Reputation is everything and Caquetá, located on the eastern foothills of the Northern Andes, has a pretty bad one. It’s bad name is entirely founded in the violence which began with the arrival of the rubber industry, initially with the genocide of the tribes that live in this part of Colombia and then the baton was handed to the various guerrilla groups who still have a strong presence in the region today. Caqueta was not heavily occupied by the early Spanish incursion so there are no pretty white towns to be found, only bustling little commercial hubs, buzzing with motorbikes and shops selling everything from the latest fashions to agriculture products. Its life and landscape have been carved out by industrialization, after the rubber business died out, the cows arrived. The land was steadily stripped clear of rainforest from the mid 20th century to what is now a vast savannah of grass land that runs from the edge of the mountain range, peppered with little patches of forrest, where amazingly the biodiversity of millions of different species still thrive. Despite Colombia’s recent pledge to stop deforestation at the COP 26 climate summit, in Caqueta it continues to be a real issue. The relative lawlessness created by a mix of fear and incompetence within the justice system means that those land owners who need more room for their cattle, burn and then clear the forrest that is left, while other industries continue to pollute the rivers.
Tourism is in its infancy, really it has barely been borne. Most Colombians fear this area because of its violent past but equally its hard to arrive there by road and there are only a handful of flights each week on small 50 seater planes which makes it one of the more expensive destinations to get to. Lonely Planet do not even list Caqueta as a place to visit, it’s blanked out on their map, yet Caqueta is known locally as the gateway to the Amazon, its literally the edge of the forrest. Caqueta is mostly populated by recent Colombian settlers but the forrest that runs from the mountainsides and beyond towards the Amazon are settled by tribes; for the tourist it provides much more comfortable conditions to see many of the animals you have to sweat buckets for inside the Amazon basin. With all the resistance both physiological and economic few Colombians visit Caqueta and international tourists are a rarity like an animal on the WWF endangered list. On going to visit the Museum of Caqueta, located in Florencia, first I was told it was closed for the day, as the guy who operates it had gone home. However as luck would have it, he decided to pop back so he opened up what is a large room on the top floor of a badly maintained municipal building. The visitor’s register showed the last visitors were over a week ago with around a few dozen people visiting each month. It’s really a collection of bric a brac, there are reproductions of pottery, Amazonian tribal items mixed with more modern colonial clothing and tools, almost exclusively newly made and not actual historical artefacts. As you delve deeper you find a large collection of mechanical and electronic items from around the 1970’s onwards such as typewrites, televisions, tape recorders and gramophones. Moving swiftly on, and it is swift, you arrive at the local history section which is a collection of hand grenades, improvised bombs, army uniforms and a short history of the violence alongside the most important people murdered in the area. There are no labels on items, you wonder if anything is catalogued, but equally there is nothing of value inside the collection. Surprisingly there is one shelf dedicated to the awards that the museum has one including the coveted Great Pirarucu! The mind boggles as to what other museums exist in the area that might have achieved the status of runner-up!
The museum sets an accurate tone for how far tourism has developed. You get the feeling that a little central government or NGO money has found its way here but only really to try and spark something into life. The result of intervention of this kind which is always fleeting leaves a merry band of enthusiasts but with no real professional skills or understanding of the wider market. Luckily I managed to tap into the nascent tourism experiences through a chance meeting in Bogota a few weeks prior to my trip, where I met some NGO workers who have contacts in the region. Through a series of referrals I finally arrived at the source of one project that is called Uruki, a small group who are trying to develop eco-tourism around a manantial, a natural spring. Through the same group I was hooked up with the local bird enthusiast who runs trips to his brother’s farm, near the much troubled town of San Vincente de Caguan. Both experiences, like the museum are not in demand, I was the second tourist of the year to travel with Jorge, the ornithologist and only a handful of people have visited Uruki this year as well.
