Colombian Government officials fiercely deny that there were FARC or other terrorist organisations recruiting children in Colombia, particularly close to the Amazon forest region that’s home to many indigenous communities.
This is much like the denial among pro-LTTE groups during ‘wartime’ that there was any recruitment of child combatants. Parents did extraordinary things those days to keep children from being recruited. The wealthy were able to send children overseas, and then there were the stories of those who adopted various ruses.
In Colombia the recruitment scourge still goes on and the father of the children whose plane crashed in the Amazon said that children as young as two or three are subject to conscription related kidnappings i.e: early recruitment, which is why he chartered the small Cessna to get them as far away from the dangerous terrain as possible.
Colombia is the country of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, assuming he was writing a novel about the children that survived after a single-engine Cessna crashed in the Amazon, how can even Marquez muster this amount of magic realism?
Here are children that are fleeing a deadly terrorist organisation with their mother and three adults, and their plane crashes and the youngest who is not yet one-year-old is pulled out of the wreckage by the eldest when the mother lay dying, being badly injured in the crash.
PROPORTIONS
Then there is Cassava, plenty of it, and the magical knowledge of indigenous tribes that apparently helped the children survive because they knew how. But there was also the fiasco of the Colombian President who announced prematurely, it seemed on the day of the crash, that the children had been heroically rescued.
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| Colombian novelist and journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Now, Garcia Marquez would have thought of something like this. But even he wouldn’t have conjured up so many uses for Cassava.
No this is not to poke fun at the fantastic survival tale of the children which is a story for the ages. Neither is it to belittle the dogged efforts of the Colombian Forces and the indigenous communities that didn’t give up the search for the three children — and the dog named Wilson — no matter what.
Wilson has still not been found. It’s the reaction of the politicians that’s a bit curious. Why is the president so keen on being seeing with the recovering children if his officials feel that the father of the children was not quite correct in his assessment that the children would have been recruited if they had been in their original homes instead of being plucked away to safety in an ill-fated Cessna?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have been still more delighted if he was presented with the skeleton of this plot to be developed into something better. But, wait a minute, how could even the master improve on something like this?
Can he — magic-realist that he is — conjure up those summons made from the low-flying military aircraft which the soldiers equipped with loudspeakers that played recordings of the children’s grandmother asking the children to be safe but come out of their hiding places in the forest?
What’s in the water that the Colombians drink — the indigenous and then others of the Marquez ilk — that makes a tragedy of these proportions so magical, no disrespect meant towards the reality of the suffering that the children went through?
Forty-days in the thick jungles of the Amazon is no walk in the park, and there would have been times the eldest of the children at least thought it may have been better if they had been recruited by FARC or whoever the insurgents on the hunt for them were...
But Colombia is a magical place as well as being a super dysfunctional state where the consequences that people have to face due to the anarchic armed confrontations that are common are phenomenal. For instance, the children whose plane crashed in the forest are there for 40 days. They barely have anything to eat, and are subsisting on roots and berries and you guessed it, Cassava. They have weathered storms and hid in tree trunks for shelter, and as if all the spookiness wasn’t enough, they are suffering from the grief of the death of their mother. The Amazon is no Wilpattu-lite or Wasgomua-lite, it’s home to all from bears to anacondas.
But yet, when the children hear human voices, and the dogs of the search teams bark, they hide. That’s Colombia for you, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez wouldn’t have been so cruel as to conjure up that sort of pressing, diabolical and nausea-inducing sense of danger for the children.
ROMANTICIZE
It’s not as if we in Sri Lanka didn’t go through a period that was similar. Crash victims of planes that went down due to the hostilities died, but inspirational yet surreal tales such as what happened in the Amazon forests to the four missing children, were few and far between.
But the coverage of the Amazon children’s ordeal was also underscored by how much focus there was on the ‘indigenous knowledge’ that saved the children. They knew what to eat and what not to eat for instance, or so the world media told us, while being rather breathless in their narration.
That’s interesting because these children were Christians most probably because there was a wave of evangelical Christianity that caused members of the Huitoto indigenous tribe to which they belong to be converted. Christianity is the religion of some 85 per cent of the people of this Amazonian tribe, and only some 15 per cent of the tribes-people follow indigenous religions.
It’s interesting because whatever the external influences have been, these people have been steeped in their traditional ways of living that are tied closely to the Amazon and are proximate to the Amazon forests and other habitats.
There is no need for the international media to romanticize these ways of life only when there is a good story to report. These ways of life are fast disappearing but there is no appreciation of this indigenous knowledge and as is the trend here in this country, everything is subsumed in the influences of the pharmaceutical industry and the global processed food enterprise etc.
PORTRAYS
Perhaps what’s more marked about the coverage of the rescue in the Amazon was the patronizing way the media covered it. It was as if to say that the civilized world had come across something quaint; something as surprising as indigenous knowledge in fact helping young children survive an ordeal in the thick jungles of the Amazon.
If only they had recourse to more modern methods, the coverage seemed to imply. However the reality seemed to be that the children could perhaps help write a book that teaches ‘civilized’ people how to survive in thick jungles that are dangerous but are still strangely hospitable to those who know how to live with nature as opposed to fighting it.
There are some isolated tribes in the Amazon that to this day want to have nothing to do with civilization and that’s almost to be expected when considering that civilization as we know it merely seems to offer a parody of living with nature.
The children who were rescued would also now be assimilated into civilized society as it were and would perhaps lose their instincts to survive in the thick jungles, meaning that if they are sent back to the forests ten years from now as an experiment, they probably wouldn’t be able to live to tell the tale.
The media portrays the children’s survival story as improbable and as something of a miracle. But it wasn’t. It was a story of children who knew their way about the jungles when most adults would have gone into a funk and perished. That’s the kind of story that Garcia Marquez would have written and then it would have been called magic-realism except there is no magic in it. That’s what Garcia Marquez always said: that he never writes anything that’s magical; what appears to be magical is what in fact happens improbably in the real world.
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