¿Hay más pantalones? For the indigenous people of Latin America, resources are sparse. Four years ago, I started the first of several travels to Santiago, an inland Panamanian town, to work with Nutre Hogar, a recuperation center for severely malnourished children. In the small town, there was a faded pink building with a blue roof and a rusty swing set that grew to be near and dear to my heart.
About four times a year, the staff at Nutre Hogar drive into the mountainous regions of Panama to visit the indigenous communities. Families walk for miles to bring their children to meet with doctors and social workers. Once there, children are examined by the doctors and then receive donations of food and clothing. On that trip one year ago, I sorted and distributed clothes to the impoverished children. Near the end of the day, a young, thin boy approached me looking for a pair of pants he could wear to school. I searched through stacks of clothing and dug through heaps of mismatched items, but there were only three pairs left—far too small to fit the seven-year who waited patiently. I knelt down on the ground and looked the little boy in the eyes. Lo siento pero no hay más pantalones. Lo siento mucho. I’m sorry but there aren’t any more pants. I am so sorry.
He nodded and, of all things, thanked me. These men, women, and children don’t suffer from poverty because they are bad people. They struggle to feed and clothe themselves because they are the descendants of native Panamanian tribes. All across the world, indigenous communities are suffering, the Panamanians being a representative example. The government fails to acknowledge their needs and they are continuously refused the resources necessary to survive. In many Latin American countries, indigenous communities have even been driven from their land by their own governments. Now left to live in areas without ample access to food, these children starve.
Then, those children come to Nutre Hogar. The caretakers at the center, many of whom work for no pay, do so in order to provide these children with a chance at a higher quality of life. The paltry federal funding allotted to Nutre Hogar doesn’t even cover the daily operating costs, but the staff does remarkable work with the limited funds they are given. The fact that their service is so desperately needed is most worrisome to me. The poverty of indigenous tribes is rooted in centuries of subjugation and discrimination originating from the arrival of Europeans who proclaimed that Indians were inferior. The repercussions of that proclamation continue to resonate to this day, as Indians live in huts of mud and corrugated metal.
Sociologist Johan Galtung writes that “cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right.” In this case, cultural violence is the establishment of indigenous Panamanians as second-class citizens because cultural practices like communication, business practices, and social interactions have been so Westernized, they limit the ability of the natives to integrate into mainstream society. The cultural aggression and hostility creates a system of structural violence in which the existence of poverty, disease, unemployment, and lack of resources are all normalized.
The indigenous peoples are alienated in a land that is their home and has been for centuries. Their languages are not recognized outside of their small communities and they have no money (or even opportunities to earn it) that would allow them to become members of the larger society. Instead, they remain on the outskirts of civilization. They work all day and yet rarely have enough food at the end of the day to feed themselves.
It’s true that generous donors can help alleviate the hardship in these communities and that Nutre Hogar can take in a certain number of starving babies to nourish them. But this material aid is, regrettably, ephemeral.
As impactful as these solutions are, they can only last as long as supplies or volunteers do. What is most needed is a series of long-term changes. In order to truly fix a problem there must be a focus on the root cause of the issue. By only focusing on the effect of the problem—like the lack of food—the solutions devised are not sustainable. Instead, the cultural convictions and structure that allows for malnutrition must be addressed. Native peoples should no longer live under a hierarchy of racial ancestry. Our solutions must make places like Nutre Hogar unnecessary rather than the only option left.
