R.I.P. The Defender of the Defenseless

Roberto Franco

He defended the most defenseless Colombians - those who wield only bows and arrows and spears and don't even know they are Colombians.

They are Colombia's isolated Amazonian tribes, ethnic groups who perhaps have never had contact with Westerners, or - more likely - had tragic contact and decided to have nothing more to do with the pale-skinned people wielding terrible weapons and even more terrible diseases. The Amazonians very sensibly retreated into the jungle to continue their stone age way of life.

Colombia has a few isolated Amazonian tribes, including the Yuri or Carabayo and Passé, inside the 2.47-million acre Rio Puré National Park, bordered by the Caquetá and Putumayo Rivers along the Brazilian border, and numbering somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand people.

A Maloka, house of uncontacted indigenous people in the
Rio Puré National Park (Photo: Colombian Park Service)

In 2012, researcher and indigenous rights activist Roberto Franco and others photographed traditional longhouses in the national park, thus documenting the isolated people's existence. Their work may even save the peoples' lives and culture, since a decree signed by Pres. Juan Manuel Santos in 2011 protects the right of uncontacted peoples to their isolated way of life and prohibits interference in their territory.

However, in a tragedy which received little attention in a Colombia obsessed with the antics of Shakira and James Rodriguez, Franco was among ten people killed when their small plane crashed in the Amazon earlier this month. Altho they will never know it, those uncontacted people lost their greatest protector. Franco died while returning from a visit to the huge Chiribiquete Park, where he had met with indigenous people.

Enslaved Amazonian Indians around 1900.
(Photo: Survival International)

Colombia's isolated people are more properly called 'voluntarily isolated.' Many have had tragic
interactions with Westerners, such as guerrillas, drug runners, illegal loggers, miners or hunters, who sometimes massacre indigenous people, drive them from their homes or transmit fatal diseases. During the decades around 1900, rubber companies invaded much of the Amazon, displacing and enslaving indigenous peoples. Some indigenous peoples fled deep into the jungle, where they have stayed ever since.

Tragically, Franco's mission may be ultimately futile. While rubber tapping has mostly ended, the Amazon remains under assault from loggers, miners, hunters and agriculturalists, particularly cattle raisers. Colombia loses somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 hectares of forest every year - a rate of 653 football fields each day. And Brazil, which possesses most of the Amazon, just reported that deforestation there leaped by 29% between 2011 and 2012.

Four days ago, four members of the Peruvian Asháninka indigenous people were allegedly murdered by illegal loggers in a remote region near the Peruvian-Brazilian border.

In 1981, evangelical missionaries called the New Tribes Mission made first contact with the Nukak indigenous people, who lived in Colombia near the Brazilian border. Using gifts, they drew the Nukaks out of their jungle isolation. After that, the Nukaks fell victim to disease and violence, and now live in squalor, dependent on hand-outs, in the city of San José del Guaviare.

The Karijona people are another tragic story. Late last year the Colombian government more than doubled the size of Chiribiquete Park, to almost 2.8 million hectares - triple the size of the U.S.'s Yellowstone Park. The park's expansion was in part intended to protect isolated peoples, as well as the largest pictographic archeological complex in northern South America. However, for the Karijona people, the protection came far too late. The Karijonas are believed to have drawn the elaborate pictographs in the park hundreds or thousands of years ago, when they probably numbered between ten and twenty thousand people.

But Western diseases, rubber harvesters, violence and deforestation devastated the Karijonas. Today, only 60 Karijonas survive.

Along with Franco, the plane crash also killed indigenous leader and conservationist Daniel Matapí, himself an indigenous native of the Amazon.

Today, the Amazon rainforest, and her indigenous peoples are fighting against the odds for survival. And, without Franco and Matapí, their chances got a bit worse.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Bogotá's Eastern Hills - So Near, Yet So Far Away

Construction equipment parked on an illegal road near La Calerain Bogotá's Eastern Hills. (Photo from El Tiempo/CityTV)

They rise up on the city's eastern edge, providing a green, forested backdrop to Colombia's capital, as well as a source of vital fresh air.

Bogotá's Eastern Hills provide a sweeping green
backdrop for the city.

But Bogotá's Eastern Hills are under constant attack, as a pair of articles in El Tiempo yesterday and today chronicled. A rancher near La Calera in north Bogotá built an acess road across his land, illegaly and without obtaining permits. The road damaged three separate protected forests, according to experts interviewed by the paper, and polluted one of the rivers flowing into the capital.

But the road's biggest impact may happen in the next years if the environmental officials do not succeed in removing it. That's because it'll enable the construction of homes and other buildings in the area, further destroying the forests.

