Colombia: Deforestation and Usurping Indigenous Land Go Together

Oct 10, 2018 | Rodrigo Botero
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Neither laws nor state actions have managed to curb the progressive deforestation of Colombia's Amazonian territories, which include the homes of indigenous tribes that have been striving for decades, even centuries, to avoid contact from the outside. The gnawing destruction is threatening designated reservations like the Chiribiquete National Park, and the nearby Nukak Maku and Yaguará II reserves that connect Chiribiquete with the Macarena National Park.

The tribes that live in these protected territories have good reason to fear contacts with the "white man." My friend, the researcher Roberto Franco, has gathered a range of historical documents and interviews with native thinkers to write Cariba Malo, a history of the Yuri — one of the Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation (PIAV, Pueblos indígenas en aislamiento voluntario), as the situation has been categorized. Their isolation, he writes in the book, "is an act of resistance emerging from the deep conviction that their freedom and independence are more important than the surrounding world of other humans or the caribas (whites)."