it cursed. (There was also said to be a resident population of aggressive lizards.) In 1914, however, on the orders of Inabaginya, one of the great Guna chiefs, the place underwent a grueling exorcism \u2014 an entire month of chanting. When it was done, the area hadn\u2019t just been purged. It had been reclaimed. In the early 2000s, when the Scots returned \u2014 this time a group of explorers including no less than Sean Connery himself \u2014 to excavate the colony\u2019s graveyard, the Guna staved them off by demanding money for a research permit.Yet the Guna never quite succeeded in inhabiting the place, either. As we walked the peninsula, the men seemed wary and subdued. We encountered an abandoned Guna village, where we found a single cheerful resident swinging in a hammock. His name was Edgardo Linares, and he was on vacation from teaching high school in Panama City. \u201cWhy am I here?\u201d he said, offering us shelter under his lean-to as a squall passed. His backyard was a shallow swamp crawling with iguanas the length of my arm. \u201cIt\u2019s paradise.\u201d\u201cCould you see a hotel here?\u201d one of the men suddenly asked, catching me off guard. A hotel? The other men stopped talking and waited for my response. I looked around, trying to see what they saw. Was this not a sacred site? It seemed like the symbol of everything the Guna had spent centuries fighting for. It was a graveyard of foreign interlopers, and a warning to keep out. Spooky as it was, I wouldn\u2019t have touched it for the world. The men were open to development, however \u2014 as long as the Guna controlled it.At the chicha, celebrants consume inna, a sugarcane-based beverage fermented in clay pots. The next morning, we began our trek to Mord\u00ed. I had some idea of the route, having attempted it once back in 1998 with my father and brother. We had no smartphones then, of course, and no GPS or map. We just filled some backpacks with food, hired a young guide from Mulatupu and started hiking where people said there was a path. Throughout my childhood, when my father would fly down to Panama on his own, he would disappear into the jungle, sometimes for weeks. On that particular trip, however, unnerved by the increasingly challenging terrain and a path that seemed more rumor than reality, we gave up after the first day.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTI assumed that our companions would know what lay ahead, but even they were at a loss. Historically for the Guna, the deep forest is a place inhabited by dangerous spirits, and one that many are still happy to avoid. Most interact with the jungle only along the shore, where it has been tamed by centuries of agriculture. As a boy, I loved walking barefoot through coconut groves and bathing in the slow, shallow rivers flowing from the Continental Divide, but I would turn back at the edge of the deep forest. No one seemed to know the uplands except hunters and neles, or seers, and by the time our family arrived in Gunayala, both were in decline.The organizers of our trek had found a guide for us who was not afraid. His name was Jer\u00f3nimo Dequ\u00eda, a 46-year-old farmer and fisherman from Mulatupu. Unusual for the Guna, Dequ\u00eda was of mixed background \u2014 his father was Ember\u00e1, Panama\u2019s other major Indigenous group, enemies of the Guna in generations past and forest people through and through. The other three Guna assigned to us \u2014 two porters and a cook \u2014 seemed to regard him as a bit of a freak. \u201cMy friend Dequ\u00eda is like an ant when he gets in the forest,\u201d said the cook, 29-year-old Eudelio Chiari. \u201cIf you aren\u2019t in shape, he will leave you behind. And I don\u2019t know what\u2019s wrong with his stomach, but he never gets hungry.\u201d In reality, all four were absurdly fast hikers, but Dequ\u00eda was in a class of his own. Even when the jungle thickened and the terrain got gnarly, his momentum never seemed to break, as if he was always moving downhill.The author in a small canoe guided downstream by two of the trip\u2019s Guna guides. One of them was Ger\u00f3nimo Dequ\u00eda Gonz\u00e1lez, a 46-year-old farmer and fisherman from Mulatupu.After a brief boat ride through mangroves, we began our trudge up the Continental Divide. Almost immediately we came across a clearing, which I did not recognize although I had seen it several times on Facebook. It was the road to Mord\u00ed, the one the men had been cutting by hand for 13 years. In person it was far more impressive. The right of way was clean, wide and contoured to the terrain. It already looked drivable. Federico released a drone and we looked down at our position; this had the opposite effect \u2014 from the air, the road was barely visible. The jungle was already closing in.As Federico operated the drone, I swatted mosquitoes swarming his neck. \u201cLet\u2019s go,\u201d Dequ\u00eda said. \u201cThere will be less insects the higher we get.