METETI, Panama – The 19,000-strong indigenous Embera-Wounaan tribe resides far beyond the reach of American pollsters who regularly log high voter disapproval of the three-plus years of illegal mass migration over the Southwest U.S. Border.
But if anyone ever sought Embera opinion about distant U.S. border policy – and, almost incredibly, I may be the only one who ever has – they’d get an ear full.
The Embera live on reservation lands right at the trail exits in Panama’s infamous Darién Gap migration foot passage that in just three or so years have emptied nearly two million stampeding US-bound immigrants moving out of Colombia for eventual illegal crossings of the opened U.S. border. And while their vote of course wouldn’t count in the United States presidential election, in these modern times, indigenous tribal cries to the heavens that imperial U.S. decisions are destroying them without thought should qualify as special moral standing requiring authentic listening.
As I finally heard them during a first-ever interview with all five Embera tribal chiefs and aired them in the New York Post, they demand that U.S. border policies that set off this vast destructive great migration through their “Comarca” lands, never asking permission nor begging forgiveness, be ended. They also want the United States to help immediately close the Darién Gap at the Panama-Colombia border for the sake of their cultural survival.
Embera tribal chiefs. Credit: Todd Bensman
“Mr. President and you candidates, you are finishing us off, and you are killing all the Indians on the Comarca!” General Chief Leonide Cunampia said. “You have to pay attention to what’s going on in our territory. The immigration is contaminating us!”
The chiefs, including Jose Anilo Barringon, Cirilo Pena, Vianide Cunapa, and Pablo Guainora, described a long litany of environmental poisonings of their village water supplies, harvest theft, and especially of corrupting access to immigrant currency that has diverted an entire generation of Embera youth from their own rich culture to drugs and alcohol. They reserve special ire for the United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have set up shop all over their reservation with “zero” permission to lure, aid and abet the mass migration. For the millions in cash the United States directs their way.
Embera earning cash running immigrants out of the Darien Gap. Leaders say the money has led the younger generation astray into drugs and alcohol. Credit: Todd Bensman
Much more must be said about all of this. The unheard cries of the Embera serve as a wake-up call that U.S. policy, enacted without sufficient thoughtfulness, often portends destructive consequences far away. The United States is ever the elephant, all too often stamping mice it never saw, thought of, or cared about, especially if no one else did either.
All the above appears to have been the case since the Biden-Harris administration’s opening days in 2021, when it decided to reverse Donald Trump’s impactful deterrence policies and instead release into the United States vast numbers of illegal border crossers with pinky finger honor system shakes that they’d self-report someday to an ICE office in the city of settlement choice. Once the world caught on that the Americans were really, truly doing this crazy thing on a massive scale, the relative trickle of less than 10,000 foreign nationals a year crossing through the Darién Gap before 2021, flooded the Embera zone to 250,000 in 2022 and 550,000 in 2023 with a similar number projected for 2024.
The time is well beyond nigh that the United States hear the Embera cries for help and stop stomping on them. It shouldn’t matter that they don’t vote in American elections; change is warranted enough by deference to the terrible history of U.S. elephant stomping of indigenous tribes that looks just like this latest instance of it.
Regional Embera Chief Pablo Guainora. Credit: Todd Bensman.
What struck me most listening to the five Embera chiefs is how much their concerns reminded me of when U.S. policy allowed gold miners, settlers, and the U.S. cavalry to push aside and destroy Native American tribes during the 19th Century.
American and international liberal UN and NGO groups are clearly repeating that same terrible old history with the Embera, prioritizing the interests of foreign national “settlers” over the interests of Native tribes in this new “gold rush” to the U.S. border.
What stood out as especially ironic in this Darién Gap situation is that, since the bad old 19th Century days of developing the American West, all sorts of indigenous-protection human rights groups step up long before alarm bells like this one are already sounding. But for the Embera, none have reached out even once, the chiefs say.
Why the hell not? I believe it’s because they won’t cross their politically ideological allies doing immigration advocacy work in Panama for hundreds of millions of dollars. When it comes to money, one liberal cause can win out at the expense of other traditionally liberal causes that don’t pay as much.
One would think that the liberal progressives who staff the UN and NGOs down there would occupy a higher moral plane than Gen. George Armstrong Custer or President Andrew Jackson during their days of doling out pain to indigenous peoples. But economic migrants rushing toward U.S. gold clearly are too profitable.
The perfect opportunity to save the Embera has just availed itself too, in the form of a new Panamanian president – Jose Raul Mulino – who took office July 1 promising to “close the Darién Gap” for the first time and begging the U.S. government to pick up the tab for enough deterring air deportations.
But alas, the Biden administration’s commitment has proven tepid, to say the least, having spent the last three years pouring cash into the UN and NGOs who have transitioned the Darién Gap from country lane to superhighway with their so-called “safe, humane, and orderly” smuggling.
Embera couple in traditional dress. Credit: Embera tribe.
A Harris or Trump administration could quadruple down on investments to help the new Panamanian government actually deter these vast numbers pouring through the Embera Comarca.
But like the gold miners who invaded the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in the 1870s, the lure of profit for everyone but the natives is just too irresistible for anyone to care about the little tribe in Panama.
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Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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