World Development 145 (2021) 105490

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World Development
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

Trafficking as settler colonialism in eastern Panama: Linking the

Americas via illicit commerce, clientelism, and land cover change
Colectivo Darién

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Rural spaces are garnering new attention in illicit economies. At the confluence of the American conti-
Available online 14 May 2021 nents, illicit commodities are being moved through rural Panama’s communities and iconic Darién for-
ests. Over the last decade, the international media have focused on the uptick in human ‘‘migration”
Keywords: while the Panamanian press has chronicled dramatic illegal logging. Less acknowledged is the surge in
Settler colonialism drug smuggling and arms trafficking. Using media reports and mapping over the last twenty years, we
Trafficking ask how multi-commodity trafficking and human exploitation are remaking rural space. We provide
Roads
the first synthetic and spatial overview of eastern Panama’s multiple trafficking, showing how it is alter-
Clientelism
Land rights
ing social and environmental relationships. Media reports, many based on government seizures, indicate
Indigenous trafficking routes throughout the region, implying the involvement of much of the local population and
resulting in new clientelistic social relationships between traffickers, residents, and the state.
Increasingly, trafficking is driving land cover change, diminishing forest cover in private lands, protected
areas, and indigenous lands and connecting them via a growing road network. Indigenous peoples’ con-
servation of forests hampers surveillance and makes their lands ideal for trafficking. This also means that
they are the only ethnicity frequently named in the media, threatening indigenous sovereignty and land
legalization efforts. We conclude that trafficking is a form of settler colonialism, continuing processes of
taking that began in this area of the American mainland centuries ago. Rather than incidentally holding
indigenous residents culpable, maligning them in trafficking’s transit area is fundamental to capitalist
expansion, integrating it with the country’s dollarized economy, highly developed banking sector, and
the canal’s global commerce. The continued transit of people and illegal commodities in eastern
Panama is quickly transforming conservation, indigenous sovereignty, and sustainable development.
Ó 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction One of the challenges to studying the effects of illicitness is the

Clandestinely moving commodities to consumers is key to illicit
economies and explains why they often are moved through more
rural, less governed regions (Elliott, 2016; McSweeney, Richani,
Pearson, Devine, & Wrathall, 2017). The characteristics that make
a region suitable for moving one illicit commodity often make it
so for another, and scholars have long addressed such multi-
commodity smuggling. With wildlife trafficking typically initiating
in rural areas, organized crime is combining wildlife with other illi-
cit smuggling, such as drugs and humans, (Brisman, South, &
White, 2016; Kangaspunta & Haen Marshal, 2009; Kessler,
2015b; South & Wyatt, 2011). Scholars have widely acknowledged
that illicit and licit economies are mixed (e.g., Andreas, 2004; Hall,
2012), but there has been little attention to the effects of illicit
commodities on the rural peoples and places of their transit.
E-mail address: colectivodarien@gmail.com
relative lack of data. Because of their illegality, illicit commodities
and exploited people1 are intentionally clandestine and directly
studying them and their effects is inherently risky and existing data
are incomplete. Governments often keep their own data on traffick-
ing, especially on seizures. However, those data are partial: the rule
of thumb estimate for drugs is that only 10–15% get seized (Peter
Reuter & Kleinman, 1986). The availability of data varies widely:
many countries only announce confiscations by press releases
accompanied by splashy photos of the weapons or drugs seized, then
requiring (and denying) formal requests for purportedly public data,
1
Importantly, many scholars and activists resist thinking of people as commodi-
ties, instead referring to both human trafficking and human smuggling as exploitation
(Campana & Varese, 2016). We prefer ‘‘illicit commodities and exploited people,” but
for ease of reading in this manuscript we also use the terms ‘‘illicit commodities” or
‘‘multi-commodity.” The United Nations protocols distinguish human trafficking as
‘‘control over another person for the purpose of exploitation” (United Nations, 2000b)
and smuggling as the procurement of illegal entry into a country (United Nations,
2000a). Because migrants are smuggled, we use the term ‘‘trafficking” to refer to
them, as is frequently done in Panama.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105490
0305-750X/Ó 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
C. Darién
or never making data public. Additionally, many governments report
their data to the United Nations (UN). Some UN databases, such as
that of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, are not public, but data
are periodically compiled in public reports, which also may be cov-
ered by the media (UNODC, 2012). Media coverage, including that of
press releases, is often the best available archive of trafficking and
there is nascent work using media data to assess illicit commodities.
Recent media analyses include assessments of illicit wildlife and its
timber, cocaine, sand mining, sand and soil mining (Nijman, 2015;
Patel et al., 2015; Rege, 2016; Rege & Lavorgna, 2016; Siriwat &
Nijman, 2018; Tellman et al., 2020). In addition, the book Bribes, Bul-
lets, and Intimidation on drug trafficking and law in Central America
relies on news reports among its sources (Bunck & Fowler, 2012).
The social and environmental effects of trafficking in transit
spaces is much more difficult to understand, often requiring
long-term, intimate knowledge that precedes trafficking. Then,
once trafficking has begun, these places often become more violent
and riskier. Journalists’, especially local ones, cultivation of sources
over time, regular beats, and relatively brief visits permit allow
some coverage of trafficking. In addition, remote technologies
(such as satellite image analysis, digital mapping, and modeling)
can be helpful for analyzing the changes to land cover or move-
ment in difficult-to-access rural areas, particularly if contextual-
ized or parameterized with on-the-ground data. In the transit
zones, news reporting may be combined with remote technologies
to longitudinally assess the transformation of rural spaces. In Cen-
tral America’s cocaine transit spaces, there is recent work combin-
ing media reports with remote sensing to understand the illicit
drivers of land use change (Tellman et al., 2020).
Over the last two decades, the media has recounted stories of
illegal commodities and smuggled people moving through eastern
Panama. Known for its biodiverse Darién forests, it has been home
to indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, who are now out-
numbered in Darién Province by the country’s majority mixed or
mestizo population. International media outlets have focused on
the uptick in human smuggling and trafficking (e.g., Associated
Press, 2019; Fernandez, 2019) while the Panamanian press has
chronicled the region’s dramatic illegal logging (e.g., Zea, 2018a).
Less acknowledged in international accounts is the concomitant
surge in drug smuggling and, in the other direction, arms traffick-
ing (e.g., Cordiat, 2018; Rodríguez Campos, 2012).
In this paper, we ask how multi-commodity trafficking and
human exploitation are remaking rural space in Panama’s Darién
region, one of the most iconic rural spaces of the Americas. Using
media reports and mapping we show how multiple commodi-
ties—not just cocaine—are transforming social and environmental
relationships in a global priority conservation area. First, we draw
on the news to provide the first synthetic and spatial summary of
human, timber, drug, and arms trafficking throughout the region
over the last two decades. Then, we use the media to build evi-
dence of social and environmental transformations driven by traf-
ficking: 1) clientelistic relationships with criminal organizations,
government officials, politicians, and residents and 2) land cover
changes that include a growing road network. In spite of traffick-
ing’s pervasiveness throughout the region, we show how indige-
nous peoples’ conservation of mature forests in the borderlands
provides traffickers cover from surveillance, creates blame for illic-
itness that is compounded by historic bias, and threatens indige-
nous sovereignty and land legalization. We draw attention to
how Panama’s increasing role in hemispheric illicit south-north
logistics and commerce is facilitated by the canal’s licit east–west
ones, dollarized economy, and highly developed banking sector.
We conclude that the multiple illicit commodities moving through
eastern Panama are having extensive, synergistic impacts on peo-
ple and conserved forests and furthering centuries of settler
colonialism.
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World Development 145 (2021) 105490
1.1. Illicit commodities and their rural transit spaces
By definition, illicit commodities’ must be hidden throughout
their transit from places of production to places of consumption,
minimizing risk of law enforcement detection and interdiction
(McSweeney, Wrathall, Nielsen, & Pearson, 2018; Peter Reuter &
Kleinman, 1986; Sanchez, 2018; South & Wyatt, 2011). As a conse-
quence of attempting to avoid interdiction, illicit commodities are
moved through diffuse and adaptive networks (Basu, 2013; Kenny,
2007). Because of illicitness, risk, and the value of the commodities,
violence often is used to protect the goods and transit routes
(Andreas & Wallman, 2009). Together, these result in higher trans-
action costs and, ultimately, high consumer prices for illicit com-
modities than for licit ones (Basu, 2014; P. Reuter & Greenfield,
2001).
