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Chris N. Gjording, Conditions Not of Their Choosing: The Guaymi Indians and Mining Multinationals in Panama (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington: 1991), 409 pp. $42.50.
Conditions Not Of Their Choosing began as the 1985 dissertation of an American Jesuit, Chris Gjording, that was revised and edited for the Smithsonian Press in 1990. Gjording, an Anthropologist, at the invitation of fellow Jesuits in Panama, all of whom he says were influenced by liberation theology, studied the Cerro Colorado copper mining project in Panama with his focus on the project's impact on the Guaymi indigenous people (plural Guaymies) between 1977 and 1985.
Gjording organizes his work into three parts, with Part 1 a background on the Cerro Colorado mining project, Panama, and the Guaymies; Part 2 a detailed description of the mining project; and Part 3 an analysis of the responses and reactions of (a) the Guaymies, (b) Panama, (c) the local Catholic clergy, (d) the multinationals, and (e) the international community including financial organizations such as the World Bank, ending at the author's choice with the death in mid-1981 of the Panamanian leader, General Omar Torrijos.
The Guaymies live in small groups of nuclear families, with an economy based upon agriculture and cooperation within the small villages of related kinfolk. During the 1970s encroachment and population increase placed severe strains on Guaymi resources. Throughout the history of modern Panama, the Guaymies had sought a legal definition of their lands and some amount of self-rule. But the Guaymies never got their land rights, in part because they focused their energies on day-to-day survival, which meant intra-kin land rights, and never established any trans-kin organization.
Torrijos saw Cerro Colorado as the source of economic growth, one of the world's largest--1.4 million metric tons--copper deposits. Of the 631 square kilometers needed for the project, however, 610 were in Guaymi areas.
The ultimate failure of the project was due to increasing cost estimates of development ($150 million...