By Julio Cesar Uribe Hermocillo. Taken from El Guaregue.
Colombia occupies about 1% of the Earth’s surface and is home to about 10% of the planet’s fauna and flora. This makes it one of the 12 megadiverse nations in the world. Likewise, Colombia is the country with the greatest diversity of birds and orchids in the world, with the second largest record of tree species, after Brazil. Colombia is third in reptile diversity and fourth in mammal classes. Colombia has half of the páramos in the world: almost 3 million hectares. 20% of our territory are wetlands, which occupy more than 30 million hectares. And our forests occupy more than 59 million hectares, equivalent to 53% of the national territory[1].
Colombia is, then, –obviously, long before this characteristic ended up becoming a government slogan– a world power of life; for its recognized and magnificent richness in biodiversity; for the munificent splendor with which life is born and multiplies in these parts, every second, since the world began, in the jungles and in the splendid ecosystems of the Amazon, the Orinoquía, the mountains and valleys of the Andes and the Pacific lowlands and the Biogeographic Chocó.
The jungle, this Colombian jungle, is home and abode, habitat and niche for hundreds of life forms. This jungle is also a customary, secular and ancestral reference point for millions of compatriots, for whom it has always been a source of vital meaning, symbolic and material production, food and medicine, recreation and contemplation, knowledge and wisdom, history and tradition. The jungle is, finally, the nucleus of the territory of the communities and ethnic peoples that inhabit it; it is the core, heart and essence of the identity shared since ancient times, which is encrypted in the languages of water, trees, animals and every living being -however tiny and invisible- cohabits with human populations in this immense reservoir of the DNA of our species and our societies.
For the ethnic people of Colombia who have lived there since the furthest of days, the jungle is literally their home; not “the dark jungle that stalks them mercilessly”, nor “the inhospitable jungle that welcomes them”, as he wrote, in a journalistic story about the three girls and the boy lost in the jungles of Guaviare and Caquetá –published on 18 May in El Colombiano, from Medellín– a journalist who –apparently– seems to have never even visited the Joaquín Antonio Uribe Botanical Garden, in her city, or at least does not seem to have read the explanatory signs of the jungle that accompany the samples of tropical flora of that place[2].
The story of the journalist from El Colombiano is almost a piece of terror, although full of commonplaces and box phrases about the dangers derived from the inhospitality of the jungle; but, she was not the only one who related this story in this way. During the 40 days that the four surviving indigenous children of the accident of a small plane that traveled between Araracuara and San José del Guaviare were missing, the entire national press – written, spoken, televised – abounded in terrifying descriptions to highlight and implant in the perception of their audiences the erroneous idea that the jungle, which is the habitat and home of millions of Colombian citizens belonging to ethnic peoples, is by definition a source of risk and danger to life. And not – as in reality it is, precisely – a source of life thanks to which the ethnic peoples of Colombia and the four children whose appearance or discovery we are celebrating with joy are still alive, like a triumph of lifefrom this Friday June 9 at dusk.
The jungle of Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy is not the jungle that Colombian journalists painted for their readers, listeners and viewers to get lost in it. Lesly is a 13-year-old girl, the daughter of an indigenous mother and father, granddaughter of indigenous people, great-granddaughter, great-granddaughter, chozna and more, of indigenous people of the Uitoto, Muinane or Murui ethnic group, whose existence dates back to the prehistory of the Colombian Amazon. . The historic heroism of Lesly’s older sister made it possible for her little brother and her two little sisters, one of them newborn less than a year ago when the accident occurred, to have at all times what was necessary to survive during the forty days in which they wandered through the jungle. Looking for directions that would allow them to reach a populated place, perhaps at no time were they fully aware of the meaning of the death of her mother in that plane from which they were walking away.
In his fabulous description of the Middle Atrato, in Chocó, in 1961, the extraordinary anthropologist Rogerio Velásquez, a forerunner of Afro-Colombian ethnographic studies, thus described the skills, abilities, and knowledge of an Afro-Chocoan puberty or pre-adolescent from that region: “At twelve years, the boy from Atrata is a light rural encyclopedia. He has learned to ford streams, to know the steps of the tiger or the fox, to point out poisonous or curative plants, to conduct himself in a socola or fishing, to build huts, to determine the changes of the weather, to buy and to sell. To his credit are the names of wasps, birds, timber trees, vipers. This boy thus prepared is a staff of the home…[3].
Like this black boy, described by Rogerio Velásquez more than half a century ago, with his knowledge, skills and abilities, Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy (13 years old) made possible the miracle of prolonging the life of his 9-year-old sister, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy; of her 4-year-old brother, You have Noriel Ranoque Mucutuyand her baby sister Cristin Neriman Ranoque Mucutuywho lived his first birthday there in the jungle.
Colombian journalism had the opportunity to narrate the country’s jungle, to tell the life of its people, to show it to the country and the world. But, he didn’t. In their ever deeper superficiality, the newscasts, the newspapers and the radio newscasts in Colombia chose -as always, and especially when dealing with ordinary people- the easy and abject path of making life and customs exotic. , even the sadness, of the families and indigenous peoples immersed in this painful tragedy that, fortunately, had a happy ending. And to present as something folkloric, curious, strange, everything that sounded different to them, from the vernacular spoken by the grandmother of the Mucutuy children -whom the journalists with microphone in hand and condescending smile made translate or say or deny- , to the presence of indigenous people in the search operation organized by the Colombian government through the national army.
Lesly Mucutuy is already part of the national history of Colombia. Hopefully the film, the series, the book, which in these times of narrative peddlers have surely already begun to put together, take care of showing a scenario that does justice to both their prowess and heroism, as well as their roots and their historical environment and cultural. Perhaps this way, when they see the series and the film, and suddenly read the book, the journalists of the Colombian mainstream press will understand what had to be narrated.
[1] WWF Colombia. May 22-International Day for Biological Diversity. Instagram: wwf_colombia
[2] El Colombiano, May 18, 2023. False hope: children in Guaviare are still lost in the middle of the jungle. By Paulina Mesa.
[3] Velasquez, Roger. Socioeconomic notes of the middle Atrato. Colombian Magazine of Anthropology, Volume 10, 1961. Pp. 158-225.