The need to move illicit commodities to areas where surveil-
lance and enforcement is lax results in their transit through rural
spaces (Elliott, 2016; McSweeney et al., 2017). This is not a new
relationship—buccaneers stealing dyewood or gold from European
colonizers used this same logic. Smuggling multiple illicit goods
minimizes the costs of their movement through the clandestine
transit spaces, both due to economies of scale and the importance
of local knowledge and relationships (Elliott, 2016). Moving multi-
ple illicit commodities along the same routes is known as parallel
trafficking and moving them together is combined trafficking;
however, whether they move together in parallel, combine, or just
converge at different points in their long transit often remains
uncertain (Elliott, 2009; South & Wyatt, 2011). Researchers have
found that illicit goods as diverse as marijuana, crocodile penises,
and arms have been trafficked in parallel and ivory, rhino horn,
and pangolin scales or cocaine and gold or abalone meat and
methamphetamines have been trafficked in combination (Bell,
2006; UNODC, 2016b; Wagner, 2016; Wright, 1988; Wyatt,
Johnson, Hunter, George, & Gunter, 2018). In Brazil, 40% of illegal
drug shipments are combined with wildlife (Liddick, 2011). Traf-
ficking in one or multiple illicit commodities assembles diffuse
business network to handle the goods and launder illicit gains, sug-
gesting the involvement of transnational criminal organizations.
With freer trade, increases in commodity volume and ship-
ments, fewer border controls, and global laundering opportunities,
organized crime groups or its Spanish equivalent, criminal gangs
(bandas criminals, BACRIM, with regional roots to Colombian
paramilitary groups), have become more transnational (Elliott,
2016; Kessler, 2015b). Environmental crime is one of the fastest
growing areas of criminal activity and increasingly is tied to
transnational crime networks (Brisman et al., 2016; Kangaspunta
& Haen Marshal, 2009). According to the United Nations’ Office
on Drugs and Crime, Latin America’s drug trafficking organizations,
considered a particular type of transnational organized crime, are
‘‘involved in a wide range of organized crime activity and manipu-
late local politics” (UNODC, 2012, 5). Corruption and bribes rein-
force trafficking networks, drawing in government officials and
politicians for support and enforcement (Elliott, 2009; Hall, 2012;
Reuter, 2014). The diffuse spatial network of illicit commodity
transit means that local residents are often incorporated into or
conscripted into trafficking networks. In rural spaces, trafficking’s
options of ‘‘plata o plomo” (money or bullet) may be especially hard
felt by people already subjected to the structural violence of the
global economy (Bunker, 2010; McSweeney et al., 2018).
Empirical attention to trafficking’s socioenvironmental effects
in rural transit spaces, rather than spaces of production or con-
sumption, appears confined to the cocaine example. In Central
America’s cocaine transit spaces, control of rural spaces are critical
for monopolizing strategic routes, smuggling surreptitiously with
little interruption, and laundering illicit gains (McSweeney et al.,
2017). As a consequence, traffickers seek to own routes where land
C. Darién
already is owned or held, often by marginalized peoples
(McSweeney et al., 2017). The result is traffickers’ expansion of
property relations into marginalized areas, disenfranchising, dis-
placing, or violently removing residents from their lands
(Grandia, 2012; McSweeney et al., 2014). It also means that cocaine
trafficking has a spatial signature in land cover change, including
narco-deforestation and narco-ranching in northern Central Amer-
ica (Devine et al., 2020; McSweeney et al., 2014; Sesnie et al., 2017;
Tellman et al., 2020). To our knowledge, no detailed research has
been published on social and environmental changes precipitated
by multi-commodity trafficking in rural transit spaces.
2. Study site and methods
2.1. Panama and its eastern region
The ribbon of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and
at the junction of the North and South American continents,
Panama is a settler colonial country geographically primed for both
licit and illicit business. Indigenous Chibchan and Chocoan lan-
guage speakers, of which Guna, Emberá, and Wounaan remain,
resided throughout the region (Cooke & Sanchez Herrera, 2004).
When European (mostly Spanish) colonizers and enslaved Africans
arrived to the American mainland, it was to Darién, where they
populated and dispossessed indigenous inhabitants of most of
their lands (Araúz & Pizzurno, 1997; Arosemena, 1972; Castillero
Calvo, 2012; Cooke, 2005; Mena García, 2011). The colonizers
and their mixed or mestizo descendants built a clientelist economy
based on exploiting the future Panama’s geography for global tran-
sit and commerce (Guevara Mann, 2016; Herrera, 2012). Long
before the Panama Canal was built, goods were carried overland
across the narrow isthmus, including Peruvian gold bound for
Spain (Araúz & Pizzurno, 1997). Centuries later, the United States
furthered those historical patterns, dispossessing residents from
the U.S. Canal Zone territory in the middle of the country to create
the Panama Canal, both of which they controlled from 1903 to
1999 (Lasso, 2019).
Panama remains a global commerce powerhouse, with its
recently expanded canal, dollarized economy, and financial center
(Díaz Fuentes, 2014). The government has implemented policies to
restrict money laundering, made famous by the 2016 Panama
Papers, but in 2018 the Latin American Financial Action Task Force
found that additional legislative measures still were necessary
(GAFILAT, 2018; Guevara Mann, 2016). The canal’s Caribbean port
city of Colón is home to a Free Trade Zone (Zona de Libre Comercio),
and such zones, with their relative absence of customs and law
enforcement, are known for moving illicit goods and laundering
money (Bunck & Fowler, 2012; UNODC, 2016a). In 2006, a U.S.
State Department report applauded Panama’s efforts against traf-
ficking and strengthening police forces and policy, while noting
that the country’s many airports and coasts were not regularly
patrolled (Brannan Jaén, 2006a). The canal’s Pacific and Atlantic
port systems aid in the global east–west movement of goods, while
the absence of a road through the Darién Gap restricts north–south
overland commerce.
The hemispheric Pan American Highway has its only gap, the
‘‘Darién Gap” or ‘‘Tapón de Darién,” in Panama and Colombia
(Fig. 1). The U.S. promoted the highway and was aided by Panama’s
strategy to geographically integrate the country through coloniza-
tion and resource exploitation in its frontier regions
(Departamento de Planificación, 1970; Suman, 2007). The Pan
American Highway’s completion was blocked in 1975 on environ-
mental grounds that the forested borderlands were a necessary
barrier to livestock’s hoof and mouth disease (Candanedo Díaz,
1997; Girot, 2002; Suman, 2007; Velásquez Runk, 2015). The high-
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World Development 145 (2021) 105490
way stops at the Darién Province town of Yaviza and begins again
106-kilometers later in Riosucio, Colombia (Fig. 1). Members of the
country’s majority mestizo ethnicity began moving east during
construction, strengthening the indigenous land rights movement
that began with the Comarca Guna Yala (Herlihy, 1995a;
Hernández, 1982; Herrera, 2012; Howe, 1998). Eventually, three
semi-autonomous indigenous areas, known as comarcas, were cre-
ated, the Comarca Emberá-Wounaan, Comarca Madungandí, and
Comarca Wargandí. The forested borderlands became a global con-
servation priority region as the Darién-Chocó (or Tumbes-Chocó-
Magdalena) biogeographic region (Marchese, 2015; Myers, 1990).
Under the Darién Sustainable Development Program the Highway
was paved to Yaviza and the land registry established to conserve
the region’s forests (Nelson, Harris, & Stone, 2001). Completed in
the early 2000s, indigenous collective lands (tierras colectivas)
(those collectively held outside of the comarcas) were left out of
the cadaster and remain untitled (Halvorson, 2018; Velásquez
Runk, 2012).
Here we use eastern Panama to refer to eastern Panama Pro-
vince, Darién Province, and eastern Comarca Guna Yala, Comarca
Madungandí, Comarca Emberá – Wounaan, and Comarca Wargandí
(Fig. 2). According to the last census, 12.26% of Panamanians iden-
tify as indigenous and 9.20% as Afro-descendant (Instituto Nacional
de Estadística y Censo, 2012). Darién Province and Panama Pro-
vince are comprised of majority mestizo populations, with
32.44% and 4.42% indigenous peoples, and 11.31% and 16.67%
Afro-Panamanians, respectively (Instituto Nacional de Estadística
y Censo, 2012).
