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MEDELLIN: Far from the rifle crevices that occasionally cut through the rainforest as local tribesmen hunt mature primates for their meat and soft skins, a sanctuary in a corner of the Colombian Amazon offers new life to the orphaned monkeys that remain.
The shelter run by a local leader, Jhon Jairo Vásquez, is giving them a second chance, while gradually changing attitudes in the area, in the indigenous settlement of Mocagua on the shores of the Amazon.
Vásquez has been shown to be the father figure of one of the orphans, a three-month-old woolly monkey, or Lagothrix, whose name is Maruja. The pair have become inseparable on their walks through the rainforest, carrying the little primate in a sack on their back.
“I have become the father and she the daughter,” said Vasquez, 38. “An indigenous family ate the mother.”
Long prized by indigenous hunters for its furry meat and fur, the woolly monkey is now classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as Vulnerable, and appears on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Given their thick brown fur and gray appendages, young woolly monkeys like Maruja are often hunted for the pet trade, and their mothers are sometimes killed in the process.
Fourteen years ago, Vázquez helped found the Maikuchiga animal shelter located in the middle of Mocagua’s 700-strong indigenous Tikuna community.
Since 2006, he has been trying to convince locals of the harm caused by “overhunting” as well as a burgeoning illegal wildlife market.
Reluctant at first, the Tikuna have developed a taste for ecotourism. The “rehabilitated” hunters have become guides who now “protect their wildlife,” says Vásquez.
But traumatized orphans continue to arrive in Maikuchiga from other parts of the Amazon. Since its inception, the refuge has rehabilitated about 800 monkeys, according to Vásquez.
The community is located in a place in the Amazon called the Triple Border, where Peru, Colombia and Brazil meet. There is a long history of hunting monkeys here for meat or ritual purposes.
They are still being fired from the trees, mother and baby intertwined as they fall, says Vásquez. “The mother does not release her baby. And the little one falls attached to his mother. Sometimes the pellets can damage or even kill him. “
Adult meat is roasted over a wood fire, as meat is prized. The small survivors are sold as pets or on display to tourists visiting indigenous communities in the Triple Frontier region.
The lucky ones are rescued by Corpoamazonia, the Colombian government agency in charge of environmental protection, based in nearby Leticia. Luis Fernández Cuevas, its director, said that 22 young primates have recovered since 2018.
Sometimes they are the result of “voluntary surrender” by people who claim to have found them by chance, to avoid an investigation for trafficking or illegal possession of the animal.
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