As their plane's engine started up, Susan and Dave Rodman looked back at a group of teary-eyed Indians watching from the grassy airstrip -- an abrupt and bitter goodbye after nearly three decades living together in Venezuela's Amazon rain forest.
The two US missionaries were among some 40 who left their remote outposts ahead of last Sunday's deadline to leave the area set by the Venezuelan government. President Hugo Chavez has accused missionaries from the US-based group New Tribes Mission of spying for the CIA and exploiting indigenous communities.
Denying they have done anything wrong, the missionaries gathered in an eastern city to ponder what comes next -- for themselves and the tribes they left behind.
"My heart is torn," Susan Rodman said on Friday from Puerto Ordaz, where the missionaries have moved into a guesthouse and acquaintances' homes. "We knew one day we'd have to leave, but we didn't want it to be so abrupt."
Rodman, 57, has spent more than half her life with the Joti Indians, who speak no Spanish and have little concept of money. Raised in Wisconsin and Brazil, Rodman said she and her husband are unsure what they'll do next.
They left their outpost earlier this month, and New Tribes flew its last two missionaries out of their jungle camp on Thursday.
Before leaving, Marg Jank -- a 67-year-old originally from Toronto who spent 44 years with the remote Yanomami Indians -- said the tribe handed her its last stash of grimy bolivar bills so she could send a final shipment of cornmeal, rice and other staples.
Jank left most of her belongings in the simple home that she offered to a Yanomami family, which promptly moved in. She took only her computer and printer so she can finish translating the Bible into the Yanomami tongue.
"When you live there, they're not just statistics, they're not a tribe, they're not an endangered species -- they're just people," Jank said. "I think of them as my neighbors."
Chavez argues the indigenous people will be better off without the Sanford, Florida-based missionary group, which he accuses of using its presence in isolated, mineral-rich tracts of Venezuela to spy for foreign mining and pharmaceutical interests and collect "strategic information" for the CIA.
The government has not backed up the charges with evidence.
Chavez, a fiery nationalist who often accuses the US of plotting against him, said on Friday that Venezuela would take over the missions from New Tribes -- which he referred to as an "organization of imperialist penetration" -- and invest in airplanes, communications equipment and other supplies to provide water and electricity to the tribes.
Chavez, who said last October that he was expelling the mostly North American New Tribes missionaries, has also accused the missionaries of destroying indigenous cultures by proselytizing -- a criticism Jank acknowledged was tougher to counter.
But she pointed to what she said were positive changes among the tribes: Populations around the missions grew as education and medical care helped combat disease, abuse of women and children declined, and tribes learned to transcribe their languages to preserve them.
Alexander Luzardo, a professor of anthropology at Venezuela's Central University, has denounced the missions for what he calls "cultural genocide," accusing them of terrorizing Indians into adopting Western practices and beliefs.
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