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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ii

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Nationalism & Developmentalism in Panama 8

Developing the Darién 18

Conclusion 42

Appendix 45

Bibliography 52

i LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Torrijos in the Bayano River 45

Figure 2 Bayano Cement Company 45

Figure 3 “Symbol of Energy Liberation” 46

Figure 4 Darién Gap Highway 46

Figure 5 ¿Qué es la Erosión? 47

Graph 1 Panamanian and Latin American Public Borrowing, 1970-88 48

Graph 2 Average Annual Public Investment, Panama, 1950-74 49

Graph 3 External Public Debt, Panama, 1968-1983 49

Map 1 Highway Network, Panama, 2010 50

Map 2 Panama in Relation to Northeastern United States 51

ii We are a People of Stone and Mud: Nationalism, Development, and Nature in Panama’s Darién, 1968-1980

Abstract

by

ANTHONY W. ANDERSSON

From the founding of its Republic in 1903, Panama has struggled for economic and political independence from the United States. After World

War II, and especially under General Omar Torrijos, Panamanian nationalists looked to their neglected hinterlands for the human and natural resources that could power an independent nation. The Darién region in eastern

Panama, a large and unknown tract of rain forest, became the object of a series of economic development projects that tried to put nature to work for the nation. Exploring the two largest of these projects, the Bayano

Hydroelectric Dam and the Darién Gap Highway, this essay argues that nationalists in Panama, and their international benefactors, misperceived the environment they were working to “develop.” The collision of the environment that nationalists envisioned with the environment in reality crippled the projects themselves, and led to the creation of a new landscape that no one had planned for.

iii

INTRODUCTION

On March 16, 1976, government officials, diplomats, and more than a few curious children watched as Panama’s dictator, General Omar Torrijos, ran fully clothed into the rising waters of the Bayano River moments after the gates closed inside the hulking new dam that straddled its banks. (See Figure

1) Torrijos’ stunt, broadcast by major television networks and published on the front pages of newspapers, celebrated more than the completion of the dam itself. The iconic image of the General splashing through the water hand-in-hand with a group of local children symbolized the importance that the dam held for a country which was mortgaging its future on such development projects in order, as Torrijos put it, to “turn a caricature of a country into a nation.”1

This essay will explore the dialectical relationship between nationalism and the natural environment through the case of the Darién in eastern

Panama, especially the years during which Torrijos and his particular brand of nationalism ruled the country. Looking primarily at two major projects enacted under Torrijos, the Bayano Hydroelectric Complex and the Darién

Gap Highway, I argue that nationalists in Panama and their international benefactors fundamentally misperceived the landscape they worked to

“develop.” Their failure to understand the social and ecological environment of the Darién created problems for the projects themselves and did as much

1 Quote is from Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, Updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 188; Alaka Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis: Hydroelectric Power and Social Dislocation in Eastern Panama, Development, conflict, and social change series (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 1-2.

1 harm as benefit to the people who lived there. Ultimately, the resistance of the landscape to attempts at controlling it forced a change in nationalists’ development vision, though the landscape itself was also changed in the process. The encounter of nationalist ideology, nature, and people in the

Darién produced a new landscape, though not the one nationalists had envisioned.

From 1968 until 1980, Torrijos’ government tried to build a new

Panamanian nation that would be politically and economically independent of the United States. The primary goal of this effort was the territorial and economic integration of the country, especially the repatriation of the U.S.- occupied Canal Zone that split the nation in two. Historians and partisans have spilled much ink over the battles to control Canal Zone.2 However,

Panamanian efforts to extend economic and political control over the rest of the country as part of their nation-building project have drawn less attention.

The massive development projects in eastern Panama have in particular escaped the gaze of historians. In the Darién, the Panamanian state, with the assistance of an array of international development agencies, launched an ambitious economic development campaign that radically transformed the landscape in an attempt to put nature to work for the nation.

2 Some representative titles include Michael L Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981, Pitt Latin American series (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Carlos Guevara Mann, Panamanian Militarism: A Historical Interpretation (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1996); R. M Koster, In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1989 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990); Steve C Ropp, Panamanian Politics: From Guarded Nation to National Guard (New York, N.Y: Praeger, 1982); Thomas E Weil, Panama: A Country Study, 3rd ed., Area handbook series (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1981); Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Michael Sánchez, Panama Lost?: U.S. Hegemony, Democracy, and the Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

2 The Panamanian Isthmus, from the mouth of the Bayano River to the

Atrato Basin in Colombia, constitutes the Darién region. (See Map 1) It today comprises all of Darién Province, the two easternmost districts of Panama province, all or parts of several indigenous reservations, and the northwestern extremity of Colombia’s Chocó Department. The name Darién originally corresponded to the lands controlled by Vasco Núñez de Balboa in the early sixteenth century, which the Spanish demarcated as one of the three principle political divisions of Panama under colonial rule.3 Humans have occupied the area for at least 11,000 years, dramatically altering the environment by their presence, especially after the advent of settled agriculture some two thousand years ago.4 At the time of the Spaniards’ arrival in the Darién (their first encounter with mainland America) the area was home to around a half a million people. Its intensively cultivated valleys, cities, and network of roads carved through montane forests testified to the influence the native Cuevan civilization had on its environment.5 Following the extermination of the Cuevan people by Eurasian diseases, the forest quickly reclaimed the abandoned fields and homes. Freed from human controls, dense tropical vegetation choked off the terrestrial migration route that for millennia had connected the ecosystems of North and South

3 Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 238. This essay will limit its scope to only those parts of the Darién within the political boundaries of Panama, and exclude the San Blas Kuna reservation along the narrow Caribbean littoral, which is both culturally and ecologically distinct. 4 Charles Bennett, Human influences on the zoogeography of Panama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 34. 5 Philip D. Young, “Guaymí Socionatural Adaptations,” in The Botany and Natural History of Panama (Saint Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 1985), 357-359; Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 238-246; The estimates of pre-Colombian population in Panama is the subject of some debate. Bennett estimated the number at up to two million, but more likely around one million in Bennett, Human influences on the zoogeography of Panama; Omar Jaén Suárez has more recently put the number at between 225,000 and 400,000 in Omar Jaén Suárez, La Población del Istmo de Panamá (Panamá: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1998), 43-44.

3 America.6 Since the Conquest, Europeans in Panama have largely ignored the

Darién in favor of the transit corridor, the narrower part of the Isthmus in the center of the country, which facilitated the trade of silver and gold under the

Spanish, and later the trade of agricultural commodities during the neocolonial era. The human population of the Darién never recovered, but the arrangement and composition of tree species in its forests still hint at its roots in Cuevan agriculture.7

The development of the Darién began in the minds of leaders in

Panama and planners in the United States who saw a new value in its landscape. In the years after World War II, both nationalists in Panama and development planners in the United States looked to the Darién and began to see not a hostile wasteland, but a hidden font of resources—a virgin land that beckoned the masses of landless peasants to a better future. The old vision of the Darién as a backward wilderness, once dangerous and repulsive, came to represent an opportunity for a nation struggling to build the foundations of a new, independent, and prosperous society.

No matter the geographic, demographic, or economic idiosyncrasies of

Panama, its nationalist leaders—particularly Torrijos—embraced the same developmentalist philosophy as other Latin American nationalists and

6 Bennett, Human influences on the zoogeography of Panama, 52-55; Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 283-289. Some animals, notably jaguars, continued to migrate through the Darién, but most of the biotic exchange between North and South America had depended on the “forest edge” ecosystems created by the borders of cultivated fields and forests. 7 This is the central thesis of Bennett, Human influences on the zoogeography of Panama. The quipo tree is especially adept at colonizing cleared regions of forest, like crop fields, when not subjected to regular burning. Hardwood trees like mahogany, which depend on mature forest to sprout and grow, have made only limited inroads into the formerly deforested Darién. The older, dominant quipo stands, and the younger, scattered mahoganies indicate a mature, softwood forest transitioning to primary, hardwood forest.

4 undertook similar projects.8 Environmental historian Kenneth Pomeranz has characterized this pervasive commitment to “state-building, sedentarization, and intensifying the exploitation of resources” as a global phenomenon with deep historical roots in the scramble for power, whether national, sub- national, or international.9 What is exceptional about Panama’s developmentalist strategy is not any fundamental difference with other Latin

American states due to geography or culture, but rather the distance its leaders were willing to go to achieve their goals: to banish its quasi-colonial status and, as one official put it, feel “free as a nation.”10 Torrijos’ nationalist government took on so many ambitious development projects, even in the face of severe challenges, that it fell deeper into debt than any other Latin

American country at the time. (See Graph 1) Its efforts to build a viable and independent nation, though unique in many of the details, may represent the archetype of nationalist developmentalism in Latin America.

* * *

Richard White has argued that history “operates on a series of scales that…intersect and superimpose themselves one atop the other.” The nation is just one such scale, and a problematic one at that. Salmon, White points out, live in international waters but spawn in rivers within national

8 For a concise introduction to developmentalism in Latin American, see Joel Wolfe, “Populism and Developmentalism,” in A Companion to Latin American History, ed. Thomas H Holloway, Blackwell companions to world history (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2008), 347- 364. 9 Kenneth Pomeranz, “Introduction,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 7. Pomeranz draws heavily from the work of James Scott, who emphasized the state’s impulsive drive to make its territory “legible” in order to better control it. See James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale agrarian studies (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 1998). 10 Statement from Robledo Landero, one of the heads of the Agrarian Reform Commission under Torrijos. Quoted in George Priestley, Military Government and Popular Participation in Panama: The Torrijos Regime, 1968-1975 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 64.