Over the last two decades, the media, government, and non-
governmental organizations have acknowledged trafficking in
Panama and iconic Darién. In particular, Mexico’s crackdown on
drug flights in 2006 meant that cocaine moved from South America
through Central American air, lands, and waters on its way to U.S.
and European markets (McSweeney et al., 2014; Silva Ávalos,
2017; UNODC, 2012). In 2008 Panama issued Law Decrees 7, 8,
and 9 creating additional public security forces: the National Naval
Air Service (Servicio Nacional Aeronaval), the National Border Ser-
vice (Servicio Nacional de Fronteras, SENAFRONT), and the National
Service on Intelligence and Security (Servicio Nacional de Inteligen-
cia y Serguridad) (República de Panamá, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c).
2.2. Research methods
We followed trafficking through news media (2000–2020), as
well as reports from intergovernmental organizations (principally
the United Nations), NGOs, and government agencies. Our resi-
dence and work in the region has informed our understanding of
those data. However, because Panama’s financial sector and
domestic politics have established connections to illicit business,
trafficking is not openly discussed as it apparently is in other parts
of Central America (cf. McSweeney et al., 2018); we did not risk our
own security nor that of our friends and colleagues by discussing
trafficking.
Our methods for this research were media analysis and map-
ping. In Panama, media provides an important data source on traf-
ficking because public data are unavailable or only made available
through governmental press releases. Panama is a small country
and press coverage for rural eastern Panama has increased with
road improvements. However, information may not be accessible
to the media, either: journalist Ardelita Cordiat (2018) reported
that her newspaper had repeatedly requested interviews with spe-
cialists from the Security Ministry and with the Public Prosecutor’s
Office on Drugs, but neither agreed. Two newspapers, La Estrella de
Panamá and El Siglo were among the holdings of the Waked Group,
which was tied to money laundering and trafficking (Morales Gil,
2017). The coverage of illicitness is still risky, as evidenced by some
C. Darién World Development 145 (2021) 105490

Fig. 1. Panama’s Darién region and the Darién Gap, the Tapón de Darién, in the eastern Panama and northwestern Colombia borderlands. The Darién Gap refers to the area
where there is no Pan American Highway, from Panama’s Yaviza to Colombia’s Riosucio.

Fig. 2. Indigenous lands in eastern Panama. The green areas are the semi-autonomous comarcas. From the west these are the Comarca Guna Yala (along the Caribbean coast)
(Guna), Comarca Madungandí, (Guna), Comarca Wargandí , and Comarca Emberá-Wounaan, which is divided into the two regions closest to the border. The yellow areas are
the 28 untitled collective lands. The blue areas are the five titled collective lands. Both the Emberá-Wounaan Comarca and collective lands overlap with the borderland Darién
National Park (see Figure 3). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

of the most specific articles lacking a byline or journalist name and iod of 2000–2020 using the terms Darién and Panama and
instead attributing the newspaper authorship. trafficking (tráfico, trasiego, trata de personas), migration (mi-
We systematically sampled for media articles. We initially car- gración), and illegal logging (tala ilegal). These searches located
ried out internet searches on Google and Google News for the per- international and Panamanian news stories—in both English and

4
C. Darién
Spanish—that were indexed on international search engines. Given
the numerous stories, we confined international articles to those in
prominent print, TV, and online news outlets, discarding data from
news aggregator sites to control for quality of data (Kuckartz,
2014). The exception was that of InSight Crime (www.in-
sightcrime.org), a site that specializes in organized crime in Latin
America and the Caribbean.
We carried out keyword searching on the website (www.
prensa.com) of Panama’s most prestigious newspaper La Prensa,
which archived articles beginning in 2001. We initially searched
using Spanish terms for trafficking (trasiego, tráfico, trata de per-
sonas), traffickers (traficantes), migrants and migration (migrantes,
migración), drugs (drogas), arms (armas), illegal logging (tala ilegal).
Based on keywords in those articles, we did sequential searches
using illicit (ilícito/a), contraband (contrabando/a), clandestine
(clandestine/a), seizures (decomiso/a, incautado/a, retenido/a), immi-
grants (inmigrantes), those from outside the continent (extraconti-
nentales), migration flow (flujo migratorio), migration wave (ola
migratorio), illegal wood (madera ilegal), extracted wood (madera
extraída), auctioned wood (subasta de madera), auction (subasta),
clearcut (tala rasa), cocobolo rosewood (cocobolo), narcotrafficking
(narcotráfico), narco, cocaine (cocaína), coca, caches or shipments
(tumbes), and those who steal from them (tumbadores). To be sure
that we accessed articles about indigenous peoples and eastern
Panama, we also searched using the terms indigenous (indígena),
collective lands (tierra colectiva), collective title (título colectivo),
Emberá, Wounaan, Guna Yala, Madugandí/Madungandí, Wargandí,
Emberá-Wounaan, Darién, and the locations of the Darién detain-
ment camps, La Peñita and Lajas Blancas.
The over 4,000 media reports were databased in DEVONthink-
Pro software. We reviewed the stories, removed duplicates, kept
ones that referred to Panama generally, and focused on those about
eastern Panama. We reviewed the articles for initial themes of
human, timber, drugs, and arms trafficking. Quotes from articles
were added, in their original language, to the notes section of the
report’s entry in EndNote reference management software. All
translations are our own.
Four separate mapping techniques were used to describe traf-
ficking: review of maps in media reports, geographic positioning
system (GPS) mapping, imagery analysis, and indicative mapping.
We reviewed the media reports for spatially explicit trafficking
routes and maps and copied them into a separate file. We obtained
geographic positioning system (GPS) mapping (done with Garmin
GPS Map 64cx devices and Locus Map applications on Android
smartphones in the ‘‘tracking” mode, which automatically marks
their location at intervals of 15 to 30 s) from colleagues in the
region who regularly map many features, including roads. Tracks
were downloaded, converted to polygon features, and displayed
using QGIS and ArcGIS software. Imagery analysis involved on-
the-ground knowledge of road networks and their review in med-
ium resolution satellite imagery available from Bing and Planet
Labs. Once detected, we traced these roads using QGIS and ArcGIS
software. We used indicative mapping when we knew of an exist-
ing road between two points, but no one had been able to travel it
with a GPS due to safety concerns and it was not detectable on
satellite imagery due to dense forest cover. We discussed the road
networks, detected them on satellite imagery (Google Earth, Bing
Maps, Planet Labs, and Rapid Eye Imagery), and traced them using
QGIS and ArcGIS.
3. Results
Our compilation of the extant publications demonstrates the
ubiquity and overall increase in trafficking throughout Panama
and its eastern region. Panama increasingly is known for human
5
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
trafficking and smuggling, especially its Darién region. During the
decade ending in 2019, 101,618 people transited the region, com-
ing from countries as diverse as Cuba, Ghana, Haiti, Nepal, Angola,
Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Eritrea, among
others (Arcia Jaramillo, 2019d). In the Global North media, these
people are characterized as migrants, even if the people moving
them were traffickers (e.g., Drost & Federico, 2020; Jackson,
2015; Linthicum, 2015; Motlagh, 2016; Schaefer Muñoz, 2015;
Smith, 2013; Yates, 2018). Journalists in Panama have more com-
monly used ‘‘illegal trafficking of people” (tráfico ilegal de personas),
‘‘human trafficking” (trata de or tráfico de personas), ‘‘immigrants
from outside the continent” (inmigrantes extracontinentales), or ‘‘il-
licit trafficking of migrants” (tráfico ilícito de migrantes) (e.g., Arcia
Jaramillo, 2019d; Castro Peralta, 2015; Concepción, 2019; Redac-
ción de La Prensa, 2019a). Additionally, Panama has been found
to be a source, transit, and destination country for sexual and labor
exploitation (Luque, 2018; Redacción Digital La Estrella, 2009;
Rodríguez, 2018). Lawyer and Minister of Security Rolando Mir-
ones warned ‘‘If you think drug trafficking is bad, the trafficking
of people is even worse, because we convert human beings into
merchandise” (Concepción, 2019). In 2008 and 2010, traffickers
routed people through the upper Tuira and Balsas watersheds
and charged $100; by 2019 routes were through the Comarca Guna
Yala and Comarca Emberá-Wounaan and cost US$25,000–50,000
(Concepción, 2019; Redacción Digital La Estrella, 2008, 2010). In
2016 the government established two encampments, one near
(mestizo) Nicanor and the other near (Emberá) La Peñita (Castro
Peralta, 2015; Redacción de La Prensa, 2016). La Peñita remains,
and because of a 2020 COVID-19 outbreak the government isolated
people in a more remote encampment near (Emberá) Lajas Blancas
and established another in (mestizo) San Vicente, near Metetí
(Rodríguez, 2020; Terán, 2020).
