Panama's indigenous people see Redd over UN forest conservation scheme
Indigenous groups have rejected UN forest plan as attempt to colonise them, as tensions over land management grow
Embera Indians in the village of Mogue, in the Darien region of Panama. Photograph: Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images
A few years ago, Mario Degaiza worked in construction in Panama
City, where he learned Spanish and, for a while, was excited by the
hustle and the bustle of urban life. But the 36-year-old Embera Indian
says he is far happier now he has returned to his home village of
Marraganti and the tropical forest that surrounds it.
"The forest is our mother," he says while tucking into a bowl of rice and fried plantains in a traditional one-room and wall-free house built on stilts to keep floods and snakes at bay. "But it is still beautiful, it is ours and we have to look after it because without it we are nothing."
Marraganti nestles beside a river within the most impenetrable part of Panama's jungle-covered Darien province that borders Colombia and is the only part of the Americas without a stretch of the Pan-American highway. Darien is now getting a reputation as a quagmire for the UN's climate change amelioration scheme Redd+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).
"The forest is our mother," he says while tucking into a bowl of rice and fried plantains in a traditional one-room and wall-free house built on stilts to keep floods and snakes at bay. "But it is still beautiful, it is ours and we have to look after it because without it we are nothing."
Marraganti nestles beside a river within the most impenetrable part of Panama's jungle-covered Darien province that borders Colombia and is the only part of the Americas without a stretch of the Pan-American highway. Darien is now getting a reputation as a quagmire for the UN's climate change amelioration scheme Redd+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).
