Around 7 out of every 1,000 newborn babies in Colombia die in their first 28 days of life. A baby who was born this year in Bogotá, on March 2, seemed to cling to this world so as not to add to that statistic. According to the authorities, the little girl was born with very low weight in a hospital located a few blocks from the presidential palace, and there she was cared for by health personnel until she was able to leave, already with more grams. She traveled in her mother’s arms to an iconic place further north of the city, the National Park. For three years now, almost 600 people from the Emberá Chami and Emberá Katio ethnic groups have lived there, in improvised shelters, displaced by violence from their territory in the Colombian Pacific—especially in the department of Chocó, where the vast majority would like to return. . The baby managed to meet her three brothers, she had good vital signs, and she lived in the park for three months. She did not get to know the Chocó jungle. On the morning of Sunday, June 9, she appeared motionless. Her parents took her to a nearby ambulance, and there she was pronounced dead. She is the second baby to die this year among the Embera indigenous people taking refuge from the war in Bogotá—and the 24th among displaced children from that town since 2021. A devastating figure that, if nothing changes, will only continue to increase.
Who is responsible? Bogotá asks. The city administration initially seemed to point the finger, in part, at the parents. “It is important to mention that the minor’s caregivers were in a presumed state of delirium” the morning the little girl died, the Secretary of Health said before the Bogotá council. Why important? He didn’t explain, it’s a message between the lines. He also mentioned that the mother did not attend medical appointments during and after pregnancy, and that on one occasion the Park community did not allow city health personnel to do a check-up on the baby. “We have two complaints before the Prosecutor’s Office for not allowing the entry of health teams,” said the secretary.
“They always say that the mother is to blame, that we Indians should not be here but in the reservation, and I am not saying that there cannot be responsibility, but they omit other very important things,” responds Maria Medina Quisque, human rights defender. and indigenous leader of the Nasa people, who has accompanied the Embera community of the National Park in the past. She explains that they omit, for example, that women do not go to a doctor’s appointment because they do not have a translator and most Emberá do not speak Spanish. Or that the pregnant mother, unable to get a job because she doesn’t speak the language or have a diploma, must spend the day figuring out how to feed her other children.
“The health brigades are going to repeat to mothers that they have to give protein to the children, when they don’t even have the money to buy a pound of rice,” continues Quisque, who is also a psychologist. “I have accompanied 22 mothers who have buried their children. I have not seen that institutions provide psychosocial support to them when this happens, but I do see a lot of criticism from society. They mourn their dead in absolute silence, alone out of necessity and also because of the accusations of the institutions,” she adds.
Laura García, who also accompanied part of the community from 2021 to 2023, says that there is also a certain distrust among the Embera community towards the Western health system. “In the indigenous worldview, ancestral medicine prevails, not that of the mestizos, and the Administration has not wanted to work with the Jaibaná [médicos tradicionales] who are in the National Park, who provide that ancestral health,” says García. “Some Embera families fear that, if they take their children to the hospital, the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) will take them away and they will never see them again,” she adds. A two-month-old Embera baby died in April 2023 when he was in the custody of the ICBF.
Inside the National Park
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Fortunately for the children of the National Park, no tragedy stops the game. Around eight in the morning on Wednesday, when the neighboring offices begin their work day, a two-year-old girl proudly drags a tiny car with a shaggy doll, and next to her two children play with long wooden sticks as if they were swords. The little ones are waiting for three students from the District University who have been doing workshops for weeks to understand how children see this difficult world into which they have landed.
“Birua Bogotá jia Parque benua chumia bedrua puedia niora ria,” says a booklet they made together, which translates “We came to this park in Bogotá because we want to return to our house without violence.” According to figures from the Secretary of Government of the capital, 83% of the Embera community hopes to return to their territory. “In Bogotá there are 1,998 Emberá people, and they all live in precarious conditions,” the official said before the Bogotá council.