Jorge Muños is one of those rare humans who gives so much to the world he inhabits. His principle work is as a doctor and he dedicates all of his spare hours to the pursuit of birds; every weekend he can be found cataloguing the hundreds of different species in and around Caqueta. He trains young recruits, as well being as active as prudently is possible in the campaign against deforestation and the pollution of the natural habitats of Caqueta. He has lost friends to the fight as those that stick their head above the parapet in the attempt to restrain man’s impact on the environment are still regularly murdered, especially when they clash with commercial interests. We discussed how ineffective the local authorities are in protecting the forests and rivers, partly because of the ground they have to cover but mostly because they are completely incompetent, lazy public workers on the gravy train with no real interest to get into conflict with any criminal who is likely to reply with a deadly response. Controlling this region through violence has been the staple tactic for over 100 years, local community leaders and municipal leaders were regularly murdered alongside other targets such as educators and journalists.
The violence comes from all sides. Jorge’s godfather was murdered in the small town of Puerto Rico by the army after he was mistaken to be part of the guerrilla. The paramilitaries took their turn, but now the conflict sits with the narco gangs who have splintered from all groups, as well as the illegal miners and the wealthy land owners who treat God’s earth as their own piggy bank. Scars of the conflict live on inside every family and are visibly noticeable on roads which are pitted in places through munitions that exploded years ago and have been barely patched up and not fully repaired. Jorge’s father was also kidnapped, he told me the story of how his family had to sell everything, including taking out bank loans to pay off the FARC in order to get him returned,. From there his family built back the cattle business they had before and now his brother runs a farm as his father, still alive at 87, enjoys his winter years in retirement.
Despite the darkness, Jorge shines a light. He does not express any anger or rage when discussing the past, he recounts stories in a very matter of fact way. His passion for ornithology brings him a natural peace and his enthusiasm overflows when a rare bird or bird only found in the region appears. He has a talent to know where each species can be found and whistles or more often uses the recorded calls of an app called Merlin, produced by Cornell University in the US. With a detachable speaker that he connects to his phone using bluetooth, he creates some distance between the human observer and where he wants the bird to land. It is not a precise art and often takes some time but the bird whisperer as I called him, normally delivers, the only exception was when a group of falcons decided to circle around for a period which prevented a smaller bird, a tanager, from arriving for fear of its life. Jorge locates a position in a tree or an open area where he indicates that the bird will land and in time it does, making it easy to photograph the feathered friend. It shows how with a little technology and half a life time of know how, St Francis of Assisi can live again, through a man that is clearly at one with nature and and man that has developed techniques that allow interactions and people to share considerable time with a species often observing it face to face.
Apart from birdlife, all other life thrives in the little forests that sit of the foot of the eastern mountain range of the Andes. The easiest mammals to observe are the monkeys, we saw a good number of different species such as the common spider monkey, but also the more interesting saki which has the wooly coat of a sloth but the mobility of a primate. A type of wild boar roams the jungle pathways, we did not see it but we certainly smelt it; a whiff, that turns the aroma of the jungle into a gents toilet. In reality inside the jungle its pretty inhospitable, apart from the mud, you are bitten, stung, buzzed at, chirped at, screamed at by mostly the macaws whilst all the time you are sweating out a good deal of water and salt with the intense humidity. But it is within that environment that there is so much biodiversity. Jorge has recorded hundreds of bird species, in one morning he recorded 70 different species inside the Merlin app. You can only begin to imagine what exists and is yet to be documented in the Amazon as we were only within a space of just a few hectares.
Talking at length with Jorge he lamented a little the changes that have happened since the peace process has taken hold. Whilst grateful that the authoritarian control that the guerrilla and other groups forced upon the community has now mostly gone, he points out that the deforestation is now much worse as the civil and criminal authorities of both the state and central government are next to useless to control it. Before people who wanted to burn and clear the forest needed permission from the armed groups, now people can burn at will with no consequence. The much maligned town of San Vicente de Caguan is now hopping with trade and life, it is growing at a steady pace and Jorge feels completely safe there. We drove around late into the night and there is no sign of fear, curfews or controls that once were part of daily life.
