by Feiling, Tom
The Nukak told Conduff that for most of their history, they had lived beneath the surface of the earth. One day, a Nukak woman made a hole in the sky and the tribe emerged to live above ground. They believed that those first Nukak had created many of the animals they saw around them. Parrots, for example, were born of an early Nukak woman who liked to sing, as all Nukak did. They believed that they were inhabited by multiple spirits, and that when they died, their spirits returned to various parts of the jungle. The spirit world was ruled over by a god called Mauro. If a Nukak man had been angry during his lifetime, Mauro was sure to eat his spirit when he died, so the Nukak taught their children never to show anger (which might explain their frequent sarcasm).
The missionaries told them that by hiding their anger, they were lying to themselves, others and ultimately to Mauro. They shouldn’t lie to God, or to one another, the missionaries told them. God was all-powerful and all-seeing, but he loved mankind. The idea that God loved them impressed the Nukak greatly and when the missionaries told them about the life of Jesus Christ, they were dumbfounded. Christianity had a huge impact on a community accustomed to regarding God as brutal and mean-spirited. They converted willingly and unquestioningly.
Only in 1984 did the Nukak venture to the edge of the forest and make contact with the outside world. As word got out of the discovery of an unknown tribe of ‘pristine’ people untouched by Western civilization, anthropologists began to visit them, first from Bogotá and then from universities around the world. The police in the town of Mapiripán would give them presents when they came across them. Local colono farmers came to eat with them and struggled to learn their language.
When the missionaries had first met the Nukak, the women had gone naked, except for bands that they wore just below their knees and around their ankles, and the men had worn short grass skirts. But as the Nukak spent more time with the colonos, they came to copy their dress. Western clothes and metal objects became their most treasured possessions. Sometimes the Nukak would take things from the colonos. At first, this didn’t provoke any ill will – these jungle people clearly had no concept of private property, the colonos said to one another, so their light-fingeredness could hardly be called theft. Besides, they dropped most of what they took on their way back into the jungle and the colonos soon got used to picking up after them.
But one day, one of the Nukak walked off with a settler’s newborn child. The colonos looked for but never found the missing baby. Soon after, many Nukak fell ill. They’d caught the common cold from the settlers, but as they had no immunity to this alien malady, some of them died. The Nukak saw this as divine punishment for their abduction of a white woman’s baby. Living in proximity to colonos soon brought the Nukak into contact with other illnesses, such as dengue fever and measles. Between 1992 and 1996, many of the older Nukak died, still convinced that God was punishing them for abducting the settler’s baby. In 1992, there were thought to be around 3,000 Nukak, but by 1996 the population had fallen by half.
In this sense, at least, the plight of the Nukak has been little different to that suffered by millions of indigenous South Americans over the last 500 years. Most of the rest of the world’s population has increased explosively since the sixteenth century. But thanks in large part to the diseases that the Europeans brought to the New World, over the same period the native lowland population of the Americas has declined by about 95 per cent.*
Although less than a million Colombians are indigenous, they belong to 104 distinct tribes, each with its own language, history and traditions. Thirty-two of these groups are currently at risk of extinction, nine of which are from the llanos. The Jiw, Sikuani, Cuiva, Jitnu, Makaguane and Iguanitos each have less than 1,000 members remaining and less than half of them practise any aspect of their traditional culture. This may not be a bad thing: hunting and gathering is desperately hard work. But rather than being assimilated into Colombian society, these tribes are being forced into a material and spiritual wasteland. Less than a third of them graduate from secondary school and most are jobless.†
And yet the single biggest threat to the indigenous groups of the llanos, and particularly the Nukak Maku, is not western diseases. It is the cocaine business. Coca cultivation took off in the llanos not only because the Army and police were nowhere to be seen, but also because the colonos were on the brink of ruin. It could take days to get their produce over the plains to the marketplaces further west. The roads were bad and the prices paid for their crops were derisory. Bereft of any help from the government, many colonos hit the road, wandering the plains towns in search of work and sustenance. So when representatives of the big cocaine producers came downriver offering them bags of coca seeds, they didn’t need to be asked twice. Coca was a native crop that needed no fertilizers or pesticides and brought a steady stream of buyers to their door. Harvests were frequent and plentiful and the rising demand for cocaine in Europe ensured that prices were only going up.
