Rangers of all ages come together in Ricaurte, Nariño, to protect their living territory amidst armed conflict, loss of culture, and deforestation.
In the Magüí Reservation in Nariño, Colombia, a group of 90 women, men, children, and adolescents are protecting Katsa Su, or Big House, as the Awá call their territory in their native Awa Pit language. They form part of the forest guard created in 2016 in the vereda (village) of El Guadual, located inside the Magüí Reservation, and they can voluntarily join, for an indefinite period, from the age of five.
The reserve is a legal and sociopolitical institution composed of tropical rainforests and cloudforests. Created in 1994, it covers 6,120 hectares in the municipality of Ricaurte, Nariño and comprises six communities: El Guadual, Invina, Cumbas, Magüí, Arrayán, and Caimitillo, which can be reached after hours of walking, or in less time on motorcycles and trucks traveling on an unpaved road.
Children like Daniel Pai, a six-year-old first-grader, join the forest guard from an early age and learn from their elders about caring for the environment. The goal, explains Campo Pai, a former governor of the reserve, is for the children to learn about the rangers’ work so that ‘when they grow up, they will be leaders, protect Mother Nature, and help strengthen the rights of humanity.’ The young student rangers attend hour-long talks on Tuesday and Friday mornings, during which time they receive guidelines. They also help prevent pollution by cleaning their schools and assisting with proper waste disposal.
The community depends on these rangers performing vital functions. In addition to ensuring that garbage does not end up in Katsa Su’s mountains or water sources, they are the ones who help transport poorly neighbours to the nearest urban centers, like the municipality of Ricaurte Nariño. They also contribute to organizing mingas, community gatherings in which they work together toward a specific goal, like cleaning up a certain area.
Between 30 and 40 members of the guard, along with reservation authorities such as the governor (who serves a one-year term), are responsible for the difficult task of interacting with armed actors – both legal and illegal – and even mediating with them should any of the Awá be at risk of an attack. This is a critically important function given this Indigenous community’s history, which has been plagued with violence and long eluded by peace.
Open wounds
Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) declared Katsa Su and the Awá people victims of the armed conflict that officially took place in Colombia between 1990 and 2016. The JEP is an institution created in Colombia after the signing of the Havana Peace Agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC-EP). Among other things, its functions include investigating and prosecuting crimes committed in the context of the Colombian armed conflict.
The Awá and their territory – where there are resources of gold, silver and coltan – were devastated by the brutality of the conflict. Their strategic location was also attractive, serving as a corridor for smuggling drugs through the mangroves near the Ecuadorian border. For these reasons, the Awá’s ancestral territory has been historically contested by armed groups such as the former FARC-EP, and continues to be disputed by the National Liberation Army (ELN), drug traffickers, and FARC dissidents who did not demobilize after the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016.
Colombian law, however, protects the territory as a key cultural element. Decree 4633/11, the Victims’ Law for Indigenous Peoples, establishes in Articles 44 and 45 that the territory is a ‘living being and a foundation of identity,’ and that damaging it prevents Indigenous peoples from living and practicing their culture. Put simply, the Awá believe that ‘all that lives is people.’
Yet, terror has disrupted the harmony of the Awá’s four worlds: the first is the world of the smallest beings like ants and armadillos; the second is where the Awá, the mountains, and the rivers live; the third is the world of spirits and the dead; and the fourth, that of the gods.
For Lida Ortiz, an Awá woman and primary school teacher, the JEP’s recognition was needed because Katsa Su ‘suffers greatly from violence and bloodshed’. For Ortiz, although the territory still feels somewhat unprotected, as a living being she is also alive and strong, surviving amidst the crossfire and despite the horror sown in her guts in the form of landmines, corpses, bombings, the contamination of her waters, and the desecration of sacred sites.
Katsa Su suffered the severity of a war that was foreign to her when the army, guerrillas, and other illegal actors arrived at her hills and waterfalls where the spirits dwell. The Awá were also humiliated by being forced to run errands for these armed groups, else they would be considered informants or collaborators of the opposing side and declared a ‘military target’. As a result, they were sometimes confined to their homes and prevented from moving about freely within their territory.
Environmental rangers of the Inkal Awá territory
Inkal Awá, the community’s full name, means ‘people from the jungle to the mountains’. Caught in the middle of the Colombian conflict, the Awá have not been able to carry out their subsistence activities as they once did. Fishing, as well as planting cassava, plantains, and corn, became difficult after the water and land were contaminated with chemicals used for illicit crops – and yet, faced with this ruthless reality, they have not sat idly by.
