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The fear and anxiety that haunted the streets of Leticia the past two weeks due to the rapid increase in positive cases of coronavirus, had some relief last Thursday. That day, the desperate calls for help crying out for help for the capital of the Amazon were felt and its echo reached the high government.
In the late afternoon, a Colombian Air Force (FAC) plane landed at Alfredo Vásquez Cobo airport in Leticia. A team of doctors and nurses, a mobile covid-19 testing laboratory, and two ventilators arrived on the aircraft.
“We have a focus that deserves our full attention,” said President Iván Duque that same afternoon in the institutional program of the Presidency of the Republic, adding that a unified command post was established to strengthen controls in the border area. As of last Friday, there were 105 positive cases, five deaths and three more cases under study.
In turn, the health minister, Fernando Ruíz Gómez, who will be in Leticia this Sunday, stated that they are going to review the epidemiological situation, “strengthen the siege and carry out a training exercise for indigenous populations.”
The health of ethnic groups is one of the biggest concerns of environmentalists and defenders of the Amazon, who, through the hashtag #SOSAmazonas on Twitter, called the world’s attention to this situation.
Leticia reached 26 people including doctors, nurses and bacteriologists; four fans for the San Rafael de Leticia Hospital and a machine that can process up to 50 samples daily. It will be operational once the necessary infrastructure adjustments are made.
This took a breather, it is a relief but it is uncertain, in the current circumstances, to know if it will be enough. The situation is serious, no measures were taken in time, the virus took advantage and also brought out the poor conditions of the hospital network that Leticia and the Amazon have lived for years, to the point that the same day the San Rafael hospital in second level, he was intervened by the Health Superintendency, which found serious irregularities.
Among these, the Superintendency told EL TIEMPO, “Patients who arrived at the hospital did not have the due guarantees of quality care because, among other things, biomedical equipment did not meet the requirements to function, they were not given antibiotics and they were not supplied with essential medicines to save their lives. ”
San Rafael de Leticia Hospital (Amazonas)
In addition, the hospital did not guarantee the quality of oxygen because it did not have the operating health license issued by Invima. He also found expired medications and, due to poor planning in contracting, there was a notorious shortage of supplies. “The hospital is in deplorable conditions and it is not fair to that region of the country,” said Superintendent Fabio Aristizábal.
Antonio Bolívar, recognized for his role as Karamatake in the movie “Embrace of the Serpent,” entered the emergency department of that hospital last Wednesday. Bolívar, 75, is now the protagonist of this tragedy. He passed away Thursday night from complications in his health due to the virus.
As has happened in other regions of the country, there are complaints related to a parallel payroll at the hospital, which became a political fort, they say. The first aid that came (markets) for the poorest families was distributed politically, which sparked protests from people in popular neighborhoods. These cases are already in the hands of the Comptroller.
Today, 14 months later, the National Government begins to pay that debt. In November 2018, President Iván Duque together with the Minister of Health of the time, Juan Pablo Uribe, announced during a workshop Building Country in the capital of the Amazon “an immediate action plan to improve the response capacity of the San Rafael de Leticia Hospital “
The expansion and remodeling of the emergency service, the improvement of the intermediate care infrastructure, and the delivery of two ambulances, one ground and one river, among other announcements, never came. In addition to the hospital, there is a private clinic, between the two they add 68 beds, 8 intermediate care and eight fans.
On April 20, doctors, nurses and auxiliaries, including the ambulance driver of the San Rafael Hospital, resigned due to the lack of labor guarantees and protection equipment against the virus. No doctor in the country submitted last week to a contest that opened to work in Leticia.
This situation, and the death of an old man who died waiting for the ambulance, and whose corpse remained for more than four hours on a street in Leticia, were the trigger that set off the alarms and made fear take over the entire population. Leticia is the city with the highest infection rate in Colombia, more than 80 per 100,000 inhabitants.
A national security problem
With late containment measures, the Leticia authorities face yet another more difficult situation. “This is like a national security problem. It is as if our neighboring countries, Brazil and Peru, were targeting and firing missiles at us, “says Pedro Cuarán, a resident of Leticia.
The capital of the Amazon is in the geographical point known as the “triple border”. It limits with Brazil and Peru. And with Tabatinga, the Brazilian city, they are like Siamese brothers, they cannot be separated. Between the two they number about 100,000 inhabitants, share a great commercial activity and are divided by an invisible invisible line ’ It is very difficult to control the daily circulation of thousands of Colombians and Brazilians who, just by crossing a street or a gorge, are “abroad.” It is even the case that many houses have the living room in Colombia and the kitchen in Brazil.