In the early 1990s, colonos began clearing the forests in the western part of Nukak territory to plant coca bushes. They also encroached from the north, so some Nukak families moved eastwards, into territory occupied by neighbouring tribes. Others decided to stay and started working for the coca growers at harvest time. They settled on the outskirts of colono villages, where they learnt how to cultivate plantain and cassava.
At first, the FARC tried to stop the colonos growing coca. They suspected that the cocaine business was part of some kind of covert imperialist invasion, and that peasants who became prosperous from coca growing would lose interest in the revolutionary struggle. The guerrillas had ruled swathes of the sparsely populated countryside since the mid sixties, and many colonos had been persuaded by their programme of rural self-government, land reform and economic development. But the FARC leadership soon realized that if they were to ban coca growing, they risked losing the colonos’ support entirely. So rather than prohibit coca, the guerrillas taxed it. The gramaje is a levy on all aspects of the cocaine trade that has earned the FARC millions of dollars a year, mainly from the traffickers and the more prosperous coca farmers.
The guerrillas’ rapprochement with coca fed straight into the hands of their enemies. With the Americans upping the pressure for results in their war on drugs, it was clear that whoever was branded responsible for the cocaine trade would become public enemy number one, not just in Colombia but in Washington, DC. The US ambassador was the first to coin the term ‘narco-guerrilla’. But the idea that the FARC were involved in cocaine production or smuggling, or that they were forcing campesinos to grow coca, was – at least in the early days – false. The FARC dominated large tracts of the jungle plains long before the first coca bushes were planted in the llanos. The colonos didn’t need the FARC to tell them that the government had no intention of investing in the development of the region; that the politicians they voted into office were corrupt; or that any attempt to organize or protest would be fiercely put down. The life of a community leader has been brutal since the first colonos settled the plains, and the FARC seemed to be the only ones willing to address the chronic lack of development in the region.
Still, the ‘narco-guerrilla’ moniker stuck. Drug-trafficking Marxists became the justification for a multi-million-dollar coca fumigation campaign that sent campesinos the length and breadth of Colombia scrambling for cover. By 1996 nearly 200,000 of them had seen the effects of the pesticides that fell from the crop-dusting planes onto their coca plants and whatever legal crops they happened to be growing. In June of that year the FARC mobilized thousands of coca farmers in the departments of Guaviare, Putumayo, Caquetá, Norte de Santander and Bolívar. The Army broke up their protest marches, in full view of the television cameras. For the first time, distant city dwellers were sensitized to the reality of coca producers’ lives and the government’s indifference to their precarious conditions. The guerrillas, who had taken the coca farmers’ side against the crop dusters and the yanquis who paid for them, seemed heroic b
y comparison.
The fumigation planes kept up their sorties over the coca fields. As the poison settled into the jungle foliage, the Army pursued the FARC’s battalions ever deeper into the wilderness. In 1997 local paramilitaries began moving into the FARC’s coca-growing areas, in an attempt to separate the guerrillas from what had quickly become one of their biggest sources of funding. They mounted roadblocks to stop supplies going into jungle villages controlled by the FARC. In Mapiripán, the Colombian Army colluded with paramilitaries in the chainsaw massacre of at least forty villagers, a brutal warning that ‘subversives’ and those who supplied them would not be tolerated. People living along the roads and rivers of the llanos fled deeper into the jungle.
The missionaries from Nuevas Tribus had already been threatened by the FARC, and in 1996 they left for good. As the fighting between the Army, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries intensified, local indigenous people were forced to leave their ancestral territories to live in makeshift shacks on the outskirts of Villavicencio.