Timber trafficking also has risen in the last decade. In 2015,
journalist Elizabeth González reported that 75–80% of the coun-
try’s wood hailed from Darién, but that over the previous thirty
years the region had lost 40% of its forest. Four years later,
20,000 ha of forest was registered lost in the prior 10 years, with
90% of that attributable to illegal logging (Rodríguez, P., 2019).
UN regional coordinator for environmental governance Andrea
Brusco explained that accurate data on illegal timber is hard to
obtain, because it is very difficult to quantify and often mixed with
lawful wood (Panamá América, 2018). A map of georeferenced log-
ging permits in Darién Province, including in protected areas,
showed the extensiveness of legal logging and hinted at the diverse
possibilities for laundering illegal logs (Zea, 2018b). The press gave
much attention to the illegal logging of valuable cocobolo rose-
wood (e.g., La Prensa, 2013d; Redacción La Estrella de Panamá,
2015). In a national television news report, an unidentified logger
underscored the illicitness of rosewood by comparing it to drugs:
‘‘to talk about cocobolo is to talk about cocaine, nobody dares to
talk or touch that, because it is completely illegal” (González,
2015). In 2019, the new Minister of Environment Milciades Con-
cepción stated ‘‘illegal logging is responsible for the extermination
of our forests, if there is no control and management plan to pro-
tect replanting” (Rodríguez, P., 2019).
From 2000 to 2018, drug (defined as cocaine and marijuana)
confiscations soared by 700%, ranking Panama fourth globally on
amounts of drugs seized per country (Cordiat, 2018). Journalist
Adelita Cordiat (2018) reported that the mostly cocaine drug con-
fiscations shot up in 2007 and have been on an exponential rise: in
2000 11.2 tons, in 2007 28.4 tons, and in 2017 84 tons, with only
6.5% of the 2018 seizures in Darién. Located at ‘‘the mouth of the
funnel” or the ‘‘entry door” (Cordiat, 2018; Pachico, 2011) to
Colombia’s cocaine production, it is assumed that huge volumes
move through eastern Panama. However, given the difficulties of
law enforcement monitoring in its largely rural spaces, the inter-
C. Darién
diction rate is likely lower than the common 10–15% estimate
(Peter Reuter & Kleinman, 1986). A 2020 news story backs this
up, with the largest number of drug seizures registered from west-
ern Panama’s Bocas del Toro (25%) and central Panama’s Colón
(21%) and Panamá (21%) provinces (Rodíguez Campos, 2020a).
Drugs have moved by terrestrial, riverine, marine, and even aerial
routes (e.g., La Prensa, 2013a; Redacción de La Prensa, 2019c). A
2013 article described how islands (branded narco-islands) and
mangroves are ideal sites for moving cocaine: using a GPS unit a
resident meets a boat at sea and picks up dropped drug packages,
buries them, and unburies them a few days later for another leg of
marine transit (Redacción Digital La Estrella, 2013). During the
COVID-19 pandemic, cocaine trafficking was found to have
increased and reinvigorated terrestrial routes throughout Central
America (AFP Panamá, 2020; Silva Ávalos, Papadovassilakis, &
Dittmar, 2020).
Available data on arms trafficking are not as detailed, partly
because Panama groups together those detained for arms traffick-
ing and those carrying illegal firearms. The massive numbers of
firearms imported and disseminated during the Guatemalan, Sal-
vadoran, and Nicaraguan civil wars, together with legally pur-
chased weapons, has resulted in regional arms trafficking (Cragin
& Hoffman, 2003; UNODC, 2012). Panama is an important link in
illegal arms trade to South America because North American weap-
ons can be purchased legally in duty-free shops (UNODC, 2012).
The country’s media reported on weapons being used to provision
Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas (La Prensa, 2003a; Otero,
2007). After Colombia’s peace process and 2016 accords, arms have
been increasingly tied to transnational crime (e.g., La Prensa,
2012a; Redacción de La Prensa, 2019d). A UN map shows weapons
moving by multiple terrestrial and marine routes into South Amer-
ica, with movement by river recorded through the Darién Gap
(Aguirre Tobón, 2011; UNODC, 2012). In 2018, SENAFRONT’s com-
mander José Samaniego commented that ‘‘we’ve had more inci-
dences of arms bearing” among those walking from Colombia
carrying cocaine (López Dubois, 2018).
The media has progressively reported on the trafficking of mul-
tiple goods and their relationship with organized crime groups.
Weapons were used for the protection of drug trafficking and for
exchange with drugs in Darién (Rodríguez Campos, 2012). The
drug trafficking organization The Zetas and the maras street gangs
appear to be involved in migrant smuggling, human trafficking,
and the arms trade (UNODC, 2012, 5). Binational cooperation
between Panama and Colombia in 2017 included investigations
on drug trafficking, money laundering, human trafficking, and
other transnational crimes (Cordiat, 2018). In 2019, SENAFRONT
reported that trafficking people through Darién had become a
lucrative business for drug trafficking cartels: they charge a com-
mission to use their drug routes to move people (Arcia Jaramillo,
2019d). Additionally, United Nations’ Brusco said ‘‘we have found
examples in the region of drug traffickers that have swapped drugs
for illegal wood” (Panamá América, 2018). Prosecutor Ruth Mur-
cillo further linked the illicit economies, noting that an illegal log-
ger ‘‘needs all of criminal machinery to ultimately obtain the
results of that illicit activity. That in itself indicates that we are
talking about organized groups” (Redacción de tvnNoticias, 2014).
3.1. Clientelism
Multiple trafficking is resulting in new clientelistic relations
among residents, traffickers, and officials. Most obvious is that res-
idents have patronage relationships with traffickers as regular and
sporadic employers. Both earn financial benefits and the patron
also grants the client protection for the attendant violence of the
illegal commerce. The pecuniary details are murky: this alone is
indicative of trafficking’s ubiquity and the risks to personal safety
6
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
by talking about it. In one of the most detailed reports about the
region’s drug trafficking, a local resident explained that they
received US$5,000 per trip, more than ten times the monthly earn-
ings for working in a local store (Redacción Digital La Estrella,
2013). Journalists do not explain which criminal organizations
relate to specific cases and even corruption cases are nonspecific
(e.g., C. A. Rodríguez, 2015). For example, the associations of indi-
vidual, prominent drug traffickers operating in Panama, such as
Pablo Rayo Montaño, are not identified (Redacción de La Prensa,
2016). Many media stories refer opaquely to criminal gangs (ban-
das criminals) or trafficking gangs (bandas de traficantes) (e.g.,
Concepción, 2019; Redacción EFE, 2015).
While not explicitly linked to events, media reports identify
multiple criminal organizations, especially drug trafficking organi-
zations, operating in eastern Panama. Colombian crime organiza-
tions are those most frequently reported in the media: the
Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), particularly its
the 57th Front, the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, the Clan
del Golfo (formerly the Usuga Clan crime gang), the Bustamente
crime gang, thought to be a founder of the drug trafficking coalition
La Empresa (The Business), and the Rastrojos (Arcia Jaramillo,
2019d; Bargent, 2014; El Espectador, 2013; Humes, 2014;
Mattson, 2010; Otero, 2002). In 2008, the SENAFRONT director said
that the two thirds of the country’s Darién Province was controlled
by Colombia’s FARC (Buschschluter, 2015), which also is referred to
as organización narco traficante (narco trafficking organization)
ONT-FARC. Additionally, in 2013, Panama intelligence operations
found four Mexican drug cartels to be operating in the country:
the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Zetas, and the Beltran
Leyva Organization (La Prensa, 2013c). Crime organizations from
both Colombia and Mexico are reported to work together in
Panama: the Rastrojos with the Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel operating
a financial network with the 30th Front of the FARC, and the Ura-
beños and Rastrojos controlling the Caribbean route, but paying a
tax to the FARC to transit through the Comarca Guna Yala
(ACAN-EFE, 2015; C. A. Rodríguez, 2015; Tatone, 2013). In 2016,
the arrest of a drug boss in Panama raised the question as to
whether Panamanian groups had begun to set up their own
transnational trafficking operations (Yagoub, 2016a). Additionally,
the Chinese mafia is involved with human trafficking and illegal
logging, the Italian mafia smuggled cocaine in tuna and shark fil-
lets, and the Russian mafia controls prime real estate in Panama
City, but its trafficking links are unclear (Grant, 2014; Grasseni,
2004; Otero, 2009).
