Saving the Amazon’s orphan monkeys

The refuge run by a local leader, Jhon Jairo Vasquez, offers new life to these orphaned animals.

Amazonas: Far from the rifle cracks that occasionally rip through the rainforest as local tribesmen hunt mature primates for their meat and soft pelts, a sanctuary in a corner of the Colombian Amazon is offering new life to the orphaned monkeys left behind. The refuge run by a local leader, Jhon Jairo Vasquez, is giving them a second chance — while gradually changing attitudes in the area — in the indigenous settlement of Mocagua on the banks of the Amazon.

Vasquez has proved to be a father figure for one of the orphans, a three-month-old female woolly monkey, or Lagothrix, he’s named Maruja. The pair have become inseparable on his hikes through the rainforest, carrying the little primate in a sack on his back. “I have become the father, and she’s become the daughter,” said Vasquez, 38. “An indigenous family ate the mother.”

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Long prized by indigenous hunters for their meat and furry pelts, the woolly monkey is now classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as Vulnerable, appearing on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. Given their thick brown coat and grey appendages, young woolly monkeys like Maruja are often hunted for the pet trade, with their mothers sometimes killed in the process.

Fourteen years ago, Vazquez helped found the Maikuchiga animal refuge located in the middle of the 700-strong Tikuna indigenous community in Mocagua. Since 2006, he has been trying to convince locals of the damage caused by “over-hunting,” as well as a flourishing illegal wildlife market. “It’s hard,” he says. Reluctant at first, the Tikunas have developed a taste for eco-tourism. “Rehabilitated” hunters have become guides who now “protect their wildlife,” says Vasquez.

But traumatized orphans continue to arrive in Maikuchiga from other parts of the Amazon. Since its creation, the refuge has rehabilitated about 800 monkeys, according to Vasquez.