PANAMA: The Caribbean Indians are paying the price for being close to a transit route to the US for Colombian drugs, writes Chris Kraul in Achutupo, Panama
After keeping the world at bay for five centuries, the Kuna Indians on Panama's unspoiled Caribbean coast now confront an insidious intruder: cocaine traffickers.
The fiercely independent tribe inhabits Kuna Yala, a semi-autonomous area that includes a coastal strip and the San Blas islands. The region is known mainly to foreign eco-tourists who can afford to reach its isolated white sand beaches.
The Kuna have fought off incursions by Spanish conquistadors, rubber growers, gold miners and, most recently, tourism promoters who ply them with a steady stream of resort proposals - but they jealously protect their sovereignty, won after a bloody uprising in 1925. Today, the tribe permits no outside ownership of its land.
The Kuna control almost 400 picture-postcard islands but inhabit fewer than 50 of them, which are crammed with bamboo-sided, thatch-roofed huts. The women are known for gaily coloured dresses and for their embroidered molas, or tapestries, a coveted souvenir. Men spend the day fishing, gathering coconuts and catching lobsters.
"Foreigners often view the Kuna as simple mola makers with hardly a care in the world, but it is they who decide when and if outsiders, including Panamanian police and other authorities, can enter their lands," said Scott Doggett, author of Lonely Planet's Panama guide.
In the last few years, however, the Kuna have faced an interloper that is difficult to fend off, and which has brought the scourge of addiction.
The 322km-long (200 miles)Kuna lands lie just south of a transit route for Colombian drugs on their way to the US market, much of them stowed aboard sleek 12m (40ft) fibreglass boats often outfitted with a trio of 200hp engines and guided by satellite positioning systems. The boats can carry up to two tons of cocaine, typically in 18kg (40lb) watertight packages.
With the increasing drug traffic, ever larger amounts of drugs wash ashore here, having been dumped by drug runners to avoid detection or to be picked up by associates. The cocaine is then sold or used locally.
The so-called "go-fast" boats make surreptitious refuelling stops on the high seas or along the Caribbean coast and have proved elusive to US and Panamanian authorities trying to stem the flow of drugs. They are difficult to track and intercept because their speeds reach 129km/h (80mph) and they travel at night.
Officials who run the joint US- Panamanian drug interdiction programme say they have had success recently in catching some of the boats. This nation's top anti-drug prosecutor, Patricio Candanedo, said that in 2005, Panama seized 35 tons of cocaine in seaborne raids, nearly four times as much as in 2004.
One American official said the anti-drug efforts have been helped by a US gift of several go- fast boats that Panamanian law enforcers now use to chase down the drug runners.
The surveillance, however, has pushed drug boats' skippers to run closer to Kuna Yala shores, so they can ditch their boats and cargo on shorter notice. That has increased the incidence of what the locals call "ocean jackpots", or the recovery by Kuna tribesmen of cocaine that is then distributed locally.
On some islands, up to half of the Kuna men between 18 and 25 are now addicts, said pharmacist assistant Galindo Morales.
"The addiction problem is on the rise," said Dr Edison Murillo, who directs a hospital on the neighbouring island of Aligandi.
Kuna Yala's idyllic surroundings mask several health problems among the 60,000 members of the tribe, he said, including Aids, malnutrition and tuberculosis, in addition to drug abuse.
Anthropologist Stanley Heckadon of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City hypothesised that a possible reason for rising drug use and trafficking among the Kuna was the 1999 transfer of the Panama Canal from the US to Panama, as well as the closing of several US military bases, which left up to 3,000 tribe members without jobs.
"The Kuna had a long history working for the canal administration and the US military as painters, busboys and cooks," Heckadon said. "Suddenly the bases were shut, and men who had a good income before now don't have a job but still a family to support."
Residents still talk about an incident over the summer that brought home the risks of being close to a narcotics shipping lane. After a boat loaded with a ton of cocaine beached on the mainland in June with mechanical problems, the skipper asked a fisherman to stand guard over the cargo for a day or two.
Instead, the Kuna tribesman sold it to traffickers in Colon for $700,000, said island sources. When the traffickers returned they threatened the entire population of Achutupo with death unless they returned the cocaine.
Terrified, elders made an almost unheard-of appeal to the Panamanian government for police protection. For a time, 40 police officers stood guard over the island waiting for the reprisal from drug runners. Today, four remain on constant watch.
In a meeting with Candanedo in November, Kuna elders said they would permit the construction of two Panamanian naval installations on their land to fight drug traffickers, said tribal security chief Adelberto Heredo.
Meanwhile, drug use has begun to tear at the social fabric of the Kunas. Tribal elder Brines Morales said Kuna youth were shunning customs such as the making and tasting of chicha, an alcoholic beverage brewed from sugar cane several times a year to mark rites of passage.
At the next tribal council meeting this spring, Panama's tourism minister, salsa singer and actor Ruben Blades, is expected to renew a government pitch for the Kuna to open up their lands to outside developers. Among the proponents is Murillo, the director of the Aligandi clinic, who thinks it would "generate revenue".
But the Smithsonian's Heckadon doubts that the tribe will roll out the red carpet. "The Kuna have held on to their land for 500 years and they will hold on to it for the next 500 years." - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)