Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  It was dark by the time we arrived in San José del Guaviare. The Hotel Colombia was one of those deeply pretentious places, which every provincial town seemed to have, that catered to the town’s honchos and their visitors. Since San José had only sprung up in the past twenty years and was known to be crawling with cocaine traffickers, I assumed that the hotel was an example of what Colombians called narquitectura, the ostentatious style favoured by the country’s drug traffickers. The reproduction Greek statues, convoluted water feature, and glamorous older woman owner might have appealed to the suddenly rich, but the place gave me the creeps – though I had to admit that they kept it spotlessly clean.

  The next morning, I woke to the chugging sound of the little engines in the park that kept the ice-cream sellers’ products cold. I made my way downstairs to the bakery on the ground floor, for breakfast. A dog was lounging on the pavement, enjoying the morning sun. The farmers liked to pat him as they sipped their coffee. He was familiar yet strange, the size of a Labrador but with blacker skin, shorter hair and a heavier brow than I’d ever seen on a dog before. One of the farmers told me that he was an indigenous dog, one of the few traces of the breed that dominated canine Colombia before the arrival of European dogs. Spanish soldiers and priests had devastated South America’s dogs as well as its people. The soldiers brought their own sturdy hunting dogs, which either killed the native breeds or contaminated them with diseases to which they had no resistance. The priests, recognizing the sacred status the indigenous tribes afforded to their dogs, were happy to see the last of them go – bound, it seemed, for the relative peace of San José.

  After breakfast, I met Edgar Alzate, a short and kindly man with no shoulders who ran education programmes for the indigenous people of the llanos, funded by the oil companies that were prospecting across the region. We walked a few blocks to the banks of the River Guaviare and sat at the top of a steep slip to contemplate the great curve in front of us. A dugout canoe was buzzing its way downstream, distant and calming. Thousands of miles to the east, the river would flow into the Atlantic, as one of the hundreds that make up the mighty Orinoco.

  ‘Plenty of colonos regard the Nukak as no more than dirty beggars,’ Edgar told me. ‘They say that they come into town to steal food or to beg from restaurants. But the Nukak don’t even realize that it’s a crime to steal. Personally, I blame the anthropologists. They encouraged the Nukak to preserve their system of common property, without realizing the trouble it would get them into.’

  Other colonos were more self-interested. Many of them had arrived in San José single and on the lookout for potential partners. There had been cases of sexual abuse of Nukak women, some of whom had been forced to live with colonos. Some Nukak children had also been abused; others had been abducted, to be brought up in colono households, where they quickly lost contact with their families.

  Fortunately, most of the colonos were more paternalistic. Although the Nukak tended to be quite indifferent to anyone who wasn’t a member of their clan, everyone knew that Nukak women were very sensitive and tender-hearted with their own. To illustrate his point, Edgar told me about the disappearance of a 24-year-old Nukak man called Luis. When the women of his clan heard the news, they went to the mayor’s office and cried for hours on end. They thought that Luis was dead and were getting ready to kill themselves. The Nukak regard suicide as a way of showing their love for a person, said Edgar. Even a false accusation could lead a Nukak to commit suicide. Indeed, the elderly practically expected their children to kill themselves when they died. Confronted by this group of near-suicidal women, the mayor made some frantic phone calls and soon discovered that Luis had been forcibly recruited by the town’s paramilitaries. Luckily, they released him a few days later. He’d been no use to them; he had no idea what a gun was for, let alone how to use one.

  Only in the late afternoon did Jack, the American missionary who I had spoken to before leaving Villavicencio, pick up the phone. He seemed reluctant to meet; the time he’d spent with the Nukak was all a very long time ago, he told me. Yes, he’d known Kenneth Conduff, the first outsider to learn Nukak, but he’d long since passed away. No, he’d not got very far with his own efforts to learn the language, despite what the woman at my hotel in Villavicencio had told me. Jack said I’d be better off talking to Albeiro Riano, the doctor who had been sent to look after the Nukak by the national organization for indigenous people in Bogotá.