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTNominally it was the dry season. Though for the previous 36 hours it had rained as hard as it ever does in Panama. (\u2019Tis a very wet country, I thought.) I was soon drenched in perspiration and struggled to keep my glasses from sliding down my nose. Eventually I gave up and stuffed them in my chest pocket, which meant that combined with the dimmer surroundings, I was becoming blind.Seeing me hesitate, Chiari smiled, but his concern was evident.\u201cIt\u2019s a very big adventure,\u201d he said.\u201cWhen was the last time you were here?\u201d I asked.\u201cNever,\u201d he replied.ImageFour of the guides catching their breath near a giant tree in the Gunayala jungle.The jungle got quiet, and the odor of peccaries became strong. A troop of howler monkeys seemed to stalk us, hooting from across a ravine. Some of the guides besides Dequ\u00eda carried machetes, but we had no guns. Chiari\u2019s bag was filled with rice and cans of off-brand Spam, which he would chop open with a machete and serve with potato chips wilting in the humidity. He and the other men were sure-footed in their rubber boots, but I stumbled in the middle of rivers, slipped on rocks and skidded down hills \u2014 a terrific way to end up with a handful of poisonous spines. \u201cUse your heels to slow yourself,\u201d Chiari advised me. At one point when Arcelio Gonz\u00e1lez, our quiet guide in his 40s, saw me coming and put up his hand to halt, I continued sliding and ended up stepping in what he wanted to show me: a shiny, greenish-brown jaguar turd.The area we were passing through is considered sacred; it was likely one of the routes by which the Golden People, as the Guna call themselves, made their flight from danger during the colonial era, when they were spread out across eastern Panama and Colombia. Today, in addition to being firmly controlled by Indigenous peoples, the area remains almost completely undeveloped \u2014 an ecological time capsule.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTPanama has the money and resources to keep it intact, but what might not be manageable are the side effects of increased traffic and development created by the Interconexi\u00f3n, as well as other projects that experts are sure will come in its wake. \u201cWe are beginning to see the end of the Dari\u00e9n Gap,\u201d says Indra Candanedo, director of Alianza por Matusagarat\u00ed, a conservation group. For decades, the separation of North and South America was maintained through the collective will of Panama, Colombia and, above all, the United States, which underwrote border-control programs and essentially suppressed development. That will has eroded, Candanedo says. \u201cYou have bridges going up all over eastern Panama,\u201d she says; some are funded by local governments or private companies, with little oversight. Locals feel the authorities have turned a blind eye.\u201cYou\u2019re not going to see the gap opened because of an official decision to build a highway from Panama to Colombia,\u201d Candanedo says. \u201cIt will just happen, because nobody stopped it. I\u2019m not sure you can stop it anymore.\u201d Without intervention, the organic erosion of the north-south divide \u2014 by loggers, speculators and other local interests \u2014 was just a matter of time. Already the forests of eastern Panama have been pushed back to fragile protected zones and mountains like the Continental Divide. In Gunayala, mountains I used to stare at as a child may now be among the oldest jungles in Latin America.ImageSmall streams winding through the jungle in Gunayala, hidden beneath the canopy of dense trees and almost invisible from the air.Later, I also spoke with Catherine Potvin, a professor of biology at McGill University and an expert on old forest. \u201cWe are talking about a forest with no comparison,\u201d she said. Potvin has collected data on trees in eastern Panama that \u201cI haven\u2019t dared publish,\u201d she said. Her models tell her they are between 500 and 1,400 years old, which would match the oldest trees in the region. The greatest concentration of such trees outside the Amazon exists in Gunayala and Dari\u00e9n, she believes.Like my father, Potvin is insistent on deference to the Guna with respect to the Interconexi\u00f3n. \u201cIt\u2019s their land,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd we white people are in no position to make comments about how to care about the environment.\u201d If the project presents stewardship challenges, \u201cthe Guna are strong,\u201d she says. \u201cThey can certainly control what comes with the road.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTBut what if they couldn\u2019t? I wanted to be convinced \u2014 not about the Guna right to self-determination, but that anyone, faced with the temptation of roads, could think clearly about the destruction they bring. I once interviewed a Panamanian engineer who helped design the route of Pan-American Highway, the segment built in the 1970s at a time when there were no roads in eastern Panama, just jungle. He burst into tears recalling the damage that could have been avoided. \u201cIt\u2019s been a disaster,\u201d he said. Within years, the planners knew they had inadvertently maximized the ecological catastrophe they had unleashed, but it was too late.The engineer, who had been a famous jungle explorer in his youth, lived in retirement in the hills outside Panama City, where I interviewed him. In the valley below us you could almost see what the highway had done: at first, devastation, empty fields and the perpetual haze of brush fires. To be sure, it hadn\u2019t taken long for the hardscrabble frontier settlements that sprouted early to become flourishing communities. To see them would have been a short drive, but the engineer never had. He couldn\u2019t face seeing what had been lost.ImageA plane approaching Tocumen International Airport on the outskirts of Panama City, flying in from Gunayala.When our group finally pulled into Mord\u00ed, the sun had just set. No sooner had I congratulated myself for scaling the village\u2019s towering muddy cliff than an uneasy feeling descended. As we walked down the community\u2019s one crowded street, no one seemed to make eye contact. Stores declined our patronage. \u201cThis town is not like other Guna villages,\u201d Federico whispered.Even my father had never been to Mord\u00ed. Perched atop a steep mud bank overlooking a notoriously violent, flood-prone river, the community seems to have always had a reputation as a tough, ill-tempered place. No town had fought harder for survival \u2014 against the jungle, isolation and disease. Added to the list of antagonists in recent decades were timber companies. Unlike Guna villages along the coast, Mord\u00ed sold its precious supply of mahogany, cedar and almendro. But the contracts were seen as one-sided, exploiting the village\u2019s vulnerability and fueling its anger at the external world. Visitors should not expect to be welcomed, we had been warned.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTGuna irascibility seemed alive and well, and in some ways \u2014 as someone who wanted to see Guna culture continue to thrive in resistance to external pressure \u2014 I frankly found the cold shoulder a relief, even if it made us feel unwelcome. The men from Mulatupu who had cut their way to the outside world seemed wholly ready to integrate with it, but here the old wariness had not gone away. I wondered how it would serve the community in negotiations for the Interconexi\u00f3n.Mord\u00ed is only accessible by water or on foot, via an unmapped ghost path. The first few miles are paved, but as soon as it reaches Guna territory it turns to mud, at which point even the most experienced backroads driver behind the wheel of the most rugged all-terrain vehicle must slow to a crawl. The condition of the road infuriates Mord\u00ed residents, who have long demanded improvements from the government. In frustration, they have turned to a timber baron known as El Chino, with whom they have a strained relationship.ImageNo town had fought harder for survival than Mord\u00ed \u2014 against the jungle, isolation and disease.El Chino, whose name is Guo Jian Zhang Zeng, began working with Mord\u00ed in 2006. His company, International Woodwork Corporation (I.W.C.), which exports wood paneling to China, works only with Indigenous communities, which control the last stands of valuable timber in Panama. This arrangement is encouraged by Panamanian law, which was rewritten in 1994 to give Indians control over their own land. Critics, however, say the reforms foster dependency between vulnerable communities like Mord\u00ed and logging companies, and Zeng\u2019s logging concessions have been repeatedly cited for overcutting. Yet he continues to be the dominant timber baron in the region. Mord\u00ed residents say he tricked the community into a contrato leonino \u2014 a one-sided 25-year contract. (I.W.C. and Zeng did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)\u201cThe Chino gains everything and has nothing to lose,\u201d says Benjamin Goodman, a U.S.-based legal professional who grew up in Mord\u00ed with his Protestant missionary parents and today advises the village on legal issues. The contract gives Mord\u00ed residents few rights, including an inability to renegotiate prices for trees they fell.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTZeng, who is the sort of merchant the Guna have long avoided, has managed to maintain a relationship with Mord\u00ed by building roads and providing other services. When he first arrived seeking permission to cut down trees (according to Goodman, offering $20,000 in cash as an \u201cadvancement\u201d), Mord\u00ed had no roads and had only recently been exposed to the outside world. It did not have the political protection of being part of Gunayala, which includes only Guna communities along the coast.Zeng\u2019s bulldozers had recently been to Mord\u00ed when Federico and I arrived. He had built the community a log bridge over the R\u00edo Chucunaque, which allowed traffic almost all the way to the village. (Of course, the farther Zhang\u2019s roads go, the more timber can be extracted.) We stopped at the bridge, which sits a few miles downstream of Mord\u00ed, and watched