Colombian school, a grim reminder of atrocities of rubber fever
By AFP
Published May 1, 2024
The United Nations says 71 Indigenous groups, several of them Amazonian, are at risk of physical or cultural extinction in Colombia - Copyright AFP/File Joris Bolomey
David SALAZAR
A modest wooden school in the middle of the Colombian Amazon preserves the memory of atrocities perpetrated against Indigenous people by rubber industrialists more than a century ago.
It used to be a house, Casa Arana, where enslaved local people were tortured and murdered at the height of the rubber fever of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Casa Arana is painful for us, it makes us sad to see the dungeons… where our grandparents died,” 73-year-old Luzmila Riecoche of the Huitoto tribe, descended of a rare survivor, told AFP.
In remote La Chorrera in Colombia’s south, the school walls sport murals painted by local artists of Indigenous people in chains, led around by men with guns.
AFP accompanied a recent government mission by plane to La Chorrera where officials apologized, not for the first time, for what they described as a “genocide” of the Huitoto, Bora, Muinane and Ocaina peoples.
They died in conditions of forced labor, torture, famine and pestilence in precarious slave quarters.
More:
https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/colombian-school-a-grim-reminder-of-atrocities-of-rubber-fever/article
Casa Arana
The community says it is facing a new threat: violence perpetrated by drug traffickers, illegal ranchers and loggers, and guerrillas operating in the jungle (David SALAZAR)