WHAT WE MADE⁴

I carried out the practice Option Colombia in Inírida, the capital of the departamento of Guainía.  Their urban helmet is quite small, more or less the size of Jamundí^e8.  Its population is compound mainly for colonists coming from different parts of the country, in an approximate proportion of 60%.  The other 40% is integrated by indigenous of several ethnos that inhabit the departamento at rural level and of an important percentage of indigenous groups that migrated from Vaupés.

The great majority doesn't possess an educational level above the high school; the professionals that live in Inírida all of them have arrived through Bogotá to work with the municipal or departmental government.  The only communication ways are the river Inírida and two airlines, Satena and AeroRepública that arrive two or three times per week.

The departamento of Guainía is located in the eastern end of the country, in the limits with Brazil and Venezuela, surrounded by Vichada, Guaviare and Vaupés.  Most of its territory is forest and water.  Their rulers consider the departamento inside the corpes⁵ of the Orinoquia for political and economic convenience, but in the strictly geographical sense, only the rivers Guaviare, Atabapo and Inírida end in the Orinoco.  The rivers Negro, Isana, Cuyarí and Guainía belong to the Amazonia.  The whole territory is crossed by infinity of brooks that end in their turn in the main rivers.

The natives are the majority of its population, with an approximate total of 24 cultures.  The puinave and the curripaco are the biggest ethnos, but there are also guahibos, sikuanis, yerales and others.  They are hard to quantify for the population's mobility.  They inhabit the riversides, distributed in small communities of not more than 800 inhabitants, very distant to each other.  Only Inírida, the capital, has near 14 thousand inhabitants, with a percentage of floating population of 25 percent.

In the Inírida river the ethnos puinave prevails; in the Atabapo and in the Guainía, the curripaco; in the Isana-Cuyarí and in the Negro river the latter share the territory with the yeral; the Guaviare is inhabited by different ethnos, mainly those coming from Vichada and Vaupés.  According to the DANE, the total of the ethnos they make the population's 98.8%, but, if I only lean on in my observations, I could say that the real figure oscillates between the 70 and 80%.  However, the census doesn't consider the mobile population neither the recently displaced colonists.

Inírida is the only municipality, the other ones are corregimientos^e9 and the gobernación^e10 administers them.  Anyway, the rural area that controls the Mayor's office is immense.  It begins in the Guaviare, it arrives until the Middle Inírida River and it includes discharging brooks.

4	This section is based on the answer to a feedback to the university format that presented us the Corporation Option Colombia.  A copy of the original format is in the appendix.  The corporation waited a project in common among all those that return of the regions, but the idea didn't clot, because the whole group of those "reinserted" was very dispersed and occupied in its own matters.
e8	A village town in Cali's surroundings.
5	Financial Corporation for Regional Development (a dependence of the National budget planning office.)
e9	The least populated administrative rural division.
e10	The governor's office.

The net

In what concerns to my practice, I supported the presidential program of the Social Solidarity net⁶.  My work consisted in coordinating the departmental table of solidarity and the sector tables of health, education, housing and employment.  I also made surveillance to the projects of the following programs:

• Integral improvement of urban housing and its environment
• To live better (rural housing)
• Generation of urban employment program (PGE)
• Generation of rural employment program (rural PGE)

At the arriving moment, the departmental planning secretary carried out these activities, by governor's responsibility.  According to the operative regulation of the net, the members of the collegiate management body (the governor, the mayors of the municipalities, representatives from the community, the NGOs, the executing entities, the churches and other civil organizations) they were those in charge of the administration of each program.  However, as all those people had the whole time almost saturated with activities, the normal thing was that it was delegated in an institution that had a general vision of the departamento's problems.  In most country's departamentos it corresponded to the PNR^e11 delegation, but in the Guainía it didn't exist.  Only until March 95 the delegate's appointment was official, and it corresponded us, to my Option partner and me, to collaborate with the organization of the new delegation and to work like secretary and messenger, while the corresponding ones were named.

Anyway, the work of the net is an interdisciplinary work, in which all the state institutions intervene, so much the departmental and municipal secretaries as the decentralized institutes (as the ICBF, the Agrarian Box, etc.^e12); with all things related to them.  In each sector table each institution technicians sat down with representatives of the community (or the same community), to make decisions about the resources used in some programs and/or which communities or people were benefited.  For example, in the housing sector table they met one representative of each neighborhood of the municipality, representatives of the communities of the rivers, one representative of the Mayor's office, one of the departmental planning secretary and at least one of the Solidarity net.  Representatives of the public infrastructure secretary were present in some occasions, the PNR, the Caja Agraria and the INURBE.  Among all them they decided which neighborhood has more poverty concentration in Inírida's urban helmet and which departmental micro-region has more unsatisfied basic needs.  None could have been cover by previous governments' rural housing programs.

The resources that would feed the programs came from the co financing funds, some of them: Solidarity and Social emergency Fund (FOSES), Integrated Rural Development Fund (DRI), Infrastructure vial (FIV), Social Infrastructure Fund (FIS), Urban Infrastructure Fund (FIU) and Financial Territorial Development Fund (FINDETER), besides the institutes of Urban reform (INURBE) and Family Welfare (ICBF) and the education and health departmental and municipal secretaries.

