Guaymí Erotic

The people outsiders have long called Guaymí call themselves Ngäbe, which means simply people, and they are the largest Indigenous nation in Panama by a wide margin. Roughly a quarter of a million live in the mountains and Caribbean lowlands of the west, most of them inside the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé, a semi-autonomous territory carved out of Chiriquí, Veraguas and Bocas del Toro in 1997 after decades of pressure. A smaller population lives across the border in southwestern Costa Rica, in five territories around Coto Brus and the Burica and Osa peninsulas, plus a floating workforce that follows the coffee harvest every year. Their language, Ngäbere, belongs to the Chibchan family, which links them to the Buglé who share the comarca, to the Naso and Bribri to the northwest, and to the Guna to the east, though it is not mutually intelligible with any of them, and the Pacific and Caribbean dialects differ noticeably.

The first thing a visitor notices is the nagua: a long, loose dress in one strong color, cut with bands of triangular appliqué at the shoulders, sleeves and hem, worn daily by most Ngäbe women whether they are in a mountain hamlet or a bus terminal in David. Men gave up equivalent dress generations ago, though the wide beaded collars called chaquiras and the pita-fiber shoulder bags called kra or chácara remain in use and have become a cash craft. The Ngäbe have a long record of not being governed. The cacique Urracá held off Spanish forces in the 1520s and now appears on Panama's one-centésimo coin, and the colonial state never really reached into the Cordillera. In the twentieth century that stubbornness turned political: a fight against the Cerro Colorado copper project in the 1970s and 1980s, highway blockades in 2012 that left two protesters dead and forced a ban on mining inside the comarca, and a long, unsuccessful resistance to the Barro Blanco dam on the Tabasará River. Religion is layered. Most Ngäbe are Catholic or evangelical, the Baha'i faith has an unusually large following here, and the Mama Tata movement, born in 1962 from a young woman's vision of the Virgin, still preaches sobriety and distance from Latino society. It condemned the balsería, the old festival in which men from rival communities hurl balsa poles at each other's legs after days of fermented corn drink. The balsería survives regardless. So does the comarca's rank as the poorest region in Panama, which shapes Ngäbe life as much as anything: seasonal labor on banana plantations and coffee farms, remittances, and a steady drift toward the towns.