Diego Arguedas Ortiz: How Indigenous Tribes Are Fighting the Drug Cartels Diego Arguedas Ortiz - Motherboard
go to original April 15, 2014

A member of the Embera-Wounaan (Wikimedia)

Over the past few years, strangers have begun approaching youngsters in the Embera-Wounaan, an indigenous tribe in Panama, with an uncanny request. Carry a bag of rice across the jungle for us, and you’ll earn American dollars. It’s dead simple, they say. A four-hour trek across the jungle at night is worth $200 in cash, straight away.

A few took the offer, carried the bags, and got the bucks. But others alerted local community leaders. Word eventually reached 43-year-old Candido Menzua, cacique of the Embera-Wounaan.

“There are no rice plantations over there,” the chieftain explained. He ordered more stringent patrolling over the 430,000 hectares controlled by his people. This wasn’t the first and likely won’t be the last time the Embera have crossed paths with drug-traffickers, and, by now, he knows their trade.

The Embera-Wounaan’s case isn’t unique. For the past five years, forest communities throughout the region have been clashing with organized crime over their lands. Woodlands from Mexico to Panamá have been plundered and destroyed, with conflicts ranging from those rice bag parades at midnight to gunshots and murder in Michoacán, where locals stood up against cartels.

As he tells his story in the lobby of the ritzy hotel Wyndham Herradura, home to one of Costa Rica’s largest convention centers, cacique Menzua casts a striking figure. He’s wearing a beaded, multicolored short skirt, dusty slippers, and, as Rambo would carry his ammunition, two long white-blue beaded chains across his bare chest, while the rest of the attendance flashes ties or broided shirts. Tourists and businessmen might consider him out of place.

Except he isn’t. Right now, this is exactly where he needs to be.

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