A Long Dead End

The young people of Arara are killing themselves. When their families drop their guard, they lock themselves in their rooms or go out into the backyard and hang themselves with a stout rope. In this community of 300 households on the Amazon River, more than 100 Ticuna have taken their lives in the past 20 years. Here, in the south of Colombia, many prefer to hang themselves rather than await the arrival of an improbable future. The town’s elders, alarmed at this epidemic of premature deaths, believe that the suicidal impulse has a foreign source. They claim that this village, inhabited by Indigenous people from Brazil and Peru, was introduced to alcohol and drugs only in this new century, when these modern vices arrived from Leticia, a city located about 30 kilometers away on the other side of the jungle.

Around 50 years ago, the Ticuna built their plank houses on this land, next to a stream of the same name, on the northern bank of the Amazon. Most live off fariña, a thick, yellow flour they extract from cassava. They also grow plantains, pineapple, papaya, sugarcane and açaí. For half a century, the Ticuna have been isolated, as only two difficult arteries allow them to enter and leave their village: the wide and tempestuous river and Route 8501, a highway that crosses 25 kilometers of jungle to connect the Amazon Trapezium with the rest of Colombia. The highway was originally designed to cross 145 kilometers, but completing it has been a challenge.

“Now there are lots of changes. It’s no longer how it was in the past,” laments Camilo Manuel, a 66-year-old Indigenous man, who for two decades was Arara’s curaca, its political and social leader. “Young people rebel, they don’t listen to their parents. A lot of them want to go far away and when they come back, they’re not the same.”

The vanguard of this still-unfinished road, on which a few work crews now labor, advances amid the noise of machinery to within just five kilometers of Arara. There, an orange sign indicates the end of the work, but it’s not entirely accurate. In a few years, if construction continues, the electric saws, the excavators and the concrete will invade the sandy streets of this community, and its placid life will change forever.

…

The Amazon Trapezium is the southernmost part of Colombian territory. It measures 10,000 square kilometers and was ceded by Peru in the wake of two events. The first was the Salomón-Lozano Treaty, which defined the border between the two countries and was signed by ministers from both in 1922. The second was a futile war that occurred 10 years later, from 1932 to 1933. That’s how Colombia gained its piece of the Amazon River and the city of Leticia, inhabited then by 4,000 people, mostly Peruvians and Brazilians.

The area was always of military and commercial interest because its river arteries allowed for different routes among the countries of the triple border, including Brazil. To take advantage of this strategic benefit, in August 1964, the law firm of Recio Constaín Asesores presented the Colombian government with a proposal for a highway to connect Leticia to Tarapacá, another port located 175 kilometers to the north, on the Putumayo River. The area now had an opportunity to play an integrating role.

The authors of this proposal criticized the government’s lack of interest in the periphery and its excessive focus on the cities of the country’s interior. “Colombia has still not understood the importance of its tropical natural resources. That’s why it has abandoned its border areas,” the technical document states. The country, at that moment bloodied by battles between the army and the guerrillas, privileged the military and neglected the civilian sector. The Amazon, concluded the authors of the highway proposal, was suffering “the consequences of the mistaken policy of neglecting the territories.”

The future Route 8501 promised to bring the advantages of national productivity and commercial exchange to the region: a common Amazonian market. To achieve it, the Colombian state would have to improve its port in Leticia, where it was suggested a free port be created. At the same time, a highway would be constructed to eventually unite the jungle with the rest of the country. Once the infrastructure was built, this region could export timber, cattle, fish, palm oil, cacao, cassava, pineapple and other products.

Construction of the highway was in the hands of private contractors for many years, but in 2016, it was turned over to the National Highway Institute, an official agency that is part of the Ministry of Transportation. Today, only 25 kilometers have been built from Leticia northwest, almost parallel to the Amazon River, toward the town of Arara, where the concrete halts in a clearing of reddish earth surrounded by trees that can grow taller than 30 meters. Crews work beneath the sun to finish the last stretch approved by the engineers.

The constant traffic on the first half of the route, more or less until Kilometer 13, decreases as the road gets farther from the edge of the city. At first, there are buses, cars and motorcycles transporting passengers in both directions. Food booths, ecolodges and small clubs with swimming pools are abundant on that stretch. But farther out, when the highway enters the jungle, the journey through the forest becomes more solitary. Every so often the gates of a private ranch are seen, and only a few careless dogs or brilliantly colored snakes cross the pavement.

