Thousand-foot-long ships tumble every day through the Panama Canal’s waters, over the submerged logs of a forgotten forest and onto the shores of a new one, its canopies full of screaming parrots and howler monkeys. About 14,000 pass through its locks each year, their decks stacked high 6 percent of the world’s commercial goods, crossing the paths of tugboats on the voyage between oceans.
In early 2023, the weather pattern known as El Niño ushered in a suffocating drought traffic through the canal, which dropped water levels in Gatun Lake, the canal’s main reservoir, to record lows and revealed the tops of trees that drowned when the canal was created at the beginning of the last century. It takes 52 million gallons of water to get a cargo ship through the canal’s locks, and by December, only 22 of the usual 36 ships were allowed to make the passage each day. Some vessels chose long routes around Africa instead, while others offer as much as $4 million to skip the queue which had grown to more than a hundred ships.
More than a year later, the water is rising and the bump has cleared, thanks to increased rainfall as well as the Panama Canal Authority’s water management and a recently installed third set water recycling locks. But the problems are bound to resurface: El Niño returns every 2 to 7 years, and when it does, climate change will continue to kick in. higher gear. Panama’s growing urban population also needs drinking water – much of which comes from the same Gatun Lake that feeds the canal’s locks.
“This means that if we do not increase water capacity in about a decade, we will not be able to provide water to the citizens,” Óscar Ramírez, the president of the canal authority’s water resources committee, said at a press conference this summer said. according to the newspaper La Estrella de Panama.
A view of exposed tree stumps in Lake Gatun in Colon, Panama in August 2023.
Daniel Gonzalez/Anadolu Agency via Getty
With a future crisis seeming inevitable, the canal authority turns to a long-considered solution: Dam the neighboring Río Indio to create a new reservoir, which can be tapped to replenish the canal when water levels drop, and dig ‘ a 5-mile-long tunnel to connect it with the canal. The idea effectively got the green light this summer when the Supreme Court struck down an old law, thereby expanding the canal authority’s jurisdiction to include the Río Indio basin. In total, the project will probably take six more years and $1.6 billion. Once the reservoir is built, Ramírez told reporters, both local residents and the canal will have all the water they need for another 50 years.
Filling the reservoir would submerge approx 17.7 square miles of landcurrently home to more than 2,000 Panamanians, according to La Estrella de Panama. Building the dam will require relocating schools, health centers and churches that serve them. An additional 12,000 people, many of them farmers, live in the surrounding area.
Humans have been building dams for thousands of years, but such mega-dam projects are a feature of economic development in modern times. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Center, dams are estimated to have displaced 80 million people worldwide during the 20th century, and information about their fate is scarce. The canal authority recognized the hardships that moving people would cause, and did said that they will not begin construction until they have consulted with these residents and heard their concerns.
“I think there’s often a better alternative than building a new dam, but of course dams are still going to be built,” said Heather Randell, an assistant professor of global policy at the University of Minnesota who impact of dam projects on communities. In her research, she found that people who are forced to move often lose their social networks and livelihoods and end up in poverty. In Vietnam, construction of the Son La Hydropower dam in the mid-2000s 90,000 people displaced and moved them to smaller plots of farmland. Revenues fell by an average of 65 percent.
Those who live nearby are also often disrupted. As the diverted water upsets the ecosystem, neighboring areas may have trouble finding food, or see diseases spread more quickly. In Africa, for example, decades of research show multiple cases of schistosomiasis, a chronic disease caused by parasitic worms, peak near dam projects and man-made reservoirs. In many regions, climate change amplifies these problems.
Residents of El Limón, a town in the Río Indio river basin, walk past a multi-grade school building.
Tova Katzman for Concolón Magazine
While there is no harm-free way to displace people, Randell says, it can help to fairly compensate them for their lost livelihoods and land. In the 1970s, the government of Panama promised to make such payments to thousands of indigenous people from the Kuna and Emberá communities who had to be relocated for a large hydroelectric dam in Panama’s Darién province. In 2014, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that the government never made these payments and failed to provide titles to protect their new lands, leaving them vulnerable to invasion by illegal settlers. These days, says Randell, there are “definitely improvements in the recognition that if you’re going to displace a bunch of people, you have to compensate them fairly.”
The canal authority says it plans to compensate residents, with the aim of improving or maintaining their quality of life. “If a person has livestock, we must preserve those livestock, even if they are displaced, because this is their livelihood,” said Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, the Panama Canal Authority’s administrator. Estrella de Panama’s reporting. According to El Siglo, another national newspaper, the authority held meetings with more than 1,600 people live in the area that would be flooded.
Randell says that community activism can also help mitigate the risks to people and the environment. In Brazil, decades of protests against the Belo Monte dam project, which began in 1979, attracted international attention and put pressure on developers – leading to the cancellation of the original project in 2002. When it was relaunched shortly afterwards , were the plans scaled down considerably. At least before the dam could be opened in 2016 20,000 people had to move to make room for its construction. “While it may not stop the project completely, it can still have a positive impact on how bad the project is going to be for people or for the environment,” Randell said.
Panama has recently seen a surge of such environmental activism. Last year, hundreds of protesters marched through cities and blocked roads after Panama’s legislature extended Minera Panamá’s operating contract for Cobre Panama, the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America. Panama’s Supreme Court declared the contract unconstitutional in November 2023 and the mine has been closed ever since ceased operations. According to La Prensathe canal authorities are actively trying to avoid a repeat of these protests while negotiating with the towns affected by the proposed Río Indio reservoir. (The Panama Canal Authority did not respond to Grist’s repeated requests for comment.)
People from dozens of these towns in the provinces of Western Panama, Colón and Coclé were protest against the damming of the Rio Indo since the environmental impact study for the project was carried out between 2017 and 2020. Last year, a coalition of farmers representing districts of these provinces – some of whom have already been uprooted by the copper mine – signed an agreement. community agreement to reject the reservoir, while also calling for the closure of Minera Panamá. Since the Supreme Court’s decision to extend the canal authority’s jurisdiction in July, leaders of the same groups have continued to organize meetings and express their voice concerns for media. Last month, a poll of families living on the banks of the Río Indio, conducted by a professor of sociology from the University of Panama, found 90 percent is opposed to the dam. Meanwhile, the canal authority started a census to count the number of families in the river’s catchment area, and set up a hotline for their questions.
Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, Panama’s canal administrator, speaks during a press conference at the authority’s headquarters in Panama City in September 2023.
Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty
The last time work on the Panama Canal needed to overturn entire towns was when it was first built, more than a century ago. A treaty ratified in 1904, gave the United States eminent domain over the Canal Zone – the power to seize any property within a tract of land covering the entire 50-mile length of the canal’s future waterways and 5 miles on either side of it include. About 40,000 people were driven from the Zone to create the canal and the lakes attached to it.
“The flooding became the only story, and it’s not the complete story,” said Marixa Lasso, a historian at the Panama Center for Historical, Anthropological and Cultural Research in Panama City. “It was used as an excuse to evict people who did not need to be expelled.” Instead, she says, many towns were displaced to create exclusively American towns, where families of expatriates who worked on the canal, known as Zonians, had lived for generations.
US control of the region continued until a 1977 treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian military dictator Omar Torrijos ceded the canal to Panama in late 1999. Lasso said what separates the present from the past is that the decision on how to handle the canal now rests with the Panamanian government, giving citizens a greater say in their own destiny. She says it’s important to consider alternatives, and if the only solution requires people to be displaced, history shows how important it is to keep communities intact and close to their original lands.
“Last time we couldn’t have a say in what happened,” said Lasso.
