Latin America Inside Out
Sept 14, 2016
Note: Latin America Inside Out (LAIO) is a blog about human rights, development, social and economic justice, political rights, culture and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean.
We arrived after several hours on unpaved road at a gloomy town which was little more than a mud-track through road with wooden houses clustered around it, and a billiard hall with rancheras that boomed late into the night. A border town of sorts. There were no police there; we had left them far behind. Beyond this point, we were in their territory.
A four-by-four took us to the wooden house, over the 1300km of roads that they themselves have built in this region, the Llanos del Yarí, the flat plains that meet the foot of the Andes mountains on the border between the departments of Meta and Caquetá, where dense Amazon jungle gives way to land stripped bare for cattle-grazing.
This photo and header image: Lucas Peña, Rodeemos el Diálogo
We were invited to come in and rest. We had to leave our shoes outside. The house was spotless, the floor swept, and red buckets with herbs and aloe vera plants surrounding the patio. Within minutes we were being given rice and plantain by a girl in camouflage trousers. After lunch, we sat in the soporific heat, to wait for our meeting.
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