Deep inside the lush green and humid Amazonian jungle, a sinewing path stops abruptly in front of a giant rock face decorated with ancient paintings of anacondas, jaguars and tortoises.
For millennia, indigenous Colombians have been illustrating their mythology in rock art, but these national treasures laid hidden — and preserved — during decades of war between government forces and Marxist rebels.
In the heart of the Guaviare jungle, a strategic area that armed groups continue to fight over, lies a UNESCO World Heritage site national park in which the Serrania de Chiribiquete table-top mountains stand tall like giant drums.
Photo: AFP
The rock frescoes adorning their sides occupy an invaluable place in the understanding of Amazonian settlement.
“It was very difficult to work in the Guaviare, because it was the epicenter ... of the war these last 50 years,” said Ernesto Montenegro, general manager at Colombia’s Anthropology and History Institute (ICANH).
“Although there were exploration missions at the start of the 20th century they stopped because of the [precarious] situation,” Montenegro said.
SACRED SPIRITS
Since the 2016 peace accord that ended the war with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, adventurers have ventured forth once again to try to decipher the secrets of the ritual drawings, some of which date back at least 12,000 years.
The area is sacred to the indigenous people of the jungle and not everyone has the right to even approach the rock art.
“Only wise men are worthy of entering sacred sites, in which spirits dwell. The common mortals should not even allow their thoughts to wander in,” said Andres Lopez, a historian at the institute, as he traipsed through mud to a rock painting spanning 30m in height and 100m in length.
That site lies an hour by jeep from the village of Raudal in the Guaviare Department, an area known for coca plantations and cocaine production that once marked the front line between government soldiers and FARC rebels.
An hour by boat down the Guaviare River, where military vessels mounted with machine guns still patrol, a hamlet on stilts, surrounded by right-wing paramilitaries until 2000, remains the stronghold of the First Front — former FARC dissidents who refuse to disarm.
Montenegro said that does not stop archeologists returning to Guaviare, insisting they are “benefitting from the peace process” that ended the decades-long guerrilla war.
The remaining dissidents, when they come across explorers, impose territorial limits — but seem unopposed to the study of cultural relics that remain little-known in the country.
PROTECTED SITES
The area was declared a “protected archeological site” by the Colombian Ministry of Culture at the end of May, in a move initiated by the ICANH, which also organized the first international mission to the site, alongside the French Institute for Andean Studies (IFEA).
“We hope to be able ... to explain all this. There’s still a lot to discover,” IFEA anthropologist Celine Valadeau said.
There are other unknown sites, for which “there is photographic evidence ... but it hasn’t been possible to find them, because back then there wasn’t any GPS” and the maps are imprecise, she said while displaying pictures of dancers, hunters and even amorous relations.
Mystery surrounds the paintings. Even carbon dating cannot shed light on when the drawings, created with a mineral mixture rich in manganese that turns orange once oxidized, were created, due to vegetable components.
The only indications come from the ashes of fires burned by the artists in front of the rock faces.
Crucially, though, the area was declared a World Heritage Site at the start of this month — the ninth such listing in Colombia.
Spanning an area of 2.7 million hectares, Chiribiquete is Colombia’s largest natural park and the UNESCO listing was vital to protect the area from oil and mineral prospectors.
It is the home to about 70,000 pictograms, but just as importantly to the Chiribiquete emerald hummingbird, seen as the only endemic species in the Colombian Amazon, and the jaguar, the big cat only found in the Americas that is threatened by the loss of its habitat due to deforestation.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing