Who are the Uitoto, the ancestral people whose children are those who survived alone in the Colombian jungle for 40 days

It’s a story rarely told: Four children, aged between 13 and 12 months, survived 40 days of wandering through the dense Amazon jungle after the accident of the plane they were traveling in, which killed three adults.

The story of how the brothers survived without food, at the mercy of mosquitoes and wild animals in an inhospitable area, has not yet been told by the children.

However, the jungle was not a strange place for the four minors. On the contrary, is part of your home their natural environment: the children come from the muina murui indigenous community, better known as the uitoto.

“We call ourselves muina murui, but the other communities nickname us uitoto,” María Kuiru, a member of the community, tells BBC Mundo.

Kuiru, whose traditional name is Jitomakury, is the Secretary for Women, Family and Children of the Indigenous Zonal Association of Cabildos and Traditional Authorities of La Chorrera, which brings together different communities such as the muina murui-uitoto,

The muina murui, which translates as “sons of tobacco, coca and sweet yucca”, are one of the largest indigenous communities inhabiting the Amazon rainforest. In addition to Colombia, they are also present in Peru and Brazil.

And they know very well the area where the accident took place and the rescue operation.

The children were wanted after the disappearance of the plane they were on with their mother was reported. last May 1.

In fact, several members of this community, numbering some 8,000 and representing 0.5% of Colombia’s indigenous population, were part of the operations that eventually found them.

“We inhabit the Predio Putumayo Indigenous Reserve, our ancestral territory, which is one of the best-preserved forests in the Amazon,” notes Kuiru.

She adds that the jungle is a wild and inhospitable place, but that Thanks to the ecological calendar, it is also the main source of food for those who inhabit it and know how to “read” it.

“Thanks to our traditional practices, we balance our daily survival in the jungle. And that is what children are taught from the earliest years. That was part of the four children surviving for 40 days,” he says.

Sacred herbs: coca and tobacco

Very little is known about the presence of the muina murui or uitoto in Colombian territory before the early 20th century.

The economy is mainly based on hunting and fishing, in addition to gathering sweet cassava, a product mainly grown in this part of the country.

“Every day he goes into the woods with the families to look for something. We live our whole lives in the jungle. And from day to day we learn what is and what is not eaten,” he emphasizes.

One of the most important traditions of the muina murui is the use of coca leaves and tobacco for ceremonies and rituals.

While the men are engaged in physical tasks such as hunting and fishing, the women are responsible for performing the rituals in the maloca, or house where they gather in each of their communities.

“Coca leaves and tobacco are sacred leaves for us. So they are the most used,” says María Kuiru.

The origin of the use of coca leaf and tobacco has to do with it with the healing powers of both, which gives it its sacred character.

“These sacred leaves were given to us by our creator for the spiritual stewardship of the world,” he adds.

However, not only these two leaves are essential to community culture, but also the sweet yucca leaf, which is widely available in the jungle.

“The mambeo of this leaf is mainly made by women, who are the sweet yucca. We make it into a drink to drink during our traditional dances,” she says.

“That potion serves to cleanse the heart, to cleanse the hearts that come uncharged to our dances.”

Another consumer item among the muina murui is bitter cassava or fariña, which is believed to be what the children ate during their days in the jungle.

The rubber tree

For centuries, the Uitoto were out of touch with the great processes of conquest and colonization that took place on the continent.

However, it was the call “rubber boom” at the beginning of the 20th century which not only marked their first contact with mestizo peoples, but also brought the community almost to the brink of extinction: the establishment of Casa Arana, a famous Peruvian trading house that operated mainly along the Putumayo River in Colombia, he used the uitotos as slaves for the exploitation of that coveted material.

“About 40,000 of us died as a result of that exploitation. We are the descendants of the few who managed to survive,” says Kuiru.

The genocide carried out by the owner of the Arana house, Julio César Arana, who was portrayed in well-known novels such as La Vorágine, caused the Uitoto population to disperse.

This was followed by the 1932 war between Colombia and Peru, which for the first time allowed the indigenous people to live with soldiers and military personnel and resulted in members of the community being enslaved to work on the rubber plantations.

“Many cities and clans, such as those of the Sun, have disappeared because of that genocide. But little by little, we reclaimed our ancestral lands with great resilience,” says Kuiru.

But in recent years they have experienced a hard-to-conquer phenomenon: coca leaf crops coveted for drug trafficking.

“We use the coca leaf to heal ourselves, for our rituals, not to sell it. This exploitation of something sacred to us has deeply affected us as a community,” he concludes.