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 From the rocky Patagonian regions of Argentina to the lush Brazilian
Amazon and the Andean villages of Colombia, indigenous groups are
barricading villages against outsiders and doling out harsh
punishment to members who violate quarantine rules.
Latin America is home to 42 million indigenous people, making up
about 8% of the population, according to World Bank data, yet their
way of life is already threatened by rapid development in mining,
oil extraction and deforestation.
The virus represents a new, and potentially catastrophic, risk. The
elderly - the group most vulnerable to complications from COVID-19 -
are the guardians of many traditions and languages threatened with
extinction.
"The fundamental importance of elders is that they hold the
collective memory, particularly regarding our identity," said
Eduardo Nieva, a community leader for the Amaicha de Valle
indigenous group in northwest Argentina.
Because Latin America's indigenous populations are often
preliterate, their history may not be written: it is passed down the
generations by elders through storytelling.
"All indigenous wisdom is oral, passed from generation to
generation, so the elders carry all the accumulated experience,"
Nieva said. "That experience - the one they keep - is what we are
protecting."
In the Amazon, on Brazil's oldest indigenous reservation, the Xingu,
guidance from elders is key to performing the Kuarup dance ritual
that brings together the community's 16 tribes each year to
celebrate life, death and rebirth.
"We are very worried. If we lose our elders we will lose their
knowledge not just of cultural traditions and religious rituals, but
of our traditional medicine," said Jair Kuikuro, 32, a filmmaker who
documents indigenous life in the Amazon.
His grandmother is a custodian of a sacred chant for a women-only
fertility ritual called the yamurikuma.
"If she gets the virus, if she goes, her song will be lost without
trace," said Kuikuro.
The rural parts of Latin America are among the last places on the
planet to be affected by the coronavirus, and testing in these
remote areas is limited, but official figures suggest the virus is
beginning to spread there.
Communities are taking special precautions to make sure older
members have food and supplies without needing to venture beyond
their territories, several indigenous leaders said.
VULNERABLE TO NEW INFECTIONS
The continent's indigenous groups, some of which only number in the
hundreds, are particularly vulnerable to new infectious diseases,
said Carolyn Stephens, a professor of global health at University
College London who has worked with indigenous communities around the
world.
Stephens cited the first wave of European colonization in Latin
America that introduced diseases like smallpox - resulting in
millions of deaths among native populations - as an example of what
could happen with a new virus.
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In Argentina, home to at least 35 officially recognized indigenous communities,
fears for the elderly have led some groups to take extreme measures to insulate
themselves from outsiders.
In northern Argentina's Tucuman and Salta provinces, some communities have
barricaded roads leading to their villages, said Relmu Ñamku, a Mapuche leader.
In other cases, community guards - who previously policed drug trafficking and
other crime - have been deployed to keep away outsiders.
In the Xingu in Brazil, locals remember how nearly half the inhabitants of a
village of the Kalapalo tribe were wiped out by measles in the 1950s.
Roads into the park have been blocked and no outsiders other than medical
personnel are allowed in.
In Colombia's Narino province, which borders Ecuador, members of the Pasto
indigenous community strictly enforce quarantine rules, using corporal
punishment for rule breakers.
A cellphone video from April on local media showed a young man who a community
leader said had violated quarantine writhing in agony after receiving three
lashes from a cow hide whip. Pasto leader Pablo Taimal confirmed the video's
veracity.
"Indigenous guards have been ordered to do what is necessary to safeguard the
health and integrity of our communities," said Taimal. He said they feared
people crossing from Ecuador, where the coronavirus has overwhelmed the health
system.
Indigenous people said community elders often held the knowledge about
centuries-old traditional medicines such as Yacon, a root known for antioxidant
benefits.
"As a Mapuche, if we take our known medicines, we will heal," said Estela
Astorga Porma, 77, a Mapuche woman in Chile's southern region of Biobio.
The effectiveness of indigenous medicines to treat diseases like COVID-19 has
not been proven.
It is also common tradition for younger people to go to the homes of elders to
seek guidance in making decisions, community members said, a practice now on
hold out of caution.
"Grandmothers are the community counselors. Older people are those who transmit
ancestral wisdom, those who organize us, give order, advise spiritually," said
Rosa Ñancucheo, 61, a Mapuche woman from Chubut province in southern Argentina.
"Today, we meet less than before."
(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison and Marina Lammertyn in Buenos Aires, and
Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; additional reporting by Oliver Griffin in Bogota and
Jose Luis Saavedra in Biobio; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
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