Camila Chindoy, the Indigenous daughter poised to lead her Amazon community – Mongabay.com

At just 25 years old, Camila Chindoy is seen by many in her community as a possible future governor of the Inga Indigenous reserve of Yunguillo in the Colombian Amazon. If elected, she would also become one of the youngest Indigenous matriarchs in the country.

But Chindoy is a simple woman who doesnt like to talk about the opportunity of occupying the most powerful political position in her community. Shed be in charge of the lives of 1,600 people who reside in Yunguillo. Many of the community leaders, and those who have closely followed her environmental and social work, are convinced that its only a matter of time before this happens.

They point mainly to Chindoys work as a facilitator of the team in charge of implementing the first territorial environmental management plan (POAT) of their community, which started nearly five years ago. Chindoy got involved at the beginning of 2019.

The POAT runs more than a hundred pages, prepared by everyone in this reserve 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Mocoa, the capital of the department of Putumayo in southwestern Colombia. The POAT lists the rules for sustainable growth for the community, whose residents are aware as never before of the enormous responsibility they have in protecting the Amazon. Their location in the Amazon foothills, where the thick jungle merges with the Andes mountain range, is a particularly important pressure point in the regions ecosystem.

After the painstaking three-decade struggle to expand the reserve, in 2015 the area was increased from 4,320 hectares to 26,716 hectares (10,675 acres to 66,017 acres).

Today, as a facilitator, Chindoy has worked hard to meet the POAT objectives, including promoting the protection of the Amazons biodiversity and advocating for the responsible administration of natural resources.

And Chindoys election as the leader of the implementation team occurred at a moment when the community had been hit by one of the worst natural disasters in Putumayos history: the Mocoa mudslide, which occurred in the early hours of April 1, 2017, and left 336 people dead and 70 missing.

That night, an overflow of the Mocoa, Mulato and Sangoyaco rivers destroyed several neighborhoods in Mocoa. Though not as deadly as earlier natural disasters a 1985 volcanic eruption triggered landslides that killed more than 20,000 in the town of Armero in Tolima department, and an earthquake in 1999 killed more than 1,900 in Armenia, in Quindo department the incident was an eye-opener. It raised alarms about the vulnerability of human settlements near rivers, and the need to protect these natural ecosystems from the impacts of overpopulation, illegal mining, and the clearing of forests for new settlements and livestock grazing.

For Chindoy, the social and environmental consequences of that event were the trigger that launched her as one of the most important Indigenous leaders in Putumayo.

Bisney Camila Chindoy Mutumbajoy was born in 1994 in the Yunguillo Indigenous Reserve, which is home to 400 families and falls under the jurisdiction of the four nearby municipal councils of Yunguillo, Osococha, Tandarido and San Carlos.

Daughter of Simn Chindoy, a farmer, and Mara Elvira Mutumbajoy, a school teacher and the first female governor of her community, Chindoy grew up in the reserve with four brothers and three sisters. When she was in the 10th grade, she traveled to Mocoa to finish high school at the Po XII school, the largest in the city.

In 2011, she began studying environmental engineering at the Putumayo Technological Institute. In her seventh semester there, she became pregnant with her daughter, Valery Sofa. In June 2017, she graduated with a project that consisted of the development of a solid-waste management system for Yunguillo, marking the first step in her environmental work with her community.

Just months later, the Mocoa mudslide struck. Chindoy remembers how that day she and her daughter were at her house they shared with Chindoys sisters Paola and Ingrid. As the disaster unfolded, they were reunited with other relatives, including her brother Daniel.

When it all started, my biggest concern was my daughter, who was 2 years old, Chindoy says in a recent phone interview. Water ran down the streets like a river as people tried to escape. I will never forget the loud noise of the water.

Then, as they huddled on a high floor in the dark with dying cellphones, a neighbor came and told them that the San Miguel neighborhood, where her brother Daniel lived, had disappeared under the mud.

Paola and Ingrid went out to look for him in the dark, Chindoy recalls.

When the sisters arrived in San Miguel, they found Daniels apartment gone, and in its place was a pile of rubble. They went to the Mocoa hospital, but didnt find him among the crowd of injured people. At around 9 in the morning they found him about 300 meters, or three blocks, from his house, where he had been dragged by the mudslide. Although badly injured, Daniel was miraculously alive.

The pain that many families suffered is unimaginable and will be felt for a lifetime. Although no one in my family died, many acquaintances did, while others lost everything they had, Chindoy says.

