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To get to the community of Bia Recuaté, where the Yuqui people live, you have to cross trails and narrow roads that connect several villages.
Almost all of these localities are inhabited by settlers who came from other parts of Bolivia.
The trip takes about five hours from the city of Cochabamba.
After crossing the Broken Bridge, you begin to smell the humidity of the Amazon jungle and you lose track of time.
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This same forest has witnessed the struggles of the Yuqui people against those who tried to seize their territory from them in the late 1950s, when the Bolivian government began the project to colonize large areas in the province of Chapare.
Before that, this community lived gathering fruit, fishing and hunting deep in the Amazon.
In the 1960s, missionaries from the evangelical group Misión Nuevo Tribo (MNT), based in the United States, arrived.
That was the Yuqui first contact with the outside world.
According to anthropological studies by Bolivian scientist Roy Querejazu Lewis, they received biblical names from the missionaries and learned, they say, from the religious to grow different types of plants.
It was not until the mid-1990s that its members recovered surnames referring to elements of the jungle, such as flowers, fruits or animals, to strengthen their connection with nature and affirm their identity and culture as a community of hunters and gatherers.
The Yuqui live, above all, in the Bia Recuaté community, in the Chapare province, a region known for being one of the main coca leaf production areas in Bolivia.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and according to data from the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in June 2019 - still under the government of Evo Morales - most of this production was linked to the drug trafficking.
Bia Recuaté is about 260 kilometers from Cochabamba.
This is a territory where at least three different indigenous peoples coexist: Yuquis, Yuracarés and Trinidadians.
Its territory was officially declared a TCO, that is, Community Land of Origin, in accordance with state terminology and, in recent years, that name became an adaptation: TIOC, Indigenous Peasant Original Territory.
There are 298 TIOCs in Bolivia and they constitute approximately 25% of the Bolivian Amazon.
They are territories destined for the life of indigenous peoples, they are distinguished from individual properties because they are protected by the collective right over the territory and are recognized as such by the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia and by ILO Convention 169 that recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples and territories.
The Yuqui-CIRI TCO comprises 115,924.86 hectares in total.
The covid-19, new enemy of the yuqui
Carmen Isategua is the chief chief, the highest authority in the community.
At 35 years old - the worried face, the restless look - she recounts how covid-19 made the community sick.
"But we have not died because we are strong," he says.
The Yuqui are one of the smallest indigenous peoples in Bolivia, with only 360 inhabitants.
According to studies by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (Iwgia) and according to the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente Boliviano (Cidob), they are considered highly vulnerable and included in the category of Initial Contact, an additional section for those described as a population in voluntary isolation.
Under the vulnerability criteria built with the contribution of various institutions and validated by Cidob, this town is identified as the most vulnerable in the Bolivian territory, prioritizing immunological or health criteria, and territorial criteria.
The Yuqui recognize that the threat to their territories is no longer the only one they must face.
The precarious health care, which already carries a chain of diseases such as tuberculosis, which reduced part of its population, has worsened since the coronavirus arrived.
Despite Isategua's optimism, according to the Secretary of Health of Bia Recuaté, Leandro Quispe, until the end of October there had been 19 cases of contagion and one death in the community.
The situation also worried the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which in June already warned through its official Twitter account that this minority was in danger from the pandemic, which “could represent a serious risk for the survival of the indigenous people ”.
At least, since then no new cases have been detected.
Yes, they have been given access to rapid tests, but there have been no symptoms for covid-19, as confirmed by the community doctor, Gimena Torrico.
Now, they are preparing to isolate themselves as a preventive measure against the second wave, as other indigenous peoples of the Amazon are doing.
Sickness and death are everyone's business
When a Yuqui relative is admitted to a hospital outside the community, Isategua says, the community members usually accompany the patient until he is discharged.
This leader is very upset at the misunderstanding of the
Abba
(in their language, this word names people outside the community) and the doctors, because they are not allowed to stay with the patient.
“When we get sick, no one goes, the whole family goes to watch over him because that is our custom.
Instead, the Abba get sick and leave their relatives.
We are not like that.
They get sick and we chase them.
We look at what they are doing, we follow up, we are next to them ”, he energetically proclaims.
When arriving at the community very few families are found.
Most of the houses are empty and with a padlock on the door.
Neighbors who still live there explain that some have gone to the forest to hunt or fish.
“It is almost impossible to know where a yuqui is going to find tomorrow.
They are free and they do not follow logic ”, explains the leader Abel Laira.
“They go from one moment to the next, they disappear and there is no way to locate them because there is no signal to call them.
Some go to the mountains and others to places that we do not know ”.
The Yuqui have a very deep collective vision of death.
The death of a person becomes a grief that involves the entire community.
As a show of respect and grief over mourning, community members may stop eating for days.
“It is a sadness to remember, very painful.
A brother that we lose here is like losing a hundred yuquis, ”says Jhonathan Isategua, a 52-year-old man, former chief of the community.
The Yuqui used voluntary isolation to avoid the coronavirus, but this measure turned into a serious food crisis
The arrival of the pandemic caused them a lot of fear at first.
As with many other Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Yuqui used the strategy of voluntary isolation to avoid contact with people from outside their community.
But this measure also turned into a serious food crisis.
By complying with the isolation, the leaders could not go out to buy the products that they commonly distribute among the community's residents.
This deficit in their eating routines caused their weakness and the already vulnerable health status of many community members worsened.
The fear of the new coronavirus was added to the several cases of tuberculosis, anemia and fungal infections that exist among the members.
Fighting for the light
Although Bia Recuaté is a community that preserves the traditions of hunting, fishing and gathering fruits, its diet is complemented by the consumption of other products that require refrigeration, since the intense heat of the Amazon accelerates the rotting of food.
But there is no electricity here.
The only point of connection to electricity and Internet that the Yuqui have is in a small corridor of the school classroom.
A three-plug extension cord is used for the few who have a mobile phone, including health personnel, to recharge the battery of their electronic devices and connect to the Internet intermittently.
Some young people believe that it is essential to have electricity, but the chief chief, Carmen Isategua, believes that this would affect the economy of families that do not have the resources to pay monthly bills, as a result of the freezing of their resources with the implementation of the Plan of Territory management Yuqui-CIRI TCO, an instrument that establishes the sustainable and legal use of the forest resources of the indigenous territory.
The community water utility, Gimena Torrico, says that drinking water is more important than electricity.
"Although they have water from the Chimoré river, it only serves them to bathe and wash clothes," he explains.
The river is polluted due to sewage from neighboring towns, such as Chimoré, and several residents have already reported constant stomach upset.
Drug trafficking
As part of the same Amazonian territory, the Yuqui people and the Yuracaré people share forest resources from their Yuqui-CIRI TCO.
The use of TCO resources has been planned in a sustainable and responsible way.
With the support of the USAID (the United States Agency for Development), forestry engineers and the Indigenous Forest Organization (OIF) Yagua Samu, which is in charge of the administration of the Management Plan and the forest census, it has been calculated how many and what Trees can be cut down and which ones should not be touched, to preserve the ecological balance of the forest.
The Management Plan establishes the legal use of the territory's forest resources through mechanisms and technical procedures endorsed by the Authority for the Supervision and Social Control of Forests and Land (ABT).
These resources are used to cover expenses within the community such as the food subsidy that is given to each family every Monday, the maintenance of children from the boarding school and medicines that are missing from the medical post.
But currently the Management Plan is frozen due to various disagreements and conflicts between the two indigenous peoples, after the Yuqui denounced the existence of illegal coca crops, drug trafficking and illegal logging in the area corresponding to the Yuracaré.
Former cacique Jhonathan Isategua is not afraid to speak out despite the risks: “They work illegal things.
We have put a control bar and we have seized packages of coca (cocaine) ”.
The checkpoint Jhonathan refers to is a delimitation point of the Yuqui-CIRI TCO.
In July 2020, his community even presented an official complaint to the Cochabamba Departmental Assembly regarding the presence of drug trafficking in its territory and the existence of an illegal track within the TCO itself.
But the authorities also confirmed the presence of drug trafficking that the Yuqui people denounced.
In August 2020, the Mobile Rural Patrol Unit (Umopar), together with the then Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, discovered a clandestine track that had been used for the transfer of drugs produced in a laboratory located in the same area, and that According to the local press, she was protected by "a lieutenant of Evo Morales."
At the same time, the minister denounced the indiscriminate felling that had been carried out for the construction of the track.
The resistance
Both the arrival of the new coronavirus and the threats from settlers to their territories, illegal logging, drug trafficking and state neglect constitute a long history of violation of the rights of the Yuqui.
Health and education depend on the resources of the Management Plan that was suspended and, as a consequence, the town's orphanage, where they house 35 children who were orphaned after their parents died, victims of a tuberculosis epidemic that happened in 2012, it has been adrift.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Yuqui had to buy their own medicines to be able to fight the disease, as the government authorities arrived late.
The pandemic was only the latest in a long series of threats to this small indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon that has declared itself in resistance.
The Yuqui people are determined to take care of their identity, their customs and their jungle at the cost of whatever.
This report was produced with the support of the
Rainforest Journalism Fund
program
of the Pulitzer Center.
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