5 boundaries. The problem of overfishing is, then, simultaneously an ecological concern independent of political boundaries, and a national concern of fishermen who chafe at “their” salmon being caught by foreigners in open water. Likewise, international conservation organizations cluster around Washington, D.C. while their “constituents” may live on another continent. In this way, parts of the natural world that have no national affiliation are still “subject to all kinds of national claims.”11

The construction, both imagined and real, of national landscapes in

Latin America played a central role in the contestation of power in the region.

The ways that Latin Americans perceived the value and potential of their national territory benefitted some people over others by legitimizing some economic, agricultural, or other cultural means of relating to the environment, and proscribing others. Exploring the nature-nation relationship, especially the unequal terms on which that relationship is articulated across Latin America’s diverse peoples, speaks directly to the formation and persistence of the region’s highly stratified society. A well- developed literature on the relationship between nature and the nation does not exist for Latin America, as it does for North America.12 Rather,

11 Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 976-986. Quotes are from pages 985 and 984, respectively. 12 The briefest of introductions to this field might list, from the start Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Madison, Wis.: Silver Buckle Press, 1984); for criticism of Turner and his frontier thesis, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); on European versus North American nationalist landscapes, see Eric Kaufmann, “"Naturalizing the Nation": The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 4 (October 1998): 666-695; on conservation, see Samuel P Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency; the Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920, College ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1969); and Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, And the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); for look at the western desert in the North American national imagination, see Patricia

6 environmental histories of Latin America bear a remarkable tendency toward declension, reflecting the often tragic narratives of the region’s historiography generally. The environment in Latin America is often cast as a victim, along with a mostly passive population, that is acted on by foreign powers or their local stooges.13 Synthesizing the field, Shawn Miller has recently argued that

“attitudes toward nature have yet to prove themselves historically significant.” All things considered, Miller states, “we of the human race have joined hands in reshaping and devastating the earth, its diversity and its vitality.”14 This reasoning, I believe, misses the crucial distinction that the burdens and benefits of that “devastation” are unevenly distributed, and that nationalist narratives in particular have figured prominently in legitimizing that process.

A growing number of scholars are broaching the subject of the nation, or nationalism, and nature in Latin America. Paul Gootenberg and Stuart

McCook trace the connections between the commodification of the environment and the process of nation-building in the nineteenth century.15

Seth Garfield and Sterling Evans have explored how conservationists and

Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts (Niwot, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 1989). 13 Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Elinor G. K Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico, Studies in environment and history (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Richard P Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, Concise rev. ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007); Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America, New approaches to the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Daniel J Faber, Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993). 14 Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America, 4. 15 Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989); Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Stuart George McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

7 their opponents used competing nationalist narratives to justify their goals during the twentieth century.16 Of particular relation to the present study,

Todd Diacon has shown the importance of technology in the territorial integration of Brazil as its leaders struggled to form a cohesive national community.17 The post-World War II era of nationalist developmentalism still remains mostly absent from the environmental history literature, however (though Garfield is one notable exception). The present study seeks to begin addressing this void with the case of Panama, and a brief period in which its nationalist leaders struggled against nature and their own people in the pursuit of national liberation. It will, I hope, not only contribute to the discussion of nature and nation in Latin America, but also to the understanding of how different groups in Panama have contested power in their own nation.18

NATIONALISM & DEVELOPMENTALISM IN PANAMA

The torrijistas’ national vision in the late 1960s and 1970s blended the socio-political views of earlier nationalist parties with an aggressive form of state-led developmentalism inspired by President John Kennedy’s Alliance

16 Seth Garfield, “A Nationalist Environment: Indians, Nature, and the Construction of Xingu National Park in Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 41, no. 1 (2004): 139-167; Sterling Evans, The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). 17 Todd A Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano Da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 18 On race and nationalism in Panama, see Marixa Lasso, “Race and Ethnicity in the Formation of Panamanian National Identity: Panamanian Discrimination against Chinese and West Indians in the Thirties,” in Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, 2001; the best overviews of early Panamanian nationalism are Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, Dominio Y Sociedad En El Panamá Colombiano (1821-1903): Escrutinio Sociológico, 3rd ed. (Ciudad de Panamá: Editorial Universitaria, 1982); and Ricaurte Soler, Formas Ideológicas De La Nación Panameña ; Panamá Y El Problema Nacional Hispanoamericano, 5th ed. (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1977).

8 for Progress. Beginning in the 1920s, populist leaders in Panama began to question the elite conception of Panamanian society, which idolized the

European, urban merchant class and excluded everyone else. Acción

Comunal, the party of Panama’s perennial presidential candidate, Arnulfo

Arias, led the challenge to elite rule, rejecting the elitist national identity that most Panamanians did not fit into.19 The nationalists in Acción Comunal presented instead a mestizo ideal type that held up the country’s rural

“Interior” provinces as the true source of Panamanian culture. Embracing a mestizo identity had profound geographic dimensions in re-defining the

Panamanian nation. The large port cities of Panamá and Colón, mostly filled with blacks who had either descended from Spanish slaves or had arrived more recently from the British West Indies to build the Canal, represented a

“foreign” threat to nationalists’ understanding of Panamanian racial and cultural identity. The rural Interior, nationalists believed, represented a more pure mestizo culture.20 By framing their national identity around the mestizo

“race,” the nationalists also broadened the geographic scope of the nation beyond the transit corridor. Political patronage slowly began to grace

Panama’s forgotten hinterlands in the 1950s under “Chichi” Remón, who opened the Canal Zone to Panamanian goods and services, and again in the

19 On the construction and promotion of Panamanian elite’s national identity, see Figueroa Navarro, Dominio Y Sociedad En El Panamá Colombiano (1821-1903); Soler, Formas Ideológicas De La Nación Panameña ; Panamá Y El Problema Nacional Hispanoamericano; Alex Perez-Venero, Before the Five Frontiers: Panama, from 1821-1903 (New York: AMS Press, 1978); Peter A Szok, "La Última Gaviota": Liberalism and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth-Century Panamá, Contributions in Latin American studies no.21 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2001). Pérez-Venero synthesizes Figueroa Navarro’s and Soler’s work, while Szok explores the problematic transition from liberal to more populist national narratives. 20 The anti-black racism behind the nationalists’ so-called “inclusive” nationalism is shown in Lasso, “Race and Panamanian National Identity.” The mestizo identity worn by Acción Comunal also excluded a large part of the Panamanian population, the urban population of which is majority black (though precise numbers are troublesome because of malleable racial definitions often based on language and religion, rather than skin color or heritage).

9 early 1960s with the establishment of new institutions designed to quicken the rate of economic growth, especially in the Interior.21 Nationalists also rallied around the popular outrage over the U.S. “colony” in the Canal Zone, an anger which had repeatedly boiled over into riots. The combination of the anti-imperial fury at the United States with the patronage of rural areas over urban ones, forged among the nationalists of the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s, indelibly shaped Torrijos’ “revolution” in 1968.22

Torrijos referred to his nationalist strategy as “driving with both hand on the wheel…neither with just the left or just the right.”23 Taking power in

1968 amid the political turmoil unleashed by the fragmentation of both the oligarchy’s and the nationalists’ coalitions, Torrijos quickly cemented his legitimacy around a revised populist-nationalist platform that welcomed certain business sectors, particularly banking. By expanding on the well worn anti-imperialist, pro-mestizo populist platform, Torrijos co-opted his nationalist rivals in the center and on the left. Passing a strict banking privacy law and loosening financial regulations, Torrijos’ government turned

Panama into “the Switzerland of Latin America” in 1970, firmly entrenching a powerful segment of the business community within his camp.24 He made a point to avoid troublesome alliances by shunning both the United States and

21 Robert E Looney, The Economic Development of Panama: The Impact of World Inflation on an Open Economy (New York: Praeger, 1976), 19; LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 89-91. 22 LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 89, 126; Ropp, Panamanian Politics, 35-37; Guevara Mann, Panamanian Militarism, 81-83. 23 Omar Torrijos, "Con las Dos Manos," in Una Revolución Diferente: Mensajes en la Historia (Panamá: Editora de la Nación, 1972), 16-17. 24 Looney, The Economic Development of Panama; LaFeber, The Panama Canal. On Torrijos’ successful marginalization of political rivals on the left, see Ibid, 127-128, 131-134; and Ropp, Panamanian Politics, 56-58. For a more critical view, see “A Democratic Dictatorship?: Panama 1968-1989,” in Alfredo Castillero Hoyos, Problems of Democracy and Democratization in Panama (1510-1989), Ph.D. diss. (University of Portsmouth, 1999): 275-292, and Guevara Mann, Panamanian Militarism, 125-127.