Many had to seek psychological help after the avalanche. Now, every time it rains, we fear the worst.

Chindoy and her family received some aid from the government, such as food and money to pay the rent. But it wasnt much, and we had to get on with our lives and keep working, she says.

Prior to 2017, there had been an alarm about a possible mudslide. And while people had prepared for the worst, it didnt come to pass, which may have explained many peoples complacency when disaster did strike, Chindoy says.

People were confident and that is why many stayed at home when the rivers did overflow, she says. This realization made her understand the urgency of starting to work with her community on prevention and awareness of disasters, using an approach that accounts for the relationship between people and the environment.

A few days after the mudslide, Chindoy began working with the Mocoa mayors office, assisting affected families, providing aid to Indigenous communities, and collaborating in prior consultation processes. By law, Indigenous peoples in Colombia must be consulted by the national government about projects or works proposed in their territories, in order to protect their integrity and traditions.

She says she wasnt aware initially of the latest organizational and community activities of the reserve, having been away during her years of study. But she became increasingly involved in them while supporting the risk management and disaster attention unit in Mocoa.

In December 2017, Chindoy left for Yunguillo. An election would be held later that month to choose a new Indigenous authority for the reserve, who would serve for 2018. The winner was William Chindoy (he is not related to Camila), whose responsibilities included implementing the POAT, the road map to establish the distribution and use of the territory of the reserve following the 2015 expansion.

The challenge now was to put our Pacha Mama to good use, Camila Chindoy says, referring to the deity revered by Indigenous peoples across much of the Andes.

Camila doesnt seem physically strong, but every time she speaks her whole character comes out, says Mara Fernanda Franco, a Putumayo-based member of the Amazon Conservation Team, a nonprofit that works with Indigenous communities. In one of the first meetings she went to with Governor William Chindoy, very few knew her, but she got up and, there, in front of everyone, mostly men, she told her story, Franco says. She said that she had left the reserve to study at the university and prepare, and that she was now returning to help. She asked to be recognized for that effort and be given a job to contribute to her people.

In 2019, the reserve chose a new governor, Juan Carlos Mutumbajoy, who proposed to Chindoy that she work on the POAT. She accepted and was hired on the POAT facilitation team, made up of the leaders of each of the four councils representing the reserve. From that position, Chindoy was to lead the groups activities.

The POAT contemplated the reformulation of the economic activities of the reserve, such as cattle ranching, which, although it generates income for families, also contributes to the imbalance of ecosystems from deforestation and the deterioration of water basins, Chindoy says. We had to understand how to conserve and live in harmony with all the wealth that the Lord has given us. Chindoy, as many Indigenous people in Colombia, shares her communitys traditional beliefs with Catholic faith.

She says that when they were working on the POAT, they remembered that when the mudslide occurred, one of the rivers that overflowed split into two, one part of which passed through an area that had been deforested and destroyed all the houses that had been built there. But the other part passed through a small forest reserve that functioned as a retaining wall, preventing the tragedy from being greater.

That made us reflect on the need to protect river basins, because, just as we have our places where we do our daily activities, rivers also have their home where they must travel freely, Chindoy says. If we go in there they will recover their house, thats why what happened, because the ravine had nowhere else to move its course, but was enclosed within the four walls.

These days, Chindoy approaches conservation of the natural world in terms of partnership.

Nature itself is wise to reflect and realizes that, even though it has provided us with a service, we have always been selfish and think only of ourselves. The avalanche made us ponder how we humans cannot control nature, and we have to adapt to it, not it to us, she adds.

Under Chindoys leadership, the facilitating team also conducted censuses of fauna populations, water resources, and ritual and conservation areas. Among their results, they delivered a complete fish inventory prepared with the help of scientists from universities in the capital, Bogot.

Chindoy also participated in the construction of a checkpoint on the road that leads from Mocoa to Yunguillo, to supervise who enters or leaves the territory. It is mostly foreigners and tourists interested in meeting the taitas, or shamans, and learning about the ayahuasca ritual.

In this way, the team sought to protect the Indigenous people and their rituals, and thus guarantee the security of this community that has been buffeted by violence for decades first by the FARC guerrillas and, more recently, by armed groups involved in drug trafficking and deforestation to grow coca and mine illegally.

In its final pages, the POAT establishes simple rules on how economic practices should be transformed in such a way that they protect natural resources, and dictates the total area that should be dedicated to conservation.

Chindoy sees responsibility for carrying out the POAT as resting with every community member.

Now we are in the implementation stage and, for this year, we will start work in the brooks, which are affected by bad practices in agriculture and livestock, because we know that water is one of the most vulnerable resources in the world, Chindoy says.

One of the episodes for which Chindoys work gained widespread recognition in her community came in October 2018, when she supported authorities in efforts to denounce and demand justice for the murder by unknown assailants of three young men from the council of Osococha.

She took the initiative to organize a commission with traditional authorities of the Yunguillo reserve, which traveled to Bogot to demand justice from national authorities such as the Attorney Generals Office, the Ombudsmans Office, the National Protection Unit, and the Ministry of the Interior. They managed to obtain security guarantees for community members leading social processes and for the community leadership due to come into office in 2019, including then-governor Mutumbajoy.

When we arrived in Bogot we realized that the prosecutors office had no reports of what had happened. That caused us outrage, because it is a sign of the abandonment of Indigenous communities, and a proof that we are only visible to the government during times of political campaign and elections. Its very painful for us, Chindoy says.

On one occasion during that period, she says, she was walking along a road with her mother when they were intimidated and threatened by a group of men. These situations led us to wonder if we should continue with the processes, because we were afraid that something would happen to us, Chindoy says, adding that, in the end, they decided that the best thing for their safety was to leave the cases in the hands of the authorities.

For all this, many within Yunguillo believe that Chindoy can follow in her mothers footsteps and become governor of the reserve. If successful, she would become one of the youngest Indigenous leaders in her department and in Colombia. Nidia Becerra, who was governor during three consecutive periods, from 2014 to 2016, was first elected when she was just 26 years old.

Even though it might seem strange that a community can have such young leaders, age does not play an important role for the Inga people when choosing a governor. Instead, it is more taken into consideration the fact of belonging to a family taitas, political leaders or educators, which is Camilas case, whose mother is a school teacher and Principal. Not to mention that she was the first female governor of the reserve.

The main qualities that anyone who wants to lead the community are the will and desire to work, because the governors do not earn any salary, says Richard Macas, the current governor of Yunguillo. I think Camila can become the governor because she has shown the will and because all that professional knowledge she has can be channeled for the success of the community.

In this reservation, elections for governor take place during the last months of the year. The candidates for this position are postulated by the community and the elders, and there are two ways in which a candidate can be elected: by an unanimous decision or via elections. Who gets elected will rule for the next year, starting in January.

Former governor Juan Carlos Mutumbajoy says there are several challenges that whoever assumes this position must face.

The biggest is that one must leave his family aside and give himself 100% to the community. One is the father, the judge and the administrator. So the commitment is very great and one has to find solutions and manage resources for the development of the community he says.

Mara Elvira Mutumbajoy, Chindoys mother, says her daughters commitment to her people has been such that she has rejected job offers with important companies to stay and work for the community in the reserve.

She is a humble, simple and responsible woman, and she has been very tolerant, since she has never had problems with the community, Mara Elvira says. She has carried out the processes that she has proposed, always thinking of the benefit of all. She has us in her heart and values the cultural identity linked to her territory very much.

Her arrival at the governorship would be important because although traditionally Indigenous communities have had matriarchal systems, in recent years we have seen how machismo has increased, mainly since the evangelization processes began by religious congregations and as a copy of the Western societies, she adds. I think it is very important to rescue those ancestral values in which women, as the ancestors say, directed most of our decisions.

In recent months, Chindoy has continued to work on the application of the POAT road map and raising awareness about the importance of caring for nature and taking care of the Amazon, including addressing global issues such as climate change.

We cannot be oblivious to what happens in the rest of the world, because it affects us in many ways, for example by altering our sowing and harvest calendars, Chindoy says. Before, the grandparents had identified the dry and rainy seasons, but now that has changed and we do not know when they will occur, and this is because of the global issue of climate change.

We, as Indigenous people, have a mission to protect resources, Chindoy adds. In the future, the conflicts will be over water, one of our most important resources here in the Amazon so we will continue working to take care of it.

Banner image: Camila Chindoy (r) during one of the final meetings for the validation and socialization of the TEMP document. Photo courtesy of the Amazon Conservation Team.

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Camila Chindoy, the Indigenous daughter poised to lead her Amazon community - Mongabay.com