According to Silvio Hernández, a valued leader, the forest guard is key, as it simultaneously defends the territory and exercises social control. Its work involves environmental and spiritual elements to ensure peace and reciprocity in the interactions among humans, flora, and fauna. The environmental guard strives to ensure survival and to weave harmony, allowing the community to preserve its traditions. These include ancestral medicines for curing diseases like the ‘evil eye’ which the river could cast if you don’t ask permission upon entering the community for the first time.
For Hernández, keeping Katsa Su alive and ensuring her wellbeing is an essential part of ‘Wat Uzán’ – living in peace, in harmony. To achieve this, Diego Chingal, general coordinator of the guard, says the rangers must possess a fundamental virtue: patience.
Each vereda has a coordinator; the groups communicate with one another by walkie-talkie, as the most remote villages have no internet access. Wilmer Guanga is the coordinator in El Guadual. Since 2019, he has been working lovingly to restore harmony to his Big House despite the numerous challenges, such as demining and recovering the bodies of murder victims. He manages the 40 rangers from his village and organizes everything in case they have to leave for a mission. Some missions take place far away from the territory, for example they might travel to the Cauca department, approximately nine hours from the reservation by car.
Cristina Chingal, one of the women of the guard, loves defending the rights of her community – and, especially, the rights of women, so that they can participate as rangers. She encourages residents to return to growing corn and chiro – as the small green plantain, known in other parts of Colombia as guineo (banana), is called – instead of the illicit crops they resorted to when they returned to their homes years after being forced to flee the violence. Guanga emphasizes that it is essential to grow the same food they used to grow in their home gardens and reduce the use of illicit crops, the cultivation of which leads to deforestation and contamination. Another essential task is raising community awareness about the importance of protecting water sources from pollution, of preserving trees on riverbanks, and of reforesting and planting more trees.
Reparations from an intercultural perspective
Demanding reparations for the damages suffered is not merely an economic issue; it ideally involves ending the Colombian armed conflict, because if Katsa Su falls ill, so do the Awá. It is vital to them to defend their territory and the wealth of their ancestors; to recover the knowledge weakened by the homicides, harassment, torture, sexual violence, and displacement that forced them to abandon their traditional crops and healing rituals. The Awá would also like to recover the use of the marimba, the community’s signature instrument that was silenced by the sound of bullets, bombings, and the state-sanctioned aerial spraying of glyphosate, which sickened their water sources and their people.
Like a mother who cares for and watches over her children, Katsa Su is perceived as a woman who deserves respect. With wisdom inherited from their elders, the Awá recognize her pain, her joy, and her sadness; her messengers are the birds, rivers, and mountains. Through their actions, such as singing in groups, the Awá communicate truths that may be imperceptible to outsiders but remain very clear to them.
Only the Awá understand her language, the varied ways in which she speaks to them. Therefore, any reparation and restoration of peace must be based on their knowledge; their particular and loving way of understanding Katsa Su.
An intercultural approach to reparations includes purifying, with the help of traditional healers, the sites where mass graves were found. ‘We are considering creating a plan, a route to purifying these places and having the elders re-define them, but we have not yet decided how,’ explains Hernández. Restorative measures aren’t just about investing money, but are symbolic. They also include performing rituals in each specific case, which the ancestral healers must decide on, to help put the spirits to rest. They also involve actions such as State-led demining. The Awá discuss these issues in two monthly assemblies, called mingas de pensamiento (thought gatherings), held on the 14th and 28th of each month. In these meetings, locals reflect on current events – from the presence of armed groups to ways to tensions between families in the community, which the rangers aim to both prevent and resolve.
Chingal, the general coordinator, believes Katsa Su will never be the same again – but this doesn’t discourage him from attempts to heal her. He does this by striving to revive her medicinal plants and her crops – like plantain, previously the main source of the Awá’s livelihood – as well as her music, in the calming, joyful sound of the marimba, which is currently not even played on the reservation.
The task is not easy, but as Pai, the former governer explains, the guard plays a fundamental role – one that is political, although nonpartisan – in defending its people’s rights, ensuring there are no more victims or disappearances, and always mediating amidst the conflict. Motivated by their love for their Big House, the rangers dedicate themselves to serving their community which, in Katsa Su, includes both humans and nonhumans.
Cristina Chingal shares her brother Diego’s view that it is necessary to respect the spirits who live in the territory, like those of their ancestors. Only in this way will it be possible to restore the harmony of the four Awá worlds.
This article was translated and edited in collaboration with our partner, Global Voices. You can read the original in Spanish via Global Voices here.
