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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