Kankintú and Northern Santa Fe

Veraguas Province

A significant government infrastructure project—the Fourth Transmission Line—threatens our Ngäbe and Buglé communities in the district of Kankintú in the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé and in Northern Santa Fe in Veraguas province. The proposed project, which is partly funded by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), would create a 300-kilometre electrical line along Panama’s Atlantic Coast. The Transmission line will traverse our ancestral territories and some of the last remaining untouched rainforest in Panama. We are particularly concerned about the infrastructure associated with it, such as mines, dams and roads.

Our Ngäbe and Buglé communities have occupied traditional territories in Northern Santa Fe for thousands of years. However, we have been excluded from the process of free, prior, and informed consent, which allows Indigenous Peoples the right to reject development projects that would affect them or their territories. In effect, our government has failed to recognise our collective land rights, which are enshrined by the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Supporting the Territorial Organization of Ngäbe, Bugle and Campesinos of the Northern Region of Santa Fe, MODETEAB brought the communities’ concerns to the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO). Their investigation into our complaints found that the IFC had failed to comply with its own sustainability policy, yet the project continues.

Rosa

The government has sometimes said that poverty is going to end [with these projects]. They are going to kill all of us when poverty ends. They are taking away our land, taking away our culture, taking away our way of life, and our way of eating; we will be dead because of all the junk that comes from outside. The food for the children is no longer the same. That is why I am worried that, as a mother and a woman, our family will no longer have a healthy diet like the one we have now.

We have been against the Fourth Line and all the projects that come from outside. We have been against all the projects because they only cause us to suffer dispossession.

Rosa

Saturnino

Our way of life, in general terms, is about sustainable agriculture, Mother Earth, and the diversity of traditional crops that give life to all the dwellers. That’s a common thread throughout the indigenous area.

Our people are of struggle, and the indigenous struggle of the original peoples is protected by the sacred power, the power of God, creator and lord of all nature. We are left with an internal challenge to unify our ideas for the social good and to resist the manipulations of the government, to resist for the life of Indigenous people.