The landowner who created the road sounded unrepentant, telling El Tiempo only that he wanted to be able to drive across his property to observe his cattle.

The cable car station to Monserrate and the
Virgin de Guadalupe statue behind.

This road is a small-scale example of one of the greatest threats to Colombia's forests: While mining, oil wells and other types of resource extraction cause damage themselves, their greatest impacts occur in the following years, as farmers and ranchers use roads and pipeline rights-of-way to invade virgin areas and carry out more deforestation.

This road is only the most recent attack on Bogotá's Estern Hills, which are protected by law, but where both rich and poor try to build houses illegaly.

But the damage to forests is only one fundamental tragedy of the Eastern Hills of Bogotá. Because of the area's isolation and the many rough neighborhoods along the base of the hills, the hills have a reputation for crime.

A view of central Bogotá from the hills.

About five years ago, some friends and I hiked to the top of Monserrate, then down the back of the hills and back into Bogotá via the canyons behind the Parque Nacional. We took precautions, including carrying big sticks and bringing along several pit bulls. Even so, we kept silent for long stretches of the walk so that the tough kids in the barrios down below wouldnpt hear us and and come out in pursuit. In the end, we had a great time walking thru peaceful pine and eucalyptus forests, where we felt as tho we were in a different world, far from Bogotá's noise and pollution.

We planned to do another hike the following Sunday. But on Saturday part of the hills caught fire and a family visiting their grandfather's ashes, which they'd scattered behind the Parque Nacional, was gunned down in a mugging gone awry. We canceled our second hike, and I haven't been back since.

There have since been many more crimes in the Eastern Hills, including a dramatic one in north Bogotá last year, in which muggers stopped hikers at gunpoint one by one and took them to a field, where they robbed them and held them for hours until they'd succeeded in methodically robbing several dozen people.

I grew up in the San Franciso, (California) Bay Area, where we loved going hiking, bicycling and picnicing in the Berkeley Hills. Bogotá's Eastern Hills could be a similar wonderful resource for the nine million people trapped in the capital's stress, noise and pollution, especially for those who don't have the time or money to leave the city.

The situation is a sort of Catch-22: As long as few people venture into the hills, they'll remain isolated and dangerous. But unless more people start recreating in the hills, they won't become safer.

The city has plans to turn the Eastern Hills into a park, complete with hiking and cycling trails. But they haven't advanced. Such plans will require lots of money and planning. However, the city might start on a small scale, creating secure trails and exhibits, which would be steadily expanded as more and more people venture into the hills. Perhaps some of the kids who now occupy themselves by mugging people could even be employed in these projects.

Related: Another Bite out of Bogotá's Hills

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

No Chingaza Dos!

A paramo, or high-altitude wetland in Chingaza National Park. Building the Chingaza II reservoir would have meant flooding more ecosystems like this one. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The news this past week that Bogotá has decided against building a new water reservoir called Chingaza II is a victory for the environment in many ways.

The existing Chingaza Reservoir.
(Photo: Nayrita, Viajeros.com)

Bogotá now gets 80% of its drinking water from the Chingaza Reservoir, located southwest of Bogotá and surrounded by a National Park of the same name. The Chingaza provides more water than the city needs now or is projected to for years to come. But there's a problem. An increasing amount of that water is polluted - so dirty that water treatment facilities can't make it drinkable.

The plan to build a second reservoir, to be called Chingaza II, really amounted to ignoring the pollution problems, which are caused by deforestation, cattle grazing and other human activities in the reservoir's watershed, as well as industrial run-off into the Bogotá and other rivers. Building a second reservoir without solving those problems would only mean flooding more land and destroying more biodiversity in order to generate more polluted water.

Bogotá has also done little to reduce water consumption, which is a much cheaper and envionmentally sound strategy than flooding more wildlands with yet another expensive reservoir. How about water conservation requirements for new housing and office construction? Or retrofitting existing buildings with low-flow showerheads and toilets? Such policies would not only save water and energy, but also lower the cost of living for residents.

But the decision is also a move towards sound environmental planning for other reasons. Right now, Bogotá is in a quiet dispute with surrounding municipalities over water supplies. Historically, Bogotá has sold water to surrounding areas from its Chingaza supply, and let those regions decide how to use it. But, in a far-reaching policy shift recently, Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro said the capital would no longer give those areas water to build new sprawl developments. That hopefully signals a shift away from the gobbling up of natural areas for development to denser 'vertical' growth within the existing city limits. And limiting urban sprawl also means less land paved over, more use of public transit and less pollution from vehicles.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours