The Wild Darien Gap

3-20-1994
^Darien Gap: To be Wild No More If Highway Comes
^By ANDREW SELSKY-
^Associated Press Writer-
   LOS KATIOS NATIONAL PARK, Colombia (AP) _ Victor Palomar emerged bug-bitten, weary and triumphant from the Darien Gap, a jungle teeming with jaguar, wild boar, bandits, guerrillas and drug traffickers.
   He had crossed the Darien before the final link of the Pan American Highway is built across it - if it is built - to complete the route from Alaska to Argentina.
   "It's just jungle, jungle, jungle, but it was worth it," said the 36- year-old bartender from Madrid.
   Plans to finish the highway delight settlers who have sawed, hacked and burned much of the tropical rain forest around the Darien, and dismay environmentalists who fear it will open the heart of the wilderness to settlers.
   The Darien Gap, covering 85 miles where North and South America meet, attracts adventurers from around the globe.
   Palomar's guide slept with a gun at his side during their week-long journey. Two weeks earlier, a Danish trekker had been found murdered.
   Natural dangers abound: There are swamps that can swallow a man. Packs of wild boar have devoured unwary travelers.
   "Not even your boots would be left after they got through with you," said Francisco Giraldo, director of Los Katios National Park in the southeastern Darien.
   Some travelers get lost and go mad. An Austrian was found naked on a trail, crazed by panic, hunger and clouds of insects.
   "He was absolutely raving," Giraldo said. "Rescuers had to lasso him like a cow, put him into a helicopter and fly him to a hospital."
   Safety is not assured even at the park headquarters, a few clapboard buildings and a dirt airstrip that the army plowed up so it could not be used by drug traffickers. Two years ago a Dutch tourist was kidnapped from his room at the headquarters and has not been seen since, Giraldo said.
   Wildlife abounds in the jungle.
   An Associated Press reporter and photographer who traveled with Giraldo for three days saw eagles soaring over the waterways, one grasping a fish in its talons. In the trees, monkeys howled and parrots chattered. We saw a crocodile, a sloth, a boar, the tracks of a jaguar.
   In the cleared area that once was part of the rain forest, cattle graze in fields studded with charred tree stumps.
   The settlers are proud of having carved ranches and lives from the wilderness.
   "When I got here 20 years ago, all this was pure jungle," Jose Monterosa said, supervising the loading of timber onto a truck near the end of the highway.
   "I was tortured by mosquitoes in the early days. I could barely stand it. But now they're not around anymore: There's no jungle and it doesn't rain like it used to."
   Monterosa and other settlers say rain fell 10 months of the year a decade ago, but only six now. Environmentalists are worried by such a change in climate wrought by humans; by the whittling away of "the world's lungs," as Giraldo calls the forest, and by the loss of plant and animal species.
   Only several hundred acres of a subspecies of a tree called cativo remain in the Darien, Giraldo said, and the tree is not known to grow anywhere else.
   Claudia Leal, a researcher for Biopacifico, an agency commissioned by the government to study the highway's impact, said environmental damage will be inevitable if it goes through.
   "Wherever highways exist in Colombia, there is deforestation on both sides," she said.
   The Interamerican Development Bank has given Colombia a $1.5 million loan to finance an environmental impact study.
   Hugo Fuentes of the Public Works and Transportation Ministry says construction of the highway link may begin this year, but efforts to build it in previous decades have failed for various reasons.
   Also, 52 miles of the 85-mile gap is in Panama. Officials there  have attached little urgency to the project and Antonio Dominguez, the public works minister, said there "is fear it would facilitate drug trafficking" through Panama.
   If the highway is never built, that would be just fine with Giraldo.
   He stood atop an observation tower, gazing at a carpet of rain forest. Twelve miles away, the forest ended where the highway began, as if God had laid down a giant ruler and decreed that one side would be jungle, the other bare.
   "The engineers come, build the highway, leave, and then the whole world comes." the park director said. "And look what happens."