10 the Soviet Union in their foreign affairs. He famously irked the Soviet delegation to the U.N. Security Council by hiring a Hungarian dissident as his official translator during a special meeting in Panama that overlooked a slum fenced off from the opulent residences of the Canal Zone. When U.S. officials realized how such a view might look to the assembled delegates, they hastily took down the fence for the duration of the conference.25 And while he courted the non-aligned movement led by Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito

(irritating the Soviets and North Americans alike), he repeatedly called for the

United States, the “leader of freedom in the world…[to] pull out of its colonial enclave” in the Canal Zone.26 Described by one of his fellow officers in the National Guard as “lacking any rigid etiquette of ideology,” Torrijos adopted policies from across the ideological spectrum—whatever he and his planners believed would help them in their quest to build a new and independent nation.27

The anti-imperialist rhetoric employed by Torrijos may have borrowed heavily from the Marxist lexicon, but the truly revolutionary aspect of his regime was its full throttle economic development program that traced its heritage directly back to the United States, among the modernizationists of the Kennedy Administration.28 “The seed planted by [John] Kennedy,”

Torrijos wrote to Senator Edward Kennedy in 1972, “now bears fruit in…the

25 This anecdote is recalled in LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 142-143. 26 Torrijos, "Bajo una Sola Bandera/ Y Dice Omar," in Una Revolución Diferente, 129. 27 Rodrigo Díaz Herrera, “Prólogo,” in Imagen y Voz, 16. 28 Especially influential in Torrijos’ rhetoric was dependency theory, though the concepts behind the rhetoric swayed him little. See LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 131. The best treatment of dependency theory from a sympathetic viewpoint is Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly U. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). For a critique of the concept, see How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays in the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800- 1914 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997), 7-15.

11 well-intentioned [Panamanian] professionals who speak, feel, and live the language of development” that the Alliance championed.29 The Alliance for

Progress, President Kennedy’s flagship Latin American policy initiative under the U.S. Agency for International Development, was the brainchild of

Walt Rostow, the “idea man” who more than any other person shaped the

Alliance’s developmentalist philosophy.30 Rostow’s theory of modernization consisted of five linear “stages” of development, from “traditional society” to

“the age of high mass consumption,” pivoting over the third and most important stage, “the take-off.” At its heart, Rostow’s model predicted that self-sustaining economic growth, which conferred prosperity and promoted liberal democracy, was “triggered” by the rapid growth of certain key industries. With a well aimed shot of capital, Rostow and his followers believed, modern industrial nations like the United States could spark take- off in Third World countries, eliminating poverty and deflating the appeal of socialism.31 Trained by the U.S. military in counterinsurgency strategy during the peak of the Alliance’s influence in the early 1960s, Torrijos continued to believe in its promise even after the Nixon Administration seemed to have lost hope: “The Alliance hasn’t failed….The only mistake was having believed that a reform so fundamental and explosive as human liberation,

29 Torrijos, "Carta a Kennedy," in Una Revolución Diferente, 208. 30 Michael Latham discusses Rostow’s influence on Alliance philosophy in Michael E Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 44-46, 69-108; W. W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 3rd ed. (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1972), 156-160. “Idea man” is from page 159. 31 A concise overview of the model can be found in chapter 2 of Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth.

12 like that which is proposed, could be realized through the corrupted political systems that exist today.”32

Modernization theory and torrijismo nationalism found their greatest agreement in the need to apply technology to the pursuit of increased productivity and accelerated exploitation of “idle” natural resources.

Rostow’s model called for massive investment in one or more industries that would foment secondary spontaneous growth, and believed that industrial transportation technologies were especially well suited for the job. Railroads, modernizationists pointed out, not only stimulated demand for industrial production in order to build the trains and tracks, but once completed they connected producers and consumers in previously isolated markets, linking producers to more resources and consumers to more products.33 The torrijistas had little interest in railroads, but they did have a special affinity for highways. Highways, like railroads, promised to integrate the country’s agriculturally productive areas with the urban core, offering domestic food security and providing employment to depressed farming communities.

Speaking on one newly constructed highway, Torrijos told his audience in moralistic terms that “this highway isn’t just a road that connects market to producer, but a means of doing justice to those who had no hope.”34 The torrijistas liked highways especially for their capacity to extend state control over an integrated national economy. Export agriculture in the rural provinces promised to balance the overwhelming dominance of the merchant

32 Torrijos, "Yunta Pueblo-Gobierno," in Una Revolución Diferente, 106. 33 Perhaps the greatest proponent of this model is Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). 34 Torrijos, "Yunta Pueblo-Gobierno," in Una Revolución Diferente, 95.

13 economy of the Canal Zone, dominated as it was by North Americans and their elite local allies. “We are a country of 75,000 square kilometers,”

Torrijos explained to a Guatemalan journalist, “of which only 15,000 have been converted to agriculture and ranching.”35 Torrijos’ agents echoed the sentiment. “A policy of development,” one of his Ministers of Public Works told the Legislative Assembly, “based on the physical integration of the country…is the basic element for faster economic growth.”36 The “swift and dynamic action” the country needed to develop, according to another

Minister, would best be served by an expanded highway system. A modern road network, he extolled, would facilitate the state’s capacity to “exploit to the greatest extent the natural and human resources available.”37

But as the torrijistas were devising their development strategy, Panama lacked the electrical capacity to reliably provide for its existing demand, never mind any new industry that might loosen foreign merchants’ grip on the national economy. Part of the 1903 treaty that governed U.S.-Panamanian relations stipulated that a subsidiary of General Electric, later reincorporated as La Compañía Panameña de Fuerza y Luz, would receive monopoly rights over Panama’s electric power industry. Without any threat to its market,

Fuerza y Luz (based in the Canal Zone, safely out of reach of Panamanian authorities) put little effort into expanding or improving service. Fuerza y

Luz’s regular blackouts, “lack of respect,” and “intransigence,” as one

35 Ximena Ortúzar, “En el Canal y en la Historia,” in Imagen y Voz, 98. 36 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1973-1974 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1974), n.p. 37 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1969 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1969), n.p.

14 Panamanian engineer phrased it, was a common target for nationalist diatribes even after its nationalization in 1972.38

Since 1954, the Office of Hydraulic Resources, a joint U.S.-Panamanian institute, had worked “to research and evaluate the hydrological potential of the nation, with the object of stoking the economic development of the country through the rational use of its national waters.”39 This informal body concluded that Panama’s hydroelectric potential was enormous—perhaps an unsurprising discovery in one of the wettest pieces of land in the world—and produced the first detailed hydrological and topographical maps of the country.40 But Fuerza y Luz refused to support further research. Frustrated with Fuerza y Luz and running out of money, in 1961 the Panamanian government folded the small hydrological research lab into a new official government agency, the Institute for Hydrological Resources and

Electrification (IRHE), with some organizational help and funding from the

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).41 The new agency had the “exclusive right” to develop the hydroelectric potential within Panama’s sovereign territory, and its first priority was to “procure the energy required...to propel the development of new industries and the electrification of rural areas.”42 USAID’s assistance with founding IRHE was one of the first

38 Quotes from Victor Urrutia, “El Régimen Octubrino y la Compañía Fuerza y Luz,” Lotería, 1972, 73-75; Marco Julio de Obaldía, “El I.R.H.E., Sus Programas y Proyecciones,” Ingeniería y Arquitectura, 1965; “Historia de la Compañía Panameña de Fuerza y Luz,” Lotería; “Nueva Tarifa Eléctrica Anuncia el IRHE para 140 Comunidades del Interior del País,” Ingeniería y Arquitectura, 1970. 39 IRHE, Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación: El Primer Año de Labores (Panamá: Imprenta del IRHE, 1963). 40 Julio O. Noriega, Sinopsis Histórica del Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación (I.R.H.E.) (Panamá: Imprenta del IRHE, 1982), 4-11. 41 Ibid., 23. 42 World Bank, Appraisal of the Second Power Expansion Project of the Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, February 19, 1970), i; World Bank,

15 actions undertaken by the Alliance for Progress, initiating a period in which

Panama was the largest beneficiary, on a per capita basis, of Alliance spending between 1961 and 1964.43

IRHE’s managers immediately set their eyes on the Bayano River, just east of Panama City. The Bayano’s flow rate, topography, and proximity to the largest market in the country made it especially appealing site for a large dam. A group of engineers commissioned by Electric Bond and Share

Company, which bought Fuerza y Luz from General Electric in 1925, had surveyed a site on the river and drawn up plans for a 140 megawatt hydroelectric dam in the 1950s, but never ventured any farther. After an official visit to the river in 1962, Panama’s President Roberto Chiari and the directors of IRHE announced that they were “determined to build the powerful hydroelectric plant on the River Bayano.” In 1963, they commissioned a series of new studies and applied for a World Bank loan to fund the dam’s construction.44

By the mid-1960s, the institutional framework that Torrijos inherited had fallen into place, but corruption and incompetence crippled any effective action by the government. Hundreds of kilometers of new roads had been paid for but not necessarily built with USAID and World Bank funding.

Those that were built, all in the central and western provinces, were mostly unpaved and many washed away in the first heavy rains after their

Current Economic Position and Prospects of Panama, CA-2 (WH-196a) (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, February 19, 1970), 21; Quote from IRHE, IRHE el Primer Año, n.p. 43 Stephen G Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 189. 44 Quote from IRHE, IRHE el Primer Año, n.p.; World Bank, Appraisal of the Second Power Expansion Project of the Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación, i; Thomas Derdak, “Harza Engineering Company,” in International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 14 (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 227-228.

16 completion. Mudslides made even some of the paved sections impassable during the rainy season.45 The greatest public works achievement of the pre-

Torrijos years was the inauguration on July 15, 1967 of the Inter-American

Highway between the border of Costa Rica and Panama City. Despite being years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget, political leaders and the press celebrated the event by driving in procession for several miles along the newest segment of paved road.46 It was, one journalist gushed, “a transcendental step,” a critical achievement for “national progress” that opened the door to “fertile regions that have until now been marginalized by the daily action of civilization.”47 It was a public relations success, if not a fiscal one, and it foreshadowed later events in the Darién.

IRHE had achieved even less than the road builders, completing one small dam, past schedule, over budget, and underpowered for the area it was to serve. The World Bank mission dispatched to Panama in 1969 in order to survey the country’s economic situation seemed to welcome the coup of 1968, and cautiously echoed the National Guard’s declarations that they had freed

Panama’s “weak public administration” from the “chronic political interference that has constituted a major obstacle to effective public sector operations.”48 The same year, another World Bank delegation, looking specifically at whether or not to finance the construction of the Bayano dam, admitted that “it was not possible to obtain the necessary reforms in the

45 World Bank, Highway Maintenance Project, Panama, Staff Appraisal Report, 1891a-PAN (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, April 20, 1978). 46 “Carretera Interamericana Inauguración, 15 de Julio de 1967” (Imprenta Rios, S.A., 1967); “La Carretera Interamericana,” Tierra y Dos Mares, 1967; “Enrumbando hacia el Mañana,” Lotería, 1967. 47 “Enrumbando hacia el Mañana,” 3. 48 World Bank, Current Position and Prospects, 5.

17 legislation creating IRHE to put it on a satisfactory operating basis until

October 1968, when the de facto government took control.” Once that happened, however, Torrijos acted quickly to calm their doubts, decreeing

IRHE an autonomous state agency, which, according to the Bank, provided “a suitable basis upon which IRHE can develop.”49

DEVELOPING THE DARIÉN

The torrijistas’ development projects were national in scope, but the big, sparsely populated, and largely unknown landscape of the Darién commanded a special degree of their attention. Six months after assuming power, Torrijos dispatched Erasmo Méndez, an engineer at the Ministry of

Public Works, to Washington, D.C. with a special message. In Washington,

Méndez informed a plenary meeting of the Pan-American Congress that his government would, with the assembled delegates’ support, “accelerate to completion the work on the Darién Gap Highway within four years.” The

“enormous importance of the Darién project,” Méndez explained, lay not just in binding together the American continents, “but in the almost 50 percent of the Republic of Panama which this project traverses.” “This project lay at the heart of the [other] economic development projects” in Panama. Integrating

“this vast and rich region” into the national economy was essential, Méndez said, “to alleviate the enormous problems typical of every country [still] on the path of development.”50 The Sub-Committee of the Darién, an

49 World Bank, Appraisal of the Second Power Expansion Project of the Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación, i. 50 Méndez, Erasmo, “Carretera Interamericana, 1968-1969: Informe,” in Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1969, n.p.

18 international body of planners, engineers, and bureaucrats tasked with promoting the interconnection of the terrestrial economies of the Americas across the Darién, endorsed the plan. Manual Alvarado, Méndez’s superior at the Ministry of Public Works, echoed the news before Torrijos’ provisional government:

The conclusion of this work will represent for the American Continent a positive advance whose benefits will be both national and international. It will help to realize the incorporation of the Darién, which occupies approximately one third of our national territory, into the economic life of the county, whose integration [bodes well for] the plans for electrification, exploitation of mineral resources, the expansion of ranching, the enjoyment of forestal resources, intensification of agriculture, the development of education, the incorporation of indigenous areas, agrarian reform, and the diffusion of the benefits of sanitation.51

Alvarado made the highway “the highest priority” of his agency.

Méndez had been sent to Washington seeking more than international approval of Panama’s public works—he was looking for money. Panama, like the other Central American nations, had traditionally depended on the

United States to pay for and provide technical assistance for construction of the Interamerican Highway through their rugged terrain. But by 1969, the last batch of financial assistance for highway construction in Panama dried up just as cheaply constructed gravel roads washed away.52 Panamanian

51 Ibid. The differences between Méndez’s and Alvarado’s accounts of what percentage of Panama’s territory the Darién represented stemmed from the various informal and formal definitions of the area. 52 For background on Congressional support for the Interamerican Highway, see U.S. Senate, Report to Accompany Department of Transportation Appropriations Bill, 1969, 1415 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Senate, July 17, 1968); U.S. Senate, Report to Accompany Department of Transportation Appropriation Bill, 1968, Senate Doc., 572 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Senate, September 28, 1967); "The Final Link": Report on the Darien Gap and Progress toward Completion of the Inter-American Highway before the Committee on Public Works (Washington, D.C.: U.S. House of Representatives, 1963); Darien Gap Highway, Y4.P96/11 91-21 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1969); J. Fred Rippy, “The Inter-American Highway,” Pacific Historical Review

19 officials partnered with a slew of other Latin American officials, business interests, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and even President Nixon to lobby the U.S. Congress for more funding.53 It worked: in 1970 the House of

Representatives authorized $100 million as part of the Federal Highway Act

“to remain available until expended,” in order to complete the highway through the Darién, though the bill still needed to pass the Senate and be finalized in the form of a treaty.54 Back in Panama, Alvarado could barely contain his excitement. “The United States,” he wrote to Torrijos, “the most powerful nation on the globe, whose gigantic process of westward expansion through the extension of [roads] toward distant and unknown lands….understands the importance that such a transportation network represents for the progress and development of the nation.” With funding secured, Alvarado concluded, Panama could follow the United States’ lead in

“reaching the highest levels of progress in the world.”55 Panama and the

United States finalized the terms of the financial assistance for the Darién Gap

Highway in 1971. The U.S. Department of Transportation would provided

$60 million, while Panama was responsible for the remaining costs, estimated at some $30 million. The whole project would be run through a new interdepartmental government agency in Panama dedicated exclusively to the “construction of the Darién Gap Highway…from the International

Airport en Tocumen [just east of Panama City] until Palo de las Letras, at the

24, no. 3 (1955): 287-298; Warren Kelchner, “The Pan American Highway,” Foreign Affairs 16, no. 4 (July 1938): 723-727. 53 The testimony of each of these groups is reprinted in House Hearings, Darién Gap Highway. 54 Ibid., 4. The actual amount ultimately approved was only $60 million, as a result of reconciliation negotiations between the House and Senate. 55 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1969-1970 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1970).

20 border with Colombia.”56 The agency was not to concern itself with any other mission.

1972 was a turning point in the torrijistas’ quest to build the nation across the Darién’s landscape. After a series of delays, construction finally began on the Bayano dam in January. Shortly thereafter, builders finished paving the stretch of highway between Chepo (just east of Panama City) and

Cañitas, the staging grounds for the construction of the main structure of the

Bayano dam. The torrijistas followed up on these achievements in October by codifying their vision in a new constitution that redefined the relationship between the state, the economy, and the national landscape. After 1972, the

Darién, long the forgotten backwater of the nation, hosted the most ambitious efforts yet in Panama to build an alternative economic base to the Canal.

The year opened with the first preparatory projects for the Bayano dam getting under way. The World Bank had approved a loan for the

Bayano dam in 1970, but arguments with contractors, changes in the dam’s design, and disagreements with Fuerza y Luz over purchasing rates convinced Bank officials to withhold major disbursements until the problems could be resolved. Bank officials were concerned about the lack of reliable data on the sub-soils and bedrock on which the dam was to sit, and replaced the reluctant architectural consultants who did not share their concerns. The new consultants recommended some minor changes to the structure’s design, making revisions necessary to the bidding contracts. The reshuffling had set

56 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1975-1976 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1976), 6. Panama’s share was covered by two loans for $15 million each from the Inter-American Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank.

21 back construction by eighteen months.57 On top of the scuffles with contractors, Fuerza y Luz had for years refused to cooperate with IRHE in power purchasing contracts, preventing analysts from making accurate financial projections, which clogged up the lending pipeline. The Bank had little sympathy for Fuerza y Luz, whose “excess profits” in the 1960s had done little to provide decent service, and whose stalling now threatened a genuine improvement, as they saw it, to the national power grid. Impatient to get the Bayano project moving, and perhaps sensing an opportunity for good nationalist showmanship, Torrijos nationalized Fuerza y Luz in 1972.

The World Bank, satisfied with the arrangement, opened up its coffers. With funding available, construction ramped up quickly, facilitated by the newly paved section of the Inter-American Highway connecting the site to Panama

City.58

The torrijistas enshrined their nation-building program in the

Constitution of 1972.59 Besides establishing worker-friendly labor laws, protecting the sanctity of the Spanish language and the “national culture,” and cementing Torrijos’ position as the “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian

Revolution,” the document institutionalized economic and social development, and outlined a new relationship between the state, the economy, and nature. Allowing that economic activity was “primarily the function of private persons,” the law obligated the state to “guide, direct,

57 World Bank, Panama: Second Power Project, Project Performance Audit Report, 2508 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, May 15, 1979), 1, 15-16. 58 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 11-12; Urrutia, “El Régimen Octubrino y la Compañía Fuerza y Luz”; “Historia de Fuerza y Luz.” 59 The 1972 Constitution continues to rule the government of Panama, though it has been updated considerably. The latest version can be downloaded from http://bdigital.binal.ac.pa/BVIC/index.html. An English translation is available from the Columbus Memorial Library of the Organization of American States.

