The Script of Violence: How Bocas del Toro Exposes Panama's Colonial Wounds. Part 1

The internet went out in Bocas del Toro on Saturday morning. As dawn rose over Panama's Caribbean province, residents found themselves disconnected from the world—no social media, no communication with family, no way to document what was happening to them. The government called it restoring order. For the predominantly Black and Indigenous communities of this banana-rich region, it felt like something much more familiar: the silencing that always comes when they dare to resist.

President José Raúl Mulino's declaration of a "state of emergency," suspending constitutional guarantees, freedom of movement, assembly and expression—marks the latest chapter in a story that began over a century ago when the United Fruit Company first carved its empire from the lands of Chanquinola. Today, that same company operates under the name Chiquita, and the script remains unchanged: extract wealth, exploit workers, and when they organize, unleash state violence to protect corporate interests.

Bocas del Toro sits like a jewel on Panama's Caribbean coast, an archipelagic province where turquoise waters meet dense tropical rainforest. Its beauty masks a brutal economic reality: this is banana country, where 90% of Panama's banana production flows through the hands of a single U.S. multinational. The province's economy depends entirely on two industries—banana cultivation and tourism—both have historically relied on the labor of Black and Indigenous communities while channeling profits elsewhere.

The Black communities of Bocas del Toro trace their roots to multiple waves of migration and displacement. Some descend from enslaved Africans brought to work colonial plantations. Others arrived as contract workers from Jamaica and Barbados in the early 1900s, recruited by the United Fruit Company to clear forests and plant the banana monocultures that would define the region's economy. Still others came fleeing violence and seeking opportunities from throughout the Caribbean and Central America.

These communities built vibrant cultures where African traditions mixed with Caribbean influences—creating unique musical forms, culinary traditions and social structures that sustained them through decades of exploitation. Their languages—English Creole, Spanish and Indigenous languages—reflect the complex history of a region where corporate colonialism intersected with multiple forms of displacement and resistance.

Before the banana plantations, before the tourist resorts, the Ngobe Buglé and other Indigenous peoples managed these lands for millennia. Today, Indigenous communities continue to inhabit the province's interior, maintaining traditional practices while facing constant pressure from 'development' projects, environmental degradation and the expansion of monoculture agriculture.

The current crisis affects Indigenous communities both directly and indirectly. Many work in the banana industry or tourism sector, making them vulnerable to economic disruptions caused by the protests. More fundamentally, the state of emergency and suspension of constitutional guarantees represents a familiar pattern of state violence that Indigenous communities have faced for centuries—the deployment of exceptional measures to protect extractive industries at the expense of human rights.

When 5,000 banana workers went on strike in May, protesting pension reforms that would reduce hard-won benefits, Chiquita's response was swift and brutal: mass layoffs. The company, which reported $75 million in losses due to the strikes, characterized the workers' action as "unjustified abandonment of work." This language—criminalizing labor organizing as abandonment—echoes the same rhetoric that the United Fruit Company used a century ago to justify violence against striking workers throughout Central America. The colonial mentality has not abandoned them; it remains very present.

The firing of thousands of workers in a province where banana cultivation provides the primary source of employment amounts to economic warfare against entire communities. In Changuinola, the province's largest city and main banana center, families suddenly found themselves without income, without healthcare, without the basic security that employment provides. The desperation that followed—the road blockades, confrontations with police, attacks on Chiquita facilities—must be understood as responses to this initial act of corporate violence.

President Mulino's emergency declaration reveals the true relationship between the Panamanian state and foreign capital. When workers organize, when communities resist, the state suspends the constitution itself to protect corporate interests. "Operation Omega"—the military-style operation deploying more than 1,900 police officers to "retake" the province—frames popular resistance as a security threat requiring exceptional measures, and reveals what alone sustains the Mulino government: public force. There lies its political power.

