The Panamanian Indigenous Ngäbe Buglé Peoples and fishers have practiced ancestral fishing in the provinces of Veraguas, Bocas del Toro, and Chiriquí for more than a hundred years. In February 2025, the government informed us that it is considering banning fishing in Escudo de Veraguas, our last ancestral fishing ground.
For our communities, who have fished sustainably with seasonal closures for centuries, this is not conservation, it is a persecution of survival. We have already endured multiple government closures of our fisheries over the years. Because of this, Escudo de Veraguas is our last fishing ground. This ban threatens our customary fishing rights, our right to food, food sovereignty, and our cultural survival.
Often, Indigenous peoples like us feel used by governments that fail to recognize all the work we have done over generations to conserve the environment. It seems there always comes a point where governments seize the territories we care for and deny us access at gunpoint, not through democracy. In the name of conservation, fishing communities have been dispossessed, even though we have been the custodians of biodiversity and food systems for centuries. Today, our livelihoods are increasingly threatened by agribusiness, extractive industries, and entrenched conservation agendas, such as the global 30×30 initiative. These fortress conservation schemes are imposed on fishing and traditional communities through deadly repression, even as they enable the destruction of ecosystems elsewhere for profit. The government has already killed three members of my family in recent months for speaking out against the Escudo de Veraguas fishing ban, as well as the new Law 462, which paves the way for the privatization of social security and has sparked indignation among the Panamanian people at large.
We, Indigenous fisherfolk, see a very prosperous future where the government can recognize our customary rights to our territories and guarantee our right as fisherfolk to participate in all decisions that affect our livelihoods, as enshrined in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and the internationally ratified Small Scale Fisheries Guidelines.
We want ownership of the island of Escudo de Veraguas to be formally handed over to the municipality and district of Kusapin so that the management of this island and the management of the fisheries, tourism, and conservation remain in the hands of the Indigenous peoples.
This September, I traveled to Geneva with my colleague and Indigenous Ngäbe Buglé fisherman, Santiago Smith, to speak before the U.N. Human Rights Council with the support of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), FIAN International (Food First Information Action Network), and the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). It was a transformative experience to appear before the UN and be welcomed with open arms by diplomats who recognized us as caretakers and defenders of the land.
In Geneva, we met with the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the teams of the Special Rapporteurs on the Rights of Human Rights Defenders, and the Right to Food. They all offered us support and affirmed that our demands to our government are part of international instruments that already exist and should be implemented.
We also met with the permanent missions of several countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, and our beloved Panama. The delegates listened to our demands, and we presented our recommendations to the Government of Panama, requesting that they be included in Panama’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR is a mechanism of the U.N, Human Rights Council used to assess the human rights situation in any country and make recommendations. Carlos Duarte, the Chair-Rapporteur of the UNDROP Working Group, spoke about how customary rights should guide policies and legal frameworks in each country in order to protect the rights of rural and Indigenous communities around the world.
Upon arriving back in Panama, we immediately met with representatives of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Panama City, before beginning our long journey back to our communities, which are 20 hours away from Panama City by bus, boat, and on foot.
We received the news that while we were pleading for our survival in Geneva, government authorities had come to destroy and confiscate our fishing nets and release our lobsters, which the fishermen had already harvested. This is an act of cruelty and imposition, knowing that our communities rely on this harvest for their subsistence. We were already complying with the government’s former fishing closures from March to June. September was our season to fish. By destroying our humble fishing systems, what does the government intend to feed us with? Their notice came to us in February. Did they intend for us to change our entire ways of life in a few months?
Outraged, we immediately joined the community to prepare for an emergency meeting convened by our local and regional governments on September 30th. Representatives of the affected districts, the mayor of the Kusapin district, and the highest authorities of the local and regional congress of the Ñö Kribo region attended. All the people affected by the fishing ban in Escudo de Veraguas and the loss of territory were present, amongst them journalists, teachers, and organizations that support the call for the island to be managed by the Kusapin District, not the national government. Together, we passed two resolutions. The first focuses on our commitment to the conservation of our environment and the promotion of ecotourism. The second focuses on the creation of an Interdisciplinary Technical Commission dedicated to the research and the development of a management plan with an ancestral approach for the sustainable use of the Escudo de Veraguas protected area.
We have practiced natural fishing closures since ancient times. These have always allowed us to fish sustainably, in line with the natural rhythm of marine species. We have always had the knowledge to fish for a total of six months of the year and stop all activities the other half of the year so that species can reproduce. Now, in the year 2025, we are engaged in this debate to distinguish between the “science” that requires our dispossession and the science, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, where the environment benefits from our ancestral practices.
Rural and Indigenous Peoples are not a threat to biodiversity, but rather its guardians. Our voices must be heard and our rights protected.
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Photo courtesy of NAMA
