Panama: The Corridor of Despair
By Lauren Fitzgerald
On the nameless road from Soná to the beaches, marked “SUR” with an arrow on the side of a house, there are eight churches and twelve cantinas, six schools and one broken bridge. The road is unfinished in some places, riddled with potholes in others, and at times congested with cows. It is known as the Corridor of Despair.
Every few miles, giant signs along the road announce that you are in La Isla Coiba’s ecological buffer zone. Now a National Park and World Heritage site, the island was formerly a high-security prison. A few well-behaved convicts currently work there as tour guides. It is a tropical rainforest paradise, untouched and unstudied. It beckons to tourists, lures them down the road, past tiny towns with tiny stores and houses.
To ride down the road in a bus or car is to watch a slideshow of Panamanian faces through the window, always staring, always still. Everything is picturesque; everyone is posing. The old men have their hats on and the children are all naked, and every woman of childbearing age has a baby on her hip and no one is wearing any shoes. Every instant is a photo opportunity, but the moments go by too fast, and you’re saving your film for the island. Maybe on the way back.
I never made it to Coiba, but I live in the Corridor of Despair,in a town called La Soledad, the loneliness. I watch the cars pass from the porch of my wood-and-clay house. Taxis with surfboards tied to the tops, delivery trucks full of soda and bread and beer. Tiny buses stuffed with uniformed schoolchildren. Enormous buses half-full of tourists, sleeping or staring, mouths hanging open. Watching a slideshow of Panamanian faces and one shot that doesn’t belong. A white girl in Chaco sandals, swinging in a hammock.
The poorest part of La Soledad is called Coibita, meaning Little Coiba.
“Did they choose that name because La Isla Coiba is so beautiful?” I ask Karina, my 13 year-old friend. “Because of all those different colored birds, and flowers, and tall, tall trees? And the reefs in the water, and the schools of tropical fish?”
“No,” she says. “I think they chose that name because La Isla Coiba is full of black people who live like savages.”
Karina’s little palm house is where Coibita begins. Her neighbor is Salustiano “Tano” Mojica, a famous singer whose house is not considered part of Coibita because it is two stories tall and because he has been on TV. On the other side of his house is the cantina whose owner blasts his "Tano" Mojica CD every night, hoping the singer will come down for a beer. And next to the cantina, you can see the tienda where Karina buys food for her family on credit, and where her brother started working to pay off their debt.
The houses in Coibita are made from all-natural materials, because the residents cannot afford blocks or zinc. The walls and roofs are thatched palm fronds. The floors are dirt. There is no electricity, and only a few houses have water taps connected to La Soledad’s aqueduct. Everyone else uses the river. There are few latrines. The houses are surrounded by an intricate web of barbed wire; you have to crawl through it, or under it, and try not to catch your clothes.
Many of the houses do not have doors. When you pass, you can see inside to the beds, those low wooden tables covered in newspaper. Sun-faded posters adorn the doors of the houses with doors, and the walls of the ones without, photographs of La Isla Coiba with the Ministry of Tourism logo and a calendar of the year 2001. They were given out in the school by a man from the Ministry of Tourism, who gave a presentation about Coiba’s beauty and how to make tourists feel welcome.
In Coibita, there is a family that disappears every time I walk by so they never have to talk to me. There is an old woman who makes and sells guarapo out of a yellow plastic bucket that is hidden behind the house because it’s illegal. There is a man who is too old to work and has no family, so he chops wood and sells it on the road. There is a girl who is ugly but tiene sus gracias, who helps support her grandparents through rural prostitution. There are twins named Dolores María and María Dolores, identical and raised by their father because their mother ran away with a Costa Rican.
One square of barbed wire is empty; that’s because the house that used to be there burned up. The couple that lived there was young, 19 and 22, with a baby about to turn one. I was at home playing UNO with Karina when she saw the flames across the way and said, “¡Se quema una casa!” She grabbed my hand and we ran over the field in the dark in our flip-flops to where people were standing in a ring around the fire. All that you could see of the house was the frame, made from tree limbs, and as we stood there, that too disintegrated. The young mother was crying and her husband was yelling at her to stop crying, saying, “Eso no se llora.” Their baby was screaming, and a lot of other people were screaming at each other too but I have trouble understanding Spanish when people scream. Karina was standing next to me saying, "Todo. To---do. Se quemó todo." Everything. Everything burned.
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