METETI, Panama – Not far from this small town, the 30,500-kilometer-long Pan-American Highway ends at a jungle wall – the Darién Gap, a notorious wilderness that stretches from Colombia to Panama.
In just three years, 1.5 million migrants – attracted by the Biden-Harris administration’s open border – have navigated the paths of this jungle on their way north.
Instead of stopping this dangerous influx, the White House has encouraged it.
Senior cabinet officials such as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have repeatedly traveled to Panama to advocate for “safe, orderly and humane” transit for migrants.
The Biden-Harris administration has donated millions of taxpayer dollars to UN agencies and nongovernmental advocacy groups (NGOs) that came to the region to ease travel pressures at the Darién Gap.
In doing so, they trampled on arguably Panama’s most vulnerable and important stakeholder: the Embera-Wounnaan tribe, whose 19,000 members happened to live at the very center of this immigration hurricane.
And they denied tribes a seat at the negotiating table where they could have had a say.
All five chiefs of the Embera Wounaan reserve, known as the Comarca, told me in an exclusive interview that mass migration has pushed their culture and traditional way of life to the brink of ruin and that this must be stopped through border closures and deportations.
Their particular anger was directed at the Biden-Harris administration, previous Panamanian governments, and the United Nations and its nongovernmental organization (NGO) proxies for not once asking for permission or forgiveness while enabling an unprecedented international mass panic in 2021 that has had devastating environmental and cultural impacts.
“Mr. President and you candidates, you are going to wipe out and kill all the Indians in the comarca!” pleaded Chief General Leonide Cunampia, whose position entails oversight of the tribe’s four other chiefs in Panama. “You must pay attention to what is happening in our territory. Immigration is contaminating us!”
Cunampia was accompanied for the interview by regional leaders Jose Anilo Barrigon, Cirilo Pena, Vianide Cunapa and Pablo Guainora, all of whom demanded that someone – anyone – listen to and respect their complaints about mass migration that they want to see stopped.
Panama’s new President José Raúl Mulino, who took office on July 1, has promised to do just that if the U.S. government would help finance the large-scale deportation flights.
But the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to contribute $6 million to finance the necessary deportations is meager, and it is unwilling to keep that commitment.
The newly appointed head of Panama’s border police agency SENAFRONT, Director General Jorge Gabea, told me that the country wants to close the Darién Gap, among other things, to help the Embera people, who have long been ignored by previous governments.
“We now have Indians who don’t know how to grow crops. They don’t know how to fish because they have focused on trade and transportation,” Gabea said. “That’s why we are trying to drive (migrants) out of the communities.”
The chiefs are skeptical that Biden and Harris are serious about helping the new Mulino administration identify the river.
After President Biden took office and opened the American border, immigrant traffic increased from fewer than 10,000 per year for decades to 350,000 in 2022, 550,000 in 2023 alone, and is expected to exceed that number by the end of 2024.
The chiefs say their destruction is motivated by greed. They are particularly angry at the UN agencies and migrant-supporting NGOs that have received hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to enter their villages without the tribe’s permission so they can facilitate the massive influx of immigrants that is destroying their tribe.
The NGOs and UN organizations entered tribal areas without any permission, claimed Chief Jose Anilo Barrigan, “because millions go to the organizations that help the migrants … and we know that. This is a business. It is a matter between the governments and the NGOs.”
The interest groups pay high rents to the Panamanian government and also to some private landowners.
The bus companies and bus owners organized by the government to transport immigrants to the north (for $60 per person) also become rich.
The tribes, on the other hand, get nothing. The news doesn’t even mention that all this is happening on indigenous reservations and not on Panamanian government land.
“We see that these organizations do not help our people; they are only there for the immigrants,” Barrigon noted. “If there were no immigrants, the NGOs would not be here. There would be no money. The reporters, the governments and the international organizations always report that the immigrants travel through the Darién River, but never that they are exclusively on tribal lands.”
Furthermore, the five leaders confirmed that none of the numerous indigenous international rights groups in the Western world have even approached the indigenous people with a request for a simple welfare check or attempted to represent their interests or glorify their plight.
The actions of powerful external forces have caused permanent and immeasurable damage to the Embera culture, traditions, subsistence agriculture, water, environment, health, and unity as a recognized indigenous people in just over three years.
First of all, many Embera men have found that they prefer the “easy money” to life in a traditional jungle boat. The immigrants pay Embera boatmen to take them from the gap to the streets.
They can charge $25 per person and accommodate 15 or more people in a single boat that travels from the jungle trail exits to Panamanian government guest camps near the Pan-American Highway.
Because there is so much easy money in transporting and guiding migrants, many Embera men have abandoned their duties to grow new crops for their new ventures, forgetting how to hunt and fish.
The money led to a wave of alcoholism and cocaine use among the Embera youth.
Embera families are being torn apart as some leave the community for long periods of time to consume drugs in Panama City and then take them into the jungle to sell them to others.
“This used to be a big plantain growing area,” Luis, an Embera farmer from the town of Bajo Chaquito, through which hundreds of thousands of migrants have flowed, told me. “Now it’s difficult to find anyone working in agriculture. They’ve practically all given up. Most of them spend their money on vice and alcohol. Around midday, the bars start playing music and they all come out.”
Food shortages and prices have skyrocketed – and are being exacerbated by thousands of hungry migrants gleaning leftover crops.
Above all, the environmental destruction is worse than anything the Embera have experienced in living memory, said Chief Cirillo Pena.
Every week, thousands of migrants arrive in Embera villages after long walks across the Darién Gap, relieving themselves everywhere, but especially in the river, which is their main source of water.
Nobody wants to drink the river water. Not only because it is full of disgusting waste and huge amounts of human excrement that is eaten by the region’s animals, but also because flash floods occur, especially during the rainy season, killing dozens of immigrants at once in the upper reaches of the regional watershed.
“We wanted to start recovering and burying the bodies, but the local government stopped us, saying that was the job of another Panamanian government agency,” said Chief Cirilo Pena. “But they never did anything.”
“We just want to get back to our normal lives. And stop all this nonsense.”
The chiefs live in constant fear that the strangers will infect their tribe with unknown, deadly diseases for which there is no cure.
The end result, Chief Cunapmia interjected, is: “We have no water, no food and no health care.”
It was unlikely that anything would change, they said, because no one – especially not the governments of Panama and the United States or the NGOs they allow to operate – despised their people so much that they would lend a voice to the great terror that had been unleashed upon the people and their sovereign land.
Your message to the presidential candidates, including Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?
“I would ask the (US) president to close the border with Colombia,” Cunampia said.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Biggest Border Crisis in U.S. History. Follow his journey through the Dairen Gap and Panama on CIS.org.
