WHITE CITY

Popayan, the capital of Cauca province has this nickname, and its downtown is indeed freshly painted in bridal tones each year for Easter, when people from all over the country come to celebrate the Christian holiday. Ironically perhaps, in spite of the strong prejudice that still exists towards “indians,” and the historic prosecution of Indigenous leaders by illustrious “white” families that have held power in the region since colonial times, Popayan is a key urban center for the modern Indigenous movement in Colombia.

I have spent the last few days here working with with Inocencio Ramos. His son Nasnasa A’ has been keeping us company while we edit.

Inocencio is one of the first people I met when I came here close to two years ago and approached the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), which is the oldest and arguably strongest Indigenous organization in the country. He began working with CRIC as a teacher when the organization was starting in the late 1970’s, pioneering educational programs developed for and by Indigenous peoples. When I met him in 2007 he was acting as coordinator of the Council’s education program, which by now runs around 500 schools and serves over 17,000 students.

When we met I found out he had taken video workshops and made documentaries years ago. Inocencio is not that innocent, as he likes to joke. He knows how powerful video can be for keeping a culture and a people alive, in his case the Nasa people. So when I told him about Cineminga, and our goals, he was excited to get back into filmmaking and we began collaborating right away.

The video we are editing now is about Rober de Jesus Guachetá, a Nasa leader murdered May 18th in the Honduras reservation, in the western part of Cauca. Rober, like Inocencio, was someone who believed in education. In 2000 he had a vision of building a community based social education center. That school now has 23 young students and teaches subjects like Family and Nasa World-View, Human Rights, and Development Models. He gathered a Council of Elders to guide the school, and to watch over a younger generation of political leaders exposed to the corrupting influence of drug cartels and paramilitary death squads surrounding the reservation. He was forty-one years old. He left three children.

On Monday we screened a 20 minute rough cut at the Intercultural Knowledge School (Escuela Intercultural de Saberes) that Rober helped found. It was a sobering experience for me, and a very emotional one for everyone there.

The remaining leaders involved in this project are in a very vulnerable situation, particularly Rober’s brother Antonino who was threatened before him and had not been back in the reservation since his brother’s death. It was the first time the school met after their last session was interrupted by news of the murder. The reservation is extremely isolated, as a dam project built in 1983 flooded part of it and barred access by car. People live hours by foot deep into the mountains after a boat ride crossing the dam, and some of the characters we encountered on the way were evidently militia trained men in civilian garb carrying the processed product of large coca plantations. People spoke of bodies turning up in the dam recently, product of gang wars. The nearest police station is about an hour away from the other shore, and there was a group of soldiers protecting the station when we drove through the town of Morales.

And yet Antonino and the others are determined to keep working in their territory and have accepted whatever fate may come their way.