For millennia, the Wounaan people, who live in parts of what is now Panama and Colombia, have hewn and sculpted various woods. Cocobolo rosewood, Dalbergia retusa, is particularly favored for carving ceremonial staffs used in traditional medicine and commercial art depicting tropical plants and animals.

Wounaan are just some of the people around the world who have used rosewoods to make a wide range of items, including gunstocks, furniture and musical instruments. There are now more than 140 tree species commercialized as rosewoods, all with lustrous, dense and typically reddish wood.

Beginning in the late 2000s, global demand for rosewood exceeded the legal supply. The beautiful woods became popular investments, particularly during China’s real estate boom, and also are renowned tonewoods, or woods used for musical instruments. By 2012, cocobolo’s value in China had skyrocketed to over US$13,000 per cubic meter ($371 per cubic foot). It can now cost three times that – much costlier than, for example, red oak at about US$1,500 per cubic meter ($43 per cubic foot).

In 2011, loggers started illegally cutting rosewood trees in the mature forests of eastern Panama where Wounaan people live. In Panama, most of the Indigenous Wounaan and many of the Emberá peoples do not have legal rights to those forested lands, despite having lived in them for generations. Once the illegal loggers invaded, Wounaan authorities elected by the communities filed legal complaints with local and national Panamanian officials, while also seeking support from the media and the public.

But that was only the beginning.

During that initial logging season, there was a three-month standoff between illegal loggers and Wounaan community members. A logger killed an elected traditional authority, hapk'ʌʌn Aquilino Opua Puchicama. In response, the logger, Ezequiel Batista, was killed.

Wounaan realized that loggers were willing to kill to get the rosewood.

The illegal logging was intense for four years. In 2014, tiny Panama was the 16th-largest supplier of rosewood to China, exporting US$55.5 million worth of it there. Before the rosewood boom, cocobolo was listed as “vulnerable, having high extinction risk in the wild” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But by 2019, it was reassessed as “critically endangered.”

That’s one way to tell the story – as a more-or-less linear sequence of these tragic and catastrophic events. But in conducting and presenting our research, we have chosen another way, reflecting and encompassing Wounaan lives, values, science and experiences, finding not........

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