Chengue (Colombia) (AFP)
Under her jumpsuit and her veil, invulnerable to the sting of bees, Yina Ortiz takes great care of a hive. The swarm and honey are allies to "heal" the wounds of his village of Colombia, theater of a massacre by paramilitaries.
Chengue, in the Montes de Maria region (north), mourned 18 years ago, after one of the worst crimes of armed conflict in Colombia. Right-wing squadrons stormed the village in the middle of the night and killed 27 peasants with machetes and stones, whom they accused of collaborating with leftist guerrillas.
Yina Ortiz, 33, has lost several family members and friends. As a teenager, she only survived because she lived in an isolated hamlet. But she keeps in mind the images of "people in tears" and "dead lying in the street" the next day.
It was just "a stream of blood, it was awesome to see so many dead, one on top of the other, there on the ground, and their loved ones picking them up," she said. AFP.
After the massacre, a hundred families fled, leaving behind a ghost town. Nearly two decades later, life returns to this sun-dusted, dusty locality, thanks to the theft of thousands of bees brought there via a project initiated by women.
"Thanks to beekeeping, people have gathered, returned, they enjoy taking care of bees," she says, smelling insects to calm them down.
For the past year, the 159 families in Chengue have been performing agricultural work and caring for the 500 hives offered by the government and the United Nations, as part of a collective program for survivors of the armed conflict.
- "The last widow" -
With "honey cultivation", we try to "heal the wounds", but it also represents a hope of subsistence for farmers whose tobacco, yam and cassava plants are drying up more and more because of global warming, Yina Ortiz adds.
The first harvest is scheduled for the end of the year and beekeepers expect 13 tons of honey.
At the head of these women who reign over the bees, Julia Meriño, a 49-year-old teacher, whose family has been ravaged by the armed conflict that has devastated Colombia for more than half a century.
Her uncles and cousins were dismembered during the 2001 massacre. Two years later, her husband was sequestered and murdered by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), since disarmed after signing the peace in 2016.
She is nicknamed "the last widow of Chengue" because she is the only one to have returned to the village where she lost her husband. In front of her white grave, in the abandoned cemetery of Ovejas commune, on which Chengue is, she remembers her healing process.
Workshops allowed her to "turn these spaces of pain" into "spaces of goodness, to heal wounds and recover the social fabric that had fragmented," she says.
Then, she decided to share this experience with other women, whom they now lead to develop beekeeping. They decided to take up "this new challenge in order to initiate economic changes," she explains.
- Reticence -
Finding new sources of income is essential in an abandoned village of the public authorities and strongly affected by climate change. Its roads are only precarious sandy tracks. There is neither water nor gas, and the droughts are each time more intense.
Among the tobacco and coffee plants, which once were the economic engine of the region, Guillermo Marquez, 62, doubts the future.
Many earn nothing since the international group Philip Morris announced in June the closure of its cigarette factories in Colombia, citing tax increases and smuggling.
"We are abandoned by both business and nature," he says, regretting having burned woods to plant maize while the land is drying up.
But after fifty years in tobacco, he is no less reluctant to venture into the world of honey.
And the practices of some farmers, whose use of pesticides puts bees at risk, are a challenge for the beekeepers of Chengue.
But they are determined to revive the village through a respectful activity of nature.
"I am returning to the land, to love and gain my autonomy," says Julia Meriño, convinced that women and bees will become "the masters of the territory".
© 2019 AFP