Panama's economy is
soaring today the capital Skyline could
be mistaken for Miami or
Dubai there's a Subway so new and so
clean that people are riding it for
fun and when finished the nearly decade
long project to widen the Panama Canal
will bring this tiny country billions in
new annual
revenues but Panama's infrastructure
hasn't kept pace with this
rally and now a crippling power shortage
threatens to slow or even reverse the
country's successful
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run the government's answer lies here 5
hours from the lights and traffic of
Panama City it's a massive hydroelectric
Dam known as Baro Blanco shown in this
promotional
video and when it's finished the dam
will generate some 29 megaw of new power
enough to keep the lights on in 50,00
homes but what might be good for Panama
as a whole poses an existential threat
to the 50 or so indigenous families who
live closest to the dam they're members
of Panama's largest indigenous group The
nobe bgl and they're determined to stop
the project from being
built Ricardo Miranda lives here in kot
and he's been leading the movement to
stop the dam he said says the dam when
finished will flood land that is home to
nearly 500 nobbe and choke off the river
that is a source of food and water for
other no communities
Upstream
the nobbe used to live across Panama but
since the arrival of the Spanish they've
been pushed into a sliver of land in the
western part of the country when the
government of Panama granted their land
reservation status in 1997 it was
supposed to Signal a new era of
self-rule and
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autonomy
despite their rough history the nobbe
have managed to preserve their own
pre-colombian language religion and
tradition Ricardo brings us to one of
the no's most important sites a set of
petroglyphs that he says were carved in
Rock by nobe hundreds of years ago
all this will be underwater when the dam
is
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finished a Panama City based company
called janisa is behind the $78 million
project financing has come from
development banks in Germany the
Netherlands and Central America but it
was the United Nations that really
pushed the project forward the body
approved the dam to be part of its
carbon offsetting scheme awarding Panama
valuable carbon credits and giving the
entire project the sheen of being
green
The Village's matriarch Juliana Li men
says it seems like everyone got to weigh
in on the project but her
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people
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after years of being pushed around the
nobay see this Dam as the latest and
most serious threat to their
existence and now they're fighting back
in 2012 nobay protesters in this YouTube
video can be seen blocking the
Pan-American Highway in an effort to
stop the project they were no match for
police who broke up the demonstration
and left two dead I think the Nova have
earned the right to become key actors or
key players in uh in National decision
making processes Felix Wing is a lawyer
representing the Nob and he's filed a
number of lawsuits asserting the
government of Panama violated the no's
right to sign off on large scale
projects on their territory they say
they consulted the communities but they
didn't uh in fact they um the
communities never learned about the
project until it was already approved
after visiting kot in 2013 this un
official agreed he was a special raur on
the rights of indigenous peoples and
after his visit he concluded that the
company had in fact failed to properly
consult the Nob about the project
but it was too little too late the dam
is already 75% complete and no Bay
fishermen near the construction site
have reported a sharp decline in fish
janisa has declined our repeated
requests for
comment
things are heating up once again back in
K news comes about a clash between
police and nobay demonstrators at the
dam
site a group of young men with
slingshots gather ready to join the
fight when they arrived at the dam site
things were already getting
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tense
for months protest like this didn't
amount to
anything but the Nob are as determined
as ever to stop the
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project even though they know their
slingshots don't do much more than
provoke
retaliation there are only so many rocks
the cops will take before they Strike
Back
police begin to fire tear gas and rubber
bullets to disperse the
crowd but the back and forth continues
until one of the canisters explodes in a
police officer's hands oh my God it went
off on
him the fight is over
for
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now back in kiot they're bracing
themselves for a final stand Panama
elected a new president in May and his
administration has vowed to protect the
dam and its
investors Ricardo Miranda says in turn
that his people will do whatever it
takes to avoid being pushed from their
Land once
again
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can
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foree
speech
spe
bu