Measures such as the restriction of the peak and schedule or the curfew have been of little use. In the mornings it is common to see long lines of people in supermarkets, stores or banks. At the beginning, the police carried out checks, but over time they have relaxed, parties are common in some neighborhoods, and even a soccer tournament was organized in one of them in the midst of quarantine, says an inhabitant of Leticia.
In the main market square the activity continued as if nothing happened, but on Thursday they had to close it because a person tested positive. It is in the process of disinfection and will reopen tomorrow Monday.
This is what the streets of Leticia, the capital of the Amazon, look like, where there are several difficulties in dealing with the pandemic.
The coronavirus entered Leticia through Brazil and this continues to be the main focus. International Avenue, as it is called in Leticia, and Da Amisade Avenue, in Tabatinga, is the border line of about six kilometers and where the only checkpoint is.
On the Colombian side, there is an army patrol that asks for documents from the few that cross there, but most people, both Brazilians and Colombians, avoid going through that place, as there are many with judicial records. That point of many of the border is still open, it is the obligatory passage of merchandise and food that merchants carry from one city to another.
On the Brazilian side, at least there is a team of Korean doctors who monitor, take their temperature, and make them fill out a form with data for everyone they cross. There are other steps such as the San Antonio gorge, one of the many through which you can go from Leticia to Tabatinga or vice versa.
On this ravine, invasion neighborhoods such as El Águila or La Unión grew little by little in floodplain areas, of houses built of wood, their inhabitants live six months on land and six months in water, without drinking water, without sewerage and without wastewater treatment system.
Hundreds of Colombians cross wooden bridges over those nauseous pipes daily. These steps are not controlled by the authorities. In this invisible line that separates Colombia from Brazil, there is also the Urumutú gorge, another invasion zone in which some 3,000 people live, all of whom live on informal trade and Mototaxism. There are houses or tenants where up to three families or about 20 people live, and curiously those neighborhoods that grew up in a high-risk area were ‘legalized’.
In Tabatinga ‘life is cheaper’. Leticia’s merchants bring food to fill stores and supermarkets; And the Brazilians come to Leticia for fruits and vegetables, they buy ‘retail’. A kilo of Brazilian rice costs 2,500 pesos there, bringing it to Leticia from Bogotá, that same kilo costs about 7,000 pesos.
Renting a ‘regular’ house in Tabatinga costs about 250,000 pesos, they can have air conditioning, a fridge and other appliances with that money; in Leticia, it costs double, 500,000 pesos, plus public services, the kilowatt of energy is the most expensive in Colombia. “The one who lives from the search is going to live there,” says a motorcycle taxi driver.
That is why thousands of nationals live in Tabatinga, but work in Leticia and it is the reason why there is a constant flow of people crossing the border. Tabatinga’s business is supplied from Manaus, capital of the Amazonas state, which until Friday registered 3,491 patients with covid-19, and 357 people died.
The President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is not exactly the most committed in the fight against the pandemic, and has even underestimated the severity of the coronavirus. The airports are closed but river transport by the Amazon river is maintained from Manaus to Tabatinga, which until Friday had 54 positive cases.
That is the route of contagion and that is where the first of 30 cases that originated in Tabatinga arrived. It was a doctor from Leticia’s only private clinic, Dr. Beleño, who treated a Brazilian patient. If it is a consolation, Leticia has better hospitals than Tabatinga, so its inhabitants say.
One of the main sources of contagion in Tabatinga is its main market square, known as La Feira, just outside the place in an informal market, on the floor or on wooden tables, the Peruvians who come from Santa Rosa, an island which was formed in the middle of the Amazon River, today in dispute between Colombia and Peru, they sell what their crops give them, cassava and plantain. Goods also arrive there by ship from Manaus and travelers continue to arrive.
There is no control whatsoever with the aggravating circumstance that for eight days the only hospital has not received any patient, so they have to go to Leticia. That is why Pedro Cuarán is not wrong, from Tabatinga and Santa Rosa, the silent coronavirus ‘missiles’ are targeting Colombia.
Indigenous communities at risk
The 22 indigenous communities that inhabit the Amazon are at serious risk, that has been denounced by the communities and various NGOs and the government knows this. President Iván Duque said Thursday that isolation mechanisms will be sought to protect them, “to prevent us from contagion with our ancestral population.”
Sources in Leticia told El Tiempo that the virus has already reached those communities. “It has already started and if the virus is spread it will kill them all, it will be an extermination of the indigenous peoples.”
The situation is aggravated because these communities live in very remote places where they do not have any type of health service and assistance may take several days to arrive. They are located in eight townships or non-municipal areas where they have not even been able to get to.
10,000 markets, as it would take at least 15 flights to deliver about 200 tons of food.
The doctor Pablo Martínez, a member of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Sinergias, familiar with the Amazon, had already launched an alert signal several days ago: “what is going to happen in Leticia can be disastrous.”
POLITICS
