What Naso Tjër Di is
Naso Tjër Di is the comarca of the Naso people, a small Indigenous nation of roughly 5,000 living in the extreme northwest of Panama along the Teribe River, hard against the Costa Rican border [1][2]. It is the newest of Panama’s four provincial-level comarcas and the last to be created, making the Naso the final Indigenous people in the country to win self-governing territory of their own [3]. The name itself is descriptive in the Naso language: “Tjër” is their mythical grandmother, endowed by God with the secrets of botanical medicine, and “Di” means water, so the territory is, in the people’s own words, the land of the river that belongs to Tjër [2].
The comarca is landlocked and overwhelmingly forested. It covers 1,606.16 km² (620.14 sq mi), of which 91% (1,468.63 km²) lies within two protected areas, the La Amistad International Park and the Palo Seco Forest Reserve [1]. Its capital is Sieyic, the community where the Naso king is seated [1]. For a sense of scale and remoteness: the comarca sits on the banks of the Teribe, the nearest town of any size is Changuinola about two hours downriver, and travel is by raft or dugout canoe [2].
A creation more complicated than the date suggests
The comarca’s founding is widely summarized as “2018,” and that shorthand hides a more interesting and harder story. The Panamanian National Assembly approved Bill 656 to create the comarca on 25 October 2018, but President Juan Carlos Varela vetoed the bill in December of that year [1]. The comarca was then created on 4 December 2020, from territory of the Changuinola district in Bocas del Toro province, only after the measure was taken up again and enacted [1].
That two-year gap between passage and enactment is not bureaucratic friction. It reflects decades of conflict over who controls the resources of the Naso territory, in particular its rivers, which have been eyed for hydroelectric development since the 1980s, and the comarca was the Naso’s answer to a question the state had been answering for them. The creation of Naso Tjër Di was, in effect, the culmination of a long campaign to turn occupancy into jurisdiction, the same arc that produced the other comarcas but compressed and delayed for the smallest and most remote of the peoples seeking one.
The territory and who lives there
Roughly 5,000 people live in the comarca, mainly Naso [1]. They are for the most part poor subsistence farmers who supplement their livelihood by selling agricultural products (cocoa, oranges, plantains), along with some animals, lumber, and handicrafts, transported downriver to Changuinola for market [2]. Most are bilingual in Teribe and Spanish, many have converted to evangelical Protestantism, and the traditional religion centers on the creator god Sibö [2]. The comarca’s being 91% inside protected areas means that daily life and conservation law are layered on top of each other: the Naso farm and live within a landscape that is also a binational peace park and a forest reserve, which is both a protection and a constraint.
The geography is the source of both the comarca’s isolation and its value. The Teribe watershed is biologically rich, well-watered, and steep, ideal for the hydroelectric schemes that have repeatedly been proposed on its rivers, and ideal for the protected-area status that now covers most of it. The Naso sit at the intersection of those two designations, and the comarca is the instrument by which they hold the deciding voice between them.
The Bonyic dam and the long resource fight
The hydroelectric politics that run through Naso territory are not abstract; they have a name and a history, and that history is why the comarca exists. The Bonyic River, which crosses Naso land, was the site of a proposed hydroelectric project sponsored by a Colombian utility (Empresas Públicas de Medellín), as part of a wave of conservation-and-development schemes that descended on the region beginning in the 2000s [2]. The Bonyic project became the defining conflict of modern Naso political life, splitting the community over whether to accept the dam and its royalties or to resist it as an infringement on territory the Naso had not agreed to give up. That split reached all the way to the kingship: King Tito was deposed in 2004 specifically because he approved the Bonyic scheme, removed by his own people in a civil uprising in the capital of Sieyic and forced into exile [2].
The comarca is the institutional answer to the kind of pressure Bonyic represents. Without recognized territory and a governing authority the state had to deal with, the Naso had little standing to refuse a concession granted over their land; with the comarca, finally enacted in 2020 after the 2018 veto, they hold the jurisdiction that lets them say yes or no on terms closer to their own choosing [1]. The long gap between the 2018 bill and the 2020 enactment (and the fact that a president vetoed a comarca bill at all) shows how contested that standing remains. The Naso won the comarca in large part because the Bonyic fight demonstrated what happened when they did not have it.