Journalists have reported that trafficking’s entrenchment is cre-
ating widespread clientelism, violence, and corruption. As journal-
ist Rafael Berrocal (2014) summarized ‘‘BACRIM are criminal
groups that do not have a determined ideology or cause other than
drug trafficking and obtaining money, through all kinds of illicit
activity to make a profit, thus creating an illegitimate economy,
and establishing a ‘culture of illegality’ in the populations where
they pass or where they reside, bringing with them other extre-
mely lethal elements in society such as corruption.” These relation-
ships are self-perpetuating. Former SENAFRONT head Frank Ábrego
stated ‘‘these [criminal] groups. . . have paid services, promote cor-
ruption of officials, incite residents to be part of their criminal
groups or threaten them with death” (Berrocal, 2014). In 2016, for-
mer President of Panama (2014–2019) Juan Carlos Varela reported
that 70% of homicides were related to organized crime (Yagoub,
2017).
Clientelism also extends to Panama’s public security forces. In a
2006 the press reported that the head of Panama’s Antinarcotics
Unit of the Technical Judicial Police was arrested for corruption
charges (Brannan Jaén, 2006b). By 2011, the U.S. State Department
had noted that the Servicio Nacional Aeronaval (National Naval Air
Service), SENAN and SENAFRONT had been penetrated by drug
C. Darién
trafficking organizations (Pachico, 2011). And the Colombian press
reported that a former Panama policeman had become a comman-
der in the 57th Front of the FARC (Crawley, 2013). By 2016, the
Panamanian government created a new police force charged with
investigating corruption and organized crime within the public
security forces, the Grupo Anticorrupción Interinstitucional (Interin-
stitutional Anticorruption Group) (López Guía, 2016b). In 2020, the
National Police broke up an arms trafficking ring of ex-officials of
their organization and the Consejo de Seguridad Nacional (National
Security Council) (Díaz C., 2020). International criminal organiza-
tions have pointed to security services, customs, and the judicial
sector to be able to pass drugs through the region (Cordiat, 2018).
These new clientelistic social relations are pronounced with the
militarized border police. With the 2008 establishment of SENA-
FRONT, the new border police quickly became a new service provi-
der directly to residents, offering vaccines, clowns, haircuts, and
food (La Prensa, 2015a). The organization displays these relation-
ships in ‘‘innumerable” billboards along the Pan-American high-
way throughout eastern Panama, branding itself as ‘‘heroes to
the people” (La Prensa, 2015a). In an article about the rising power
of SENAFRONT, one local intimated corruption saying ‘‘they are
everywhere. They control everything, but who controls them?”
(La Prensa, 2015a). Both the U.S. and Colombian military support
SENAFRONT with multinational cooperation on busts, and the U.
S. have assisted with humanitarian aid in the borderlands and
building a base deep in the Darién (Joint Task Force Bravo public
affairs, 2019; Panamá, 2019; Redacción de La Prensa, 2018).
Journalists’ accounts of prominent corruption cases give a win-
dow into interactions between traffickers, officials, and politicians.
The most tangled case is that of the protected Matusagaratí wet-
lands that were titled in apparent collusion between Colombian
businesspeople (often a euphemism for illicit merchants), a local
politician, the environmental agency ANAM, the land titling agency
ANATI, and the water resources agency ARA (Arreaga, 2017). Citi-
zens and subsequently the NGO Alianza por un Mejor Darién (Alli-
ance for a Better Darién) filed legal grievances against the titling
in 2007, 2009, and 2014 (Arreaga, 2017). Journalist and environ-
mentalist Lidia Arreaga, who fought against the titling, was warned
by a priest in Yaviza that an assassin was planning to kill and dis-
appear her (Bech, 2017). In another case, legislator Alfredo Fello
Pérez was charged with trafficking illegal rosewood and tied to
gang member and drug trafficker Carlos Enrique Mosquera (Redac-
ción de La Prensa, 2019b). Ministry of Environment forestry direc-
tor Victor Francisco Cadavid said that officials lent themselves to
issue transport paperwork for felled wood that was not entirely
legal (Rodríguez, P., 2019). In 2003, the chief of the Secretariat of
Drugs in Darién Province, Lida Alguero, was charged with arms
trafficking in a sting operation and Darién judge Humberto López
Correa was suspended in 2017 after an investigation found him
tied to an unnamed criminal network (La Prensa, 2003b; Vega
Loo, 2017). Drugs were seized in the Guna governor’s vehicle and
in one of the Electoral Tribunal, the state registrar charged with
issuing identity cards, certifying marriages, and holding elections
(Manuel, 2020; Reyes, 2018). In 2016, then President Varela
warned of politicians involved with criminal groups and narcotraf-
ficking and not to let them take over the country (Bustamante,
2016).
Given the extensive clientelism of multi-commodity trafficking,
it is striking that indigenous peoples of eastern Panama are the
only ethnicity frequently named for their involvement (e.g.,
Manuel, 2020; Pérez & Seligson, 2011; C. A. Rodríguez, 2015; O.
Rodríguez, 2015; Samaniego, 2017). That pattern is most pro-
nounced by comparing the media in majority non-indigenous com-
munities, such as Jaqué, Metetí, Chepo, Chimán, and Yaviza, in
which ethnicity is not stated, versus majority indigenous areas
where the word ‘‘indigenous” is used frequently in the text and
7
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
often in the title itself, such as a 2015 article titled ‘‘Indigenous col-
laborate with narcotrafficking” (La Prensa, 2008, 2012b, 2014,
2015b; C. A. Rodríguez, 2015; L. A. Rodríguez, 2015; Rodriíguez,
2017). In that story, journalist Carlos Rodríguez ambiguously sta-
ted that at least 200 indigenous people could be using Panamanian
territory to collaborate with criminal gangs in narcotrafficking (C.
A. Rodríguez, 2015). In an article titled ‘‘Indigenous people from
Darién say their forest management is sustainable, despite accusa-
tions” the legal assessor for the Comarca Emberá – Wounaan
defended indigenous residents. Guna lawyer Hector Huertas stated
‘‘yes there is a deforestation problem, yes there is problem with
illegal tree-cutting, but it is outside the Emberá-Wounaan admin-
istrative district, it’s in the rest of Darién” (EFE Servicios, 2018).
Journalists use demonyms to refer to other groups, such as
‘‘Darienitas,” and even couple demonyms with naming indigenous
peoples, such as ‘‘Chinese and Panamanians—among them indige-
nous peoples” (Arcia Jaramillo, 2015; Castro Peralta, 2014). The
UN’s Brusco used Spanish implicit communication, noting that
Darién had an important deficit on issues related to land use and
land tenure and adding ‘‘if communities feel they are owners of
the land, they can contribute more to safeguarding threatened for-
ests” (Panamá América, 2018). This was a pointed comment given
that indigenous collective lands were left out of the regional cada-
ster. The Panamanian media does not address that indigenous peo-
ples have little choice regarding trafficking. In an international
Reuter’s article, that perspective is more evident: Emberá leader
Betanio Chiquidama explained ‘‘our young men are forced by these
drug traffickers to act as guides. They say: ‘You die, or you take us’”
(Mattson, 2010).
3.2. Land cover transformations and the growing road network
Our review of locations identified in media reports shows the
expansiveness of trafficking throughout eastern Panama. Smug-
gling is reported from a number of specific locations, zigzagging
(as one story referred to drug trafficking) throughout the region
(Mattson, 2010). The many marine routes for cocaine cover all of
Panama’s coasts, best visualized in a series of U.S. Southern Com-
mand maps, posted on-line, of suspect aircraft or boat routes
(Isacson, 2019).
The growth of trafficking also has been tied to significant land
transformations in eastern Panama. Most obvious is the deforesta-
tion caused by timber trafficking. Panama’s Ministry of the Envi-
ronment reported that 90% of the Darién Province’s logging is
illegal, resulting in the loss of 20% of the region’s forests over the
last decade (Rodríguez, P., 2019). Once highly valuable mahogany
and rosewood trees were cut, illegal loggers diversified to other
tropical hardwoods, such as espavé, bálsamo, and cedro amargo
(Arcia Jaramillo, 2019b; La Prensa, 2013d). In 2016, the Ministry
of Environment reported on 17 intentionally set fires for land-
grabbing and 36 for illegal logging (Arcia, 2016). The UN Food
and Agriculture Organization overlooked the potential role of
transnational organized crime in deforestation, attributing it to
land-grabbing by farmers, ranchers, and loggers who do not think
it is feasible to protect the forest from logging and colonization and
therefore ‘encourage’ extraction (Rodríguez, P., 2019).
