The Indian-Hunters

The invitation was as irresistible as it was unexpected to the 18 nomadic Cuiba Indians who had been wandering the llanos, the vast prairies that stretch from the Andes to the Orinoco River. A group of Colombian cowboys rode up and invited the Indians to their ranch where two women cooks had prepared an alluring alfresco buffet of meat, rice, vegetables and fruit. Hardly had the Indians started eating when the cowboys' range boss, Luis Enrique Morin, gave a signal by rapping on the ranch house door. His men burst out, shooting with pistols, slashing with machetes and bashing with mallets. Sixteen Indians, including women and children, were killed. Two survived and crawled away. They later reported the massacre to a priest.

That was in 1967. Last week six llaneros, or cowboys, and the two women cooks were belatedly tried in the frontier town of Villavicencio. They were charged with the mass murder of the Indians, which they chillingly admitted they had carried out as a lark. As Morin, now 33, put it: "For me, Indians are animals like deer or iguanas, except that deer don't damage our crops or kill our pigs. Since way back, Indian-hunting has been common practice in these parts."

None of Morin's men suspected that they had done wrong. Marcelino Jimenez, 22, hiked for five days to a police outpost when he heard the authorities were looking for him. "If I had known that killing Indians was a crime, I would not have wasted all that time walking just so they could lock me up," he explained during the trial. The cowboys cooperated fully with the investigating magistrate, helpfully supplying every detail of the massacre. "All I did was kill the little Indian girl and finish off two who were more dead than alive anyway," protested one of the defendants. "From childhood I have been told that everyone kills Indians."

The defense lawyer's basic argument was that the government was unfairly trying to apply 20th century law to the llaneros, a swashbuckling and primitive breed of cowhand, whose lives and attitudes have changed little since the days of Simon Bolivar. Besides, the lawyer argued, others had done the same thing and gone unpunished on the llanos, "where the law that counts is that of the fastest." The defense claimed that on one occasion, the local DAS, the police force modeled on the Texas Rangers, helped kill 17 Indians accused of rustling cattle. One witness, an elderly trader, recalled that trappers used to offer him cured Indian skin along with crocodile hides and deer pelts. The llaneros even have a verb for Indian-hunting--guahibiar (which is derived from the name of another local Indian tribe, the Guahibo).

The defense obviously impressed the three-man jury. After nearly 4 1/2 hours of deliberation, they decided that the defendants were "not responsible" for the crime "because of their invincible ignorance." Instead the jury accepted the argument that blame should fall on all Colombian governments since the conquistadores for "doing nothing to improve the way of life in the vast outback where Indians have been regarded mostly as marauding animals." The jury's decision does not amount to an acquittal. The judge has 15 days to decide whether to accept the verdict or call for a retrial.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.