Even showing the aftermath of the genocidal violence of the rubber fever (1870-1913) and the war between Colombia and Peru in 1933, the indigenous peoples – Uitotos Tucanos, Magüta, Marubo and dozens of other ethnic groups – responded positively to the proposal of the Catalan Capuchin friar Antonio Jover i Lamaña in the mid-sixties.
“Brother Jover proposed to bring objects to the mission to create a space for cultural exchange; they already constitute the core of the collection we have here”, explains Mariza Ruiz, the young coordinator of the public museum of ethnography in the Colombian city of Leticia, in the so-called Triple Border – Colombia, Brazil and Peru – of the Western Amazon.
More than a tourist destination, the museum – housed in a modern purple building, one and a half kilometers from the chaotic Brazilian city of Tabatinga – is an educational center.
“We are visited by 30 children a day, most of them indigenous”, he explains. “I am of Maguta descent; before I didn’t consider myself indigenous, now I do; young people identify more and more with their ethnicity”.
Here at Leticia, identity is not an anecdote. Since the invasion of the Peruvian rubber trees, the triple border, with three countries disputing the riches of the jungle and its subsoil, has only meant violence and terror for the indigenous people, despite the fact that “for them these borders are rather fictitious”, says Ruiz. In the middle of Picasso collage masks and wind instruments painted with geometric abstraction, a rifle is exposed. “He was from the rubber plantations; when the friars arrived they found victims of decades of killings”, he explains.
Fifteen years after his death, at the age of 84, Jover i Lamaña – born in Barcelona, ??son of a Catalan banking family – would be afraid to leave the museum and walk ten minutes to the border. It’s a bustling environment of churrascarías, cevicherías and tri-flag shops, with the constant hum of hundreds of motorbike taxis descending on the boats. But it is one of the most violent places in the three countries.
During this visit, the news of the day is about a fifteen-year-old boy injured by a stray bullet in a shootout between different groups of criminals. Tomorrow will be another death in this triple municipality, through the barely guarded borders where everything is trafficked, from drugs and weapons to protected species, such as Amazonian turtles, valued for their sweet meat.
The triple border made international headlines in June last year, when indigenous ethnologist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Don Phillips were shot dead by an illegal fisherman, following a chase by Javarí river, which serves as the border between Brazil and Peru and flows into the Amazon, 20 kilometers from Leticia. The alleged motive for the crime: Pereira’s allegations against illegal fishermen and hunters in the huge indigenous reserve of Brazil’s Javarí Valley.
The drug trafficker Rubens Villar, alleged mastermind of the crime, has already been arrested. With dual Brazilian and Peruvian nationality, his name is El Colombia and he lives in a houseboat on the island of Iceland, half an hour from Leticia/Tabatinga, which belongs to Peru.
“During the years of Bolsonaro, the state disappeared,” said Marcio Maura, former president of the Brazilian Indian Foundation. But the truth is that in this area of ??the Amazon there is not one state missing, but three. Something similar is happening on the other jungle border, that of Venezuela and Brazil, in the north-central Amazon, where a violent invasion of Yanomami territory by tens of thousands of armed illegal miners has been described as genocide by brazilian government
“Indigenous Venezuelans have been victims, as well as indigenous Brazilians,” says Luis Salas, Caracas-based executive director of the Wataniba organization. Likewise, “there are many Venezuelans in illegal gold mining in Brazil and Brazilians in Venezuela; then there are the Colombians, guerrillas who have not laid down their arms and are operational in the Venezuelan Amazon”. Hence the importance of the summit of the eight countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA) – Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname –, held last month in Belém (Brazil).
The news that transpired internationally after the summit was the failure to reach a commitment to zero deforestation before 2030 – only Brazil and Colombia signed – as well as the discrepancies between the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, regarding oil exploration in the Amazon. Petro opposes it and Lula is ambiguous about the discovery of an important deposit at the mouth of the Amazon.
But there were important developments. The eight countries committed to “guarantee the conservation, protection and ecosystemic and socio-cultural connectivity of the Amazon”, and to create in Manaus an International Police Cooperation Center for the Amazon.
“Punishment is not the only solution, but it is necessary”, says Sales, whose oenagé has participated in meetings in Leticia on sustainable economy. There are hopes that Bolsonaro’s departure and the leftward turn in the region can facilitate a common agenda of protection and sustainable development in the Amazon.
The Venezuelan Government has pledged to act against hundreds of thousands of illegal miners on the border with Brazil, through Operation Autana. “One of his most notable achievements has been the eviction of the Yapacana mining camp, located in the national park,” says Salas.
On the other side of the border, Lula has deployed thousands of police and military personnel to expel the garimpeiros, although Yanomami leaders have denounced the presence even in the area of ??these illegal gold seekers and precious stones
On the Brazilian side of the Triple Border, the presence of the federal police has been reinforced to protect the environment and fight organized crime. “It will not be provisional,” said the new head of the environment of the Brazilian federal police, Humberto Freire.
Petro, for his part, has focused his policy on disarming armed groups and the search for alternatives to cocaine production. Ecuador has just approved in a national plebiscite the protection of the Yasuni Amazon reserve against oil interests. Peru, immersed in a deep political crisis, may be the weakest link in the chain.
After imposing the law in the jungle, it is intended to adopt other multilateral initiatives in areas such as agro-industry, tourism and culture with the full involvement of the original peoples, the true guardians of nature without borders. The Leticia museum wants to contribute its grain of sand. “This is a museum of diversity, anthropologists from Brazil and Peru come here, but more indigenous leaders need to come as well,” observes Ruiz.