as the Chucunaque oozed underneath, carrying debris and the occasional car-length crocodile. Three days later, we would learn, a powerful storm swept through, flooding the river and washing the bridge downstream.From there we boarded an outboard canoe and journeyed back to Mord\u00ed, where we encountered the same coolness.We were preparing to leave when a young man came up to me and introduced himself. His name was Mauselio Kasta\u00f1a. He said he had heard that I was interviewing Mord\u00ed residents about the megaproyecto, and he wanted to explain his view. The people of Mord\u00ed have serious reservations about a road being built so close to their community, he said, partly because of the impact the noise could have on animals and sacred sites. But since they assumed that it would be the only benefit they would ever receive from Panama\u2019s government, they were reluctantly in support of it.\u201cWe are the most forgotten Indigenous people in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are vulnerable because the government does nothing for us. Of course, the government promises schools, roads and housing for the Interconexi\u00f3n. But once they have what they need \u2014 permission to move forward \u2014 they\u2019ll forget about us.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTI asked him how the negotiations were going.\u201cA lot of pressure,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of pressure.\u201dThat afternoon in Mord\u00ed, Kasta\u00f1a asked if he could tell me a Guna myth. Thousands of years ago, he said, seven brothers and a sister were born in a river. A pair of women, each part frog, approached them and announced, \u201cWe are your mothers.\u201d The siblings believed them and allowed them to be raised by them, until one day they came to a clear, tranquil river and saw their reflections for the first time.\u201cThey had been deceived,\u201d Kasta\u00f1a said. \u201cIn fact, the frog women were their enemies.\u201d He continued: \u201cWhen the government comes to us with sweet words, we compare it to our history. The governments have all been the same. Everything you see here, we did ourselves.\u201dImageA Guna family navigating the sea in a wind\u2011powered canoe, its sail stitched together from fabric remnants and sugar sacks.In the founding myth of ethnographic fieldwork, set by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1922 in \u201cArgonauts of the Western Pacific,\u201d the anthropologist arrives on a tropical beach as the boat that brought him sails away, plunging him into native life. His job is to bring back reports on how different societies construct meaning, organize social life and define right and wrong, potentially undermining our own certainty in the order of the universe.Today, anthropologists who spend their entire careers studying a single group of people are a vanishing breed, like the Indigenous groups they used to specialize in. Some anthropologists, criticizing the sort of ethnography my father\u2019s generation did as continuing the discipline\u2019s extractive, colonialist ways, use the label \u201csalvage anthropology.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTI kept thinking about this as I struggled with my own wavering thoughts on the Interconexi\u00f3n. What the Guna face is an almost pure distillation of the old Conradian dilemma between progress and tradition. The Mulatupu-Mord\u00ed road is a noble undertaking, but it could come at a tragic cost. After our hike through its future path, I went back to my father. Did he believe that tourism would be the death of Guna independence? (\u201cNo.\u201d) Did he trust the Guna\u2019s political leadership? (\u201cMore than I trust ours.\u201d) Did they have any idea what they were getting themselves into? (\u201cDo any of us?\u201d)And what about Guna resistance to the outside world \u2014 the key to their identity? Had it finally been worn down? Here I realized that I understood the resolve of the Mulatupu commissioners. The Guna do not merely resist the world; they thrive in tension with it, and the way those men were trying to seize control of the project showed they were not letting down their guard.Still, the Interconexi\u00f3n might be too much for anyone to control. And it\u2019s moving ahead: Last month, the leadership of Wargand\u00ed, the inland Guna reserve that includes Mord\u00ed, took a significant step toward approval of the project \u2014 by voting to enter a critical consultation and consent phase with the government. A similar agreement will be presented in Gunayala in October. Panama, meanwhile, which has long promised to start construction in the fall, is continuing to push forward aggressively.Critics of modern anthropology argue that interminable self-questioning has caused the field to lose its nerve, and to doubt its own ability to understand anything. At times, I wondered if my father had become resigned \u2014 whether he agreed too much with what the Guna wanted rather than worried about what might happen to them. But when, during our conversations for this article, I suggested that anthropology might have gone overboard with its endless discussions about representation, and lost its ability to actually study the world, he reacted harshly.