Indigenous fishers fight to keep their last ancestral waters

The Ngäbe Buglé peoples of Panama have fished the waters around Escudo de Veraguas for over a hundred years, using seasonal closures and ancestral knowledge to keep the fishery alive. Now the government is considering banning them from those waters entirely—their last remaining fishing ground after multiple previous closures forced them off other ancestral territories.

For communities whose survival depends on these waters, this isn't conservation. It's dispossession dressed up as environmental protection.

When conservation becomes exclusion

This pattern repeats across the globe. Indigenous and small-scale fishing communities are the original stewards of their ecosystems—they've managed these waters sustainably for centuries. Yet when governments adopt conservation frameworks, Indigenous peoples are often the first to be locked out. Fortress conservation, as it's called, protects land by removing the people who've always lived there, even as industrial fishing and extractive industries operate elsewhere with minimal restriction.

The stakes here are visceral. When the Ngäbe Buglé representatives traveled to Geneva in September 2025 to present their case before the U.N. Human Rights Council—supported by the World Forum of Fisher Peoples and international human rights organizations—they were fighting for their right to food, cultural survival, and a voice in decisions that affect their livelihoods. These aren't abstract principles. They're codified in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Small Scale Fisheries Guidelines, instruments Panama has already ratified.

While they were in Geneva advocating for recognition of their customary rights, government authorities back home destroyed and confiscated their fishing nets and released their already-harvested lobsters. The message was clear: your international appeals don't matter here.

A path forward rooted in what works

The Ngäbe Buglé response has been to double down on what they know. Upon returning to Panama, they convened an emergency community meeting and passed two resolutions: one committing to conservation and ecotourism development, the other establishing a technical commission to create a management plan for Escudo de Veraguas that centers ancestral knowledge and sustainable use.

They're not asking to exploit their waters. They're asking for what international law already promises—formal recognition of their customary rights, community ownership of the island, and a genuine seat at the table in decisions about their territory. The request is straightforward: hand management of Escudo de Veraguas to the municipality and district of Kusapin so that the Indigenous peoples themselves control the future of fishing, tourism, and conservation there.

This matters beyond Panama. Indigenous communities manage roughly 80 percent of the world's remaining biodiversity, despite representing a fraction of the global population. When governments ignore their voices and their rights, they don't just harm communities—they undermine the ecosystems they claim to protect. The Ngäbe Buglé aren't obstacles to conservation. They're its most proven practitioners.

The question now is whether Panama will recognize what international bodies have already confirmed: that these communities' demands are rooted in law, backed by evidence, and essential to both their survival and genuine environmental protection.