  By good fortune, Albeiro lived in the Hotel Colombia, so I hung up the phone and walked down the long, shiny corridor from my room to his. I found him sitting on his bed, shirtless and cross-legged, reading Patrick Suskind’s The Pigeon. Albeiro was a calm and serious man in his late thirties who had lived in the same small room for the past eight years. The shelves around him were piled high with medical textbooks, academic reports and manuscripts that flapped in the wind created by the overhead fan.

  Albeiro told me that he had given inoculations against illnesses like tetanus and polio to the displaced Nukak. Mortality rates had fallen; but there were no vaccinations to be had for influenza, diarrhoea or malaria. Even with western medical treatment, the Nukak were still five times more likely to fall ill than the colono population. Albeiro had watched a lot of Nukak die. ‘The only ones left are those that have managed to develop some immunity to the illnesses that killed off the older generation.’

  I was curious to know how the Nukak explained their plight to themselves. Did they still put it down to their abduction of a settler’s baby? ‘Well, they still believe that illnesses are caused by malevolent spirits,’ he told me. ‘But since western, not traditional, medicine is what has saved them from the spirits, most of them have stopped using the old cures and potions.’ The Nukaks’ appreciation of western medicine would make their return to the jungle, which already looked unlikely, harder still. But maybe this was a good thing: the Nukak who lived in the jungle were far more likely to fall ill than those living in the displaced community on the outskirts of San José.

  Albeiro was planning on visiting their camp the following morning. Perhaps I’d like to come along and see things for myself? I accepted his invitation, and bade him goodnight.

  Back in my room, my attention was caught by the notice on the back of the door: ‘Please read this in silence: it’s very short and very effective,’ it read. ‘Lord Jesus: Forgive me my sins. I love you very much. I’ll always need you. You are in the depths of my heart. Cover with your precious blood my family, my home, my job, my finances, my dreams, my plans and my friends.’ My inherent wariness of the Catholic religion came back with a vengeance. Did the Nukak really have to cover themselves with the ‘precious blood’ of Jesus? Hadn’t this country seen enough bloodletting? ‘Pass this prayer on to at least seven other people,’ it went on. ‘Tomorrow you will receive a miracle. Don’t ignore it.’

  I ignored it and took a shower. There was no hot water, not that I needed it. The concrete shell of the building had heated up over the course of the day and the shampoo came out of its bottle lukewarm. The single stream of water that gushed down the pipe from the tank on the roof was strangely reminiscent of home for a few moments, before the colder depths came on-stream.

  Promises and threats; enticement and fear-mongering: perhaps Colombia’s conflict had started in its churches? The priests had always tried to mediate between the powerful and the powerless, sometimes siding with one, sometimes with the other. Arguments over the moral and theological right of Spaniards to conquer foreign lands were virulent in the first years after the conquistadores arrived on these shores. Ecclesiastics told King Charles I of Spain that his very soul was endangered by the conquests being made in his name. Driving infidel Moors out of his Catholic kingdom might have been a valid crusade, but occupying the lands of innocent tribes that had never even heard of Christianity certainly was not.

  Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda had no such compunction. An erudite humanist and scholar, he argued that the superiority of Spanish civilization and rel
igion justified the conquests. In August 1550, Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas, the leader of Spain’s anti-colonial movement, engaged in a debate to resolve their differences. Bemused judges in Valladolid listened for days on end as the protagonists read hundreds of pages of argument in Latin, with both men turning to the Bible and Aristotle for support. Their to-ing and fro-ing went on for so long that the king issued a decree suspending all expeditions, exploration and conquests from Imperial Spain until such time as the judges could decide on the legitimacy of the competing arguments.