Trafficking also has caused less obvious environmental transfor-
mations in the region. The first coca plantation of Central America
(two hectares) and a small cocaine processing lab were found near
Chucurtí, in the border area of Comarca Guna Yala with Colombia
(Meléndez, 2014b). A larger, eight-hectare plantation with 54,000
trees and another lab were destroyed in Darién Province’s Matu-
gantí (José Alberto Chacón, 2013). Other new suspect land holdings
include a 50-hectare oil palm plantation intended to expand to
3,000-hectares in the buffer zone of Darién National Park (Zea,
2017b) and titled rice and oil palm plantings within the Matusa-
C. Darién
garatí Wildlife Refuge (Arreaga, 2017). In 2019, the Panamanian
government suspended over 200 applications for land title in
Darién, including those in the indigenous, Matusagaratí Wildlife,
Canglón Forest, and Filo de Tallo Hydrologic reserves, and noted
200 titled landholders in Matusagaratí (Arcia Jaramillo, 2019a).
Both the titles and title applications indicate significant changes
to land control in the region.
The growing road network in eastern Panama facilitates traf-
ficking and traverses public and private lands, including indige-
nous and non-indigenous lands (Fig. 3). Secondary roads extend
from the Pan-American Highway to the Pacific Ocean or rivers that
flow into it, making ideal trafficking routes. A number of additional
roads have been cut or improved, such as those in the corregimien-
tos of Río Congo Arriba and Santa Fe (Ducreux, 2019). Roads also
were cut or extended to harvest rosewood (Cortez Ovalle, 2014).
The road extension to the Darién National Park buffer zone’s oil
palm plantation was promoted by that plantation’s owners, sup-
ported by local politicians, and facilitated by the Ministry of Public
Works, with its final destination the Guna village of Púcuro, well
within Darién National Park (Zea, 2017a). In 2019, the Ministry
of Public Works publicized their rehabilitation of secondary roads,
using the term agricultural production roads (caminos de pro-
ducción), throughout eastern Panama (Ministerio de Obras
Públicas, 2019). The Ministry of Agricultural Development noted
that they were cutting, enhancing drainage, and improving a
remarkable 66.4 km of road for 692 farmers in eastern Panama Pro-
vince (Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario, N.D.). In 2019, the
Minister of the Environment Milcíades Concepción said that the
police had found that drug traffickers take advantage of illegal log-
ging to open roads (AFP, 2019). Additionally, human trafficking has
caused, according to one broadcast ‘‘great damage to the environ-
ment,” as traffickers fell trees to widen trails and allow more peo-
ple to traverse: SENAFRONT director Oriel Ortega noted ‘‘the royal
roads that indigenous peoples use, where one person walked
behind another, today up to five people can walk side-by-side”
(Concepción, 2019). The road network is directly (in terms of road
construction) and indirectly (via road access) diminishing forest
cover throughout the region and facilitating the intermingling of
illicit commodities.
Recent reporting reveals the potential for mining to create land
cover changes in eastern Panama. The country’s gold has long
served to launder illicit monies and in the eastern region gold pla-
cer mining was associated with drug trafficking controlled by
Colombian crime gangs (J. A. Chacón, 2014; Rodríguez, 2019;
Yagoub, 2016b). In 2013 gold mining equipment and tanks of mer-
cury were seized in Darién (La Prensa, 2013b; Rodríguez, 2019). A
2019 report clarified that gold ingots, US$250,000 of which were
confiscated in the Comarca Guna Yala, are used by drug traffickers
and transnational organized crime in money laundering
(Rodríguez, 2019). A 2016 article linked drug-affiliated illegal min-
ing’s threats to the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in western
Panama with that in the east (Prieto-Barreiro, 2016)
4. Discussion
We conclude that eastern Panama’s skyrocketing timber, drug,
human, and arms trafficking is synergistically transforming the
region’s rural spaces and furthering centuries of settler colonialism
of indigenous peoples. Over the last few years journalists increas-
ingly are reporting on the relationships among multiple illicit com-
modities, although it is clear that they have been limited in a place
where trafficking is pervasive and secured by violence. Even with
the sparse details that come from the ubiquity of illicitness in
the region, these accounts clearly indicate discrete, parallel, and
combined trafficking for at least portions of timber, human,
8
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
cocaine, and arms transit. Drugs have particular importance: they
are characterized by cocaine and serve as a platform for all other
illicit trafficking (Gavin, Corbin, & Lecce, 2014). These media results
show how the country’s illicit economies are well entrenched in
eastern rural spaces, creating new everyday relationships of crim-
inal patronage for rural residents who previously lived under rela-
tive autonomy. We illustrate the spatial ubiquity of trafficking,
which drives land cover change, and road expansion, but that
indigenous peoples are held culpable, eroding autonomy and land
rights. We do not consider this incidental, but part of centuries of
taking from indigenous peoples, normalizing settler occupation
and exploitation. We conclude that that multicommodity traffick-
ing is settler colonialism.
For eastern Panama’s rural spaces (and the country overall),
trafficking’s social embedding is revealed by clientelism. The term
is used, especially by Latin American authors, to address the histor-
ical restructuring of society via relations of patronage by (typically)
outside powers and also has been used with respect to drug traf-
ficking (Arias, 2006; Leal Buitrago & Ladrón de Guevara, 2010).
With transnational organized crime part of expansive multicom-
modity trafficking, clientelistic relationships with politicians, offi-
cials, and militarized security forces are changing the social order
of everyday life in eastern Panama. As power shifts, such as the
recent overland, marine, and air routes through Central America,
violence and corruption flare up (Ballvé & McSweeney, 2020).
Although some of the actors may be new, clientelism together with
settler colonialism frames trafficking to be part of histories of elite
wealth capture, rather than entirely new regimes of rule.
The militarized response of governments to trafficking and its
attendant violence is a growing concern throughout Latin America
and is against rural peoples, including indigenous ones (e.g.,
Kessler, 2015a; Müller, 2012; Nievas, Heinrich, & Salazar Pérez,
2014; Rivera Vélez, 2004; Youngers & Rosin, 2005). Political scien-
tist Carlos Guevara Mann warned about those changes: ‘‘the out-
come [for delivering the east of the country to SENAFRONT] has
been a chain of outrages against the population, consented by
the hierarchical superiors of the public forces, without any demo-
cratically controlled body intervening to correct the outbursts of a
venal and arrogant soldiery, which threatens to take the entire
Republic” (Guevara Mann, 2015, p. 1). Sociologist Marco Gandáse-
gui likewise called attention to increasing militarization and drug
trafficking’s enabling of a U.S. military presence (Gandásegui,
2009, 2014, 2015). This critique has local resonance because the
U.S. military only left in 1999, when they returned the Canal Zone
territory. Both the U.S. and Colombian military are involved in aer-
ial and maritime detection and monitoring of trafficking, law
enforcement in trafficking interdiction, and capacity building
(Ballvé & McSweeney, 2020; Gavin et al., 2014; Sweeney, 2019).
A recent book cover summarizes the concerns for rural areas: a
camouflaged military boot carried on a campesino’s back, weighing
him down so that he can only crawl (Nievas et al., 2014).
In the widespread press reports about trafficking, a lack of detail
is contrasted with explicit and tacit maligning of indigenous peo-
ples. Rather than assuming that all of the region’s residents are
drawn into illicitness, our media analysis shows how the press
overwhelmingly holds indigenous peoples culpable. This is surpris-
ing given that indigenous residents are not the majority ethnicity
in much of the region, reporting and mapping indicate trafficking
routes throughout eastern Panama (Fig. 3), and Panama’s illicit
business and money laundering are well established (e.g., Bunck
& Fowler, 2012; Rodíguez Campos, 2020a; Silva Ávalos, 2017). His-
tories of Latin America document the particular racialized pater-
nalism from settler colonialism, which in eastern Panama
nurtured an idea of wild Darién that facilitates intervention
(Gott, 2007; Speed, 2017; Velásquez Runk, 2012; Wade, 1997).
