Vaupés and its epidemic of indigenous suicides - El Espectador

Journalist Sergio Silva of El Espectador visited Vaupés with us to tell the country about the high rates of indigenous suicide in the department.

Before inviting me to his house, on the banks of the river, Salvador wants me to explain why I traveled from Bogota to this city of thirty streets in the middle of the jungle. He is surprised that these days another “white” comes to the capital of Vaupés, one of the departments with more indigenous people in Colombia, not in search of the places where El abrazo de la serpiente was filmed, but trying to find out about a strange epidemic that broke out without precise date, which everyone knows about and fears: suicide. So in our first meeting, Salvador Fernandez, from the indigenous Cubeo people and with a name and surname imposed by a priest, sees me and hesitates. If he has learned anything in the 56 years he has been walking these lands colonized by rubber tappers, evangelists, drug traffickers, guerrillas and military, it is that when a white man arrives, the best thing to do is to hesitate.

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I landed in Mitú on a Sunday morning on one of Satena's two weekly flights. I had arrived in that capital to try to understand the reasons that had placed Vaupés as the department with the most suicides in Colombia. The first scene I came across had already been captured by Óscar Naranjo in his documentary La selva inflada: next to the main park, in a place they call “Maloca” but which is far from resembling that ancestral construction, a reggaeton was playing and the indigenous people accompanied it with beer and large quantities of chicha. Old people, adults and teenagers drank on the dry earth, while the younger ones took care of their Neymar-style hairdos.

I had walked there with Camila Rodríguez, one of the people who had insisted most on understanding the origins of the deaths. For two years she attended patients in the hospital of that city and was part of the only project to study this phenomenon in detail. This work, achieved thanks to the NGO Sinergias - Alianzas Estratégicas para la Salud y el Desarrollo Social, resulted in several workshops and case analyses that left her perplexed.

Western medicine, - she would later explain to me - does not give us the tools to work in another culture. We are trained (she is a doctor at the National University) with the idea that what we study is the absolute reality. But in this context everything is different. It is a subject that has surpassed our capabilities".

That Sunday, Camila introduced me to Salvador Fernandez. He was wearing black shoes, beige pants, a salmon-colored polo shirt and a Democratic Center cap. The only good thing left from the last mayoral and gubernatorial elections was the batch of clothes and appliances that the candidates handed out shamelessly.

Salvador's eyes were red from the chicha and he was about to set sail for Macaquiño, his community, a name that translates to marmoset monkey and was given to him a hundred years ago by a Brazilian military officer. Fifty-two families gather there, of which Salvador is the captain.

Since it was already 4 p.m. and he had to leave in his canoe before the darkness mimicked the stones, Salvador promised to come back two days later. Talking about suicides implied asking for authorization from the sabedor or traditional doctor of his community. Talking “two days later” meant 48 hours of uncertainty: in Mitú a meeting depends more on the trust in the other or the luck of the voice to voice, than on a cell phone signal that has not been able to overcome the remoteness of the jungle.

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