  So for the next ten years, the native peoples of the Americas enjoyed some respite from the raids and press-gangs of the marauding conquistadores. Eventually the Christian soldiers hit on a solution to their quandary. The Requirement was a proclamation, to be read aloud, through interpreters if possible, before the Spaniards launched any attack on the native tribes. It began with a brief history of the world, moved on to descriptions of the Papacy and the Spanish monarchy and concluded with the ‘requirement’ that the native chiefs accept King Charles as their ruler and allow the preaching of Christianity to their people. Failure to comply made the listeners liable to Spanish attack, and – in the words of the Requirement – ‘we protest that any deaths or losses that result from this are your fault.’ Bartolomé de las Casas confessed that he didn’t know whether to laugh at its ludicrous impracticality or weep at its injustice.*

  Early the next morning, Albeiro gave me a lift on the back of his scooter to the Nukak’s makeshift camp. It was a twenty-minute ride from San José, past one of the military bases where the Colombian Army was co-ordinating their southern offensive against the FARC. A conscript was mowing the grass outside the perimeter fence; another was slapping white paint on the boulders that lined the road leading up to the heavily fortified main gate, where a soldier in shades slouched on the sandbags surrounding an idle machine-gun. Albeiro turned down a sandy dirt track, past grazing brahma cattle and over great slabs of volcanic rock to Aguabonita, the piece of land that the mayor of San José had ceded to the Nukak while everyone made up their minds what to do with them.

  There was great excitement at our arrival, perhaps because Albeiro had stopped on the way to pick up a big bag of bread rolls. ‘Wash your hands first,’ the doctor told them. As well as treating the many illnesses they were prone to, Albeiro had taught them elementary hygiene and rubbish disposal, but this had been hard to do. Still, they did as he asked. Once back with clean hands, everyone was quick to scoff the rolls. There were lots of little children, who played with the wing mirrors of Albeiro’s scooter. In fact, apart from a solitary old man, who Albeiro guessed to be seventy-five, everyone was young. Their play quickly turned into a game of not giving one of the older boys his cap back. They threw it from one to another to great hoots of laughter. Everyone seemed so, well, childlike. The old survivor, who walked with two canes, had the happy, smiling face of a child. Even Albeiro had a grin on his face. It was the first time I’d seen him smile.

  Their camp was of six open-sided thatched huts. Albeiro told me that they’d copied them from the colonos. The Nukak were nomads: in the jungle, they would only spend five or so days in any one place before moving on, so living in a permanent settlement was new to them. In the main hut, T-shirts and shorts hung unwashed from the beams. Western clothes were a novelty that most of the Nukak had taken to with interest, though many of them suffered skin infections because they still didn’t understand the importance of washing them.

  A girl was peeling chontaduros, a starchy orange vegetable, for the pot. Unopened bags of flour and ground coffee lay in the dust next to a bag of meat that a local butcher had given to them. Feeding the Nukak had also created unforeseen problems: they weren’t used to eating the rice, beans and powdered milk that they received from Acción Social, the government’s welfare agency, so cooking classes had been arranged for the women. At first, the Nukak would cook and eat all they had in one sitting, just as they would have in the jungle. Only in time had they learnt to make their supplies last for a week.

  Though rendered childlike by their ignorance of colono life, the Nukak have a deep understanding of life in the jungle: in their natural habitat, they regularly eat eighty-three types of vegetable, more than half of which have yet to be identified by the outside world.* They consider monkeys a great delicacy, which they hunt with blow-darts tipped with poison prepared from the milky sap of the bejuco creeper. On their hunting trips, they also gather the various seeds that they eat as antidotes to jungle illnesses. But the camp at Aguabonita was surrounded by cattle ranches, so monkeys were few and far between. The people from Acción Social did their best to accommodate them, even organizing hunting trips, for which they would chauffeur the Nukak four hours south into the jungle, where they could hunt monkeys, peccaries and ducks, before driving them back to Aguabonita. It was a pragmatic response to the crisis the Nukak face, but hardly a sustainable one.

