One lives in Panama and the other lives in Colombia and Don Justino, whose work takes him between the two countries in a small open boat, can enjoy the company of one woman and when the time comes he goes back to sea and returns home to his wife.
Justino Ortiz Londono is 85 years old and is a former schoolteacher from Nuqui who is the best known figure along the border between Choco Department in northwest Colombia and Darien Province, the farthest southernmost part of Panama, where Central and South America meet. There's no road, just Don Justino. You’ve heard of the Darien Gap? This is it.
Locals on the Colombian side call Don Justino “El Profe,” a term of endearment because he taught so many of the people here, although he’s long retired from the schoolhouse. About once a week now he operates a kind of high seas shuttle—in a fiberglass launch with a 40-horsepower engine—carrying a handful of passengers between Choco’s main port and the first Panamanian town, Jaque, the beginning or end, respectively, depending on which direction you’re going, of a stretch of the most wild real estate in the world, separating North and South America. If you want to see the region in terms of its most famous commercial role, which is unfair, because there's so much more here including awesome nature—but is still kind of accurate, yeah—think cocaine going north and guns and cash going south.
People here are amazed by Justino’s stamina both in the cama and at sea. A decade ago the locals were already saying that he was too old to continue his taxi service, six or eight hours on the open Pacific in an open boat that can be a challenge even to a younger man. Times have changed in such a way however to make the importance of Profe’s work even more critical to the community than his teaching. You get what you pay for with Justino, safety. He travels with an assistant because it’s the prudent thing to do and he's a prudent captain, on a recent voyage to Panama the mate stayed at the bow for hours on end, on the lookout for stray logs that seem to be found so frequently on this stretch of coast, floating evidence of illegal timber activity that, like illegal mining, is stripping Choco's natural resources. But we digress. Our captain insists that the real physical danger is not the weather nor the sea itself, not drug traffickers or ocean-going guerrillas. The real danger is seasonal and comes in April and leaves in September: humpback whale moms and their calves.
“They like to sun themselves just below the surface,” Justino says. He’s been “tapped” before, he said, by a whale mother who didn’t know he was passing. But he has never capsized.
The human population of Bahia Solano is not seasonal. It’s growing continuously. A Choco-based immigration official recently estimated that there are now 10,000 people in this last outpost on the Pacific coast of South America, a doubling of the town in just a few years: a list of illegal foreigners arrested passing through the area was printed in the local newspaper recently and included east Indians and Chinese.
A fisherman who was born in Bahia Solano but has lived the last 20 years in Buenaventura, the big Colombian port down on the coast, just returned to Choco with his children, saying the big port city has become unlivable due to “delicuencia,” the polite term for that mix of guerrillas, traffickers and ordinary dockside criminals who plague Buenaventura and the rest of the coast. Bahia Solano's growing pains are also clear. Two husbands were arrested for killing their wives earlier this year, women have had to take to the streets to protest small-town machismo, and violence, still it’s not like Buenaventura where bombs go off and the Marines patrol in speedboats along the docks. A laundry opened two years ago here, in extreme Choco, that is how progress is measured—commerce—there’s now a dive center/hotel operated by a Medellin expatriate and a network of small stores. One gentleman from Kentucky opened a backpacker hostel in nearby El Valle, a beach near Utria, the national park, also in Choco. Everything is cool and the gang so far. Don Justino charges $125 or $150 for the ride from Panama to Colombia or vice-versa, a hefty sum, which depends on the number of passengers, for a few hours' trip, at a price he describes as necessary to defray fuel costs. On the Panamanian side there are expectations of a further increase in demand for Justino's services. The government in Panama City has ignored Darien with the exception of the police barracks, re-engineered recently from bunks for 40 to bunks for 140, in Jaque, where Justino's speedboat arrives and leaves. The only constant in this changing world is the Don himself.
Justino looks back on a teaching career that began when he was 19 years old in Medellin and continued when he moved to Bahia Solano more than four decades ago. He retired a decade later—he believes, he can’t really remember, after teaching all the subjects in the local schools including English, “Even though,” he smiles, “I don’t speak the language.” A small trim man he has a quick smile, and is distinctive riding his bicycle around town, with a slightly more severe manner at sea, like a school teacher, yeah, when he's at the rudder. Like all small boat captains, his constant worry on the water is the right balance of weight to avoid risk. And those whale moms.
Don Justino declines to discuss his personal life—although everyone else does—except to say that he finds big-city women like those from Medellin and Cali “no confiables,” undependable, while the local women especially the Afro-Colombianas know how to treat a man right. He’s not retiring the second time anytime soon, he says.
“The sea gives me life.”
