METETI, Panama – The 19,000-strong indigenous Embera-Wounaan tribe resides far beyond the reach of American pollsters who regularly log high voter disapproval of the three-plus years of illegal mass migration over the Southwest U.S. Border.
But if anyone ever sought Embera opinion about distant U.S. border policy – and, almost incredibly, I may be the only one who ever has – they’d get an ear full.
The Embera live on reservation lands right at the trail exits in Panama’s infamous Darién Gap migration foot passage that in just three or so years have emptied nearly two million stampeding US-bound immigrants moving out of Colombia for eventual illegal crossings of the opened U.S. border. And while their vote of course wouldn’t count in the United States presidential election, in these modern times, indigenous tribal cries to the heavens that imperial U.S. decisions are destroying them without thought should qualify as special moral standing requiring authentic listening.
As I finally heard them during a first-ever interview with all five Embera tribal chiefs and aired them in the New York Post, they demand that U.S. border policies that set off this vast destructive great migration through their “Comarca” lands, never asking permission nor begging forgiveness, be ended. They also want the United States to help immediately close the Darién Gap at the Panama-Colombia border for the sake of their cultural survival.
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