Panama Connection

Sept. 27, 2006

There’s nothing like serving as a Peace Corps volunteer to learn how America’s demand for cocaine ultimately forces a good-hearted tribal leader to flee from seven assassins through a thick, tangled rainforest.
The tribal leader’s name is Sergio and he had befriended Ashley Thompson of Traverse City and her newlywed husband, Jon Fazzola. For the last two years, they worked for the Peace Corps in Panama, one of the safest and most stable countries in Central America—safe, except for where they lived.
The Peace Corps pulled Thompson and Fazzola out of the country a few days before their scheduled departure. Peace Corps officials feared they might be kidnapped, or even worse, killed due to their high profile of being white, American, and Peace Corps workers—not to mention their friendship with Sergio.
Thompson and Fazzola were home for a few weeks in late August, staying with Thompson’s parents who live at the base of Old Mission Peninsula. They were still in awe of the hot water showers and soft beds without the buzz of mosquitoes.
Fazzola and Thompson stressed that the high drama of their last few weeks in Panama was just a tiny fraction of a fantastic experience in the skinny country that is home to warm and generous people.
WORLD TRAVELERS
Thompson and Fazzola, both 25, were college sweethearts. They met at Kalamazoo College, married soon after school, and have already traveled the world. Because they both worked with migrants and studied abroad, they spoke Spanish fairly well. Spanish, however, varies greatly from country to country, so they struggled with Panama’s version.
After graduating, they wanted to continue traveling and experiencing another way of life, prompting them to join the Peace Corps. In late June of last year, they left for their assignment that was literally at the end of the road: the 16,000-mile Pan-American Highway that runs from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. The only break in the highway is close to where Thompson and Fazzola were assigned—the 54-mile Darien Gap, where the highway dribbles into a dirt road, and then ends without fanfare in the village of Yaviza. They were placed in Meteti, about 30 miles up the road. From there to the Colombian border is a dense, lush, and spongy rainforest where live several indigenous tribes.
The Lonely Planet Guide gives this pithy warning about trekking into the Darien Gap— “Don’t even think about it!”

TOO CLOSE TO COLOMBIA
The rainforest is nearly impenetrable and also a hide-out and resting spot of sorts for rebel groups from Colombia. One is a revolutionary group called FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), guerrillas who dress in camouflage. They claim they are fighting for the rights of the poor, but make millions through extortion, kidnapping and drug running, sometimes recruiting 12-year-olds as soldiers.
Also inhabiting the jungle are paramilitary groups, who have also leaked over the Colombia border. They make up a rather weird alliance of landlords, political bosses, and drug lords. Their common interest is a hatred of FARC guerrillas constantly extorting protection money. These paramilitary groups have mushroomed in recent years and are responsible for a good share of the killing in Colombia.
The drug runners make life miserable in the villages of the native people. Basically, the FARC wants the consent of the villages to run drugs and often splits a community. Some villagers desperately accept the drug runners’ money, while others believe it’s taking a ticket to hell. Sergio, a handsome, charismatic tribal leader in his early 40s, was in the latter group and thus targeted for assassination, Fazzola said.
But this is getting ahead of the story.

MOVING IN
Fazzola and Thompson were impressed by the peacefulness of the village during their two-year stay. They realized the Darien Gap was dangerous—a village man told them that FARC guerrillas kidnapped him in 1998 and held him for ransom for two years. But the couple felt that the violence was on the fringes in the rainforest, and they were able to get quite a bit done.
Rolling into town on an old school bus, Fazzola and Thompson had to go through three checkpoints before they reached
Panama City. Every little town has a police station. The police carry AK-47s and have a bit of a military edge, in part, because the country disbanded its true military in the 1990s
after the overthrow of Manuel Noriega.
Their cement block house had a pink, stucco, California look. There were fresh air gaps along the roof so the couple had frequent visitors—rats, lizards, poisonous frogs, lots of snakes, and ants, which once swarmed the wall en masse one night—“like a National Geographic movie,” Fazzola said.
Thompson worked with a regional health center for Panama’s Ministry of Health to help townspeople prevent diarrhea, teen pregnancies, malaria, high blood pressure, and sexually transmitted diseases.
“One thing I was proud of was this: the health center opened up at 8 a.m., so the people start lining up at 7:30. We took advantage of the captive audience by doing a daily health talk from 7:30 to 8 a.m. on how to prevent malaria, STDs, and other basic health education themes,” Thompson said.
She also helped start a Youth Health Promoter group, working through the town’s high school, attended mostly by country kids who lived with in-town relatives. In order to graduate, a student had to earn 80 hours of community service.
“We told them, come join our program and you’ll get your 80 hours as a youth health promoter going to the community or schools to talk about STDs,” Thompson said.
Because of the guidelines specified by the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS (the PEPFAR program), the health promoters were required to emphasize abstinence and being faithful. “President Bush said that only a small fraction of money could go toward education about condoms and protection,” Thompson said.