6	In this text the initial letters of the institutions are all in low letter.  It is not an orthographical error; I made it on purpose.  I have known them so impersonal and so impersonalising that I believe that to treat them like a personal name is not the most appropriate thing.  They don't deserve the honor of treating them like personal names.
e11	National Rehabilitation Plan.  It was the Virgilio Barco's presidential administration main social plan and searched the reintegration of demobilized guerrilla members.  The net pretended to replace it with success only in certain areas.
e12	Caja Agraria ("Agrarian Box") was the only national rural bank until 1999.  It was the only financial institution available in the countryside but went into bankruptcy due to corruption and bad administration.  The short names of the funds and institutions are expanded in this page last paragraph.

Obstacles

It was an obstacle for us to arrive to a departamento where there was not PNR delegation.  People in charge of the net programs in departmental planning knew very few about it and they waited much from us.  As we were instructed in Bogotá at fantastic speeds, the advantage that we took them was very small.  Even more, we had to borrow everything:  Computers, paper, typewriters, telephone, etc.  It was a plus that in the departamento they were very kind and they didn't complain about the annoyances that we cause them.

Almost all the decisions we had to consult them with the central level; hard phone communications and congestion are bread of every day for the precariousness of local Telecom^e13 equipment.  We had the luck to be in the airport with people that knew the region; not being this way, we had arrived without knowing at least where was the governor's office.  Anyway, the departamento collaborated with us with 2 months of rent and feeding.

Another obstacle was the scarce possibility to visit directly the indigenous communities, for the distance and the enormous consumption of gasoline that mean the overboard motors. I could only be within the communities in three occasions, two days long each one.  In the departamento the centralization is very hard to avoid, because there are communities at a distance of 15 days by river and those connected by air only have flights every 15 days, like Barrancominas and San Felipe populations.

About the central levels, the decentralized institutes regional offices are all in Bogotá or Villavicencio, it complicates the deskwork a lot.  In many times the officials were not, after (at least) 40 minutes of insistence, or they didn't want to respond because "they were very busy", and that neither would be a cheat, because the regional offices assist the whole Orinoquia or Orinoquia and Amazonia the both.

e13	The state owned telecommunications company.  It uses to be the only one phone company in rural areas.

And we benefit...

Whom my work did benefit?  I believe that mainly to the presidency of the republic and the net delegation.  It is supposed that it was for community benefit, but it is hard for the community to make the most important decisions.  The normal thing is somebody other who knows how the things are made.  The officials are not accustomed to the people participating.  If somebody consults them they answer the little thing that they know and they put him to turn rounds or to make line for speak with the governor or the mayor.  Only some few officials manage the entirety of the problems.  In a poor departamento as the Guainía there is not an information office for the public, when what is needed would be more than four.

The bad attention is not only owed to laziness.  When requesting them about communitarian participation, departmental government's secretary and the municipal planning secretary (both in charge of their local entity by absence of the holder) they told me almost in chorus in a meeting "you could not be so democratic".  As if it was not enough, the departmental corregimientos coordinator mentioned me informally a proverb of the region:  "Neither the mañoco⁷ is food neither the Indian is people".  His intention when making that quotation was a clear manifestation of racism, because he dedicated the whole conversation to demonstrate that the Indians were inferior people.  That they are still high officials with mentalities like that gives worries to anyone.

It cannot be refused that to face a different culture implies more than a difficulty.  The natives have a different way to behave, they manage terms in their own language, but they find hard to understand Spanish terms in a technical level.  They listen to you, they say and they make as if they have understood, have they understood or not.  For them the ignorance is something supremely shameful and it is not normal that they accept it in front of who represents an authority.  With the little thing that I knew them, I found that they only accept it in front of well-known people, of trust, that they do not seem "to be doctors^e14".  There are also differences in the blood relation, in the way they celebrate, with the language, with the data...  However, none will be enough to justify dictatorial, prideful and racists positions.

The government's ministry Indigenous Affaires Direction has an office in Guainía.  It is supposed that it assists all the problems presented to the communities with the state authorities and anything like that, but only one anthropologist and one indigenous boat pilot are in charge.  Only one person to assist at least four cultures in a departamento twice more extended than the Valle!  Add to that colonists that look at the natives as an inferior ethnos and say "they are lazy", "they seem like animals", "they do not have any ambition" and so on.

The anthropologist should explain cultural aspects to human groups that do not have the most minimum interest in understanding each other, and among them I can count the professionals.  Also, the communities have a heap of necessities to solve; each one implies that the indigenist moves to distant places and explains the same thing one time and another.  In the long, he takes the same posture of a box official in a state institution: &he nags people, he gives them excuses, display with the tone of his voice and attitude the nuisance that causes him that they ask him the same question for fiftieth time.  The mistreatment to the citizen is the state corporate culture and they are few the entities that escape to it.