This part of Colombia received a lot of investment in terms of military presence and also the roads are in the main pretty transitable as well as being free of charge; most of the country has a series of tolls every fifty or so miles, here there are none at all on the main thoroughfares. Some enterprising communities have built their own roads that connect small hamlets, they are called veredas and they charge a toll, but Jorge compares this to the alternative which are impassable mud tracks so he is happy as are others to contribute to this alternative governance, completely contrary to law, but something that works. It shows how there is a gaping void of authority between the ending of the tyrannic control of armed groups and the new control of a semi-democratic governing regimes of the state.
Another positive Jorge points out is how with COVID 19, much needed funds have finally arrived to his hospital in Florencia. They did not have any ICU units and now they have 20. The hospital is being transformed with new testing equipment not just for PCR tests but others that arrived with the technology necessary to deal with the pandemic. Before patients with critical condition were sent on 5 or 10 hour road journeys with a family member to Neiva or Bogotá. Without a family member the patient could not be transferred to a suitable hospital with facilities such as life saving equipment or an isolated room with germ free conditions.This was horrendous as many died on route or if they survived the journey often the family member who went with them was left destitute with no accommodation or money to survive the days or weeks in a strange city far from home.
In a contrasting experience to exploring the wildlife with Jorge, I spent some time in a local community project called Uruki, which is a small barrio in the hillside of the city of Florencia. The community is made up fo three groups, the Uitoto, Coreguaje and the colonialists or whites as they are referred to, effectively the modern Colombian. The project within the community is to try to maintain a sustainable woodland as well as harmony between the 3 groups. The Amazon tribal groups of the Uitoto and Coreguaje are not inside their native lands as they have all been “displaced” by one group or another that operates within the interior of the Amazon. One of the representatives of the Uitoto is a man named Raul. He greeted me exhaling a dust of green coca leaf floating from his mouth that he seems to consume the whole day. He grows his own coca plants, he has various varieties; he dries the leaves and then with a large wooden pole and a meter long casing of bamboo he pounds everything down to a fine powder inside his giant sized pestle and mortar. The powder is so dry that he also consumes a “tabaco” which is a black tar like paste, a bit like marmite. This has medicinal properties but also encourages the production of saliva which is essential to balance out the dryness of a couple of table spoons of powder every hour.
Inside Raul’s little market garden he grows all sorts of different shrubs, herbs, spices, chiles and as part of the community project he has a small collection of orchids. Each plant has a medicinal purpose, some are for renal conditions, others for an upset stomach, but many are used to treat cancer. His version of Amazonian medicine is heavily infused with a confused spirituality that he has had since adolescence. He was orphaned, I suspect by the guerrilla but he did not say, maybe he simply does not know. He doesn’t know his birth name and was brought up missionaries in Putumayo before finding his way back to his ancestral routes. His approach to medicine is based on 4 key plants, coca, tabaco, yuca dulce and jacin or something that sounds like Jasmin in English but is a different plant. These four plants are the plants of power, the principal plants that need to be understood and treated in a certain way as if abused each can lead to problems. The obvious example of this is the coca plant!! He has various rambling, part ancestral yarns about each one, how each plant was delivered by a mysterious stranger or the god Mo into the community. The reason I emphasize the idea that everything is partial is that his ideology is littered with Catholic dogma. He talks of one true, all powerful god, but then he branches into the powerful elements of the forrest and the water who are most likely gods within his real ancestral culture. He talks at times like a parable from the Bible, carefully repeating the core concepts of community, such as dialogue, listening, patience and the eternal quest of knowledge.
His religious and spiritual development stops pretty sharp when it comes to women, women cannot consume coca as it is a feminine element inside his theology. If a woman were to consume the plant then she would become confused and disorientated. He tells us he becomes confused and disorientated in the presence of women if they join the tribal meetings, he cannot concentrate; he tries to gloss over his misogyny by inferring that the women are naked, which of course they were many moons ago but not in his life experience where the missionaries put a stop to that! He talks of sexual distraction but it’s really an internal fight of someone who is very conscious of the “colonial” mentality where women have a more central role in society, Raul is also living under the rule of the colonialist, not his tribal rules. Many Uitoto live in their own lands and under their own laws in areas known as resguardos, they would certainly not try and explain or appease in any way their beliefs but Raul is not from either world, orphaned, then displaced from his early life to the edge of what is to him a metropolis.