22 regulate, replace or initiate such activities, in accordance with social needs [in order to increase] the national wealth and guarantee its benefits to the greatest possible number of inhabitants of the country.”60 In order to accelerate the pace of development, the state recast the place of nature in

Panamanian society: the “proper utilization of land,” was the sovereign right of the state to decide “in accordance with its potential use and national development programs.” The state claimed title to “all free and vacant land,” and all subterranean and forestal resources not otherwise granted to private owners by the state. Likewise, the water of all lakes and rivers within the

“national territory” became the property of the state, though open to public use. Any and all private claims to national waters were strictly prohibited.61

“Uncultivated, unproductive or idle” land was forbidden, and the government gained the authority to expropriate what it deemed “idle” land from landowners who would horde land in contempt of the nation’s needs.

In the enforcement of these laws, “special attention” would be given to indigenous groups and isolated peasants “in order to promote their productive participation in national life.”62

With the authority conferred by the Constitution, and hundreds of millions of dollars from the World Bank, USAID, and the U.S. Department of

Transportation, Panama’s leaders moved to assimilate the Darién into the national landscape. Besides the Bayano dam and the reservoir it would create, planners in Panama envisioned an orderly colonization around

60 República de Panamá, Constitución Política de la República de Panamá 1972, 1972, article 248, http://bdigital.binal.ac.pa/BVIC/index.html. 61 Ibid., article 226. 62 Ibid., 111, 112, 114.

23 centralized communities in the region’s central valley that would avoid

“undercutting the productive resource base” they believed was there.63

Planners feared that peasants from the Interior, already pushed by land shortages and unemployment, would feel the pull of the Darién’s “virgin” lands and follow the Darién Gap Highway into the forest, squatting on national land and wasting valuable resources by clearing forest for non- exportable crops. To avoid squandering the Darién’s natural bounty, in 1973 the Panamanian government declared all lands beyond an eight kilometer strip on either side of the planned highway route off limits for any settlement or economic activity without prior approval.64 The government also commissioned the Department of Regional Development, a consulting group of the Organization of American States, to compile an “integrated regional development plan” that would unfold in tandem with the construction of the

Darién Gap Highway. The consultants returned a plan revolving around two population centers, where transportation networks and public services would concentrate, and concentric agricultural plots tailored to the variously fertile soils of the area. The costs associated with their plan, the scope of which “had to be curtailed to match the available [government] resources],” amounted in the end to $49 million.65

* * *

In the Darién, as the torrijistas worked to build the landscape they dreamed out of the landscape they believed, they encountered problems from

63 Organization of American States, “Case Study 2: Darien Region Study, Panama,” in Integrated Regional Development Planning: Guidelines and Case Studies from OAS Experience (Washington, D.C.: Organization of American States, 1984), 102. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 98.

24 the landscape in reality. Problems arose immediately with contractors at

Bayano dam unfamiliar with local conditions. Locals, who planners had largely believed did not exist, but whose homes and livelihoods were threatened by the dam and the road, frequently obstructed the projects as soon as equipment and personnel arrived. Their battles with the government would play a large role in shifting nationalists’ imagined landscape away from a frontier paradise for small-holder mestizo farmers to something considerably more humble. In the process of fighting against and adapting to the changes induced by the development projects, locals’ vision of the landscape and its value also changed, shaping later events in unexpected ways. Like the human landscape, the natural environment itself failed to match planners’ expectations, ballooning the costs of construction, and even threatening the physical viability of the projects themselves. And a little- known microbe that scared cattlemen in Wyoming, perhaps more than anything or anyone else, shattered the nationalists’ hopes for the Darién. The development projects unleashed by the nation-builders would radically transform the landscape, but not into that which they had envisioned.

The Bayano dam was the largest construction project in Panama since the completion of the Canal in 1914, and its construction was similarly plagued by setbacks, both human and non-human in nature.66 Its main structure, a mass of concrete 75 meters tall and almost half a kilometer in

66 Still the standard work on the construction of the Panama Canal is David G McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (2007): 724-754.

25 length, required more cement than contractors were able to find.67 Unwilling to wait, IRHE assumed responsibility for procuring its own materials and

Torrijos founded a state cement company, mostly to supply the dam’s needs.68 (See Figure 2) The greater obstacle the builders faced, however, was their own inexperience. IRHE had chosen a Yugoslav firm to build the main structure and powerhouse for the dam, ostensibly for its bidding price, which was considerably lower than the others. At the time, Yugoslavia, which had built dozens of hydroelectric plants in the years after World War II, was sending large numbers of hydropower engineers abroad as a form of foreign aid.69 Some engineers in Panama openly wondered if the choice of

Energoprojekt was more political than practical, given Torrijos’ stance with the Non-Aligned movement.70 As it was, Energoprojekt had never built a dam before, had no Spanish-speaking personnel on site, and refused to hire local labor (requiring Slavic workers to be shipped in). The first two years of construction saw a lot of activity, but little actual progress.71

IRHE’s directors also found themselves confronting an uncooperative local population. Their project assessment noted only that “approximately

450 Indians occupying about 60 houses will have to be resettled on the northeast bank of the lake.” That an “undeveloped Indian reservation”

67 Technical specifications of the Bayano dam can be found in Noriega, Sinopsis Historica del IRHE; IRHE, Historia del IRHE: Plantas Hidroeléctricas (Panamá: Imprenta del IRHE, 1991); World Bank, Appraisal of the Second Power Expansion Project of the Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación. 68 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 17, f.n. 1. 69 F. Nesteruk, trans., Development of Hydropower Engineering in the U.S.S.R. (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1966). 70 The controversy is recalled in a 1984 roundtable discussion inspired by another questionable Energoprojekt contract with IRHE. See “SPIA Cuestiona al IRHE Contratación de Energoprojekt por Ilegal y Experiencia Negativa,” Ingeniería y Arquitectura, 1984, 31-34. 71 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 21-22.

26 would lose “the major portion” of its land area did not concern them, according to the World Bank’s original appraisal.72 In fact, about 4,500 people lived in the affected area, about half of whom were mestizo “colonists” who had followed the feeder roads for the dam into the forest to farm the

“unclaimed” land they found there. The Kuna and Chocó indigenous groups, some of whom had lived in the area for more than 300 years, refused to leave.

The colonists, who felt betrayed by their political patrons who had promised them land, also resisted.73 Unsure of what to do with the locals who weren’t supposed to be there, IRHE mostly ignored them until they could no longer afford to.

IRHE’s disregard for the local population reflected more than a naïve ignorance of local conditions—it reflected a cognitive process that erased real elements of the human and natural landscape from the imagined landscapes in planners’ minds. The month that construction began on the dam, IRHE’s directors received a report from the Institute for Historical Patrimony, an autonomous government research agency. The report detailed the culture, agricultural practices, trade relations, and political dynamics of the Bayano

Kuna, whose legally protected reservation would be almost completely submerged by the reservoir. The anthropologist finished the report with a detailed plan for the resettlement of the affected Kuna families, taking into account the need for large tracts of healthy alluvial forest in order to support

72 World Bank, Appraisal of the Second Power Expansion Project of the Instituto de Recursos Hidraúlicos y Electrificación, 7. 73 Alaka Wali, “The Transformation of a Frontier: State and Regional Relationships in Panama, 1972-1990,” Human Organization 52, no. 2 (1993): 116.

27 their basic subsistence needs.74 One forward-looking planner at the World

Bank also raised concerns with his superiors regarding the environmental impact that the artificial lake would have. Noting that the area to be flooded was some of the most fertile land in an area otherwise unfavorable to most kinds agriculture, the prophetic official argued that the dam would put agricultural development plans at risk. He also pointed out that failure to clear vegetation could result in algal blooms and the proliferation of water weeds that could acidify the water (damaging the turbines) and harbor mosquito eggs (spreading yellow fever and malaria). Concluding his letter with a plea, the skeptic simply asked: “I wonder if [the project] should not be carried out even at this late hour.”75 IRHE and the World Bank ignored the reports.

The Bayano Kuna had descended from the Cuevan civilization that was virtually exterminated during the Conquest. Their ancestors who had survived by fleeing into the Andes mountains had migrated back into the

Darién in the seventeenth century, settling in small groups along the major rivers and the Caribbean coast.76 According to the anthropologists at the

74 Reina Torres de Araúz and Marcia A. de Arosemena, Estudio de Antropología Social y Aplicada de las Comunidades Cunas de la Reserva del Bayano que Serán Movilizadas con la Construcción de la Represa Hidroeléctrica (Panamá: Dirección de Patrimonio Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Deportes, January 25, 1972); Charles Bennett, “The Bayano Cuna Indians, Panama: An Ecological Study of Livelihood and Diet,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52, no. 1 (1962): 32-50; James Howe, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers: Kuna Culture from Inside and Out, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). The Bayano Kuna are somewhat distinct from the San Blas Kuna, who inhabit a reservation along the Caribbean coast north of the Darién. For the duration of this essay, I will use “Kuna” to refer to the Bayano Kuna only. 75 Letter from Mervyn Weiner and James A. Lee, “Panama: Bayano Hydroelectric Development,” Letter to World Bank (?), March 16, 1971. 76 The Kuna’s heritage was discussed in detail in the report. More information can be found in Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis, 21-25; Sauer, The Early Spanish Main; Cynthia S. Simmons, “Forest Management Practices in the Bayano Region of Panama: Cultural Variations,” World Development 25, no. 6 (June 1997): 989-1000.