From the Andean-industrial point of view, the natives do not know how to make anything, they are very belated people.  As they do not have industrialization (machines, electronic and other teams), they are considered belated.  A worker of any company would overcome them with easiness in the machinery⁸ operation, most of them are undocumented and illiterate, and that locates them at the same level of the unemployed or the indigent.  Very few people recognize that many of their complex abilities in the handling of the natural means are top technology.  In the great majority of the communities of the rivers Isana-Cuyarí and Guainía-Negro, where only the miners and the few Colombian government's representatives have arrived, the natives have devised how to him to obtain out everything (drinkable water, nutritious, transport, medicines, housing, etc.) from forest and rivers.  Their activities generate a tiny contamination level that any country's municipality would envy.

However, in the Guaviare and in the near to Inírida communities, where the colonization is more and more intense, the natives feel shame of being what they are.  They reject the natural and traditional products for consume foods produced for the market, with a smaller nutritional content and to those they are not accustomed.  The forgetfulness and the cultural shame attack with force the traditions of sharing things in community, they mine their deep respect to the ancestral authorities and the environment.

It can feel the step of the different ethnos toward the customs that we would call ours.  It becomes a common cultural place the physical native with mestizo's mentality; somebody with features and indigenous accent, but that he only has in common with the communities his genetic code.

The road that we follow in our relation with the U.S. has the same symptom.  The Colombian also feels shame out of his culture.  It is very strange an English school without clientele, they are more those that have travel to Miami that those that know an indigenous resguardo^e15.  Right here in Cali, the signs in Spanish are disappearing.  It seems that to the merchants they don't find their language very "in", neither very "play"^e16, nor anything similar.  We behave like a subordinate culture and the codes of the dominant one are those that prevail.  However, we can still follow the advice of Rubén Blades and look for something better.
 

7	The mañoco, together with the casabe, is the feeding base of the indigenous communities of the region.  It consists on flour of brave cassava to which they have extracted it the poisonous juice by squeezing it.  To the both they roast in big pans of mud; when it revolves and it is like dried flour it is called mañoco, when they arm it and roast it in form of a big cookie, is called casabe.
e14	"Doctor" in Colombia is not only the physician but also every state official or somebody important.
8	In general it is ignored, or it tends to forget, that the country's industrial devices are almost all elaborated in the U.S., Germany or another industrialized nation, and that they are obsolete or overdue in front of which they use.
e15	A resguardo is an Indian land, documented and recognized by the state.
e16	In English in the Spanish original.

MINEiROS

Mining in Guainía is the activity that reports more earnings, above the coca cultivation or trading.  In any curve of the Inírida River it can be seen the "rafts", or metal frames mounted on drums of gasoline full with air that float on the dark waters.  Each one has palm roof and it loads on the indispensable pumping motors for to impel air to their plungers.  These guys descend until 25 meters under the water, in search of gold.  Each one takes a hose to absorb the earth of the bottom and to look for the veins amid the darkness, the sand and the mud.  Of his expertise it depends if he becomes rich or he dies flat.  It is normal that from absorbing the bottom, a niche is made and the land comes over.  It is also necessary that he be a strong and resistant man, because the hose pull hard for wherever it wants.  In addition, he has to spend whole hours under the cold water, amid treacherous currents.

Spite the arduous work, people come from a distance because they can end up being won three million pesos in one month.  As iron powder attracted by a magnet, miners, prostitutes and merchants have arrived from all parts of the country, behind the Guainian wealth.  In Inírida there is a block where most are miners; their houses are firm, wide and well built.

The Brazilian plungers, well known in Brazil like garimpeiros, they end up coming from places so distant as Manaos, Brasilia and until Sao Paulo.  They seem more experienced in the search and the extraction than the Colombians, because they have acquired experience working in their country that has ten times more forests and mineral wealth.  Most of these men don't speak Spanish, they understand when you speak to them, but they answer in Portuguese.  They don't come to learn, not even for tourism, they only come for the gold.  When they get it, they spend it out almost immediately in beer and women.

However, the luck not always smiles them.  They are many those that have arrived only to suffer, to get in debt and to know the mysteries of the Guainía.  For the Brazilians the terror in Colombia is the DAS.  Some times this security body organizes combing to capture them and deport them.  They enter in hotels, in rent-rooms houses, usually at night, and they catch them unexpectedly.  However, little or anything the operatives do, because they hide or they get some from the town each time they have to.  In 4 or 5 days they are seen back by the streets of the town, as if nothing had passed.  Most has been hired by gold merchants and the raft owners, they are who keep most of the earnings.  With all their money, it is easy to influence the local politics.

Although most of the bosses are Colombians, there are some "mines" inhabited almost exclusively by Brazilians and there the Colombians are treated as foreigners.  Little cares that the territory in the map has the «Colombia» sign, they are majority and in fact they are not distinguished for their honesty.  Some Colombian miners spoke to me very well about them. They assured that they are very humanitarian and more cordial that the same countrymen.  But very few of them have a medium level of instruction; their consumption habits make them live on the edge of the bankruptcy, in spite of all the money that they achieve to earn.  Anyway, that it is a disease that attacks them all, without distinction of nationality.  Moreover, the merchants move to the "mines" and they get paid according to the revenues of their clients, it means with inflated prices.  Not very big breads can be seen by thousand pesos, beers by the triple of their commercial value.  The plungers pay as well.  The traders consider the surplus something natural, a retribution for put them the goods almost in the hand.  "If it was not for us they would have to go until Inírida" some of them say.

"Come, I'll tell you..."

Among the plungers there are legends, thousands of anecdotes that they love to tell.  Some of them like to show their rafts and to explain the process.  Diary they risk life and work until late night.  When they are seen walking around, with the Sunday clothes, it is that they are resting.  They take advantage of those moments to speak about everything with emotion.

In Mavicure they told me a history that seems a Creole "Deep Blue":

There was a very quiet plunger; he didn't say anything more than the thing asked, but he was very good under the water.  All those that worked with him knew that he was overturned.  His wife had left him, boring of expects wealth and not see anything but debts.  As he was so needy of money, the guy continued working.  An evening, just he submerge, he unfastened his hoses and went down at most deep, by pure lung.  Other plungers that were able to see him made signs calling for his return, but he didn't notice.  Something like that meant to let that the current dragged him into a sure death.  Almost everyone thought that it was an accident.  One also came unfastened and was able to make that he saw him, amid the darkness of the river.  The guy looked at him and continued as if nothing was happening.  His helper thought it better and it recognized that he could not follow him so deep.  He said himself that he would probably have to fight for take him out so he returned to the surface.  In addition, there was the possibility of him attempting it another time, when he would be alone.  The mad plunger got lost in the darkness and nobody saw it again.  There was the hope that they would find his body river below, but nothing happens.  The fishes ate him up or the earth swallowed him.

They also told in Inírida of a candid one who arrived from Boyacá without at least money for return.  The guy thought that the mines were dug in the floor, as those of coal or emeralds.  As he didn't know how to dive, he had to devote himself to work for a daily wage to be able to return; he finished staying definitively.

The miners are men with lots of money but without instruction, nomadic that they only pursue gold and they leave when it finishes.  And it is easy to go.  The "mine" is in fact only a heap of rafts anchored in a place of the river's current.  They are always above the biggest veins, those that they can explode with the system they use.  Nothing about tunnels.  Some said that they invented that name at the beginning, to hide the true origin of the gold and not to have to share it.  Nowadays it is strange the Iniridense not knowing a raft.

A lot of gold, but...

The miners spoke very well of their activity, but not all shared their opinion.  The Inírida River was the favorite place to dig in its channel with the dredges, but Inírida's mayor decided to veto the place.  The riverside indigenous communities were annoying with their drunkenness, their weapons, their fights and the prostitutes those came behind them.

As strange thing, the prostitutes are not the professional group more socially accepted; at least by the face.  The "women of the life"^e16 have their main headquarters in the bar "Firulais", distant three blocks of the Governor's office, it is normal in any town of the country.  But their branches in the rural area are not.  Near to the mine they can be seen carps made with plastics and sticks, where the ladies hang their hammocks and they shelter sun and rain.  They get paid according to their experience, beauty and popularity, always in gold, in grams or in lines (0.8 of gram)⁹.  The gold of the plungers is so attractive that there are always women willing to pursue them.

Most native communities are evangelical, very strict about the illicit sexuality and the alcohol consumption.  In addition, the mining contaminates their sources of water and it generates dispersion among the youths.  As one of them told me:  «Work the earth is very tiring.  You sweat a lot and you don't win anything.  On the other hand, in the mine you won more than the triple and in less time.»  The novelty and the possibility of entering the national society under economic superiority conditions, they are very strong incentives for them.

Among the colonists the contamination with mercury begins to be a concern, too.  Populations in the Guaviare and the Inírida rivers already realized and they didn't like.  They begin to appear illnesses in the skin, inflammations in the pleats of the body and they diminish size or are scare some species of fish.  The origin of such things is not mystery at all.  The plunger uses the quicksilver to purify the gold and, when he doesn't spill the resulting liquid in the river, he burns it.  After all, the chemical will go down to sources of water that they are used for cooking and drinking.  To the merchants, charmed with the consumption of beer and the lot the miners buy them, they didn't like the idea of stop seeing them.

e16	In Spanish "women of the happy life" is a synonymous of prostitute.
9	Gold is the only currency accepted among the miners, because it is very annoying to move to the town to change it for money.  The Brazilians would have double trouble.  As they have a foreign currency, they would have to pay commission to the moneychanger in Inírida and give a chance to the DAS.

The near Venezuela, the distant Brazil

Some in town looked the Brazilians with mistrust and they didn't give sample white of wanting to make something different to drink and impel prostitution.  Their dishonesty and their relaxed customs didn't help a lot.  Lacks of economic integration with Brazil make many of its beneficent possibilities become wasted.  Trade with the neighbor is not profitable, because its inflation has lowered a lot and its currency now is stronger.  The nearest city is Manaos and it is as far as Bogotá; with the small difference that there are not flights neither roads that take until there.  You can arrive by river, but the trip is too long.

With Venezuela happens the opposite.  In spite of the Guardia^e17, the trade with this country is a fact:  They are brought gasoline, roof badges tiles, cement, beer and until flour for the arepas^e18.  All the cars that you see giving turns around the town are brought of smuggling from there.  Many of the aid the Venezuelan state gave in previous decades went to stop in communities of this side of the frontier, sold as merchandise.  A typical trick of our contractors:  to charge the cement at Colombian price and to carry out the work with Venezuelan cement that worth near the half.  The Venezuelan consulate in Inírida is as well-known as the ICBF.

On the other hand, the Brazilian office is in San Felipe, a colonization center distant 10 days by river.  There are flights until there, but 15 days each.  In fact, the south frontier of the departamento is an almost unknown place, where the colonization is still incipient.  To arrive at the Isana-Cuyarí River they are needed three travels by air through Vaupés, two for take gas and another for the passenger, because there the gas distribution can suffer trips.  By river, a long distance should be traveled by the Inírida, pass to the Guainía and from there to the Isana.  In summer, you walk another distance carrying the load in the shoulders or pay a expensive transport that only  knows if it is there.

The indigenous officials that came from the frontier with the Brazil were very quiet.  Each resguardo has a legal representative before the government, but to those of the south the communications, the transport and its costs, isolate them from its territories.  Data about their populations are scarce and old.  According to the same governor's words, this area is in hands of the garimpeiros and nobody knows the luck of the inhabitant natives.

As "solution", the congress members promote roads toward the river Guainía, which would make easier taking out gold, deforesting and colonizing.  As if it wasn't enough, in the whole departamento you can not get a single environmental license.  The leaders know what they are, but because they have said it in t.v.  The ministry of the environment only demands them when a project affects 15 thousand people or more.  Inírida, the "megalopolis" of the region, hardly arrives at the 14 thousand.  The departamento is an entire bank of species, rich in oxygen and animals in road of extinction, but its wealth is as big as fragile.  Observing the speed of state advancing I see this a very serious thing...

e17	The Guardia Nacional, Venezuela's army.
e18	Round maize loaves, the Colombian typical plate.

Tell me with who you administer and I will tell you who loses

By law, the indigenous communities are entitled to the bonuses generated by the minerals extracted from their territories.  Many of them don't know how to spend their money.  Some of them distribute it among their selves in same quantities, other parts give it to the captain (recognized legal authority) and this man flies away and nobody knows about him again.  The local politicians like to impel projects, but they are half-ended, with such a scarce community instruction that they condemn them to failure.

The money sent by the state isn't surrender directly to the communities, but rather the governor's office administers it and executes it.  The populations present the projects, according to their needs, the leaders give the check mark and they carry out them.  However, the indigenous authorities know few about methodologies.  The offices that should serve them difficultly as a guideline hardly work, their officials defer and defer the delivery of such projects to Bogotá.  The contracts between the community authorities and the miners are usually oral and the miner is who determines how much was taken out.

Everything accumulates so the money and the gold get lost in the road.  I only knew about a community that used their money well; they were directed by an evangelical pastor, a very quiet and very serious guy.  Other, on the Atabapo River, knew that they had gold and they didn't still exploit it.  Today, their destination depends on the instruction that they reach and in the capacity that they demonstrate to manage the language of the state.  It is as putting a newspaper of a small municipality to investigate all the puzzles of the proceso 8.000^e19.

For take out a project ahead, the communities of Guainía (and of whole Colombia) they should:  To fight with the state, to push it so that it moves, to hold back the promise managers, to take out the well educated thieves, to solve their problems of internal coordination, to prevent that the system corrupts their leaders and (if they have left time) to be in charge of all the works that allow them to continue alive and to raise their children.  Superman, with all and his powers, would be seen like a baby.  There is nothing left but trusting in  and to hope our faith saves us.

e19

The process 8.000 was the name of the judiciary process against the then president Ernesto Samper.  It was started by his counterpart in the election, the now president Andrés Pastrana, few days after his counterpart won the election.  This latter presented to the media cassettes with evidence incriminating important members of the Samper's presidential campaign of having receive money from narcotraffic.  The nation split in two bands:  One claiming Samper's resignation and the other supporting him as innocent.  One important bishop said that "an elephant" was in the middle of the campaign and he didn't see it. The president shortened his position in the phrase "here I am and here I stay", and left his judiciary status in the hands of the Supreme Court and the political in the Congress.  The judges absolved him for lack of evidence but the congress, more infiltrated by narcotraffic money than the president, didn't found any political responsibility.  Samper finished his period with governability problems, his name and the elephant became the symbols of the one who says only self-convenient words.

COLONISTS

In Guainía there are three main colonization centers:  Inírida, Barrancominas and San Felipe.  The most important is Inírida, very big and heterogeneus, as a hot neighborhood of Bogotá.

The first capital was in San Felipe, then in Port Colombia and later they changed it to Inírida.  And there it stayed.  The others were in the river Guainía and it was complicated to arrive to them even by river.  Inírida, on the other hand, served to the armed forces as support point.  They no longer had to travel so long distance for arrive to the frontier with Venezuela, and they had the Guaviare and Atabapo rivers at near step, both near the colonization area that interested them.

Since its foundation the town has grown vertiginously.  In 30 years, the small indigenous population became a town with more than 14 thousand inhabitants.  A sharp contrast with the rest of the departamento, with indigenous populations that don't surpass 800 people.

The town is seated in a dry area surrounded of in-flood-covered areas.  There are three brooks around the urban helmet:  Pipe Deer to the east, Pipe Vitina to the occident and Pipe Rabbit to the south.  In the middle of summer they don't overcome 2 meters wide, but in winter (or more properly in rain season) you cannot see a bank from the other one.  As Colombian town that is respected, it has people living in in-flood-covered area.

The population grew from the margin of the river, with the port at a wise distance, to avoid that the waters took it out.  The Inírida is an enormous river if we compare it with the Pance or the Cali, let us say three times wider than the Cauca and very much deeper.  Many years ago, it grew so much that it flooded six blocks beyond the port.

But their river is their life.  By it they arrive daily fishermen in canoes and boats to offer some of the 24 fish species that can get, with merchandise to sell.  In the past they were fish so big that a medium man could not measure it with the extended arms.  Today they are not so common.

Inírida has two very gifted supermarkets, Servientrega^e20, Agrarian Box and all that is usually found in a small town.  People of all parts, mainly from Boyacá and from the Plains, they turned it their house, attracted by its calm and the money that coca left.  Lately, the gold and the employment that the state entities offer are what maintain them.

e20	A well known courier office in Colombia.

Tourism?

Tourism is hardly seen.  Carlos Cubillos, a hotel administrator, told that only once he had assisted a gringo^e21, but that he had left unsatisfied, because the guy waited a resort.  My eyes only saw Brazilian in plan of business, state officials "working", a couple of Colombians adventurers and two Argentineans.  Very little bit for 6 months and such a potential.

The fame of guerilla and coquera area doesn't help a lot.  Those whom enjoy more the territory are the officials that stay some little days at there and they spend them very well.  It doesn't matter, the one that pays is the state and the governor's office assists them the best way they can, so that they take a good impression.  Some they are sent by their superiors, it wasn't that way they would not come.

The couple of Colombians that I knew was "ecoturists" that caught the fishes with fishhook, they took them pictures and then they loosed them.  They looked for places where the forest was intact, where they could see the Indians in live and direct.  "They told us that there were places where the Nukak took out the whites by arrow, and we desired more go there"! told me the man.

Anyway, it lacks a lot of hair for bun.  The Agrarian Box, the only bank entity that there is, it hardly works.  The one that arrives is because it is willing to arrive anywhere.  Although to people it is charged expensive, they are treated well.  The problem is the precarious situation.  The tourists are not informed about the importance of conservation.  The tourist publicity of the departamento is limited to one or other folding and an almanac.  This latter has a picture of a river dolphin, thrown in the beach, as if they had just fished it.

e21	Gringo means any foreigner with blue eyes and blonde hair, not any foreigner.  For example, the Japanese are not considered gringos.

Animals in roads of...

Unusual opinions arrived to my hearing, as that of an official of the governor's office.  He believed that it was better to legalize the smuggling of animals.  He saw the traffickers put monkeys, birds, snakes and other species amid barrels, plants or whatever they would imagine.  As they had to take them out by flight, they didn't feed them in the airplane, fearing being discovered.  As consequence, their "shipments" arrived almost all dead because of stress, heat and oxygen lack.  For those that went better they took them out by earth, but just in the itinerary toward Bogotá they died for accumulation, fright or just sadness.

The posters of the INPA¹⁰ stay as decorations. They show the legal sizes for some 21 species, between maximum and minimum, but people fish what they can and most of them don't know how to read.  If the police get complicated, the fishermen give a turn and they enter the town from behind.  They travel it by foot, with wheelbarrows full with their copies; and they scream loud lung the name of the species that they take:  «Mojarra, mojarra!» «cachirre, cachirre!»  There always was who bought them, and if not, they got paid cheaper.

However, the fishermen didn't make as much damage as mining or pruning.  They were the first ones seeing the consequences and they got scared when seeing the shortages and the size decreases.  Some blamed the barbasco¹¹ of the natives, others to the army and the police that pushed them with the smuggling and looked blind with the Brazilians.

There was a rumor that "the boys" (the guerrilla) had prohibited the pruning and the fishing in the Guainian Guaviare.  Their sudden ecological conscience will leave many with unoccupied hands.  Some Inírida councilmen were happy with the possibility of see the town grew.

10

National Institute of Fishing and Fish Cultivation.

11

Barbasco is a poison obtained from a liana given in the forest.  The indigenous communities used it in festivities, to fish for the big meetings.  They tossed the poison in a small brook and all the fish that it found in the road died.  The women and the children only had to pick up.  As the poison is biodegradable its consequences were not serious.  In the last years, laziness, irresponsibility and shortage has taken to use it in more brooks.  I listened about conflicts with the colonists for poisoned livestock and because, once used, the fish take a very long time for returning.

Professionals?

The region has an endemic shortage of professionals.  There are only merchants, miners, guerillas fighters, peasants and public officials.  The young high schools that leave the only school are hired most by the state as teachers for other populations.  Some end up getting work just leaving elementary school, because there is not who teaches for the smallest.  The "contracted one" (it means the Church) controls a third part of the departamento education, and all by boarding schools.  The population's dispersion and the shortage of resources make impossible another modality.  Almost that they pulls up the youths of their environment for give them a teaching of very low quality.  If they go to the university, in Villavicencio or Bogotá, it is to end up their transplantation.

Services?

The water that arrives by aqueduct cannot be drunk without being boiled and the electric power is rationed 2 or 3 times per week.  The diesel plant of the outskirts goes out every day at 12 in the night, to avoid its reheat, and it lights up at 8 o'clock a.m.  The water it is not properly treated, They only allow it to sit a little.  It is pumped from the river until bigger moto-bombs and it arrives at each house through PVC tubes.

To the guainieños have to leave the pipe in the surface of the streets, because the pipe cannot be buried in floors of pure rock.  They are seen there, like a temptation.  In some of the neighborhoods they ended up stealing a mother tube and they left everybody without water.

The Inirida's floor is an extremist:  It is sand or immense rocks, nothing else.  It is not found a cobble or round rocks as in the rivers of the Valley.  That whole area of the amazonia rises on the Guyana Shield, a single enormous rock that goes from southern Venezuela, northwestern Brazil to the Amazon areas of Ecuador and Peru.  In some streets it raises the rock to the air amid the sand because otherwise it would be necessary to fly it with dynamite or to spend a lot of drill to reduce it.  In the Indigenous Area, a near neighborhood to one of the brooks, the rocks appear amid the houses and until inside them.  From one moment to another it is seen arising there, between the room and the kitchen, or in the rear end, as if it would be a wall.  It makes part of the landscape and it breaks in to its domains.

When the airport was built, it was flew the rock with dynamite and several indigenous old women noticed that since that time, they would come all the wickedness, that it was better to leave the rock as it was.  And the rock was flew and by air arrived the politicians, the merchants, the miners, the prostitutes, our civilization, our half-modernity...  Nowadays there is a quarry in route to the airport, and the floor is eaten away to build, like in Bogotá or Cali.

Garbage begins to accumulate toward the south, beyond the airport.  Inírida, innocently, it has begun its basuro^e22.  Only some few indigenous families (they can be counted with the fingers of one hand) they are devoted to the recycling, in the same way as our indigent make it.  Even this way, the normal thing is that all the garbage produced by a family it is burned exactly in front of the house, when the garbage drum is filled.  There is a truck paid by the Mayor's office that each that it can pass by and takes the things to the basuro, but they are several neighborhoods that they don't know it.

Inírida sees rainwater running by its wide streets, in abundance in the rainy season.  Only the main street and the roadway in front of the church are paved.  Hardly seven blocks, between the governor's office and the port, have sewer system.  There are other two small tracts with buried pipe, but they don't have any connection to each other, as if the town had been made by pieces.  Most sees the residual waters pass in front of the house, how they travel to pleasure in its route to the river and they stagnate in plane places.  Thanks to , those that come out of the houses they are not black waters, but those of laundries and dishwashing.  Many homes have septic well.  People dig it among the holes that appear amid the rock, or they lift it in a little house outside the house.

e22	The basuro is Cali's city dump, a dirty and ugly example of how not to dispose garbage.

...And the town there

Now there is not anybody who stops the growth of Inírida.  Its kind, working (except the state professional employees), drinking full at highest levels people, they reproduce and they take in their families to know that beautiful and peaceful corner, so likely to stay.  The ordinary Colombian when "Guainía" is asked, they confuse it with La Guajirae23, they have to see the map to know where to locate it, they think that it is at the Eastern Plains, but they doesn't imagine the forest.  And she is there, know her or not.  As well as the town tranquility, stranger for the great city inhabitants.  In its streets the robberies, the murders are not every day bread.  There are them, but they are not plentiful.

Their streets are almost all for pedestrians.  Only the rich of town have car, it is not good for something different to turn the town around.  Minibuses, trucks and vans take charge of passengers and load, and they are not many.  The normal thing is that the driver waits and people pass.  Something completely strange for the city dweller:  Their streets hardly sound.  What sounds is the bustle of taverns, billiards and stores, but few motors.  With the main street paving, motos and cars began to run and even this way, its streets continue being human.  They don't know that in the city we don't live them but rather we suffer them!  They ignore that pedestrians pass the street as quickly as possible and with fear, so that they don't pass us for above...

The colonists are a mixture between the simple and rustic peasant, and the inhabitants of the marginal neighborhoods of our cities.  Each one for their side defense his self, takes their earth and tame it like a wild pony.  Even the parish priest from the only one Catholic temple he complained about how hard it was to motivate them to make something in common.  The natives that live to their side continue being community, but not in the same way, because they want to resemble their neighbors.

The Iniridense society is a hard to believe kaleidoscope:  Boyacenses, Cundinamarqueses, Llaneros, Bogotanians, Vallunos, Chocoanos, Nariñenses, coasters and some few local.  All live blended with Puinaves, Curripacos, Piratapuyos, Yerales, Guahíbos, Tucanos, Desanos, Uaunanos and another small groups.  To them they are added the Brazilians and some few Venezuelans.  All of them can live in the same neighborhood, to marry among them, to suffer with each soccer game, to despair with every time that the plant is damaged...  Everybody fight, everybody suffer, and it doesn't care the ethnos.

