Yukpa

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Women of the Yukpa ethnic group by a river in the Sierra de Perijá

The Yukpa (also called Yucpa , Yu'pa ) or Yuko are Indians who live on both sides of the Sierra de Perijá , i.e. both in Colombia and in Venezuela . In Colombia the name Yuko is still used although this means enemy, the self-name is Yukpa.

history

The Spanish conquerors had begun to forcibly drive the ancestors of the Yukpa from their land. Most of the expulsions did not take place until the 20th century. During the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s, expropriation was particularly intense.

In the 1970s, the Yukpa descended from the protective Perijá Mountains to repopulate their ancestral lands.

Settlements

In Colombia they settle in an area of ​​33,678 hectares in the department of Cesar and in Venezuela in the state of Zulia . According to the Colombian Ministry of Culture, there were 4,761 Yukpa in Colombia in 2005 and 10,877 Yukpa in Venezuela, according to the 2011 census, which is two percent of the Venezuelan indigenous population. The Yukpa are divided into numerous groups with different dialects. The Yukpa language belongs to the Carib language family .

Demand for restoration of land rights

Most of their ancestral land is in the hands of predominantly white large landowners. Many of the Yukpa are demanding the restoration of land rights from pre-colonial times.

In Venezuela, the Yukpa claim a contiguous area in the northwest border state of Zulia. The ranchers who settled there had for a long time had excellent relationships with politics and security agencies in order to secure their position of power, and national companies and international corporations have started to exploit raw materials such as coal and ores. At the end of 2005, the Venezuelan parliament and government passed the “Law on Indigenous Peoples and Communities”. This will transfer the traditionally inhabited areas to the country's 35 indigenous groups. The property titles are inalienable, non-statute-barred and non-attachable for the indigenous communities. Since then, the large landowners in the region had increasingly built up paramilitary groups and had members of the Yukpa communities murdered, including in 2015 Yupka spokesman Sabino Romero, who became known throughout the country for his struggle for the land rights of the indigenous population. According to activists, a total of ten people have been killed to date, but only the murder of Sabino Romero has so far been tried in court and his perpetrators have been punished. In August 2015, the campaign by environmental and indigenous groups got President Maduro to withdraw a decree allowing further mines in the mineral-rich region.

literature

  • Ernst Halbmayer: Cannibalistic sun, father-in-law moon and the Yukpa. Principles of social organization and the worldview among the Yukpa Indians of Northwest Venezuela . Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt / Main 1998, ISBN 3-86099-280-5
  • Ernst Halbmayer: Elementary Distinctions in World-Making among the Yukpa In: Anthropos , Vol. 99, No. 1 (2004), pp. 39-55.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Andrés Otálvaro and Maxim Graubner: The indigenous Yukpa in Venezuela fighting for their country. In: Latin America News. March 2010, accessed October 28, 2011 .
  2. Maximum sentence imposed for murderers of Sabino Romero in Venezuela , Achim Schuster on August 20, 2015 on the website amerika21.de, accessed on December 28, 2018
  3. Venezuela signs controversial mining contracts , Lucas Koerner on July 28, 2017 from the amerika21.de website, accessed on December 28, 2018

This article is based on the article Yuko ( memento of July 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from the free encyclopedia Indianer Wiki ( memento of March 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) and is under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 . A list of the authors was available in the Indian Wiki ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).