Nukak territory is vital to the guerrillas, not just because so much coca is grown there, but also because nearly all of their kidnap victims are held there. Fear of informers is pervasive and well founded among the guerrillas. In some jungle villages, all calls made from public phone booths are routed through loudspeakers, so that the local FARC militia can hear exactly what is being said. The FARC have no inherent problem with the Nukak, but they are wanderers and have earned themselves a reputation for talking too much. The guerrillas have tried to explain the importance of not talking to anyone about their whereabouts, but the armed conflict is a mystery to the Nukak. The FARC have tried to stop their wandering, telling them that they can no longer go on hunting and fishing trips and confining them to specific parts of the jungle. But this too is incomprehensible to the Nukak. By way of warning, the FARC killed a Nukak leader in 2005. The Nukak still didn’t understand what they had done wrong.
So the FARC forced them out. In 2008, the entire tribe arrived in San José del Guaviare, claiming to have been ordered out by ‘the green brothers’, presumably a reference to the guerrillas’ fatigues. A Nukak man called Mow-be emerged as their spokesman and asked the government to help them to return to their lands. The government offered them humanitarian assistance, but said that it could do little more. The situation seemed hopeless; despairing of ever finding a solution to the crisis his people faced, Mow-be committed suicide.
After my meeting with the director of the UN’s refugee programme, I sat at a café and had a cold drink in the shade. Some soldiers were studying a map at the table next to mine. A campesino farmer came and shared my table. Héctor must have been my age; he had a thin, rat-like face and light-brown eyes. He was from a village in La Macarena, the national park I had hoped to visit to see the Caño Cristales. Things were bad there, he told me; there was a lot of fighting between the Army and the FARC. People were too frightened to work their fields and their families were getting hungry. Héctor had come north to denounce the theft of his horse by his neighbour to the police, but he didn’t hold out much hope of anything being done about it. I bought him a cold drink, wished him luck and walked back to my hotel.
When I’d told the woman at reception that I was on my way to San José, where I hoped to find out more about the Nukak Maku, she told me that she knew an American missionary in the town who had lived in the llanos for years and spoke the Nukak language fluently. I wondered if she was talking about Kenneth Conduff, the first outsider to learn their language; no, she said, his name was Jack. She called his number and handed me the phone. He sounded as surprised as I was to be speaking English in the llanos. I told him that I was planning to take the bus to San José that afternoon; he told me to give him a ring when I got there.
The journey, which can’t have covered more than 120 miles, took six long hours. For much of the way south, the jungle had been cleared to make way for near-empty cattle pastures. Every hour or so, the road would come to a sudden end and the bus inched along what had become a rutted dirt track, past the road-building crews that were laying concrete under the blazing sun.
For a while, we followed the languid River Ariari and then we passed through a town with a clue in its name: Fuente de Oro – source of gold. Between 1530 and 1535 three expeditions of European adventurers left the coast of Venezuela in the hope of finding gold on these plains. They spoke of a land so rich that tufts of grass pulled from the ground had gold dust on their roots.
The first expedition was led by Diego de Ordás, a Spaniard who was convinced that there was a causal connection between the brilliance of the sun and the glow of gold. It followed that gold would ‘grow’ best at the Equator. By Ordás’ reckoning, the source of South America’s fabled gold had to lie at the headwaters of one of its two great rivers, the Orinoco and the Amazon, somewhere behind the Andes. Ordás and his men travelled up the Orinoco for hundreds of miles in search of the chimerical gold mines, enduring terrible hardship along the way. One of them was to write, ‘If someone was bitten by a vampire or got a small cut, he immediately became cancerous. There were men who, from one day to the next, had their entire feet consumed by cancer, from the ankle to the sole.’ They suffered in vain: by the time Ordás left South America, ‘his only gain was that most of his followers had lost their lives; and those who escaped alive were left poor and sick, without property in that wilderness.’ Ailing and broke, Ordás died at sea on his way back to Spain.*
The early explorers’ greed and recklessness was only matched by their complete ignorance of the lands they ventured into. They had no maps to guide them and the local Indians had limited knowledge of what lay ahead, so they were constantly losing their way. In 1530, a German adventurer called Nicolaus Federmann left the Venezuelan coastal town of Coro to look for a route to the Pacific Ocean. When he climbed a small hill and gazed out over the vast expanse of water that lay ahead, he felt sure that he had reached it. Had he waited for the morning mists to clear, he might have realized that he was not on the shore of an ocean, but the edge of the llanos, which had been flooded by the annual rains.*
Five years later, another German reached the llanos. Georg Hohermuth declared himself ‘overcome by the great fame of [the region of] Meta, which was the general objective that explorers pursued in those days’.† After crossing the River Arauca, Hohermuth came to a village called Sarobai, where ‘all the Indians said unanimously that the riches were on the other side of the mountains’. His party began to climb into the foothills of the Andes, but the mighty Sierra Nevada Del Cocuy prevented them from going any further west, so they headed south. In April 1536 they came to an outpost on the River Upía, where they found Muisca tribesmen from the highlands trading with the lowlanders. The Europeans had no idea that they were immediately below Bogotá and the sacred lake of Guatavita, origin of the myth of El Dorado. ‘The Golden One’ was reputed to be a tribal chief so rich in gold that every day he covered his body in gold dust before jumping into the lake.