Route 8501, parallel to the border with Brazil, was created within the framework of the Alliance for Progress, an initiative for international cooperation promoted by the administration of US president John F. Kennedy. The Alliance lasted through the 1960s and channeled investments to Latin America to halt the rise of communism driven by the Cuban revolution. If the work were realized, the Amazon Trapezium could connect Colombia by land with cities such as Iquitos in Peru, and Manaus in Brazil. But this ambitious project hasn’t even managed to satisfy domestic needs.

Today, Leticia, the capital of the department of Amazonas in Colombia, survives as an island: it’s possible to get there only by plane or by embarking on an arduous trip lasting days or weeks via the many rivers that cross this vast geographic area. The Colombian jungle attracts growing numbers of foreign tourists: North Americans and Europeans who land at a renovated but only lightly used airport and fill the city’s hotels and restaurants while they travel its outskirts in search of a brief and comfortable jungle experience.

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Camilo Manuel, dressed in an old pair of pants and a threadbare shirt, sits under the enormous roof of the maloca, a sacred hut where members of the Arara community celebrate various rituals. They dance there for celebrations and hold assemblies to discuss their collective future. Camilo looks up and proudly surveys the structure, which they built themselves from trunks and palm branches, but his expression changes when he remembers the reason for this conversation. Although he doesn’t know the route of the new highway, he fears that his plot of land, where he grows cassava and pineapple, will soon be cut in two. That’s why he’s readying another plot located far from the village.

Despite the threat, Camilo harbors a certain optimism: he thinks the highway is necessary and will bring advantages, but he has doubts and acknowledges that it may also bring dangers.

“We elders are thinking about that highway,” he says, worried. “Things that are difficult for us—robberies, vices, violence—might come from it. We have to think about how we can defend ourselves. With the highway, people we don’t know will come.”

When he’s not working his land, Camilo makes canvases out of tree bark and paints on them with natural pigments, selling these handicrafts in various shops in Leticia—his hands are stained an intense violet. He recalls that in his youth, when they didn’t have motors, he and his neighbors had to travel to the city by paddle power: trips of six or seven hours. In the ’60s, he says, this community was the first to receive tourists when they began to arrive, every so often, in search of traditional dances and “authentic” handicrafts.

Camilo is also worried about the suicides. “Now there’s a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs that come from outside to harm the young people. Some young people have gone to work on the highway. Then they bring back money from their work and drink alcohol. When I was young, people didn’t drink as much as they do now.”

He says that this town has always been safe: they’ve only seen the country’s guerrilla war on TV. When he mentions this subject, he warns that the highway might bring the first firearms to Arara. And to this hypothetical risk comes another one, more certain: deforestation. To build the last stretch of the highway will require cutting down many trees.

“Now that’s a serious problem,” Camilo acknowledges.

Arara embodies the tension between development and conservation. Many here want the highway for a variety of reasons. With it, they say, transporting their crops to the city’s market will be easier.

“Getting out is very difficult,” Camilo complains. “We carry the products to the river. We have to get up early and spend three hours to get to Leticia. And when we come back, we arrive at night. Going by boat costs a lot of money.”

The new highway would allow any Indigenous person to catch the first bus going by and would give the Ticuna access to schools, the university, new employment opportunities and the hospital in the regional capital. A few weeks ago, a child died from a snakebite, very far from an antivenom treatment. Traveling down the Amazon and the stream that gives its name to the town is perilous and depends on the season: the water level rises in winter and falls in summer. Between August and December, when drought conditions usually exist, nothing heavy can be transported.

Camilo Manuel has never seen Route 8501. Although it’s more difficult, he prefers to travel by river. “I don’t know whether I’ll live long enough to see that highway. Maybe my children and grandchildren will.”

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Andrés Varona, a biologist and botanist born in Cali, has lived at Kilometer 22.8 for 14 years. He, like nearly everyone else here, is precise when locating his place along the highway. Varona, 43, always dreamed of protecting a nature preserve; today, he owns 18.5 hectares of forest, 90 percent of it well conserved.

“We carry out research and studies on the tree species I have here,” he explains from his office at an institute for scientific research. “The plan is for researchers to work on birds, butterflies, ants and termites. The idea is for me to transmit my knowledge of botany to different researchers.”

When Varona moved to Leticia, 20 years ago, Route 8501 went as far as Kilometer 19 and 300 meters. Over the years, he has seen little movement. Though construction began more than 60 years ago, progress has been slow.

“There has been a lack of planning,” Varona says. “I don’t think the highway will ever be finished, for a variety of reasons.”

He mentions the two most important: the Amacayacu National Park, a large nature preserve created in 1975, whose land includes part of the highway’s planned route, and the Indigenous reservations, extensive stretches of land protected by the national constitution that are under the control of different ethnic groups as private and collective property. To build Route 8501, the Colombian state would have to buy land from the Ticuna and other Indigenous communities. And it would also be forced to build in a national park.

“These factors protect the jungle from the highway. It would be really difficult to build it because it would pass over all the streams in the Amazon Trapezium. There is an environmental reason not to do it.”

The South American Council on Infrastructure and Planning (known by its Spanish acronym, Cosiplan) is a body for political and strategic discussion that plans and implements infrastructure integration in South America. It is made up of the ministers of infrastructure and their equivalents, designated by the member states of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur). Route 8501, says Varona, does not figure among Cosiplan’s projects.

A new study by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) asserts that planned infrastructure projects in 137 countries could affect the habitats of some 2,500 species around the planet. The tropics, including Colombia, are the zones at greatest risk. Today, the highways of this country add up to more than 206,000 kilometers.

Colombia’s new government, headed by the environmentalist Gustavo Petro, for now has said that it will construct only secondary routes beginning at Kilometer 25 of Route 8501, until arriving at the Indigenous communities that inhabit the area. And it promises to discuss the continuation of the project with them.

“A highway in the jungle has disastrous implications because it increases deforestation, facilitates access to resources and extraction,” Varona says. “Many species will disappear, hunting, fishing and pollution will increase. An urbanized place doesn’t return to what it once was.”

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The Ticuna of Arara possess 12,308 hectares of protected land, and they hope to more than triple that holding in the coming years. To cross this vast green land, the Colombian government must submit the highway to a plebiscite in which the Indigenous people will decide whether they want it. Redín Salvino is a 31-year-old agricultural technician, one of the few young people who left this village to study in Leticia. He has worked on conservation projects and frequently crosses the road that connects the highway with Arara through the jungle. Redín always has a machete in hand and identifies trees as he walks in their shade.

“This one’s good for curing fevers. That one over there, the tall one, is good for making canoes. And this one to make paddles,” he explains, as we make our way in the oppressive heat and humidity.

If the entire community is consulted, Redín thinks that young people will vote in favor of the highway.

“They can be freer with the highway,” he claims. “They can have their motorcycle, their vehicle, move around. Some have left and haven’t returned. They leave because they’re bored, or they’re looking for adventure. Many want to keep studying, but their parents can’t help them. That demotivates them.”

In Arara there are several high school graduates and men who have served in the army, but the town has no employment to offer them. Only a few have managed to improve their circumstances by attending and graduating from the university in Leticia. Despite the obstacles, more and more Indigenous people from different ethnic groups are going to the city.

Redín thinks that the highway can change everyone’s life. Some young men from the town have worked on the construction and the salary has allowed them to build their houses. He himself, who works occasionally with environmental organizations, reporters and tourists, could benefit. But Redín also harbors fears. Watching some neighbors digging cassava out of the muddy soil, he recalls that “several crazy people” have come to town: uninvited thrill seekers. The Indigenous guard—a local defense group armed only with wooden sticks but who carry a lot of authority in the community—has sent them back by the same road on which they arrived. Some in the town have suggested installing a checkpoint to monitor arrivals.

Like others in the community, Redín is alarmed by the wave of suicides, a phenomenon also present in other communities of the Colombian Amazon. Occupying a middle ground, he considers that behind these acts might be a mix of desperation about the future and harmful influences coming from the outside world. He knows of up to eight in a single year, almost all of them young people. The Ticuna, like many other ethnic groups, believe in signs. Redín recalls one that the elder Orobio Angarita, an old man who died a number of years ago, pronounced.

“He said that we were going to see strange things, that the community was no longer going to be united. And it’s true, that’s happening. Now the elders call a meeting and very few show up. It’s not like before. Before, everybody used to go.”

It may be that the changes are coming to Arara thanks to the new access routes, which break its historical isolation. It may be that cell phones, satellite television, the internet and social media are shaping the new generations in unexpected and problematic ways. Or perhaps the highway is being blamed for change that has been incubating for a long time, change that at this point is unstoppable.