When the university students arrive, two dozen children come out of the black plastic huts to greet them: they do not speak the same language but happiness is communicated with hugs, colors, white sheets to paint and a couple of packages with saltine crackers to share. “I’m hungry,” one of the children says to the university students in Spanish. Most of the children in the park suffer from malnutrition, says a doctor who has worked in the ambulance near the park, and due to the cold of the capital many have had tuberculosis, pneumonia and bronchitis. The Victims Unit brings food to the park, but only once a month, says one of the children’s parents, Alipio Vitucay.
The little ones, between 1 and 12 years old, sitting next to the statue of the murdered liberal leader Rafael Uribe Uribe, look for the pencil sharpener to sharpen the color blue: they want to paint rivers. Reynaldo, a little boy of about four years old, paints the Chocó house in which he lived with his parents and the river that was close to them. “Do,” he tells me, pointing to the blue one. It means river. Chocó is one of the most hydrologically rich areas in America.
But in the National Park water is scarce. The almost 600 Embera only have six public bathrooms available, which open from 7 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. There is a small aqueduct tube with drinking water in the mountainous area in the east of the park, but it does not have enough flow for bathing. Thus, several mothers ‘shower’ in a stream that descends from the hills to the tumultuous seventh race. The little ones don’t show that scarcity. One of them, Luis, chooses to draw chickens, fish, birds, pigs. The city, when he appears in his drawings, are large buildings and cars on the seventh. Not much color. But it is also “new ebira,” explains a little boy painting: “our territory.”
An institutional labyrinth
Since the 3-month-old baby died, the ICBF has committed to having a constant presence in the park, and both the national and district governments have said that they will reinforce health personnel, involving traditional doctors. They also promise that they will seek to work together to allow the returns or relocations of the displaced “with all the conditions of dignity” in the coming months. It sounds promising, but it also sounds repetitive.
A government official who has been working alongside the Emberá for several years, in Bogotá and other cities, prefers not to reveal his name in order to speak with autonomy. He says that the death of the minors is the result of “a long list of failures: of local governments, national governments, and indigenous authorities.” The Embera took over the National Park for the first time in 2021 and since then they have reached agreements, some individually and others in groups, to improve their living conditions. Hundreds of them have relocated, others have arrived. But in no way has it turned out well for them.
Bogotá has not managed, for example, to offer shelters without overcrowding (it happened in 2023 in La Rioja and La Florida, two of the centers where the Embera went temporarily). The national government has not yet offered rural land to temporarily relocate, despite the fact that the SAE, Sociedad de Activos Especiales, promised land more than a year and a half ago. Nor has it been able to guarantee security to make collective returns to the Chocó territories, where the war continues. And the indigenous people, on the other hand, are very divided in their leadership, which has prevented them from having a united front to demand from the Government how to protect children: if the authorities meet with one group, another protests saying that they do not represent them. . “There are at least seven different leaderships, each one with a particularity. That is why we are making community pots, to define the exit plan,” says the city’s Secretary of Government, Gustavo Quintero.
The Embera seem locked in a labyrinth with no easy institutional exits for return or relocation. After almost three years in Bogotá, with comings and goings, patience is running out for many capital residents, like right-wing councilor Julián Uscátegui, who calls for faster measures. At the beginning of May, the Uribista politician filed a tutela against the ICBF, requesting the relocation of the Emberá minors settled in the National Park: he warned that the current conditions put them in grave danger. “All government entities say that we cannot do anything because we must respect the autonomy of indigenous peoples, but the rights of children prevail,” he tells EL PAÍS. “And we also have to reestablish the rights of those who live around it, because the community wants to recover the park,” he adds.
The ruling on their guardianship does not require an immediate relocation of the children, but it does give the ICBF 30 days to follow up on minors whose rights may be being violated. Just four days after that sentence, her three-month-old daughter died. Neither justice, nor the ICBF, nor the national or local governments, nor the indigenous authorities arrived in time to save her life. None of these institutions yet knows what the route will be to save the lives of all the children who today draw Chocoan rivers on the cold asphalt of downtown Bogotá.
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