COLOMBIAN CLAM DIGGERS' LIVELIHOODS UNDER SIEGE

Environmental Pollution and Encroaching Narcos Have Taken Their Toll
on Narino State's Afro-Colombians. The Community's Unique, Altruistic
Culture Is in Peril.

TUMACO, COLOMBIA -- After a lifetime spent digging for black clams in
the swamps that line the coast here, Clojilda Velasco remembers when
she could count on finding 400 a day. Now she's lucky if she gets 100.
But she still shares when one of the other women comes up salado, or
unlucky.

Oil spills, industrial pollution, drug traffickers and over-harvesting
are quickly reducing the clam population in the mangroves of Tumaco
and snuffing out the livelihoods of Velasco and other extremely poor
families who depend on the mollusks for their subsistence.

But even more at risk is an Afro-Colombian culture unique to Narino
state that economists and ethnologists describe as one of South
America's most unusual in its spirit of altruism, cooperation and equality.

"Here, we take care of each other," Velasco, 58, said as she stepped
from a canoe and trudged into the mangrove, which resembled an
enormous muddy sandbar topped with mangle, as mangrove shrubs and
trees are called. She was accompanied by two of her granddaughters as
she ranged, calf-deep in mud, at low tide through the dense foliage.

She stopped to reach a foot down into the ooze to grab a mollusk the
size of a walnut that had attached itself to a hidden mangrove root.
As always during her 40 years in the swamps, she kept an eye out for
snakes, scorpions, centipedes and a nasty mud-dwelling fish called the
pejesapo whose bite causes the flesh to rot.

"Too small. Let's leave it, and let it make a family," Velasco said of
the clam, known as a piangua.

For Velasco, her fellow clam diggers are family. She may be tall and
forbidding in her manner, but it is she who takes charge when a
comrade gets sick or is short of cash or needs a loan of sugar, rice
or beans.

When Orofilda Prado fell in the mud and hit her head on a mangrove
root a few weeks ago, Velasco quickly raised money to hire a taxi to
take her to the hospital, then arranged shifts of women to feed and
take care of her five children.

Juan Camilo Cardenas, a behavioral economist from the capital, Bogota,
who studies Afro-Colombian communities, said Velasco's values are
typical of the piangueras, as the clam diggers are known.

Experiments he conducted among the women revealed an unusually high
degree of cooperation, Cardenas said, "where you include in your
behavior the interests of others."

"The values of hyper-fairness, altruism and aversion to inequality are
as strong as any community I know of in Latin America," said Cardenas.

Asked what shaped those values, Cardenas cited "abandonment by the
government, the absence of private agriculture and shocking poverty. .
. . You have people saying, 'OK, we're on our own and we need to share.' "

The poorest of Colombia's poor, Afro-Colombians began gravitating here
in the 1850s, when slavery was abolished. They naturally settled on
the inhospitable Pacific coast, where their lack of private property
didn't matter and where they could freely extract timber, fish,
shrimp, gold and clams.

A few years ago, piangueras could count on earning $10 a day, enough
for Velasco to keep her six children fed and in school. Returning by
canoe to their stilt shacks built over Tumaco Bay, she and her friends
would celebrate by singing folk songs called arrullos.

Now the singing is infrequent and Velasco's catch is meager, even with
the help of her 15-year-old granddaughter, Alicia, who can't go to
school because there is no money to pay the $3 weekly tuition charged
by public schools.

"If we don't come up with a strategic plan soon, we could see the
clams diminish until they disappear," said Carmen Julia Palacio,
president of the Clam-Diggers Assn. of Narino, a union she formed with
other piangueras in the 1990s.

Mangroves, which hug half of Colombia's Pacific coast, are under siege
around the world from creeping development and pollution. But over the
last decade, Tumaco's estuaries, among the largest in South America,
have been swamped by a combination of environmental, political and
economic crises.

A massive 1998 oil spill from a Petroecuador tanker that caused much
of the mangroves to wither was the first of a succession of disasters
associated with a trans-Andean oil pipeline that brings crude to an
offshore depot here from Colombia's Putumayo region.

Industrial pollution and the lack of sewage treatment in Tumaco have
turned many parts of the swampy areas into cesspools, despite the
tides' twice-daily flushing.

South of Tumaco, narco-traffickers have taken over a huge mangrove
zone called Papajal for clandestine bases to transport drug shipments
by "fast boat" to North America, officials say. The narcos have
declared the area off-limits to piangueras, depriving them of a
quarter of their hunting grounds.

Coca fumigation this decade in the jungle lowlands forced the cocaine
industry into Narino state, with narcos pushing huge numbers of
peasants off their land. As a result, Tumaco's population of 150,000
has risen by half since 2002, said Cielo Araujo, a municipal social
worker.

"People arrive here with nothing to do, with no economic alternative,"
union leader Palacio said. "So now they're out there with us."

Once the exclusive vocation of women, clam digging now attracts local
men who have lost their fishing jobs because of declining stocks of
shrimp and sea bass.

But the clam diggers of Tumaco aren't standing meekly by as their way
of life slips away like the tide.

Long invisible, the piangueras have made strides to improve their lot.
With the help of the World Wildlife Fund office in Cali, they
initiated a legal process with the Colombian government that in 2003
resulted in formal recognition as a union that got them health
benefits and political representation.

But Carmen Candelo, a WWF community development director, said the
piangueras need help in "adding value" to their catch if their
industry is to survive.

Carlos Borda, a marine biologist with ICA, the Colombian equivalent of
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the government was holding
meetings in Tumaco to discuss possible development programs, including
investments in a processing plant, and a study of the clams' life
cycle to optimize conservation.

Citing the Colombian Constitution, which "recognizes and guarantees
cultural and racial diversity," Borda says the government owes the
clam diggers of Narino their livelihoods despite their relatively
small numbers.

Palacio says it may be too late: "What we need is job training,
because this resource is disappearing."

The end of the piangueras would be a loss for Colombia, economist
Cardenas said.

"Their way of life has a lot to show the rest of Colombia with its
violence and broken social contract," Cardenas said. "They could be
the source of lessons Colombians have been ignoring for 200 years."

Back in the swamp, Velasco joked about how life's crooked path brought
her to the mangroves, how she grew up on a farm an hour's walk east of
Tumaco but left for the city to "look for a man." Her husband, a
fisherman, introduced her to clam digging as a compatible activity.

"Here is where he brought me, to dig among the pejesapo," Velasco
said, smiling as she remembered her husband, who has died.

"We're bent over all day, but I prefer it to housekeeping or working
on a farm. We work at our own pace. . . . We know more people. This
work is very social."