Biden-Harris policy allowing open border is adversely impacting an indigenous tribe’s land and traditional way of life

METETI, Panama — Not far from this small town, the 19,000-mile-long Pan-American Highway ends at a wall of jungle — the Darien Gap, a notorious wilderness that stretches from Colombia into Panama.

In just three years, 1.5 million migrants — lured by the Biden-Harris administration’s open border — have braved the footpaths of this jungle on their way north.

Rather that stop this dangerous flow, the White House has encouraged it.

Top cabinet officials such as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, State Department Secretary Antony Blinken have repeatedly come to Panama to press for “safe, orderly, and humane” transit for migrants.

The Biden-Harris administration lavished new billions in tax money on United Nations agencies and non-governmental advocacy groups (NGOs) that descended on this region to ease the burdens of Darien Gap travel.

In the process, they have trampled arguably the most vulnerable and important stakeholder of them all in Panama: the Embera-Wounnaan tribe, whose 19,000 people happened to be living smack in the middle of this immigration hurricane.

And they’ve denied the tribes a seat at any table where they might have had a say.

All five chiefs of the Embera-Wounaan reservation, known as the Comarca, told me in an exclusive interview that the mass migration has driven their culture and traditional ways of life to the brink of ruin and must all be stopped with border closures and deportation.

They reserved special fury for the Biden-Harris administration, prior Panamanian governments and the United Nations and its nongovernmental organizations (NGO) proxies for never once asking permission or begging forgiveness as they facilitated an unprecedented international stampede in 2021 that has wreaked environmental and cultural havoc.

“Mr. President and you candidates, you are finishing off and you are killing all the Indians on the Comarca!” beseeched General Chief Leonide Cunampia, whose position oversees the tribe’s four other chiefs in Panama. “You have to pay attention to what’s going on in our territory. The immigration is contaminating us!”

Cunampia was accompanied to the interview by regional chiefs Jose Anilo Barrigon, Cirilo Pena, Vianide Cunapa, and Pablo Guainora, who all demanded that someone — anyone — listen to and respect their complaints about a mass migration they want to see halted.

It so happens that Panama’s new president Jose Raul Mulino, who took office on July 1, has promised to do just that if the American administration would help pay for large-scale deportation flights.

But the Biden-Harris administration’s $6 million pledge to help pay for the necessary expulsions is paltry, and it has proven reluctant to follow through.

The newly seated head of Panama’s border police agency, SENAFRONT, Director General Jorge Gabea, told me that the country wants to close the Darien Gap in part to help the Embera people, whom the prior governments have long ignored.

“We have Indians now who don’t know how to plant crops. They don’t know how to fish because they have been focusing on commerce and transport,” Gabea said. “That’s why we are trying to push [migrants] out of the communities.”

The chiefs are skeptical that Biden-Harris are serious about helping the new Mulino government show the flow.

From less than 10,000 a year for decades, once President Biden took office and opened the American border, the immigrant traffic skyrocketed to 350,000 in 2022, 550,000 just in 2023 and is on track to top that by the end of 2024.

The chiefs say greed is driving their destruction. They reserve especially hot ire for the United Nations agencies and the migrant-aiding NGOs that received hundreds of millions of US tax dollars to move into their villages without tribal permission so they can facilitate the massive immigrant swell destroying their tribe.

The NGOs and UN agencies have invaded tribal lands with “zero” permission, Chief Jose Anilo Barrigan alleged, “because there [are] millions going to the organizations that help the migrants . . . and we know this. This is a business. It’s between the governments and the NGOs.”

The advocacy agencies pay big rent money to the Panamanian government, and some private landowners too.

Bus companies and bus owners the government arranges to transport the immigrants north, at $60 a head, are getting rich, too.

The tribes, meanwhile, get nothing. News reports don’t even acknowledge that all of this is happening on native reservation lands, not Panamanian government lands.

“We see these organizations are not helping 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 international organizations are always reporting that the immigrants go through the Darien, but never that it is all on tribal lands.”

Furthermore, the five leaders confirmed, never once have any of the western world’s many indigenous people’s rights groups reached out to the tribe for even a basic welfare check, nor sought to represent their interests or magnify their plight.

The actions of powerful outside forces, in just a little over three years, have inflicted permanent, incalculable harms on Embera culture, traditions, subsistence farms, water, environment, health and unity as a distinct recognized indigenous people.

For starters, many Embera men have discovered that they prefer “easy money” over traditional jungle craft living. The immigrants pay Embera boat pilots to transport them from the gap to roads.

They can charge $25 per head and fit 15 or more in a single boat from the jungle trail exits to Panamanian government hospitality camps near the Pan-American Highway.

With so much easy money coming in for transporting and guiding the migrants, many Embera men have abandoned their duties to plant new crops for these new endeavors and are forgetting how to hunt and fish.

The money fueled a rash of alcoholism and cocaine use among Embera youth.

Embera families are being torn apart as some leave the community for extended periods to use drugs in Panama City and transport them back to the jungle for sale to others.

“This was a major plantain production area,” an Embera farmer name Luis told me in the town of Bajo Chaquito, through which hundreds of thousands of migrants have poured through. “Now it’s difficult to find someone who works planting agriculture. They basically all quit. Most of the spend their money for vices, alcohol . . . around noon, the bars start playing music and they all come out.”

Food insecurity and prices have spiked — aggravated because thousands of hungry migrants take the harvests that are left.

Above all else is an environmental degradation beyond anything in living Embera memory, Chief Cirillo Pena said.

With thousands of migrants a week showing up in Embera villages after long foot journeys through the Darien Gap, they relieve themselves everywhere and especially in the river, which provide the main source of water.

No one wants to drink that river water, not least because it is full of disgusting trash and huge volumes of human waste that local animals ingest but also because, especially during rainy season, flash floods kill dozens of immigrants at a time at the top of the regional watershed.

“We went to start recovering and burying bodies, and the local government stopped us and said that’s the job of another Panamanian government department,” Chief Cirilo Pena said. “But they’ve never done anything.

“We just want to get back to our normal life. And stop all this nonsense.”

The chiefs live in constant fear that the foreigners will infect their tribe with unfamiliar deadly diseases for which there is no cure.

The net result, Chief Cunapmia chimed in: “We are without water, food, and health.”

Nothing is likely to change, they said, because no one — especially not the Panamanian and American governments or the NGOs they allow to operate hold their people in too much contempt to allow a voice on the great terror unleashed on them and their sovereign land.

Their message to the presidential candidates, including Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?

“I would ask the [U.S.] president to shut down the border with Colombia,” Cunampia said.

Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.” Follow his progress through the Dairen Gap and Panama at CIS.org.