A protected land: La Amistad and Palo Seco
The other defining fact about Naso Tjër Di is how much of it is already under formal conservation protection. Ninety-one percent of the comarca’s 1,606.16 km² (1,468.63 km²) lies within two protected areas, the La Amistad International Park and the Palo Seco Forest Reserve [1]. La Amistad is a binational park shared with Costa Rica and a UNESCO-recognized piece of the Talamanca range; Palo Seco is a forest reserve that buffers it. The result is that the Naso comarca and a major international peace park occupy almost exactly the same ground, which is both a protection and a constraint: the forest is shielded from conversion, but the Naso must also navigate the rules of two protected-area regimes on top of comarca and national law.
This overlap is increasingly seen as a feature rather than a bug. The pattern of Indigenous territory and formal conservation covering the same land is one that research has found delivers strong forest outcomes elsewhere in Panama, because the people living on the land have both the authority and the incentive to keep it forested [3]. For the Naso it means daily life is lived inside a layered legal landscape (comarca, protected area, national forest law), and the community’s farming, gathering, and settlement all take place within boundaries drawn by more than one authority. The comarca’s being mostly protected is the reason its forest is intact, and it is also the reason the Naso’s relationship with the state over that forest remains negotiated rather than settled.
The king and the politics of the river
The Naso distinctive feature, the thing that sets them apart even among Panama’s Indigenous peoples, is their monarchy. They are one of the few Indigenous groups anywhere that continues to have a king, and the comarca’s capital at Sieyic is the seat of that king [2][1]. The monarchy’s modern history is inseparable from the territory’s resource politics: the most consequential deposition of a Naso king came in 2004, when King Tito was removed after he approved a hydroelectric scheme on the Bonyic River that crosses Naso land [2]. The Bonyic conflict is the defining episode of recent Naso political life, and it is the reason a hydroelectric project and a kingship have been entangled in the public record.
The monarchy is covered in full on the Naso king page, including how succession moved from heredity to a community vote. The point for the comarca page is that Naso Tjër Di is governed by a blend that exists nowhere else in Panama: an elected comarca structure sitting alongside a hereditary monarchy, both operating inside a territory that is also a protected area. That blend is the comarca’s defining political fact.
The Teribe, the river, and the name
The comarca’s name carries the Naso’s own understanding of their land, and unpacking it is the quickest way into who the Naso are. The people are the Naso, also called the Teribe after the river that runs through their territory and the language they speak; they themselves use “Tjër Di” for their homeland, in which “Di” means water and “Tjër” is their mythical grandmother, the figure endowed by God with the secrets of botanical medicine [2]. The name, in other words, ties the territory to a woman, a river, and a body of plant knowledge all at once, which is a compact statement of what the Naso are fighting to protect. The comarca is not, to them, an abstract jurisdiction; it is the land of the grandmother and the water.
That relationship to the Teribe River is practical as well as mythic. The Naso are river people: they live along the Teribe, travel it by raft and dugout canoe, and reach the outside world downriver toward Changuinola, the nearest town, about two hours away by water [2]. Their subsistence economy (cocoa, oranges, plantains, some lumber and handicrafts) moves along that same river to market. So when a hydroelectric scheme proposes to dam a Naso river, as at Bonyic, it threatens not only a resource but the literal artery of the community’s life and movement. The comarca, with its capital at Sieyic on the Teribe, is the legal recognition of a relationship to a river that long predates the republic [1].
Why this comarca matters
Naso Tjër Di matters first as a matter of justice: a small people, marginalized by remoteness and by the resource value of their land, won the same legal standing that larger peoples secured earlier. It matters second as a conservation fact: more than nine-tenths of its territory is under formal protection, meaning the comarca is effectively a jointly managed Indigenous-and-conservation landscape, the kind arrangement that research elsewhere in Panama has found delivers strong forest outcomes [3]. And it matters third as a cautionary one: the long fight over the Bonyic dam and the veto of the comarca bill show how contested that standing remains, and how the rivers of the Teribe watershed are still the fault line.
For visitors, Naso Tjër Di is not a casual destination (it is remote, river-accessed, and not served by regular tourism), and the realistic way to engage with it is through understanding rather than through a day trip. Read alongside the comarcas overview, the Naso king, and the overview pages, it completes the picture of how Panama built its comarca system (one people, one law, one territory at a time), and of the small nation whose territory was the last piece of that system to fall into place.
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