The Panamanian Indigenous Ngäbe Buglé Peoples and fisherfolk have practiced ancestral fishing in the provinces of Veraguas, Bocas del Toro, and Chiriquí for more than a hundred years. In February 2025, the government informed us that it is considering banning fishing in Escudo de Veraguas, our last ancestral fishing ground.

For our communities, who have fished sustainably with seasonal closures for centuries, this is not conservation, it is a persecution of survival. We have already endured multiple government closures of our fisheries over the years. Because of this, Escudo de Veraguas is our last fishing ground. This ban threatens our customary fishing rights, our right to food, food sovereignty, and our cultural survival.

Often, Indigenous fisherfolk and peoples like us feel used by governments that fail to recognize all the work we have done over generations to conserve the environment. It seems there always comes a point where governments seize the territories we care for and deny us access at gunpoint, not through democracy. In the name of conservation, fishing communities have been dispossessed, even though we have been the custodians of biodiversity and food systems for centuries. Today, our livelihoods are increasingly threatened by agribusiness, extractive industries, and entrenched conservation agendas, such as the global 30×30 initiative. These fortress conservation schemes are imposed on fishing and traditional communities through deadly repression, even as they enable the destruction of ecosystems elsewhere for profit. The government has already killed three members of my family in recent months for speaking out against the Escudo de Veraguas fishing ban, as well as the new Law 462, which paves the way for the privatization of social security and has sparked indignation among the Panamanian people at large.

We, Indigenous fisherfolk, see a very prosperous future where the government can recognize our customary rights to our territories and guarantee our right as fisherfolk to participate in all decisions that affect our livelihoods, as enshrined in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and the internationally ratified Small Scale Fisheries Guidelines.

Read the full article about defending the rights of Indigenous fisherfolk by Alfonso Simón Raylan and Estefanía Narváez at Food Tank.