28 Institute for Historical Patrimony, the Kuna’s society had changed little since returning to the Darién, revolving mostly around subsistence agriculture, supplemented with hunting, fishing, and limited trade with other groups in the region.77 The Kuna’s agricultural system operated through the complex and intimate management of large tracts of forest. Families would cultivate small plots by cutting and burning a patch of forest along one of the many tributaries of the Bayano, raise crops for a few seasons, and then fallow the field, moving on to another patch of land. In order to promote rapid regrowth, the Kuna kept their fields widely dispersed, allowing the mature surrounding forest to quickly reclaim the soil. Preservation of mature forest in the Bayano’s alluvial lowlands was essential to their way of life. The

Kuna’s subsistence, the anthropologists explained, demanded “large expanses of terrain, and the necessity of preserving the environment in order to permit the rapid regeneration of the resources that are lost” with each cycle of cultivation.78 Centuries of controlled burning, planting, the introduction of new species (especially plantains and citrus), and selective logging for housing and canoe construction had turned the Bayano’s watershed into something resembling (to Kuna eyes) a vast garden more than an empty jungle.79

77 Torres de Araúz and de Arosemena, Estudio de la Comisión del Bayano, 6-7, 49-59. 78 Ibid., 50. 79 For an excellent general work on how Native Americans changed their environments, see Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999). A selection of the work on how non-European humans have shape their environments in Panama is Bennett, Human influences on the zoogeography of Panama; Mark B. Bush and Paul A. Colinvaux, “Tropical Forest Disturbance: Paleoecological Records from Darien, Panama,” Ecology 75, no. 6 (September 1994): 1761-1768; Young, “Guaymí Socionatural Adaptations.”

29 IRHE’s imagined landscape did not include the Kuna, their cultivations that peppered the area, nor a healthy, managed forest that supported both. The inhabitants of the Darién universally lacked titles to their land, and their land use practices generally did not meet official definitions of “productive” or even “occupied,” according to the

Constitution.80 Planners had believed the Bayano was not just empty of humans, but also of any sort of dynamic, living ecosystem. According to the

World Bank, “at appraisal no study was made to take into effect the Bayano hydro project would have on the ecology and the environment.” The possibility that rotting vegetation might interfere with the operation of the dam’s turbines did concern engineers, however, so the bank hired a consultant who recommended clearing the entire flooded area of trees. The consultant also drew heavily from the report of the Institute for Historical

Patrimony, recommending that IRHE began resettling the local population

“as soon as possible.”81 That local population included, besides the Kuna, a few hundred indigenous Chocóes and around two thousand mestizo colonists. In 1973, IRHE began cutting down trees, and the next year started negotiations for resettlement with locals.

The logging operation was an unmitigated failure. The torrential rains of eastern Panama made any kind of work extremely difficult, and the heavy equipment needed for full scale commercial logging was unusable in

80 For background on the problems with land titling and usufruct rights in the Darién, see Peter Herlihy, “Participatory Research Mapping of Indigenous Lands in Darién, Panama,” Human Organization 62, no. 4 (2003): 315-331; Derek Denniston, “Defending the Land with Maps,” World Watch Magazine 7, no. 1 (1994): ?; Shelton Davis and Alaka Wali, “Indigenous Land Tenure and Tropical Forest Management in Latin America,” Ambio 23, no. 8 (1994): 485- 490. 81 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 8.

30 the mud. In an average year, the dry season in the Darién lasts only about two and a half months, between January and March, leaving IRHE about five months of clear weather before the dam’s gates were scheduled to close in

1975.82 To speed up the process, in 1973 IRHE established an independent state company, the Bayano Corporation, to oversee the logging.83 The Bayano

Corporation brought in specially trained loggers from Colombia because the first batch of workers recruited from Panama’s arid Interior provinces did not know how to use chainsaws and were unfamiliar with forests generally. The trees proved a difficult match even for the experienced Colombian loggers, especially a species of palm that withstood the chainsaws for so long that the loggers soon chose to leave them alone altogether.84 In spite of, or perhaps because of, the difficulties they faced, the Bayano Corporation chose to focus on the most valuable species of mahogany in the hope of recouping the costs of the whole ordeal. The World Bank reported that before the reservoir formed, the Corporation had “managed to harvest all the commercial grade species…and…felled about 30% of the forest” in the flooded area.85

Unfortunately, the time between the last cutting and the flooding of the reservoir allowed a substantial regrowth of non-woody plants, which easily rotted in the rising waters. When the dam closed its gates and the reservoir

82 Torres de Araúz and de Arosemena, Estudio de la Comisión del Bayano, 5; World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 15. 83 RENARE, Plan de Acción Inmediato para el Manejo y Conservación de la Cuenca Hidrográfica del Río Bayano (Panamá: MIDA & RENARE, April 1979). 84 Alaka Wali provides the most detailed account of the logging operation based on interviews with several of the people who were involved. See Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis. 85 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 8. A recent report from the Inter-American Development Bank seems to contradict the World Bank’s optimistic estimates of how much timber was extracted from the Bayano. In short, companies are vying to harvest the “stands of mahogany trees [that] can still be seen rising from the water.” Inter-American Development Bank, Technical Cooperation Programme Abstract, Submerged Timber Extraction Pilot Project, PN- T1029 (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, April 27, 2007).

31 formed, the rotting vegetation fed algal blooms that acidified the water, killing most of the fish and corroding copper machinery in the dam. Trees that had been cut down but not removed floated in the fetid water toward the dam’s intakes, where the crane that was built to remove them could not lift their water-logged weight. In the shallower parts of the reservoir, water weeds spread across the surface of the water, inviting mosquitoes to lay their eggs. Fears of a an insect-borne epidemic convinced IRHE to hire a full-time crew of thirty to keep the weeds in check, at a cost of more than $130,000 per year.86

The resettlement effort fared better than the logging, though it was hardly an unqualified success. IRHE put together a team of anthropologists and other scientists (some of whom had helped to write the Institute for

Historical Patrimony’s report) to coordinate the resettlement process, though it placed one of its own civil engineers in charge. The resettlement effort reflected the tensions between the interests of IRHE, represented by the resettlement team’s chief, and the interests of the local population, represented by the resettlement team. Each of the three groups involved— the Kuna, the Chocó, and the colonists—negotiated their terms separately.

The Kuna, who positioned themselves as “protectors of the forest,” received the best deal.87 Engineers at IRHE, by then anxious of the threat that the local

86 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 8-9. The ecological problems with the Bayano reservoir are discussed in some detail in R. Goodland, “Panamanian Development and the Global Environment,” Oikos 29, no. 2 (1977): 195-208; Zygmunt J. B Plater, “Multilateral Development Banks, Environmental Diseconomies, and International Reform Pressures on the Lending Process: The Example of Third World Dam-Building Projects,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 9 (1989): 169-215. 87 The Kuna have a reputation for being politically savvy. James Howe describes the Kuna’s various uses of foreign anthropologists to achieve domestic political ends in Howe, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers.

32 ecology could pose to their dam, hoped that the Kuna would prevent any potential deforestation that might accelerate the siltation of the reservoir. The

Kuna agreed to an enlarged reservation contiguous with their existing one, as well as rights over much of the future reservoir. Their new territory comprised much of the upper braches of the Bayano river, which was not radically different from their former dwellings, but the soil was of a poorer quality because of the less substantial sedimentation from seasonal flooding at higher elevations. The Kuna managed to prevent the “cultural extinction” that anthropologists had feared, but their agricultural system never fully recovered—canned foods, purchased with revenues from fruit trees that escaped the flood, began to assume a large role in their diet.88

The Kuna’s relative success in negotiating their resettlement compared well to the disorder among the colonists and the Chocó. IRHE offered the colonists a large piece of good land west of the Bayano that had been appropriated for redistribution as part of Torrijos’ agrarian reform program.

According to the torrijistas’ agrarian policy, however, such land grants were to be collectively farmed, though produce was privately owned and sold.89

Most of the colonists, who saw themselves as rugged individualists in the frontier, and who preferred to raise cattle over rice or corn in any case, rejected this plan outright, demanding monetary compensation and then moving somewhere else. Feeling betrayed by the government whose leader had called the mestizo peasantry “the torch, guide, and light of the New

Panama,” many of these colonists followed the Darién Gap Highway deeper

88 Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis, 88-96. 89 For a concise overview of the formation of the policy regarding collective farms, see Priestley, Military Government, 61.

33 into the forest, safely out of reach of duplicitous authorities.90 The few colonist families that did accept the government’s offer struggled to cooperate with each other and received little institutional support. By 1979, the collective farm lay abandoned, the colonists having left for more promising opportunities elsewhere.91 The Chocó also refused to settle far from their existing homes, winning, by their stubborn refusal to cooperate, a small group of reserves within the Bayano watershed but away from the reservoir.

