Ngobe Bugle Girl in El Salto

Amistad International Park is in C. America’s Talamanca Mountains. Amistad is home to the largest virgin forest remaining in C. America. Amistad is a fitting name since it straddles the Costa Rica – Panama border and Amistad is Spanish for “friendship”. The park is home to stunning biodiversity with the following species counts: 600 bird species, 250 amphibians and reptiles 180 endemic plants, 115 fish, and 215 species of mammals including cats such as Jaguars, Ocelots, and Pumas.

Human habitation in Amistad dates back 12,000 years according to pre-ceramic sites discovered near Volcan Baru in Chiriqui, Panama. According to UNESCO, “such sites are extremely rare in C. America and represent some of C. America’s earliest human inhabitants”.  About early inhabitants on the Costa Rica side of the park, UNESCO notes that “skillfully created elaborate gold ornaments, jewelry, and huge symmetrical stone spheres are the most outstanding evidence of the cultural development of pre-Colombian man over the last 3,000 years”.

UNESCO speaks of the indigenous Teribe residing in Amistad. However, my visits to Amistad’s Rio Teribe in 2007 revealed a tribe calling itself the Naso, a monarchy governed by a King.  The Spanish likely called the tribe by the name of the river ‘Teribe’ which runs through the 7 Naso villages.  The Naso are small tribe of 3,500 people living in villages connected by footpaths. The river provides for the primary traffic route to the Caribbean coast.  Naso use rafts to trade fruit such as cacao in Bocas del Toro for the few items they do not produce in the rainforest themselves, such as machetes.  I had the pleasure of meeting a university professor who has recently launched an eco-lodge to help the Naso capitalize on adventure tourism opportunities. It is called Wekso.

There are much smaller tribes that live in or near Amistad, such as the Bribri, Boruca, and Cabesar. All the Talamanca peoples maintain their ancient folklore, customs, agricultural and hunter/gatherer traditions.   They also maintain their languages which are now supplemented with Spanish. By far the largest indigenous tribe is the Guaymi, which is a bit of a misnomer created by the Spanish who called many tribes Guaymi, such as the Ngobe and the tiny Bugle tribe. The Ngobe are the most populous indigenous tribe in the region with 200,000 members in Costa Rica and Panama. ‘Guaymi’ is based on the Buglere term for the Ngobe, which was ‘Guaymiri’, shortened by the Spanish.

The Spanish found three distinct tribes which they called Guaymi. At that time each tribe was known by the name of its current chief and each spoke a different language. The chiefs were Nata, Parita, and Urraca. Urraca is famous for never having been conquered by the Spanish who tried too many times and grew to fear all “Guaymi” because they didn’t learn to distinguish the tribes.  Urraca forced Spanish Captian Diego de Albitez to sign a peace treaty in 1522. Urraca was later betrayed by his successor and captured by the Spanish, but he escaped and died a free man and legendary figure.

In 1997 the descendents of the blended ‘Guaymi’ tribes, calling themselves Ngobe-Bugle, joined forces to obtain a Comarca (autonomous lands) that comprises roughly 10% of Panama’s land area. Many Ngobe-Bugle live outside their Comarca near Amistad around the Chiriqui-Bocas del Toro-Costa Rica borders.  In Costa Rica and a few places in Panama they still use the name Guaymi.  I have the privilege of serving as an English tutor to a young Ngobe woman attending university in Chiriqui. Many of her tribe’s women speak very little Spanish and no English; the men speak Spanish for work and use their native tongues at home.  Women wear brightly colored traditional handmade dresses called naguas and men wear trousers and, often, shirts made from manta-sucia.

This is a warm and friendly culture, cohesive and unchanged by modern neighbors with whom they co-exist peacefully.  The dominant Hispanic culture tends to be a bit cynical regarding the indigenous, perhaps because they live apart from the mainstream culture.  The growing European and N. American expatriate cultures near Amistad tend to view the indigenous with fascination.  Many indigenous peoples migrate to pick coffee for half the year and live on the Comarca for the balance of the year. Others manage coffee farms or other fincas year round. If you drink coffee in this region, you are certainly benefiting from the efforts of its indigenous peoples.

Cacao was introduced to Europe by the Spanish around 1585, the date of the first recorded commercial shipment of chocolate from Veracruz, Mexico to Seville. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the tree ‘Theobroma’ which means “food of the gods”.  Cacao beans were historically used as a currency, serving in the place of small coins as recently as 1840 on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

The largest producers of cacao in the Americas are Brazil, Ecuador & Venezuela with a combined market share of 10%.

The best quality cocoa beans are from the Criollo variety. Criollo cacao can be enjoyed directly from the pod and, properly fermented, maintains natural sweetness. When used commercially, the Criollo variety requires less sugar which is why 70% – 85% cacao dark chocolate bars are possible.  Gourmet chocolate represents roughly 4% of the world’s annual cacao production, a market of 160,000 short tons per year.

The main source for Criollo beans today is Venezuela’s Hacienda San José, www.cacaosanjose.com , with representatives in France, Switzerland and Spain. This hacienda has 200 hectares of Criollo cacao with an average density of 1,000 trees per hectare.

Criollo cacao is prevalent throughout C. America, with crop development occurring from Guatemala to Panama, where it thrives in rain-forested regions to an altitude of 2000′.

In Panama, cacao cultivated by indigenous growers produces a superior product preferred by chocolate aficionados over products produced by newcomers to this exotic crop, according to French Cacao Broker Mathilde Grand of Isla Colon’s Starfish Cafe.

Grand’s “Citizens Chocolate” markets tribal cocoa spheres, a hand-crafted organic product from a cooperative in Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast of Panama.  This region is home to the Ngobe-Buglé whose autonomous lands stretch between International Park Amistad to the coast of the Caribbean Bastimento Nature Reserve.   In the shade of their jungles, cacao is cared for and harvested using sustainable indigenous traditions.  After collecting the ripe pods, the seeds are removed, brought to fermentation then put out in the sun to dry for several days.  Once dried, the seeds are roasted over a fire, ground and rolled into spheres that are perfect for baking or melting into water, milk, and spices for a delicious drink.

© Mathilde Grand

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This post is comprised of excerpts from the article “Cacao: a crop ready for new investment?”, written for Alternative Latin Investor‘s next issue. Photos by Mathilde Grand ©