The distance from Yaviza to Panama City is only 165 miles, yet it feels much farther by car. Most of it is unpaved, and near Yaviza, it is little more than a mud slick. Yaviza, though a prominent dot on maps of Panama, is not much bigger than a football field. The village holds a crumbling Spanish fort but otherwise reveals little of its age. In this climate, where an inch of rain can fall in an hour, visual distinctions between old and new are blurred.
Houses start rotting as soon as they are built.
The look of tropical decay conceals a tenacity that has kept Yaviza alive for almost 400 years, through a series of mini-booms separated by epochs of stagnation. In Spanish times Yaviza was a trading town, a place where two heavily traveled rivers intersected and people came to cash in on a harvest of plantains, some recently panned gold, or a felled mahogany tree. Today, despite its connection to the outside world, Yaviza is still only a trading post. If there has been any change in the twenty or so years since the highway arrived, it is a slight rise in cocaine and weapons dealing with Colombians. Since the late 1970s an epic migration of peasants from the western parts of Panama has broken the landscape open.