The international press often had a different tone. For example,
C. Darién
Fig. 3. Eastern Panama’s growing road network. The Pan American Highway is the gray line from Panama City to Yaviza. Numerous secondary roads extend to indigenous
lands, which hold much of the region’s remaining forest cover, and to the coast, which are prominent areas for cocaine trafficking. Mapped roads are in red, which includes
recently resurfaced roads, and indicative roads in light orange. The green indigenous territories include Comarcas and collective lands, including untitled ones. (For
interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
in Colombia’s El País newspaper, reporter José Meléndez (2014)
wrote that ‘‘Colombian narcoguerrilla gangs deploy an intense
offensive to recruit impoverished and young indigenous peo-
ples. . .seducing them with attractive offers for work. . .lead them
to be enslaved to the service of transnational organized crime”
(Meléndez, 2014a).
The Global North media amplifies a pervasive U.S. and European
discourse against migrants, rather than attention to the impacts on
residents, indigenous ones among them. By evading or minimizing
‘‘forced displacement,” ‘‘human smuggling,” or ‘‘human traffick-
ing,” journalists diminish human suffering and wittingly or unwit-
tingly conflate people willingly seeking migration with those
trafficked against their will. Scholars have found that this criminal-
izes human exploitation, makes migrants a security issue, and per-
petuates the vilification of residents (Müller, 2012; Sanchez, 2018).
This tacit maligning of residents often is done while reporting from
within indigenous lands, such as in the encampments or crossing
through comarca forests. Instead, in many of these stories, the
Darién trope is a leading character, bolstering the journalists’
adventurism and fostering ‘‘immigration pornography” (De León,
2015, p.5). By avoiding discussion of human, timber, drug, and
arms trafficking, journalists, especially international ones, get safe
passage through the region but evade the clientelism, attendant
violence and militarization, and land cover change that are remak-
ing life in eastern Panama. Such indigenous vilification and era-
sures are familiar to the histories of settler colonialism in Latin
America (Castellanos, 2017; Gott, 2007; Speed, 2017). In northern
Central America, scholars found that blaming indigenous residents
for cocaine trafficking served to alienate them from their legalized
lands, much as it has in Colombia’s cocaine production regions
(Britto, 2020; Grandia, 2013; McSweeney et al., 2014; Paley, 2014).
In eastern Panama, maligning residents threatens indigenous
land rights, particularly the untitled collective lands in eastern
Panama and Darién Provinces. Gandásegui (2014) has suggested
9
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
that under the guise of combating drugs and terrorism, the State
creates an environment for criminalizing social movements, espe-
cially those of campesinos and indigenous peoples, similar to the
structural politics of associating rural citizens with weapons,
paramilitary, or terrorist organizations noted from Guatemala
(Ybarra, 2016). For decades, Panama’s indigenous movement has
centered on land rights; the association of indigenous peoples with
multiple types of trafficking criminalizes them and their social
movement for land. The region’s indigenous land rights struggles
resulted in the comarcas, but the government has only legalized
five of eastern Panama’s 28 Guna, Emberá, and Wounaan collective
land territories, in some cases as a result of verdicts against
Panama by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Díaz,
2020; Halvorson, 2018; Herlihy, 1995b; Herrera, 2012; Howe,
1998; Velásquez Runk, 2012). Over the last decade, the region’s
Guna, Emberá, and Wounaan collective land communities have
steadily mapped and documented their tenure histories, submit-
ting them for collective land titles (Halvorson, 2018; Vega Loo,
2018). In 2019, Panama’s Ministry of the Environment cleared
the way for titling indigenous areas overlapped by protected areas
and in 2020, Panama’s Supreme Court ruled that 1,428 ha of land
be returned to two Emberá communities (Díaz, 2020; República
de Panamá, 2019). Seemingly on the brink of securing their titles,
trafficking diminishes indigenous sovereignty and plays on racist
tropes that threaten land rights. It is telling that in 2020, the gov-
ernment supported the legalization of indigenous lands in western
Panama (the Comarca Naso Tjër-Di), but not in eastern (Redacción
de La Prensa, 2020).
Denigrating indigenous residents is possible not only because of
their proximity to the Colombian border, but because of their con-
servation of forests, which provide cover for illicitness (Fig. 4). In
Panama, as throughout Latin America and the world, forests are
most conserved in indigenous lands, community managed forests,
and protected areas (Nelson et al., 2001; Porter-Bolland et al.,
C. Darién
2012; Ricketts et al., 2010; Vergara-Asenjo & Potvin, 2014). Traf-
ficking is not borne equally across space: moving illicit items is
harder to detect beneath forests and in forests public security offi-
cials typically are absent. The combination of the two is important,
explaining why drugs are dropped near, hopped along, or buried in
the extensive, difficult to navigate, and relatively unpatrolled
coastal mangroves. It also explains the differences in the forested
routes of Darién Gap adventurers and smuggled people: adventur-
ers typically cross on a multiple-checkpointed route linked by vil-
lages through the Tuira watershed and smuggled people moved
through multiple routes that evade the few checkpoints confined
to villages in the Comarca Guna Yala and Comarca Emberá-
Wounaan. Moreover, the wood of forests is a valuable resource
and also is trafficked.
Indigenous forest conservation makes their lands more vulner-
able to illegal logging, multicommodity trafficking, and coloniza-
tion. Not only is there continued demand for precious tropical
timbers, but the logging industry has deforested most of eastern
Panama outside of indigenous and protected areas and also is
working in protected areas (La Prensa, 2018; Vergara-Asenjo &
Potvin, 2014; Zea, 2018b). Indigenous communities and authorities
have registered formal complaints of logging for many years, and it
is through legal logging that illegal timber can be trafficked, often
by moving it into legal forest concessions to mask the true origin of
the wood (e.g., Arcia Jaramillo, 2019c; Brancalion et al., 2018;
Castro, 2011; Finer, Jenkins, Blue Sky, & Pine, 2014; Zárate, 2002;
Vardeman and Velásquez Runk, 2020). Moreover, illegal logging
is on the upswing throughout Latin America and tied to drug traf-
ficking (e.g., Bergenas & Knight, 2015; Panamá América, 2018;
PRISMA, 2014; Salisbury & Fagan, 2011; Sesnie et al., 2017). In a
recent paper on deforestation and drug trafficking in Central Amer-
ica, Sesnie et al. (2017) found that Panama’s anomalous forest loss
was poorly correlated with the number of drug shipments, which
was the opposite of northern Central America (Sesnie et al.,
2017). Because illegal narcotics gain value as they move north-
ward, profits are much lower in Panama, and, they reasoned, there
was less need to launder money through land use change. They
suggested that deforestation was related to non-narco affiliated
tree plantations and forestry concessions (Sesnie et al., 2017).
However, given these media reports of multi-commodity traffick-
ing, much of it after Sesnie et al.’s 2014 forest cover data, their
assumptions were premature.
In addition to logging, our media and spatial analysis found that
multi-commodity trafficking is generating recent land cover
change in eastern Panama. The land cover change to intensive agri-
culture, such as oil palm and rice plantations, is similar to cocaine
driven deforestation in northern Central America (Díaz C., 2020;
McSweeney et al., 2014, 2018; Sesnie et al., 2017; Tellman et al.,
2020). We have furthered those findings by showing how multi-
commodity trafficking synergistically transforms the landscape.
For example, where people, cocaine, and arms move on the same,
widening forest paths which are connected to recently logging
areas linked by newly cut roads that facilitate colonization. Impor-
tantly, other trafficking driven land cover changes found in Latin
America may also be affecting land cover change in Panama, but
are not yet well documented by the media. In Honduras and Gua-
temala, cocaine’s illicit gains are being laundered by purchase or
conglomeration of large expanses of territory for cattle ranching,
characterized with low stocking levels (e.g., Devine et al., 2018;
McSweeney et al., 2014). Journalists have not reported on narco-
ranching in eastern Panama, but as far back as the last agricultural
census in 2011 Darién was among the provinces with the second
highest number of cattle (INEC, 2011). By 2017 cattle ranching
had expanded into Darién National Park (Arcía, 2018). In the coun-
try’s western Azuero Peninsula, drug traffickers infiltrated cattle
auctions to launder illicit gains, but there was no mention of sus-
10
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
pect ranching (Rodíguez C., 2020; Rodíguez Campos, 2020b). In
addition, in Colombia mining, especially gold mining, is to linked
to trafficking (Rettberg, Cárdenas, & Ortiz-Riomalo, 2018; van
Uhm, 2020). Since the early Spanish colonial era, Darién has been
known for gold with fabled nuggets the size of olives (Mena
García, 2003). The press reports of illegal gold mining in eastern
Panama and its ties to organized crime suggest future mining-
related land cover change, especially given Panama’s numerous
mining concessions that include indigenous comarcas and Darién
National Park (Bebbington et al., 2018). Mining has been an unre-
lenting concern in the country’s western indigenous lands, but has
not in the east; that looks poised to change. Illicit goods (and licit
timber) throughout eastern Panama, and not just in indigenous
lands, are moved by a growing network of secondary roads linked
to the country’s main transportation artery, the Pan American
Highway.
