The President Smiled

First Steps on the Path of the Panther

Archie Carr III

 The President Smiled

The president of Nicaragua in 1994, Violeta de Chamorro, had a

beautiful smile. It illuminated a handsome, proud face; a face of such
dignity I liked to assume it reflected aristocratic bloodlines, appropriate to a
leader who, by election and international consensus, was the strong but
tolerant head-of-state who could guide her country, and the region, into a
new, prosperous, and peaceful day.
One glamorous evening at the Masaya Volcano National Park, not far
from Managua, President Chamorro turned that beacon of a smile my way,
and paid me and my family and colleagues a high compliment.
Her gesture was brought about by a conservation project which I
directed. It was known as the Paseo Pantera project, and was sponsored by
the US Agency for International Development (USAID). By design, the
Paseo Pantera, which roughly translates into Path of the Panther, was
intended to assist all seven Central American states to collectively address
critical issues in wildland and wildlife conservation.
By late-1994, the Paseo Pantera project was well advanced; very
mature. Our consortium, the union of the Wildlife Conservation Society
(WCS) and the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (CCC), had made the
case for a regional biological corridor in every forum we could find. We had
even written a book about the corridor, and about the inevitable connectivity
of natural and cultural history of Central America, and how that fortuitous
background hinted at a unique strategy for conservation. As early as 1992,
the natural resource ministers of Central America, united in a treaty
organization known as the Central American Commission for Environment
and Development, or, from the Spanish, the CCAD, had resolved to take the
still-rudimentary Paseo Pantera idea to Rio de Janeiro, to the “Earth
Summit,” the UN Conference for Environment and Development. The
Central American leadership would declare to the world that, by
implementing this biological corridor through 7 countries of the isthmus, an
anxious global public would be reassured that Central America was going to
do its part to save the biodiversity of the planet.
Our group had crafted a map of a possible corridor through Central
America. We had commissioned a team from the Departments of Landscape
Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida
to help with this crucial and exciting aspect of the project. The team’s leader
was Margaret H. Carr, my brother’s wife. We called her Peggy. My

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brother, David, was executive director of the CCC, the WCS partner on the
Paseo Pantera project. Peggy Carr and her associates were already deeply
involved in planning conservation schemes on a large scale for the state of
Florida, and they jumped at the chance to help out with a projection of the
Central American corridor.
The map relied upon GIS technology: Geographical Information
System. A computer was asked to evaluate four sets of criteria concerning
the landscape of Central America, and to paint out, in vivid color, the most
feasible pathway for a forested corridor reaching from the Colombian border
with Panama to the Mexican border with Guatemala: the Paseo Pantera, Path
of the Panther.
Land cover was one key criterion for the computer to analyze, because
the whole purpose of the project was to link existing tracts of wildlife habitat
together. Our team fed the computer with land cover data. We updated an
existing map of current and proposed national parks and other types of
protected areas in Central America, and loaded the revised park data into the
mainframe. In deciding upon the route for a corridor, the computer was
programmed to give a large park greater weight than a small park, and a
nearby park greater weight than a distant one. We also pumped in human
population density data, and asked the computer to avoid populous areas in
projecting the corridor. The entire land surface of Central America was
divided into tiny squares, and each square assigned a value for its potential
contribution to a biological corridor.
Then the computer went to work processing data, crunching numbers.
When it had a solution, it beeped and its handlers took charge. It was time
to consider the appearance of the final map, a moment when the
professionalism of the landscape architects shown through. Peggy, and her
two principal collaborators on the job, David Lambert and Paul Zwick, spent
an afternoon discussing colors. The purpose of the map was to communicate
an idea, to enlighten an observer who might not be versed in the biological
principles bearing on wildlife corridor design. And so a color scheme for
the map was thrashed out, with various tentative arrangements tested on an
oversized computer monitor, rejected, and re-plotted. The final map used 10
colors, with green indicating the preferred or most feasible route for a
corridor, red the least suitable, most “costly” route, with the other 8 colors
portraying a feasibility gradient between red and green.
It made for an agreeably colorful final rendering. We made enormous
posters of the map, garnished with secondary graphic portrayals of the
datasets employed. The project was written up into a report in English and
Spanish, and published along with the corridor map, and the supporting