Of the 400 Europeans who left the Caribbean coast with Hohermuth in 1535, only 160 made it back. The young Philip von Hutten, who accompanied Hohermuth on this disastrous three-year escapade, wrote, ‘It is horrible to consider what the poor Christians ate on that expedition: snakes, frogs, lizards, vipers, worms, herbs, roots and other food always of the same sort and without any value. Some, contrary to nature, ate human meat: one Christian was found cooking a quarter of a child with some greens … God dispensed his grace to those of us who managed to save our lives.’*
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to pour scorn on the greed and ignorance that sealed the fate of those early explorers. But that would be to overlook the terrible fascination that South America exercised over the minds of many sixteenth-century Europeans. Von Hutten wrote, ‘God knows it was not avarice that impelled me to undertake that journey, but a strange desire I have harboured for a long time. I believe that I could not have died in peace without having seen those Indies.’
The myth of El Dorado (and the hope of robbing him of his gold) was to lure Europeans into the plains and mountains of Colombia for centuries to come. The eighteenth-century writer Basilio Vicente de Oviedo wrote that every year the local tribesmen would draw lots to decide who would be sacrificed to their idol. ‘They open him up and salt him with gold dust, and offer him as a sacrifice in their church. Because of this they call him El Dorado.’† As late as 1965, foreigners were still trying to figure out how to drain the sacred lake at Guatavita and get their hands on the gold thought to lie on its silt-laden bed.
For most of the colonial period, however, the gold prospectors stuck to the highlands and left the plains untouched, a source only of hostile tribes and legendary beasts. Not until the 1950s did Colombians return to the llanos, when they became the sponge that absorbed the labour of thousands of peasants forced to flee the violence then raging in the west of the country. Migration to the llanos was always more a matter of expulsion than attraction, as malaria, yellow fever and tropical anaemia were rife in the lowlands. An American physician by the name of Hamilton Rice travelled across them in 1912 and was amazed at the poverty and sickness he found in the colono settlements. In San Martín, every one of the 300 people Rice examined was stricken with malaria.
The bus passed through San Martín a couple of hours after leaving Villavicencio. It looked to be a prosperous little farming town, but I knew that appearances – and particularly the appearance of peace and prosperity – could be deceptive in Colombia. The poverty of the colonos has long been the hidden face of the country’s progress. Since the fifties they have cleared huge swathes of jungle to make way for cattle pastures; their herculean efforts made many of the local landowners rich. In return for felling trees and draining swamps, the colonos were given small plots of land to grow the food they needed to survive. But they have never been granted legal title to anything, and becoming a legal smallholder is still a distant prospect for most of them. As one commentator put it, ‘their tribulations and generalized insecurity are the price of free competition for land in a profoundly unjust and viscerally independent society. On the agrarian frontier, the state has always been waiting in the wings, and there it still waits. The weak have no laws to free them from the freedom of the strong.’*