Receiving legal protection in the form of a reserve meant little to many of these Chocó, as many of the colonists displaced by the reservoir or, later, fleeing the collective farm settled within their land.92

The debacle around the Bayano dam raised serious doubts about the wisdom of Panama’s national development plan. The estimated cost of the dam had exploded from $58 million to $110 million, mostly as a result of the mistakes made in the design and construction itself, though global inflation also played a role.93 The “symbol of energy liberation” that the dam represented, and that Torrijos had invested so much of his reputation in, failed to produce electricity in its first year of scheduled operation because a drought left the reservoir too low to run the turbines. (See Figure 3) In subsequent years, its actual production would vary between one-third and

90 Torrijos, "Yunta Pueblo-Gobierno/ Y Dice Omar," in Una Revolución Diferente, 103. 91 Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis, 96-98. 92 For some background on Chocó problems with protecting their legally protected lands, see Stephanie C Kane, The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 177-178. 93 World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, ii, 18. Because the World Bank would not agree to loan more than the original $42 million to which it had agreed, IRHE financed most of the extra costs through private short-term loans and suppliers credits, both of which had high interest rates. See ibid., 20.

34 full capacity, depending on the rains and the amount of vegetation and silt clogging the intakes.94

To the east of the Bayano, the Darién Gap Highway continued to stretch eastward through the jungle. The Bayano Cement Company had provided ready access to paving material, and a bridge over the Bayano River

(high enough to avoid the reservoir once it formed), completed in 1974, eliminated the largest physical obstacle to the movement of construction equipment into the Darién.95 Concrete and asphalt poured over the roadbed soon after loggers had cleared a path through the forest. (See Figure 4) As late as October 1976, the Minister of Public Works rosily predicted that “this effort will finally achieve the opening of immense areas for agricultural production, ranchers, the exploitation of forest reserves, marine resources and many other industrial activities.”96 But by 1976, nationalist rhetoric no longer matched the nationalists’ development goals. Financial pressures, and a renewed focus on the Canal, drained the attention of government officials.

The highway kept rolling its way across the landscape, but its constellation of related plans lagged behind.

* * *

Pressure had been growing for some time. As the torrijistas were struggling to turn their vision into reality, global events shook Panama’s economic foundations. The oil shock of 1973 slashed traffic through the

Canal. Panama’s economy, some 50 percent of which revolved around

94 IRHE, Departamento de Relaciones Públicas, “Central Hidroeléctrica del Bayano: Símbolo de Liberación Energética” (Litho-Impresora Panamá, S.A., 1979); World Bank, Audit Report, Bayano, 21. IRHE, Memoria, IRHE 1984 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1984), 51-55. 95 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1975-1976, 8. 96 Ibid., 2.

35 services related to the Canal, sputtered to a halt.97 Annual inflation jumped from around 2 percent in 1970 to over 7 percent in 1972 and 19 percent in

1973.98 Panama’s economic growth rate, which had averaged eight percent a year in the 1960s, was under 2 percent in 1975 and zero in 1976.99 Panama’s external debt, which had been a worrisome, but manageable, $147 million when Torrijos took office, had reached over $1 billion by 1976—growing from

18 percent to 47 percent of gross domestic product in eight years.100 (See

Graph 3) Facing skyrocketing debts and seeing revenues plummet, Torrijos shifted his sights. Driven before anything else by his thirst to repatriate the

Canal, his focus on rural development drifted away from support for small producers and toward commercial export production that could float his regime through the successful negotiation of a new Canal treaty. Collective farms organized under the agrarian reform program received less attention while larger, mechanized farms received government loans to increase their production.101 In 1974, Torrijos repealed labor protections that he had enacted only two years before, hoping to attract investors. The proclamation that “we don’t consider [recovering the Canal] the only goal of our revolution…we have built dams, highways, housing, and ports” rang hollow in some sympathizers’ ears by the mid- 1970s.102 The pan o palo (“carrot or stick”)

97 Looney, The Economic Development of Panama, 2. 98 Looney, The Economic Development of Panama, 136; U.S. Agency for International Development, Field Budget Submission Fiscal Year 1976, Panama, Budget (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, August 1974), 2. 99 LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 152, 157. 100 It would reach almost $2 billion by 1978, or 84% of GDP. World Bank, Current Position and Prospects, ii-iii; World Bank, World Development Report, 1978, PUB-2080 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, August 1978), 97; World Bank, World Development Report, 1980, 10880 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, August 1980), 139. 101 Priestley, Military Government, 67. 102 Quote from an interview with a Chilean journalist, reprinted in Ortúzar, “El Canal y La Historia,” in Imagen y Voz, 98.

36 equation that glued together torrijismo’s uncomfortable balance of competing political interests began to reveal more palo than pan, as the National Guard began quashing dissenting voices after several years of relative restraint.103

The torrijistas’ vision seemed to be unraveling as it rolled eastward across the landscape. Through the mid-1970s, idealistic planners in the

Darién had progressively found their ideas marginalized in favor of the highway, whose budget enjoyed the full faith and backing of the U.S.

Department of Transportation. Officials in agencies not supported by large amounts of foreign aid hacked off most proposals that were not related to roads or their associated infrastructure. The Organization of American States, which prepared the integrated development plan, noted that even as officials in the Darién brushed aside most of their recommendations, “in the face of worldwide recession, limits on the availability of external funding, and inflation….road building has been extensive.” The agricultural development plans that were precisely tailored to specific soil types in the Darién became

“too theoretical” by Panamanian officials’ judgment.104 One reason for the persistent road building in areas no longer slated for settlement may have been the lure of rare timbers and mineral deposits that had the potential to offset some of the government’s mounting debt.105 Another may reason might have been the torrijistas’ refusal to abandon deeply cherished models of

103 LaFeber, The Panama Canal, 156. The “pan o palo” metaphor is borrowed from Guevara- Mann, Panamanian Militarism, 143. 104 Organization of American States, “Darien Region Study,” 122. 105 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and RENARE, Plan de Desarrollo Forestal, Parte I: Estado Actual del Subsector, PCT/6/PAN/01/I (Panamá: FAO, 1978), 8.Alaka Wali cites officials who worked in the Darién at the time as the source of the claim about lumbering. See Wali, “The Transformation of a Frontier: State and Regional Relationships in Panama, 1972-1990,” 121-122. See also IUCN, “World Heritage Site Nomination, Darién National Park, Panamá” (IUCN, July 1981), 4.

37 modernization that predicted good social and economic returns on such investments. The circling of wagons around the highway may ultimately have been a matter of budgetary realpolitik—the United States was funding the highway, while Panama was to fund the rest, and lenders were fast disappearing.106

All of the factors above certainly played a role in recasting development policy in the Darién, but the way public officials characterized the Darién Gap project reveals a fundamental change in the way they perceived the area’s value. Directors and managers in Torrijos’ government had always talked about the Darién in terms of its open land, the opportunities for agricultural development—in short, the projection of an idealized, rural, mestizo society over the landscape. After 1976, this narrative disappears from the record. A sub-thread of the original narrative that championed the benefits of continental integration suddenly rose to prominence. Managers emphasized the international consensus around the value the highway would provide to all American nations. “All of the countries of this Continent have affirmed their support” for the highway that would provide the first terrestrial link between the North and South, read an annual legislative update in 1978, which had little else to say about the project.107 The “deep rooted myths about the region’s unlimited potential,” as the OAS planning team put it, no longer figured in the nationalists’ vision. A

1978 report to the Panamanian legislature subtly implied that the Sub-

106 Besides Panama’s profligate spending and the drop in revenues from the Canal Zone, investors were wary of the outcome of Torrijos’ negotiations with the United States, adopting a “watch and wait” attitude through the mid-1970s. Organization of American States, “Darien Region Study,” 102, 122-123. 107 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1977-1978 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1978), 33.

38 Committee of the Darién’s principle objective, rather than foment the development of Panama, was to “attend to” the needs of the continental community, who wanted their economies bound by land as they were by sea.108 But the new mission of the highway lacked the excitement of national development. By 1978, the hopeful proclamations of previous years’ reports from the Ministry of Public Works had been replaced by statistical tables and dispassionate cost analysis.109

But even this more humble vision of the Darién landscape faced challenges from the environment and its human representatives. In 1975, an odd group of plaintiffs filed suit in U.S. federal district court to stop all federal assistance for the Darién Gap Highway. Led by the Sierra Club, a coalition of environmental groups and beef industry lobbyists—rarely allies in legal battles—charged that USDOT had not filed an environmental impact statement (FEIS) for the highway, as required under the National

Environmental Protection Act of 1969 (NEPA).110 NEPA required that most federal agencies submit “a detailed statement” of the environmental impacts of, and alternatives to, any public works project as part of their funding requests.111 The suit grew out of fears that a cattle disease that was endemic in Colombia, but nonexistent in North and Central America, would burst through the “plug” of the Darién forest once it was penetrated by the highway, ravaging livestock in the North, just as it already had in Colombia.

The disease, aftosa, disfigured cattle and ruined their milk, but was slow to

108 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Memoria, Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1978-1979 (Panamá: República de Panamá, 1979), 74. 109 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1977-1978; Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1978-1979. 110 Sierra Club v. Coleman, 405 F.Supp. 53 (D.D.C. 1975). 111 42 U.S.C. § 4332(2)(C) (1970).