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datasets, in an inch-thick, spiral-bound document. On the cover, standing
out from a glossy white background like a 10-color, tropical bouquet, was
the corridor map. It was probably our most satisfying “product” during the
5-year course of the Paseo Pantera project.
The report carried the title “Mapping of a Continuous Biological
Corridor Potential in Central America.” Because that title was long, and
because Peggy Carr had been so instrumental in rallying the University of
Florida team, giving them direction, and driving the process to completion, I
came to call the document “the Peggy Book.”
When President Violeta de Chamorro made her grand pronouncement
that night on Volcan Masaya, the Peggy Book was in her right hand.
The moment with the president came at the end of a long day of
speech making by diplomats from all over the hemisphere. The occasion
was the Cumbre Ecologica Centroamericana para el Desarollo Sostenible,
the Central American Ecological Summit for Sustainable Development.
An ecological summit for sustainable development: Was that an oxymoron?
Time would tell, but it was, and remains, a fashionable union of hopes and
dreams.
Be that as it may, on that day, I was thrilled and optimistic about the
“Cumbre Ecologica.” It was at this event that the Central American
governments would declare their commitment to implement a Mesoamerican
Biological Corridor (MBC). After almost 5 years of advocating, declaiming,
explaining, and holding workshops, the aspirations of the Paseo Pantera
project would, if not come true, then at least be affirmed by the leadership of
the countries and stewards of the landscapes that the corridor was intended
to help.
Most of the formalities of the Ecological Summit took place at the
incongruously elegant Olaf Palme International Conference Center, a
splendid structure, shouting optimism and grandeur for those who entered.
Somehow, it had been constructed during the 1980s, in the midst of
Nicaragua’s brutal conflicts. Most of Managua was still in the shambles left,
first, by the 1972 earthquake, and second, by a decade of war and turmoil.
The Olaf Palme was obviously built as a beacon or vanguard of better times
and greater promise for the beleaguered country.
The Summit in Managua was an Ecological Summit, and accordingly,
a tremendous organizational and logistical burden was placed the shoulders
of my old friend, Dr. Jaime Incer, Minister of Natural Resources for the host
country, Nicaragua. It so happened that Don Jaime was a great fan of my
father, Archie Carr Jr. Archie’s first popular book, High Jungles and Low,
published in 1953, was mostly about his life and discoveries in Honduras,

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but it also had a chapter or two about Nicaragua. Jaime Incer loved natural
history almost as much as he adored, and mastered, the cultural history of
his own country. So, he had an inordinate appreciation for Archie’s
accounts of trekking in the 1940s in the vast forests of eastern Nicaragua,
and consuming, fried, the colorful fish called guapote, taken from Lake
Managua…back when it was still free of heavy metals.
As minister, Dr. Incer was the Nicaraguan representative to the
CCAD, the inter-governmental body whose task was to define an
environmental agenda for Central America as the smoke cleared from the
decade of war. Dr. Incer had learned of the ideas of the Paseo Pantera
project, the regional corridor, and had enthusiastically encouraged their
review by his counterparts in the CCAD. During part of this time, my
colleague, Mario Boza, was serving as Vice Minister for National Parks in
MINAE, the ministry of natural resources in Costa Rica, and he and Jaime
Incer had had many opportunities to coordinate and collaborate in the task of
having the other countries of their region embrace the goal of a regional
corridor for Central America.
The Paseo Pantera delegation to the Ecological Summit consisted of
my brother, David, representing the CCC, and Mario Boza and myself from
WCS. In Managua our little group was joined by Gerardo Budowski, a
legend in Central American conservation thinking and training, and the
previous Director General of the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), the global umbrella group of all conservation. Dr.
Budowski had made kind remarks to me about the scope and progress of the
Paseo Pantera project, and he was looking forward to the formalities of its
adoption by the governments.
Another legendary figure from our team, Jim Barborak, would be
pulled away from us for the evening to attend a gathering of park directors
from all over Central America. Jim had trained almost all of them and most
of their staffs; thus his celebrated status in Central American protected-area
management circles.
Eager as we were to pay our respects to Don Jaime, it was not to be.
His diplomatic and protocol duties that day were so staggering that the best
he could do was to send a minion our way with the admonition to be sure to
make it to the Masaya Volcano reception that evening. He would meet us
there.
And so would the presidents.
As the sun began to set, and the dust of the Pacific coastal plain of
Nicaragua made the air glow with a reassuring warmth, we hired a cab and
asked the driver to haul us the short distance to the volcano. Masaya was

