La Mesa, Colombia – Decked out in jaguar fangs and feathers, Colombian healer Claudino Pérez serves his followers a dark, thick brew, ayahuasca. He has just resumed his ceremonies after two years in prison in Mexico for transporting that ancestral drink of the Amazonian indigenous peoples.
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Colombians and foreigners who want to relieve discomfort of the body and spirit drink in a ritual the preparation made with hallucinogenic plants from the Amazon. Some of them contain Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a natural psychoactive compound, but prohibited in Mexican legislation for being “susceptible” to “improper use.”
In March 2022, the taita, as the authority of the Uitoto people is known, was captured at the Mexico City airport, since the force in charge of combating drug trafficking at the air terminal found DMT in ayahuasca bottles from your luggage.
“There one is just another criminal (…) they classify us as drug traffickers,” complains the 63-year-old healer in an interview with AFP in the municipality of La Mesa, west of Bogotá.
According to Pérez's lawyer, the Mexican Prosecutor's Office requested a 25-year sentence against him for “introduction of narcotics,” but a judge ended his process in a dismissal hearing when he found no reason for his detention.
His case opened a debate between the conservation of indigenous traditions and the fierce war on drugs.
In recent years, eight other people, half of them from indigenous peoples of Colombia, Peru and Brazil, were captured in Mexico for the same reasons and later released.
“Gray zone”
According to Mexican law, DMT constitutes “an especially serious problem for public health.” Although experts have not proven that it is addictive, the psychoactive drug is prohibited in the United States, Canada and some European countries.
Pérez rejects these restrictions, because as a healer he travels the world with ayahuasca. They look for it, he says, to treat pain linked to the treatment of serious illnesses or to stop addictions.
In Colombian indigenous peoples, 84% of those over 12 years of age have used ayahuasca as traditional medicine, according to official figures.
Julián Quintero, director of the NGO on drug issues Acción Técnica Social, assures that “there is a gray area that Latin American countries should regulate” regarding their “ancestral use and ceremonial use by communities.”
However, the sociologist emphasizes that some of these drinks are “moving out of indigenous ritual contexts” given the “global trend of returning to spiritual experiences.”
In his opinion, it is necessary to specify it legally: “Who are those who have this power (to use ayahuasca responsibly) and how it is done, and that this is not being diverted for a purely recreational commercial sale.”
To convince the Mexican judge of the ancient use of ayahuasca, the leftist government of Colombia sent academics to Mexico who supported Pérez's position. President Gustavo Petro acknowledged that he tried the concoction.
Pérez claims that he had already gone to Mexico more than 30 times since he was young.
The Navy, the Prosecutor's Office and the administration of the Mexico City International Airport did not respond to requests regarding these processes.
Organizations criticize the anti-drug policy of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for allegedly being soft on drug traffickers.
'Ancestral plants have been equated to cocaine'
Contrary to Mexico, in Peru ayahuasca is the country's intangible heritage.
On September 26, 2023, Lauro Hinostroza, shaman of the Peruvian Amazonian Shipibo-Konibo people, landed in Mexico City to chair the International Congress of Medicine of Indigenous Peoples, but suffered the same fate as his colleague Pérez.
In an ancestral medicine shop in Mexico City, dressed in a ceremonial robe and hat, Hinostroza works while he gets the money to return to Peru after regaining his freedom in March.
The crime is being indigenous
At 71 years old, it is not explained why he ended up behind bars. In “healing, the working tool is the plant, ayahuasca,” he claims. He lights a tobacco cigarette and blows the smoke onto a tiny vessel. He then takes a few sips and starts dancing and singing.
“In reality, they arrest us for being poor and for being healers (…) the crime is being indigenous,” he insists.
“That was ugly and very hard,” he laments.
Among the few public official documents on these arrests, an opinion from the Indigenous Affairs Commission of the Mexican Senate reproaches that “ancestral plants with psychoactive properties have been equated with narcotics such as heroin and cocaine.”
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