In the mixed up ideology of Raul you begin to understand the beauty of the project of the community which is to try and develop language and ways to express ideas that allow completely different cultures to live together in harmony. It’s a microcosm of the challenges that people face in Colombia, a certain historic diversity but also such strong and often violent individual experiences that shape a very disjointed country. The more time anyone spends in Colombia the complex tapestry of life unravels itself a little. Just the story of Raul, firstly born into a tribe, then orphaned, then formed by missionaries, then a period in his tribal life, then married to woman from a different tribe, then displaced by a violent group, then thrust into a modern day city after years of living in the jungle. Just one of those experiences is hard to contemplate, but now that same man is part of a project to fuse disjointed communities, two distinct tribes and the modern day Colombian (who is created from Spanish, black and indigenous genes and ideas). The mind boggles but with carefully chosen language and patience a blended philosophy can be sustainable. One good example is medicine. Raul talks of his medicine as only being preventative, his plants are mixed with prayer to help his patients. He talks of when this fails and diseases take hold then the modern day medicine has its purpose which effectively in his mind is some type of surgery. There is a harmony that makes sense to everyone from all communities if each branch of health and healing techniques can be compartmentalized and appreciated for their intrinsic values and nobody disrespects anything as bogus or contrary to their philosophical or scientific beliefs.
Interestingly enough the challenge around sustainability of the environment without the community is with the Coreguaje, who will clear land for the planting of yuca or other staples. One initiative they have developed is a focus on the production of copoazú, a fruit related to cacao which grows readily in the Amazon. The deal is simple - if the Corequaje provide an ample supply of the fruit and promise not to destroy the forest to grow other plants, in turn they receive a steady income which makes things a little more sustainable all round. Its too early to know if anything is really working and there is very little traction with any eco-tourism related to the project but they do get a lot of plaudits and government visitors for the initiative as an all round idea that ticks many boxes that are in the list of fundamental challenges for Colombian society in general.
The last element of the project is with orchids, they call them orchids for peace. Many of the people involved have their own little orchid collection of ten or twenty plants. However Mary has managed to collect over 150 and receives regular visits from national and international experts who are both observing and helping her develop the collection; Mary is hopeful to fulfill a planned invitation to Kew Gardens in London to share and improve her knowledge of orchids. On regular visits into the rain forrest different species are gathered and taken into the homes, some grow in the soil but many are parasites or air plants that grow on small wooden stumps or attached to trees in the many gardens. Mary has plans to commercialize her garden and has a number of orchids for sale, each fully grown plant is around 12 USD to buy. The same group are trying to grow vanilla, a non native plant but again something that for a low yield has quite a high price. The Uruki project is incredibly small and in a national and global terms not even a drop in the ocean, but in its own way it shines a little light on what can be achieved on the edge of the Amazon forrest, a key part of the long term future of the planet.
Caqueta has a strong sense of autonomy, it’s a long slow journey to Neiva, the nearest principle city of the Huila, the neighboring state and then several hours more to Bogotá. You get a sense that much progress has been made and the society despite some overbearing capitalists and drug runners, now operates with some sense of normality. It is a beautiful part of Colombia, with access to the heart of the biodiversity that Colombia often boasts about in its tourism adds but under delivers to nearly every single visitor to its shores. It’s a gigantic melting pot of recent internal migration. Of the many residents, the style of talking is very much a mix of phrases and accents from Cundinamarca and Antioquia, Colombias two most populous states. All of that is mixed with several different indigenous groups, some still autonomous but many integrated into the society, albeit on the fringes. For those that love to arrive at places before they get over run, this should definitely be on the list. It may take years for it to forget its past, but when it does, those who currently fear it (the majority Colombians), will finally take the plunge and the international tourists will follow. I am sure one day it will become a key eco-tourist destination, where Jorge, Raul, Mary and others can let the diversity of the gateway to the Amazon do all the talking as visitors will be amazed and marvel at the diversity, all the time with the sound of the squawking family favorites of the macaw and the toucan echoing in their ears.
