Can Panama’s Guna People Survive Climate Migration?

The little boys are having a blast, and their giggles are infectious. Clad only in shorts, they’re rolling in the sand, which coats them like sugar on a powdered donut. When they reach the water’s edge, they roll in and rinse off. Roll. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a good game.

I watched the boys play while bobbing in the sea alongside my fellow cruise passengers, admiring the children's simple fun. It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic place to pass one’s childhood.

But these young boys, members of the Guna tribe, are unlikely to grow old on these islands off the coast of Panama. Because the Guna, who have survived war, forced migration, and attempted cultural eradication, may not survive the looming effects of climate change, coupled with the inevitable lure of the modern world.

The Guna (formerly called and still pronounced Kuna) are the indigenous inhabitants of Panama’s San Blas Islands. A paradisiacal archipelago and a long swath of coastal mainland, which starts east of the port city of Colón and extends to the border of Colombia, is known as Gula Yana. San Blas is the name bestowed by Spanish conquerors nearly 500 years ago. Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Guna inhabited much of the Darien peninsula in what is now Panama and Colombia.

Conflicts with the Spanish invaders hastened their migration to the coast and islands. For the majority of Guna, the islands became the safest place to be — far enough from Spanish reach that they could preserve their traditional ways of life with relative autonomy. Today, they’re a semi-autonomous group within Panama, protected by the state, but also largely self-governing.

Guna men practice traditional fishing and agriculture, and the women produce and sell molas, the brightly colored applique panels that form their customary dress. They also profit from island tourism. Guna families, each serving as caretakers for a particular island or group of islands, travel in small boats from the larger islands where their villages are located, and spend the day on any island where outsiders visit. They’re there to sell handicrafts and present cultural programs but as much as anything, they’re also there as the islands’ protectors. No non-Guna can legally set foot on one of the islands without paying, and all fees for go to the families, which then share the profit with the larger community.

While indigenous communities are often exploited by corporate tourism interests — particularly when the product is this enticing — the Guna have largely succeeded in protecting their culture and territory.

But life is changing for the Guna.

Tourism, even at the sustainable levels the Guna stridently maintain, is luring more and more Guna youth to the mainland for education and jobs, the majority to Panama City. After tasting the modernity and convenience of the city, it can be tough to return to island life, where communication with the outside world is often via a single village payphone. Resources are extremely limited, and stricter cultural mores are firmly in place.

Yet the more imminent threat to the Guna way of life, according to Isabelle Gribomont, an anthropologist specializing in Latin America, is rising sea levels that will necessitate the abandonment of their low-lying islands and return to the mainland. Based on current predictions, islands like the tiny strips of high ground my cruise ship visited will easily be underwater in a few decades. And of the 365 islands that make up the San Blas archipelago, 49 of them are occupied, and often lined wall-to-wall with thatch-roof dwellings. Increasingly violent weather events mean that one big tropical storm could level houses and leave the islands completely inundated.

Antonello Pasini, a scientist who studies climate change at the National Research Center’s Pollution Centre for Research in Rome, says that the current “business as usual” model will lead to a one-meter sea level rise by sometime between 2070 and 2100. That is enough to completely submerge the low-lying island where we watched the boys frolic in the sand.

Pasini says that recent studies suggest that those sea levels will arrive a lot sooner than previously thought, and bring with them more frequent and severe hurricanes and storm surges. Coastal areas, in addition to the islands, have already begun to be affected by sea level rise.

“This exacerbates sea water intrusions and salinization of the internal soil,” Pasini said. In turn, this renders the land too contaminated to successfully plant crops. The domino effect means that the Guna — like billions of climate refugees around the world — will have to abandon their vanishing islands and their coastal communities, and move far enough inland to escape the rising seas.

Unlike much of the world, the Guna already have a plan to deal with the inevitability of rising sea levels. Since the early 2010s, they have been organizing the construction of new settlements on the mainland, on various plots of land set aside within Guna territory. Faced with the loss of their water-bound way of life, Gribomont points to their history as a reason for optimism.

“The Guna already survived one drastic change of habitat a few centuries ago when they moved to Guna Yala,” she said. “That move altered their culture quite dramatically, and they adapted.”

Jesús Prestán Arosemena, an eco-guide of Guna descent, feels positive about the future of the Guna, as their fortunes on the mainland improve. “It used to be if you were a Guna in Panama City, you were a cook or a janitor,” he said. “That’s changing.”

Prestán Arosemena cited a group of Guna he knows, all under 30 and all entrepreneurs. They’re working in tourism and setting up ways to process the community’s organic produce in Panama instead of sending it to Colombia for refining. “That means that more money stays in Panama and flows to the Guna,” he said.

When asked about the possibility of cultural extinction with a move to the mainland, Prestán Arosemena is pragmatic. “We don’t have any more options,” he said. “Before conquistadors came to Panama, we lived on the mainland. We will adapt. The most important thing is that we’ll still be in our own territory, on our own land.”