The language used by government officials is revealing. Presidential minister Juan Carlos Orillac spoke of "rescuing" the province from "radical groups," as if communities fighting for their economic survival were foreign invaders rather than the people who have worked these lands for generations. This rhetoric of rescue and invasion inverts reality: it is the communities themselves who need rescue from a system that treats their labor as disposable and their resistance as terrorism.

Human Rights in the Crosshairs

The suspension of constitutional guarantees in Bocas del Toro violates multiple international human rights instruments that Panama has ratified. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention Against Torture prohibit the arbitrary suspension of fundamental rights, even during states of emergency.

The cutting of internet access represents a particularly insidious form of state violence. In the digital age, communication is not just convenience—it's a lifeline. Families separated by police operations cannot verify each other's safety. Workers cannot coordinate mutual aid. More critically, communities cannot document and share evidence of state violence, creating an information blackout that enables further abuses.

The detention of 140 people, including 11 minors, under emergency powers that allow arrests without judicial orders, violates basic due process rights. The death of a protester—found with a wound in his back after police deployed tear gas—demands independent investigation, not the official narrative that treats his death as incidental to "restoring order."

What is happening in Bocas del Toro cannot be separated from Panama's broader alignment with U.S. imperial interests. Mulino's government has signed a controversial security agreement allowing U.S. military bases on Panamanian soil—the first such arrangement since the 1989 U.S. invasion. This militarization of Panama serves U.S. strategic interests while providing the Panamanian elite with the security apparatus necessary to suppress resistance within the country.

The pension reform that sparked the protests—Law 462—follows the familiar neoliberal playbook of austerity measures that transfer economic risk from capital to workers. Though presented as necessary for fiscal sustainability, such reforms consistently benefit financial institutions and foreign investors while imposing hardships on working communities.

Despite the internet blackout, despite suspended rights, despite overwhelming police presence, resistance continues in Bocas del Toro. This resistance draws from deep wells of historical memory—memories of previous struggles against the United Fruit Company, memories of community organizing that won previous victories, memories of survival strategies developed through generations of exploitation.

The participation of both unions and Indigenous groups in the protests reflects the intersectional nature of the struggle. This is not simply a labor dispute, but a fight for communities' right to exist with dignity on their ancestral and adopted lands. It is a rejection of the colonial logic that treats people and places as resources to be extracted rather than communities to be respected.

The International Dimension

The crisis in Bocas del Toro exposes the limitations of international human rights frameworks when confronted with the intersection of state and corporate power. While international bodies may condemn the suspension of constitutional guarantees, they have little power to address the underlying economic violence that created the crisis—the mass layoffs, exploitative working conditions, the deprivation of freedom of their union leaders, the extraction of wealth from communities that remain impoverished despite their labor.

This highlights the need for new frameworks that recognize economic violence as a form of human rights violation. The right to work, to organize, to live with dignity in one's own community—these cannot be separated from traditional civil and political rights if human rights are to have meaning for the world's most vulnerable communities.

As the state of emergency is about to end, the people of Bocas del Toro face an uncertain future. The immediate crisis may pass, the internet may return, constitutional guarantees may be restored. But the underlying conditions that created this explosion—economic dependence on exploitative industries, the alignment of state power with corporate interests, the abandonment of Black and Indigenous communities—will remain.

Real resolution requires more than lifting the state of emergency. It requires recognizing that communities have the right to economic self-determination, that workers have the right to organize without facing mass termination, that the state has obligations to its people that supersede its obligations to foreign corporations.

The darkness that fell over Bocas del Toro when the internet went out is not just technological—it is the darkness that always descends when power seeks to hide its violence from the world. But as history shows us, that darkness is never permanent. The light of resistance, of community solidarity, of the demand for dignity—that light cannot be extinguished by emergency decrees or corporate board decisions.

The people of Bocas del Toro are not just fighting for pension benefits or job security. They are fighting for the right to exist as complete human beings in a system designed to treat them as disposable. Their struggle is our struggle, their resistance is our hope, their demand for justice is a demand we must all carry forward.