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less than 30 minutes away. As such, it was accessible to the citizenry of
Managua, and, like Volcan Poas in Costa Rica, which looms over San Jose,
Masaya was heavily visited, and much loved by the people as a park, as
heritage, as a symbol of what it was to be Nicaraguan. The sentiment rested
not just in the stark, powerful image of the crater, but in the fact that the
volcano was constantly fuming, emitting sulfurous smoke, and, over the
centuries, erupting often, causing misery in the blink of an eye.
As we dashed along the Masaya Highway in our cramped taxi, we
tried to talk about events at the summit. I commented on Vice President Al
Gore’s appearance on stage equipped with crutches. He had spoken well,
complementing the diplomats on the advancement of peace, extolling the
concept of the regional corridor and the advancement of environmental
standards in Central America, but what about the crutches?
David didn’t know. He and I had both been traveling. Gerardo didn’t
know. But Mario Boza had seen a brief news piece before leaving San Jose
the day before: Al Gore had sprained an ankle in a backyard basketball
game.
Near the main gate to the park there were several buildings. One of
these was large; barn like. That’s where the newly arriving visitors were
heading from the parking lot, so we had the driver let us out nearby. Inside
the big structure there was a large-scale model of the volcano itself, showing
lava fields and recent blast patterns, marked by cinder rubble, altering the
lay of the land far beyond the slopes of the notorious mountain. The main
room of the wooden building must have been built with school groups in
mind. A couple of hundred people could easily assemble there, and it was
clearly the location for the evening’s events. The space was well lit.
boquitas were being offered: kabobs of grilled beef with a chimichurri
sauce; patacones, made of wheels of green plantains, smashed slightly and
fried; and over there, against the wall, happy guests were crowding the Flor
de Caña bar, where the national rum was mixed with Coke and garnished
with a squeeze of lime. Wry jokes were made of Cuba Libre versus
Nicaragua Libre, with everyone agreeing that wasn’t it wonderful that
Nicaragua was finally free of Cubans!
An unusual cubicle had been assembled in the center of the hall. It
was made of Plexiglas, and there was a table and a handful of chairs inside.
Within, there would be some insulation from the chatter out on the main
floor, but the room was brilliantly illuminated and conspicuously
transparent. It was here that the public would meet the presidents. There
would be no secrets. Government would be open to scrutiny, from now into
the future.

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 We saw the dignitaries assemble in the fishbowl, and then Jaime Incer
appeared, urging guests to make a line if they wanted a word with President
Chamorro, or with one of her guests, who included the president of Panama,
and the president of Costa Rica, Jose Maria Figueres. Jaime stood at Mrs.
Chamorro’s side, standing by to be helpful as the supplicants passed through
the little room. Their remarks were brief, the responses, equally quick.
After a few moments, with good cheer and broad smiles shared by all, the
citizen would move on.
I guessed at what was transpiring. These were people from many
walks of life, judging by their dress and demeanor. They were there to offer
encouragement and support to the new Nicaraguan president, and, in certain
cases, to ask for help.
“My daughter, in Leon, is gifted. She is brilliant. I am poor. I cannot
give her the break she deserves. Can you help?”
Or perhaps it was a farmer saying, “The vampire bats in Chinandega
are terrible this year. The cattle are losing weight. I’ve lost two goats,
outright. Can you help?”
In this instance, I’m sure Mrs. Chamorro would have asked for
guidance from her environment minister, Jaime Incer.
Don Jaime met us at the entrance to the little glass enclosure. We
shook hands, tried not to use too much time with big abrazos for our old
friend, and said we simply wanted to personally pass the Peggy Book on to
President Chamorro; give her her own personal copy of the maps of the
potential corridor through Central America. Jaime spun around and
presented the document to Mrs. Chamorro, whispering a few words in her
ear.
President Chamorro immediately nodded her understanding to Dr.
Incer, and turned in her chair to look my way. The famous smile lit up her
face. She held the gleaming, colorful Peggy Book aloft with one hand,
pointed at it with the other, and, with the whole room held in silence by her
gesture, she declared: “Este es la formula para el futuro de Centro
America!”
My friend, President Figueres, was at her side at that moment. He had
on his most somber, diplomatic face. He looked at me, and with supreme
gravity, nodded his head in acknowledgement, only the tiniest tick of a smile
crossing his lips.
Then it was all a hubbub, my delegation shaking hands, and thanking,
and promising our continued interest in Central American affairs. I made
sure to remind the Nicaraguan president of the hero in her ranks in the
person of Jaime Incer, and she agreed with a shout, and more big smiles.

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President Figueres and I exchanged hugs, spoke briefly about fate and how,
40 years before, his father, the legendary President “Pepe” Figueres, and my
father, had walked the beach and fished together in Tortuguero, and through
those meetings in the wilderness had helped nudge the Costa Rican park
system into being. i
Here, on the slopes of Volcan Masaya, had another nudge for
conservation been accomplished? The volcano, like the region, was
troubled, it’s outlook uncertain, day to day. Was our work truly the
“formula for the future,” as the generous president had said? Time would
tell, but in our ebullience on that particular evening, we were bolstered to
believe we had seen the launch of a new framework for regional
conservation in Central America.

Archie (Chuck) Carr III, PhD

Senior Conservationist
Wildlife Conservation Society

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i
The formal off-shoot of the Paseo Pantera project was the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), a regional program,
continuing today under the broad oversight of the Central American Commission for Environment and Development
(CCAD).