\u201cYou have made quite a few passing remarks which give the impression that you are depicting me as fundamentally different or even opposed to my discipline,\u201d he emailed. \u201cWe are in a moment in which anthropology is under attack, just as it has been in the past, and mostly for political motives.\u201d (He was referring to a controversial report on the humanities last spring called \u201cThe State of Scholarship,\u201d commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington universities, which singled out anthropology for \u201ca widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity.\u201d) \u201cI would not want to participate in an article in which I would be seen as opposed to anthropology or as apolitical,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn fact, I hadn\u2019t wanted to portray my father as apolitical; on the contrary, I see him as someone who would do anything for the Guna. After being involved with them for 60 years, it was impossible to say what they meant to him. They were his life.ImageThe Interconexi\u00f3n might be too much for anyone to control. And it\u2019s moving ahead: Panama, which has long promised to start construction in the fall, is continuing to push forward aggressively.I wondered if it was possible to show loyalty to the Guna in a different way. I turned to my father\u2019s former colleague Mac Chapin, who is a different kind of anthropologist. Chapin, who also started working with the Guna in the late 1960s, edited a compilation of Guna oral literature that is still widely read, especially by the Guna. But at heart he was an organizer and an activist, with a pugnacious, combative streak. At age 40, he quit the academy.\u201cI wanted to engage,\u201d Chapin told me recently. \u201cI wanted to get involved with the practical stuff.\u201d His first engagement was with the offshoot of the Pan-American Highway, that early attempt to pierce Gunayala. When Chapin turned to advocacy, it was already facilitating an influx of colonos \u2014 slash-and-burn farmers from western Panama. The Guna had kept them at bay haphazardly, but mostly with mere threats.According to Chapin, who would go on to a long career as an Indigenous land rights advocate, the Guna were different from other groups. Whenever they had an issue with wagas, \u201cthey would send delegations to the capital and have meetings with the president. No other Indian group in Panama could do that.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTBut a road? That was a different kind of issue \u2014 an alien technology the Guna at first failed to recognize as the threat it was. \u201cWe felt you really have to pay attention to this thing,\u201d Chapin says.A group of younger Guna agreed, and in the late 1970s they started pressuring their leaders to fund an organized response. At the same time, Chapin lobbied the international conservation community, which responded with millions of dollars in aid. Soon they had funding to build an outpost built atop the Continental Divide, housing a team of border guards, topographers and biologists.ImageWomen during the chicha ceremony in Mulatupu.The most important part of the project was mapping: As it turned out, the Guna \u201cdidn\u2019t really know where their borders were,\u201d Chapin says. Thanks to the threat of the road, they became more vigilant. Community mapping initiatives have since spread to Indigenous communities around the world, with resounding success. But at the time they were new. For the first time in Latin America, an Indigenous group had marked off its own nature reserve.Today the road that alarmed Chapin has become the catalyst that he feared, funneling tourism into Gunayala. But the adjacent adverse effects have been contained. The jungle lining the road is largely untouched, proving that at least some of a pioneer road\u2019s environmental impact can be managed.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen it came to the Interconexi\u00f3n, Chapin had a strong opinion, but it wasn\u2019t the one I expected. He was a pragmatist, and not an optimist, having first engaged with the Guna as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. He had witnessed the complete arc of environmental tragedy in eastern Panama, and he had a somewhat dark view \u2014 one that amounted to, If a road can be built, it will be. This made it paramount for the Guna to embrace the Interconexi\u00f3n and execute it on their terms. \u201cThe Guna have to do it,\u201d Chapin said. \u201cIf they don\u2019t, somebody else will.\u201dBen Ryder Howe is a frequent contributor to The Times.Federico R\u00edos is a regular contributor to The Times, known for documenting migration, armed conflict and the environment in Latin America. He is the author of photo books \u201cVERDE,\u201d \u201cDari\u00e9n\u201d and \u201cWhite Line.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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