  A tiny hairless dog was sitting in the dust, frantically scratching itself. Albeiro washed it with some antiseptic that he found in the little shack that served as the settlement’s dispensary. Once the door was open, the ailing crowded around with their complaints. A girl with a squeaky, high-pitched, voice had the first signs of the same complaint on her shoulders. Pedro, who must have been in his early twenties, had an abscess on his leg. Some of the infants had distended bellies; Albeiro told me that their light-brown hair was a sign of malnutrition.

  Once he had tended to the sick, we walked to the dry bed of a nearby stream. The once stagnant water had been a source of malaria, so workers from the UN’s refugee programme had diverted the stream and installed a water pump. It was driven by a windmill and brought water up from the water table thirty metres below our feet. On the side of the storage tank was the dark blue and gold flag of the European Union.

  Despite the risks, four of the six remaining Nukak clans had chosen to return to the jungle since their mass exodus in 2008. The other two clans were still living in the camp at Aguabonita, where their culture was on the brink of disappearing. Few of them worked and most were reliant on handouts from Acción Social. They were stuck, unable to go hunting or gather traditional remedies, without enough to eat, and beset by health problems. Albeiro estimated that in total there were only 500 Nukak left.

  Even before their displacement from the jungle, the Nukak tended to die young, so anyone who reached the age of forty was considered an elder. But these days, the young were the clan’s spokespeople, partly because the elders spoke no Spanish, but more because the young seemed more willing to admit the enormity of the challenge their tribe faced. I spoke to Pedro, who was one of the few Nukak adults that spoke Spanish. ‘We can’t go back into the jungle because the FARC won’t let us,’ he said. ‘We’d like to grow sugar cane, cassava and plantain, like the colonos, but we don’t have any land of our own. Some of us have found work clearing land for the cattle ranchers, but it doesn’t pay much.’

  On our way out, Albeiro and I passed four young Nukak who were on their way back to the camp from a fishing expedition. They were carrying palm leaves and long metal poles, and one of the girls had a baby monkey on her head. It looked to be a simple life and I allowed myself a moment of unthinking envy. Then a Black Hawk helicopter roared over the treetops. It was heading south, towards the FARC, Nukak territory and the still uncharted depths of the jungle. I remembered the director of the UN’s refugee programme in Villavicencio and his parting shot as I had got up to leave. When he’d told his boss about the work they were doing to help the Nukak, she’d asked him a simple, inescapable question: ‘But they’re going to disappear anyway, aren’t they?’

  Jhon Henry Moreno was the grandly titled People’s Defender* and a pugilistic graduate of the National University in Bogotá. His name, not to mention its spelling, might once have surprised me, but I’d heard it said that there are more Henrys than Enriques in Colombia, as well as thousands of Kevins, Yonathans and Yasons.

  We were sitting sat on
the veranda of his office in San José, drinking guava juice and watching the burnished gold of the setting sun. Despite his instinctive support for the underdog, the dilemma facing the Nukak had Jhon Henry stumped for solutions too. ‘The problem is not a lack of political will,’ he told me. ‘A lot of organizations have tried to help the Nukak. The real problem is knowing what to do.’

  Like many indigenous peoples, the Nukak were given land of their own by the new Constitution of 1991, widely regarded as a model document of enlightened good sense. Colombia’s indigenous peoples were also granted their own judicial systems, in which outsiders were not allowed to intervene. Unfortunately, when the guerrillas moved into their reservation in 2002, the Nukak had no way of prosecuting the interlopers or preventing their own eventual displacement.

  That year, the Army began their southern push into FARC-dominated territory, but the guerrillas still controlled much of the jungle. The problem wasn’t so much that the Nukak’s rights were being violated by the FARC. It was that the Nukak had no conception of rights, much less the organizations they would need to defend them.

  ‘The Nukak are nomadic, which means that they’re spread out over a very wide area,’ Jhon Henry explained. ‘Being nomadic, they have never developed a settled, agricultural society or a religious or political hierarchy. Traditionally, they have only organized along family lines and that makes them very fragile.’