39 develop and generally not lethal, meaning the disease could infect an entire herd before handlers realized something serious was wrong. Carried by biting flies and mosquitoes, aftosa affected only ungulates, but was transmissible through any mammal, and therefore it could leapfrog through wildlife and domestic animals (potentially even humans) up to the United

States, where it could wreak havoc on deer, elk, moose, and bison populations, as well as cattle. An outbreak of aftosa in North America, ranchers estimated, could cost the U.S. economy $4 billion in lost productivity and containment measures.112

Environmentalists, who wanted to preserve the Darién forest in any case, found common cause with cattle ranchers in organizing against the highway. As charged, USDOT had not filed the FEIS, and the judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. USDOT scrambled to complete and file the statement, allowing money transfers to Panama to continue in the interim. But late in

1976, in a supplemental to the original case, the district court found the FEIS lacking and enjoined the U.S. government from “entering into any contract, obligating any funds, expending any funds, or taking any other action whatsoever in furtherance of construction of the Darién Gap Highway.”113

USDOT appealed and won its case in 1978, but to no avail.114 Congress had heard the same arguments that the court had about aftosa, and eliminated the assistance program in 1979.115

Panamanian officials protested “the harm that any delay in the

112 For details on aftosa, also called foot-and-mouth disease, see John H. Blackwell, “Internationalism and Survival of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus in Cattle and Food Products,” J. Dairy Sci. 63, no. 6 (June 1, 1980): 1019-1030. 113 Sierra Club v. Coleman, 421 F.Supp. 63, 65 (D.D.C. 1976). 114 Sierra Club v. Adams, 578 F.2d 389. 115 Wali, Kilowatts and Crisis, 50.

40 construction” would incur on their country, but had already turned away from the Darién.116 Around the time Congress pulled the plug on the biggest development project in Panama, it ratified the Carter-Torrijos treaty that began the process of handing the Canal to the Panamanians and a withdrawal from the Canal Zone “colony.” The dissolution of the Canal Zone opened up hundreds of square kilometers of sparsely populated land to development, directly adjacent to the country’s population centers and with highways and other infrastructure already in place.117 The Canal Zone was a richer prize than the Darién, and absorbed the attention of Panama’s nationalists once the treaty was passed.118 The governments of Panama and Colombia signed an agreement in late 1979 that reaffirmed their commitment to completing the highway, but Panama designated no more funds for the endeavor.119 The

Darién Gap Highway ended abruptly in the town of Yaviza, a small fishing town in the middle of Darién province, about 50 kilometers from the

Colombian border. In 2010, the road still ends in Yaviza.

Torrijos resigned from office in 1980, but before doing so, he once again acted to reshape the landscape of the Darién. By decree, Torrijos established the Darién National Park, protecting the lands between the

Colombian border and the end of the highway from any kind of development, save for two mining concessions that were later rescinded.120

116 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1978-1979, 33. 117 And toxic waste dumps and live explosives. See John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 118 Organization of American States, “Darien Region Study,” 122. 119 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1978-1979, 145, 211-212; Daniel Suman, “Globalization and the Pan-American Highway: Concerns for the Panama-Colombia Border Region of Darién-Chocó and its Peoples,” Inter-American Law Review 38, no. 3 (n.d.): 573. 120 The park was later granted World Heritage Site status by the United Nations. UNESCO, Report of the 5th Session of the Committee, Decision (UNESCO, 1981).

41 The lands adjacent to all reservoirs in Panama had come under legal protection from development the year before, at the behest of engineers terrified of the rate of siltation in the Bayano from illegal cutting by colonists within the Kuna reservation.121 Outside of these protected areas, underfunded offices of the Department of Agriculture were unable to hold back the flood of colonists that rode the highway into the Darién. Officials tried to restrict titles to flat lands to reduce erosion, and they distributed pamphlets warning colonists that “cutting and burning is your worst enemy” and encouraging them to “plant a tree today!” (See Figure 5) But for lack of funds or authority to evict, the Ministry of Agriculture merely rubber stamped land titles to thousands of colonists that arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s.122 The Darién’s landscape, in 1980, comprised several indigenous reservations, large areas of protected forest, and a growing swath of lowland cleared of trees and increasingly cleared of soil, home to migrant peasants, who were pressing ever outward, but never, it seemed moving upward.

CONCLUSION

As the torrijistas worked to build the national landscape across the

Darién, their perceptions of the environment collided with reality, changing both in the process. The geological, anthropological, and environmental studies that were carried out as part of the construction of the Bayano dam and the Darién Gap Highway eventually came back around to challenge the vision that had inspired that effort in the first place, just as the projects

121 RENARE, Plan de Acción para el Bayano. 122 Organization of American States, “Darien Region Study,” 123; RENARE, “¿Qué es la Erosión?” (Imprenta del MIDA, n.d.).

42 themselves suffered sever budget constraints. Confronted with the potential failure of their nationalist agenda in the Darién, the torrijistas were forced to revise their vision of the landscape as they went. The haphazard execution of their development plans, projected across a dynamic environment that resisted and confounded their attempts to control it, constructed a new landscape that neither matched their original vision, nor the wasted, dead landscape that environmentalists had feared.123 In the Darién, the dream of an idyllic landscape populated by prosperous, patriotic, mestizo farmers faded into a utilitarian concept of the land as a natural bridge and source of electrical power, and faded again into something more complex and considerably less audacious, but at least somewhat mindful of the value of the environment preserved.

Many of the officials in Panama’s government were from or were familiar with the central and western Interior provinces that splayed over the rich volcanic soils gracing the lower slopes of the Tabasará mountains. They believed that if the Darién’s forest were tamed, its soil and water could be put to use in familiar ways. The Darién, geologically distinct from the rest of

Panama, was not volcanic in origin, and therefore possessed different types of

123 A collection of essays, mostly written in the 1970s by scientists in Panama, captures spirit of the apocalyptic warnings well. See Stanley Heckadon Moreno and Alberto McKay, Colonización y Destrucción de Bosques en Panamá: Ensayos sobre un Grave Problema Ecológico (Panamá: Asociación Panameña de Antropología, 1984). The problem of deforestation accelerated rapidly in the 1980s, as colonist continued to migrate into the Darién, and their farming techniques failed to adapt to the local ecology. See Stanley Heckadon Moreno, “La Colonización Campesina de Bosques Tropicales en Panamá,” in The Botany and Natural History of Panama (Saint Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 1985), 397-410; Stanley Heckadon- Moreno, “Spanish Rule, Independence, and the Modern Colonization Frontier,” in Central America: A Natural and Cultural History, ed. Anthony G Coates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Alberto McKay, “Ecología de la Industría Ganadera en Panamá,” in The Botany and Natural History of Panama (Saint Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 1985), 393-396; and the essays in John R Bort, ed., Panama in Transition: Local Reactions to Development Policies (Columbia, Mo: University of Missouri, 1983).

43 rock and soils, generally of a poor kind for agriculture.124 This simple, yet unobvious difference, lay quite literally at the base of many of the more

“superficial” problems the nationalists faced in the Darién. The ecological systems of the Darién were fundamentally different from those the nationalists knew and those they imagined. Speaking from a bridge of the

Pan-American Highway that his government had recently built, Torrijos explained to a group of locals the significance of the structure. “This government has stolen something,” he said, “it has stolen the river from its banks. But it is a just theft, because it is a theft to be enjoyed by all.”125 He misjudged the nature of his prize.

124 Richard Weyl, Geology of Central America, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Gebr. Borntraeger, 1980), 150-154, 171-175; Carolyn Hall, Héctor Pérez Brignoli, and John V Cotter, eds., Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 125 Torrijos, "Hijos Predilectos/ Y Dice Omar," in Una Revolución Diferente, 152.

44 APPENDIX

Figure 1.126 Torrijos in the Bayano River, as the reservoir begins to form.

Figure 2.127 A Bayano Cement Company advertisement in Engineering & Architecture Magazine. The caption reads: “Bayano Cement builds the future of Panama.”

126 Imagen y Voz, 136. 127 “Cemento Bayano [Advertisement],” Ingeniería y Arquitectura, 1982, n.p.

45 Figure 3.128 The “symbol of energy liberation,” Bayano dam.

Figure 4.129 The Darién Gap Highway, before paving.

128 IRHE, Departamento de Relaciones Públicas, “Símbolo de Liberación Energética.” 129 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP Memoria, 1977-1978, 26.

46

Figure 5.130 Government pamphlets discouraging uncontrolled deforestation.

130 RENARE, “¿Qué es la Erosión?,” n.d.

47

Graph 1131

131 Source: Steve C. Ropp, “Explaining the Long-Term Maintenance of a Military Regime: Panama before the U.S. Invasion,” World Politics 44, no. 2 (January 1992): 219.

48

Graph 2132

Graph 3133

132 Source: Looney, The Economic Development of Panama, 96. 133 Sources: World Bank, Current Position and Prospects, ii-iii; World Bank, World Development Report, 1978, 97; World Bank, World Development Report 1979, PUB-2534 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1979), 155; World Bank, World Development Report, 1980, 139; World Bank, World Development Report, 1982, 10887 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1982), 139; World Bank, Report and Recommendation of the President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to the Executive Directors on a Proposed Structural Adjustment Loan in an Amount Equivalent to US$60.2 Million to the Republic of Panama, P-3644-PAN (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, October 19, 1983), 5.

49 Map 1. The Darién Region and the Pan-American/ Darién Gap Highway. By author, with assistance from Ann Holstein.

50 Map 2.134 Panama in relation to the northeastern United States.

134 Central Intelligence Agency, “Panama” (Arlington, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 1974).

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