Puerto Armuelles a town in crisis

CHIRIQUI. Puerto Armuelles is a town in crisis. Not only for the collapse of the banana industry which for the last six months has left 2,800 workers dependent on the government’s $700,000 a month subsidy, but also for the hundreds of ex-laborers who worked for years with toxic chemicals that were known to cause cancer, sterility, blindness, and damage to their nervous and reproduction systems, who have still not been compensated for their medical problems.

The laborers, many of whom say they spent five hours a day spraying Nemagon, Fumazone, DBCP, Ditane, and Bravo, have been fighting a legal battle for the last 13 years to get the American-owned transnational, Chiquita Brand, to pay $42 million for their medical costs and to compensate them for the damage to their health.

But as elsewhere in the region, the case has become stalled in the court system.

Chiquita Brands used to rent 18 farms from the Panamanian State at a cost of $700,000 a month.

Workers were required to spray the 3,000 hectares of the Chiquita plantations with chemicals that at the end of the 1960s had already caused havoc in plantations in Costa Rica, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and the Phillipines.

But up until the 1990s, Panama still permitted the use of toxic chemicals that had been banned in the United States since the early part of the decade because of the irreversible damage to health that they can cause.

Some of the chemicals, such as Nemagon, are known today as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) because they filter into the subsoil and groundwater and continue to pollute for up to 200 years or more.

Contact with even low doses of Nemagon causes retarded growth, lung and kidney damage and reduced testicle size. According to the Pesticides Action Network for Latin America (RAP-AL) some 26,000 workers throughout the region may have been made sterile through contact with poisons long-banned in the developed world.

Nor are the laborers the only ones affected. Even second-hand contact with many of these chemicals can be highly pernicious: women who washed their husband’s clothes and children who breathed the air also suffered the consequences. Many workers lost children to cancer at an early age or had babies born with birth defects.

Following imposition of illegal quotas and tariffs by the European Union in 1993, banana exports from Latin America were reduced dramatically. In Panama, between 1990 and 2000, the population of Puerto Armuelles went down from over 46,000 to 22,075. If it continues to decline at the same rate, by 2020 it will be a ghost town. It is extraordinary that the country with the highest economic growth in the region, that is widening the canal, and planning to build a metro, cannot find a means to revive the economy in a town that is literally dying largely through no fault of its own.