GOVERMENT SNOOPS
Peace Corps workers in Africa and Asia told Thompson that monitors were hired to audit health lectures and ensure the guidelines were obeyed (if not, the health program would risk not receiving funding the next year or even being shut down).
Thompson tried not to focus on the limitations, but instead on helping youth build their self-esteem by getting them involved in projects and setting goals. A youth’s self esteem is the biggest predictor of responsible behavior, Thompson said.
“If a girl has no self-confidence, she is easily persuaded to have sex or to not make an issue of birth control. I ended up feeling really good because I felt I was really making a difference.”
To get the youth—most all who grew up in the country—to think more expansively and ambitiously about their lives, the couple took a small group of youth health promoters to a conference in Panama City.
It was a great success, although Thompson dreaded the long ride to Panama City. They always took an old school bus painted with a Caribbean flair with windows down, salsa music playing full blast, and chickens in the aisle. The ride, in theory, was supposed to take only seven hours, but frequently broke down. The biggest problem was the driver had to replace a flat old, worn tire with a different old, worn tire.
On one of their worst rides, the couple was forced to balance on a broken seat (over the wheel). A young boy started vomiting across the aisle, and then his mother—worried about his empty and hungry stomach--would feed him again. Then a chicken started pecking at the vomit. It was more than Thompson could stand, so she finally reported it to the bus driver.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he asked. He threw a bucket of water on the vomit, which splashed onto everything—including Fazzola’s suitcase.
“Needless to say, I was throwing up the next night,” Thompson said.

COMPOSTING LATRINE
Fazzola worked on public health projects, educating villagers on how to prevent malaria by dumping out standing water where mosquitoes breed. He also worked on a composting latrine, an ingenious invention for producing composted human waste.
“After six months, it produces a compost that looks like earth and has no smell. You can grow vegetables with it, use it as compost. You can use this latrine your whole life. We spent a month on building eight,” Fazzola said.
Trying to stay healthy was a huge challenge. The couple avoided drinking water, but it was impolite to refuse what was offered, including coffee or tea. Fazzola, with the stronger stomach, would drink his coffee and then quietly trade cups with his wife, and drink her coffee too. Despite her efforts, Ashley ended up sick for three months from a parasitic stomach infection.
As time went on, the couple felt at home. The village kids would come in and hang around the house and watch Fazzola do dishes. A man doing dishes was something to behold, Fazzola said.
The couple soon had a circle of trusted friends, including Sergio, who was a health promoter and a community leader in one of the indigenous villages. He was trying to convince his village to resist the drug lords and winning over many converts. Yet he knew his stance might cost him his life—drug runners killed his brother-in-law in 1997. In July, he learned seven assassins had been sent to kill him.

THE ESCAPE
“The best way out of his village was the river, but I think that Sergio feared that he’d be ambushed on the river so he decided to walk through the rainforest,” Thompson said.
Sergio’s niece, Kitty, lived in Meteti and was panicked. She began calling Fazzola and Thompson every couple hours. They were not only her friends, but the only people she felt she could trust, since drug runners often hire other villagers to work as spies.
“It took three days to walk through it, and he looked exhausted when we saw him. I have no idea how he ever got through the jungle and what he had to endure. We saw him just after he arrived. We dropped off some banana bread to Kitty and his extended family. We went into the house, we were thrilled to see him, and we listened to his story of escape. But we thought we probably shouldn’t be here because anyone could be watching the house. You always want to over-exaggerate your own importance,” Thompson said.
When the couple told Peace Corps officials about Sergio a few weeks later, they were quickly sent home. They felt guilty leaving behind Sergio and the indigenous people who lived in fear of the drug runners, and suffered in other ways. For example, many nonprofit groups refuse to deliver medicine or supplies to the rainforest villages, fearing guerrilla attacks. The Panama police also offer little to no protection because they are not allowed to fire unless fired upon.
Fazzola believes that legalizing the drug trade would cause drug prices to plummet, quickly reduce the fabulous profits, and ultimately bring calm to the area. He and Thompson have since left Traverse City to study at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Thompson is getting a law degree, Fazzola is studying public policy.
“I’ll be able to solve all of this when I’m done in two years,” he joked.