High road could pierce the heart of darkness - completing the Pan-American Highway through Panama

Insight on the News, Dec 12, 1994 by James Otis

Completing the Pan-American Highway would link North and South America via Panama's Darien jungle. Congress is holding out on the project, however, sensitive to the cries of environmentalists.

Panama has always presented challenges. Here, scientists conquered yellow fever, and workers overcame volcanic landslides to carve a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, turned the country into an international terminal.

Yet the more pedestrian task of completing the Pan-American Highway remains bogged down in a sleepy jungle hamlet known as Yavisa near the Colombian border. At a time of expanding world trade and tourism, when an underwater "chunnel" connects England to mainland Europe, a wilderness roadblock seems a throwback to another era.

In theory, the highway wends its way from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the southern tip of Chile; but at Yavisa, the road dissolves into an oozing brown muck. It resurfaces 67 miles later on the Colombian side, but to get there, a traveler must cross the Darien jungle on foot and by dugout canoe. The trek can take two weeks, and guide books warn those willing to try it to wait for the dry season.

Manifest destiny notwithstanding, there are compelling arguments against completing the highway project. Environmentalists charge that the road has wrought unprecedented destruction on one of the world's richest rain forests and that it has traumatized the local Indian communities. Still, pressure to continue construction is increasing. Colombia and Venezuela want to truck textiles to Central America and Mexico, and Panamanian supporters say the highway would be an economic bonanza to a remote backwater. "You couldn't maintain the Berlin Wall. Sooner or later, the Darien Gap will have to disappear," says Abran Preto, a logger who has lived in the Darien for decades.

Contractors boast that they could bulldoze a thoroughfare in a matter of months. But some of the best-laid plans have gone awry in the Darien Gap - hence its reputation as a brooding heart of darkness. "You can hear every kind of scream and music in the jungle," says Jose Quintano Martinez, a Panamanian guide who has encountered jaguars, packs of wild boars and bushmasters, the jungle's deadly, 8-foot-long snakes. "First you hear an ooh, ooh, ooh, and then ya, ya, ya, then an uuh, uuh, uuh." The U.S. Army's elite Green Berets trained in the Darien to prepare for the quagmire of Vietnam.

Would-be conquistadors have tried to cross the gap on everything from homemade amphibious vehicles to mountain bikes. In 1972, a British team hauled two Range Rovers through the jungle with ropes and floated them across rivers on rafts. They made it to South America in 99 days, but five Colombian soldiers accompanying the expedition drowned when their boat overturned in a swamp.

Some hikers get lost and go mad, suffering from true-life cases of "jungle fever." Francisco Giraldo, director of the Los Katios National Park on the Colombian border, recently told the Associated Press about an Austrian man found naked on a trail, crazed by hunger, panic and clouds of mosquitos. "He was absolutely raving," Giraldo says. "Rescuers had to lasso him like a cow, put him into a helicopter and fly him to a hospital."

Spanish explorers were the first to propose a royal road to South America. In the 1500s, they built a cobblestone mule trail across the Darien to carry gold bullion and Inca relics from Peru to Central America. Centuries later, American automakers salivated about the growing market for cars and parts south of the border: "When completed, [the Pan-American Highway] will make immeasurably for human happiness and open markets for 15 million American-made automobiles," declared the Washington Herald in 1928.

During World War II, Japanese expansionism and German U-boat attacks made access to Alaska, the Panama Canal and Latin American ports seem vital. The U.S. War Department (now the Department of Defense) proposed a strategic spinal column running the length of the Americas and agreed to pick up two-thirds of the bill for building it.

Working conditions on the road often were brutal. Construction crews faced steep mountain passes and annual rainfall up to 300 inches. When their blasting powder ran out, laborers had to split rocks by hand. Those in the more isolated pockets of the jungle hunted deer and gathered vegetables, literally living off the land.

Gradually, though, they managed to patch together a 15,000-mile network across 16 countries, and by the 1970s, the road snaked through much of the Darien jungle. People living in the Darien could take an eight-hour bus ride - instead of a two-day boat trip - to Panama City, and farmers could truck their yucca, yams and plantains to other markets.

Alarmed at the potential spread of hoof-and-mouth disease from Colombia, however, the U.S. government cut off funding for the road before the final leg could be finished. Panama had misgivings about drug trafficking, illegal immigration and leftist insurgency in Colombia. Even more troubling was the arrival of loggers, cattle ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers, who razed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest.