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Although Felipe Henao witnessed with joy since he was a child the dazzling and variegated nature that surrounded his house, at the northern gate of the Colombian Amazon, he only came to find out that that immense and magnificent backyard where his childhood games had taken place was the border of a true universal relic.
Pipe Q-ida in Chiribiquete.Courtesy Pipe Q-ida
It was June 2018 and, on the radios of the town of El Calamar, Guaviare, with no more than 9,000 inhabitants, only a single fuss could be distinguished amidst the suffocating humidity: the news that Unesco had declared the Serranía de Chiribiquete National Park a heritage mix of humanity.
The park located between the departments of Guaviare and Caquetá, with the announcement, went from having almost 1.5 million hectares to becoming a vast piece of land of about 4.3.
And there he was,
Pipe
, as he was known to his friends, the son of a generation of settlers who came from the interior of Colombia encouraged by the cattle boom that would devastate thousands of hectares of Amazon forest, witnessing how even the borders of his town now extended a land that would be celebrated throughout the world as an ancestral and natural relic.
But what was Chiribiquete?
How is it that no one, not even he, an always curious student, knew of the importance of this land?
It was not the name of a parrot, nor of a tree, nor of an indigenous town as many of the young people of the town believed.
As the book describes it
Chiribiquete: the cosmic maloka of the jaguar men
, by Carlos Castaño, the anthropologist who discovered this treasure in the middle of the jungle, this was a sacred land, of shamanic pilgrimage, the archaeological site with the oldest human evidence in Colombia, the land of jaguar, with the highest density of cats in the country, an inaccessible territory where stone walls boasted paintings 100 meters high full of figures, hands, spirals and scenes painted in ocher narrating the stories and rituals of the past.
Faced with the wonderful discovery of the treasure in front of them, Pipe, who since he was 11 years old had been active in caring for the jungle, realized that he had a new and important mission.
“Thinking that seven park rangers -those initially assigned by the Government-, of which four only do administrative work in the town, were going to be able to protect and care for a territory of more than four million hectares was an illusion, it was also a doom to failure. to protect the park.
That is why we approached the corresponding institution, National Parks, so that they would train us.
What better guardians than those of us who were children of those lands.
But there we had no answer, so we, the young people, decided to train and become, without the endorsement of anyone, except the community, the 'Guardians of Chiribiquete,'” explains Pipe, who now uses the power of social networks to expand his work, where he calls himself Pipe Q-ida.
“We wanted to be the voice of the territory, of the jaguar,
promote environmental education.
Because this, in addition to protecting it with justice and laws, requires the education of its peoples.
There is no point in cities teaching them about the dangers of deforestation if here, in the jungle, no one knows that this has consequences.
Just as they taught us in other decades to destroy the Amazon to live, today we must teach to care for the Amazon to survive”, explains the young man, who is now 28 years old.
Pipe Q-ida and his friends, including Andrea Rodríguez, William Tribales, Jhon Edwin, Jefferson Hilarión, created the 'Chiribiquete Guardian School', a nine-session program that is taught in schools throughout the area.
Today there are already more than 1,000 young people throughout the territory who have gone through courses where the relevance of the Amazon is taught or the environmental benefits of keeping Chiribiquete virgin, which is where, for example, 60% of the water comes from. surface of the Amazon River.
But in addition, they are trained in activism, international treaties and agreements, leadership, and in an essential tool, communication, essential to capture the attention of more young people.
"They call us the influencers of the jungle," says Pipe with grace and almost radio eloquence, who,
By dint of using social networks for his educational programs, he feels that the destiny of being a rancher, cultivating coca or palm, is no longer the only future that is drawn for the young people of this Amazon area.
"Now they see that there is a chance to live protecting their deepest roots, the territory, and, furthermore, to be recognized for that," he says.
View of the Chriribiquete area. Courtesy Pipe Q-ida
The task, however, is much more complex than what can already be intuited by the vastness of the jungle.
According to an article by the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS), livestock exploitation in the Amazon foothills increased after 2015, after the signing of the peace agreements that led to the demobilization of the armed groups that made them unstable and dangerous territories.
In a way, his departure opened the door to the territories to be exploited, in addition to the reconversion, at the hands of the State, of many illegal coca growers into ranchers.
In just four years, the organization says, livestock increased by 77% in the area.
Confronting these old economic systems leveraged by great political powers is not an easy task for young activists.
“We are volunteers who are willing to put our knowledge, time or labor at the service of helping to take care of the jungle.
And for this reason, we face everything, from protecting our lives, always threatened by insisting on continuing to care for the jungle, to the frustration of not having the money to save the ecosystems that we see at risk, going through our own struggles. against our economic dreams.
I am 28 years old, I should have a house and I have exchanged that house for a community dream”, explains Pipe Q-ida.
From their experience in the classroom, their exchange with researchers who come from all over the world, and with the jungle itself, the School of Guardians of Chiribiquete recognizes five imminent risks for the national park.
The most worrisome seems to be the illegal appropriation of land that, by law, no one should own, but over which there are already disputes over illegal titles that grant a right of possession.
"The problem is that the one who appropriates deforests, then puts cattle or coca and then looks for a source of water to bring in tourism," says Pipe emphatically, who has focused on spreading in his educational programs the high costs for humanity of this illegal appropriation.
“We need to convene guardians of Chiribiquete in all parts of the world, because this park is so big, it is so relevant, it is so complex,
that only Colombians cannot take care of it.
The duty belongs to humanity”.
To address the issue of deforestation, which in the last year alone reached 20,000 hectares, Pipe and his entourage of enthusiastic guardians hold, for the graduation of their program, a day of reforestation of affected areas that the community itself chooses.
Thanks to donations, they receive saplings of moriche, abarco, cedar, cabo de hacha, native species that can help restore the balance of the jungle.
“Our dream now is to buy a piece of land to have our own nursery where endemic species grow and where we can receive experts and professors from all over the world who come to teach us more tools to protect this paradise that, so you can imagine, is like the movie 'Avatar', full of those vertical plateaus that seem to float in the sky and are called tepuis, like that, but in real life”,
A group of Pipe Q-ida students.Courtesy Pipe Q-ida
But if their fight against the ranchers is difficult, who in turn do not want to be stigmatized as bad people for doing what they have done all their lives, the work of keeping national and, above all, foreign tourism away has been just as challenging. from the park.
The Serranía de Chribiquete National Park cannot be visited, it is protected from all human visits and, nevertheless, the town of El Calamar, one of the doors of this reservation, does not stop people who want to know what experts have baptized as the Sistine Chapel of ancestry.
For them, those tempted to discover these lands, Pipe has a very forceful message: “This is a paradise that I really invite you NOT to discover.
Chiribiquete is not visited, it is only breathed, because its power is in the air.
Come to San José del Guaviare, there is everything in Chiribiquete, but on a smaller scale: cave paintings, indigenous communities, tepuis, jungle, cats, rivers, waterfalls, and with public access.
But the park is the park and we have to leave it that way if we want other generations to breathe it”.