With the exception of the evangelical ones, all the men of Inírida are good to drink.  They invite everybody who they can and they talk on any thing.  And not only on weekends!  It is striking the quantity of alcohol that they can waste away in a small town.  The ordinary colonist thinks that "he is making homeland", he swears that he makes to recognize that territory like Colombian.  The settlers of the town are hardly found and it doesn't care to them a lot.  Very often the militaries go out to the streets with their colored faces and their camouflaged uniforms; and they jog and sing their male and patriotic hymns.  In its turn, the guerrilla is everywhere, but they walk in civil clothes and they are more discreet.  The common knows who they integrate it but conflicts are not generated by that reason.

Only ten deaths for a confrontation between guerrilla and army are the thirty year-old balance.  A record that any departamento would envy.  And those deaths were originated by a policeman that killed several in a small population.  The guerrilla requested the army to bring him that they will judge him.  The militaries refused and, when they were taking him out by the road to the airport, a shooting lit up, and the ten policemen that accompanied him they were all dead.  The guerillas fighters took their own ones.  The surplus is almost anything.

They are more the deaths for fights between the same "relatives" (indigenous) or the same colonists that they face for any thing when they are drunk.  Anyway, the main cause of death continues being the bullet wound, followed by the drowning and the tuberculosis (according to the secretary of departmental health).

The discords, the sudden ill wills, I saw them somewhere around, blended in an explosive way with alcohol, money and women.  But I felt surer in the most dangerous street in Inírida than in any corner of Cali.  In the great city the aggressiveness is twice as much, the enemy is not nobody and it is everybody.  It can be that a bullet comes out from a camper and it takes you directly to heaven.  In Inírida, as in almost every town, if somebody wants to kill the other, the whole town smells it from the beginning.  That they remain silent for convenience it is another thing.

With the growth it is getting lost the spontaneous charity, an ingredient that was very common among the colonists.  As everybody have passed difficulties to arrive, if one arrived deeply distressed, it didn't lack who spread him the hand with a dish of soup or a place where to shelter for a while, provided he showed will to work.  This is being replaced by the typical city unresponsiveness.

e23	La Guajira is the northern most Colombian continental departamento; it is predominantly desert.  Nothing to see with jungles and rivers.

The day of the...

May 15*, the Peasant's Day, they arrived to Inírida indigenous from almost all the departamento communities.

All they were organized under the roof of the school court, in a tumult of people and animals.  They came to sell and to show what they had taken out from the earth or handmade. The government gave "incentives" to those that they presented better their products, but everybody knew that they were prizes and they assumed them as such.  It was supposed that the name change was "for not generating competitiveness among the participants", but each one arrived was for selling.  Only the agriculture secretary lifted a "stand", there they sold all class of mango derivates.  The rich colonists came to exhibit their horses and to learn how to exhibit them in front of expert judges.  Everything was a fair exhibition try-out, but more seemed an indigenous gallery, as bio-diverse as few.  There I met the paujiles, birds big as a hen, with red beak and the whole plumage black.  I saw very big roosters and hens, raided to tip of food, without hormones.  I also tried manaca, chontaduro mañoco, caimarona grape, cocorito and other fruits from the region that I didn't know that they existed.  I saw gigantic cassava, bananas and platano bananae24 in big quantity.  Crafts and fabrics, Brazil sticke25 carved in symbols of the region:  Christes, little canoes, little princesses Inírida, birds.  These products would stand out in any part of the world, and even of Colombia.

The peasant's day in the Guainía is the native's day.  That day the whole departamento appears just like it is.  The colonists are seen as the minority that they are, small and rich.  The one playing peasant is the native from the corregimientos.  I find healthy not to mark ethnic differences, but are the natives recognized as such, or do they already consider themselves peasants?  To sell that day it is necessary to speak Spanish, to manage something of the life of the capital, for not to lag behind.  Competitions made that day were to rope a stick with horns, the oiled pig and the stick of prizes, all typical from the Plain and the interior.  Is the loss of native culture the price of equality?

This was the way the school Custodio García Rovira court was left after the peasant's day.

But what I know is so little.  The natives are very different and I don't know them.  I had small sporadic contacts with them, with their religiosity and their humility, with their communities, with their language, so different to ours, with their green world there in the east...

NOTES

*	Approximated dates.  Each region and each municipality defines when they carry out the holyday; it is usually by the same time, but the day is not always fixed. The jury of the university did not approve this subsection, but I found important to include it, its images and content continues effective.
e24	All this fruit are exotic even for Colombians, with the exception of chontaduro, cassava and bananas.  The chontaduro is a palm fruit, small with a hard bone, but I only have seen it as mañoco in Guainía.  People from outside Colombia an its neighboring countries only know one variety of banana.  In the whole country everybody know the plátano, the kind of banana indispensable for cooking sancocho, the Colombian typical soup.  But there are almost five more varieties, guineo, bocadillo, maduro and two more unknown to me.
e25	This is the wood that gave Brazil its name.  The conquerors found it very similar to the braze for its lighten red color.  It is hard wood, excellent for kitchen tools and decoration.

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