As a globally important environmental conservation region, the
press is attentive to logging and deforestation, but not the expand-
ing road network. A significant ecological literature recognizes the
way that roads catalyze socio-ecological transformations (e.g.,
Alamgir et al., 2017; Forman et al., 2003; Van Der Ree, Smith, &
Grilo, 2015), which is why conservationists and environmentalists
campaign against them. However, trafficking is facilitated by not
acknowledging roads. Our map of the region’s roads illustrates
how secondary roads from the now-paved Pan American Highway
are extending trafficking routes throughout private lands, indige-
nous lands (including comarcas), and protected areas (Fig. 3). In
Guatemala, axial roads were constituents of megaprojects in which
the military became a shadow beneficiary of the new power
assemblages in narco/cattle/agro-industrial land concentration
(Grandia, 2013). In eastern Panama, overlooking the secondary
roads has been possible because they were unmapped, beneath
the forest canopy, and difficult to distinguish in satellite imagery.
In some cases, roads and road improvements have been linked to
suspect business, politicians, and officials. The government’s pro-
motion of ‘‘agricultural production roads” takes on new meaning
since in Panama cocaine has been found transited with yuca, sugar,
inside beans and pumpkins, and, in other countries, inside cattle
(Agencia EFE, 2016; Corro Ríos, 2009; López Guía, 2016a;
Romero, 2015; The Panama Digest, 2010; Webmaster de La
Prensa, 2014).
Rather than smaller roads, environmental concerns get chan-
neled into the unrelenting possibility of the Pan American Highway
being cut through the Darién Gap to South America. A recent book
illustrates this perspective, ‘‘Others were simply preoccupied by
the consequences it would have for the country if the highway
were constructed that would facilitate trafficking of drugs, arms,
uncontrolled migration and even mining, felling trees, and illegal
cultivation” (Vásquez & Bronstein, 2019, p. 2). In 2018 the Colom-
bian ambassador to Panama, Juan Claudio Morales, envisioned the
anticipated electrical connection (between the Americas) as com-
merce: ‘‘once we have the electrical interconnection, later we
could begin to look at the Highway and soon, include a train to
connect and move merchandise” through Darién (EFE, 2018). In
2020, the Panamanian Association of Business Executives (Aso-
ciación Panameña de Ejecutivos de Empresa) sponsored a webinar
promoting new economic and logistic opportunities by a road
traversing the Gap, linking South America to global commerce
through Panama and its canal (Barnes Hassan, 2020).
Our use of media about eastern Panama has the unfortunate
effect of disconnecting it from the changes occurring in Colombia’s
Darién. By 2010, northwestern Colombia was described as ‘‘a
deforested landscape, that, in pieces, has been negotiated by the
authorities and the Colombian Government for the benefit of
national and international companies” with multiple large infras-
tructure projects planned (Carmona Londoño, 2010, p. 15). In addi-
C. Darién
Fig. 4. Forest cover and indigenous lands in eastern Panama. In indigenous areas, outlined in green, residents conserve their forests, including the Comarcas and titled and
untitled collective lands. Indigenous areas also overlap with Darién National Park, in magenta, along the Colombian border. Much of eastern Panama outside of indigenous
areas has been deforested. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
tion to the potential Pan American Highway extension, the planned
infrastructure were the Atrato-Truandó interoceanic canal, new
and widened ports, a rail line known as the interoceanic land
bridge, and hydroelectric projects on the Murrí and Baudó rivers
(Carmona Londoño, 2010). Scientists found significant land cover
changes throughout the Chocó-Darién Global Ecoregion, raising
concerns about biodiversity conservation in Panama, Colombia,
and Ecuador (Fagua & Ramsey, 2019). Those changes were attribu-
ted to the expansion of cattle ranching, oil palm plantations, coca
cultivation and cocaine trafficking, illegal logging, gold mining,
human trafficking, and the forced displacement of residents from
the entrenched drug economy (e.g., Beltrán, 1996; Fagua &
Ramsey, 2019; Flórez & Calle, 2018; Kane, 1992; Poussa, 2004;
Rojas, 2003; van Uhm, 2020). They also have been linked to capital-
ism and, like Guatemala, the military agro-industrial complex in
resource rich and geographically strategic areas (Ballvé &
McSweeney, 2020; Paley, 2014).
By considering the South American desire to get commodities to
international markets, whether licit or illicit, it becomes apparent
that access to Panama’s Free Trade Zone and canal almost require
the socio-ecological transformations that eastern Panama is expe-
riencing. If that frame is widened again to the U.S. and European
market for cocaine, the Chinese market for rosewood, the global
market for people, or the Colombian market for arms, then traffick-
ing becomes a telecoupled global issue. The marriage of land cover
change with political ecology, telecoupling shows how the
dynamic interactions and feedbacks of socioecological systems
can have spillover effects in other places than the sites of produc-
tion and consumption (Liu et al., 2013, 2014).
Multicommodity trafficking and human exploitation are syner-
gistically driving clientelism and land cover change, reterritorializ-
ing transit space and furthering settler colonialism in eastern
Panama. Darién, as historian Carmen Mena Garcia (2011) wrote,
is where the first continental frontier was opened in the Americas.
11
World Development 145 (2021) 105490
It is ironic that it is perceived as its last. In eastern Panama, traffick-
ing criminalizes indigenous peoples and, tacitly, their land rights
social moment. Moreover, by locating the encampments for smug-
gled people in the Emberá villages of La Peñita and Lajas Blancas
(Fig. 3), the government formalizes trafficking routes through the
Comarca Guna Yala and the Comarca Emberá-Wounaan. The gov-
ernment’s inaction to legalize indigenous lands continues over five
centuries of settler colonialism, with trafficking’s expansive road
network, clientelism, and land cover change dispossessing resi-
dents of resources and autonomy. If Guna, Emberá, and Wounaan
are able to title their collective lands, sovereignty looks extremely
challenging. It is troubling given that globally indigenous, more
than non-indigenous, people defending their land were objects of
violent repression, which was deadlier when drug trafficking was
involved (Le Billon & Lujala, 2020).
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we use media reports in eastern Panama to con-
clude that multi-commodity trafficking is settler colonialism. Traf-
ficking continues the region’s long history of settler colonialism,
eroding of the remaining indigenous lands and sovereignty. We
build on Central American research focused on cocaine to demon-
strate how multiple types of trafficking --timber, humans, drugs,
and arms—are often intermingled. We show how taken together,
multi-commodity trafficking and it’s resultant clientelism are syn-
ergistically transforming the nature of authority in eastern
Panama. By spatializing trafficking routes, we have made visually
explicit the ubiquity of illicitness and the likely incorporation of
all the region’s ethnicities, illustrating how trafficking’s social
and geographical embedding is driving deforestation and the
growing road network. We show how trafficking plays on historic
biases against indigenous peoples, naming them to the exclusion of
other ethnicities. Rather than incidental, the maligning of indige-
C. Darién
nous peoples furthers settler colonialism, dispossessing indigenous
Guna, Emberá, and Wounaan sovereignty and their remaining
lands.
Given Panama’s geographic position, trafficking’s embedding in
Darién is poised to significantly alter development in the hemi-
sphere. Centuries of global commerce across the isthmus have long
intermingled the licit and the illicit. The ubiquity and pervasive-
ness of trafficking in eastern Panama has served to once again coa-
lesce and strengthen power of the elite, especially the corrupted
elite. This is not a new pattern, as historian Ivonne Suárez Pinzón
(2011) and others have demonstrated, the region has been at the
heart of three centuries of disputes in capitalism’s expansion.
Given Panama’s importance for hemispheric transportation and
worldwide trade and logistics, trafficking’s settler colonialism in
the Panama-Colombia borderlands it key to the expansion of licit
and illicit business in the Americas. Conservation, indigenous
sovereignty, and sustainable development in eastern Panama
already are being rapidly changed by multi-commodity trafficking.
Declaration of Competing Interest
One author declares employment by a non-governmental orga-
nization that addresses these topics.
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the thoughtful comments of three anonymous
journal peer reviews and four colleagues to improve the manu-
script. We are grateful to colleagues for encouraging this
manuscript.
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