The invaders ended the voluntary isolation of the Nukak indigenous people 33 years ago, thus being displaced out of the Amazon rainforest.
When he directs his hunting blowgun to the top of the tree, Mauricio approaches the world from which he was expelled along with the other indigenous people. Violence transformed the last contacted nomads from the Colombian Amazon into displaced persons.
But still today some Nukak leave their precarious shelters to go hunting or gather fruits in the forests of the department of Guaviare (southeast).
The invaders, first settlers and then armed groups, ended the voluntary isolation of the Nukak 33 years ago and they were pushed towards small cities where they poorly survived as displaced from the Amazon jungle.
Mauricio, 44, who communicates in his native language with his daughter Yina, 22, returns from time to time.
Small, broad-shouldered, calculates and blows hard on the metal joint. The puja hits the woolly monkey, which falls asleep from the poison. The other hunters carry squirrel monkeys that they lured by mimicking their sounds.
“We came to look for food,” Yina explains to AFP during a six-hour walk. There are six men in jeans, European football shirts and caps.
Three women in crocs shorts and slippers come close chasing long-eared turtles through the shell marks on the ground. Everyone is excited by an unexpected feast: the honey from bees that they extracted from a tree that they felled.
The older ones keep the tongue, hunting and gathering alive. The other traditions succumbed to violence and deforestation that made way for drug farmers, ranchers and landowners.
“They displaced us, they took us out,” laments Over Katua, a 28-year-old Nukak who did not know life in the jungle.
“Ka’wade”
In 1988 the first nukak appeared in the Guaviare villages. They arrived in poor condition and decimated due to “diseases caused by contact with the settlers,” according to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.
Fourteen years later, the fighting between Marxist rebels and far-right paramilitaries caused massive displacements. By 2018 there were 744 nukak, 336 fewer than in the 2005 census, according to the statistical authority.
The indigenous people refer to their executioners as “whites” or “ka’wáde.” “Our territory is being occupied by war,” Over complains in broken Spanish. The Colombian State recognizes them as the legitimate owners of 954,000 hectares of protected jungle.
In 2017, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla that exercised de facto power in large areas of Guaviare, left these territories after signing peace.
However, antipersonnel mines that protected drug crops were planted in the Nukak forests.
“The institutions have not been able to take them (back), because a demining has to be carried out,” says Delio Acosta, head of the indigenous peoples of the department’s governorate.
“The only nomadic community” in Colombia is “threatened” and in “danger of disappearing,” the UN warns in a report.
In 2020 alone, the document adds, the Nukak area lost 1,122 hectares due to deforestation for the cultivation of cocaine raw material.
The NGO Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development believes that the damage was greater: 2,892 hectares if those destroyed for illegal roads and livestock are added.
Tristeza nukak
The Nukak who fled the conflict survive in slums. In San José, the capital of Guaviare, they are seen crowding into a park and begging for alms.
In their long searches for food, they dodge wire fences and electricity and complain that animals for their consumption are in short supply.
The anthropologist Gabriel Cabrera believes that the nomadic tradition is wounded by the forced “semi-endeterization”.
Although the indigenous people “still have the idea of how pleasant it is to move and walk through the forest,” says this expert on the Nukak from the National University.
In one of the settlements, you can see a woman with her face painted with red lines. They represent, they say, the shell of the morrocoy turtles and is a symbol of happiness.
But “now we are sad”, Over Katua released, before the violent change of their customs. And he gives as an example the girls and adolescents who wear their hair down to their waists, when tradition imposed heads and plucked eyebrows.
The loincloths also disappeared and some drink liquor, consume drugs foreign to this community such as crack and there is even “prostitution,” says Katua. “They are falling into the other tradition of the settlers,” he laments. (I)
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