The Quaint Men of Guajira

On the Guajira Peninsula, at the northernmost tip of South America, live 18,000 nomadic Indians who roam a sandy waste (part Colombian territory, part Venezuelan) mounted on horses or old Ford trucks. Anthropologists' accounts of the Guajiro Indians read like tongue-in-cheek parodies of all sober treatises on Quaint Customs of the Aborigines. Item: a thief hurt while trespassing on the property of an intended victim can demand, and get, compensation from the property owner. Item: suicide is a means of vengeance; the person who kills himself believes that he will suffer less than those who goaded him into the act.

Crime & Settlement. Next to murder, the worst crime a Guajiro Indian can commit is to call another Indian by his true name in Guajiro language; to get around this difficulty, all Indians have names in Spanish as well as in their own tongue. But any crime, even murder, can be squared by payment of goats, the accepted currency of the Guajiros.

When an Indian from one of the 30 Guajiro tribes (each named for an animal) kills an Indian from another, the blood money, in goats or cattle, may run to high figures. The offended tribe can demand payment for 1) the original bloodshed, 2) the victim's agony before death, 3) the victim's actual death and 4) the re-establishment of friendly relations. When the fine gets so high that the compensation machinery breaks down, tribal war follows. That was what happened two years ago when Jose Velasquez, one of the Epieyus (Blackbird) chiefs, got liquored up and gunned down Jose Aguilar, a chief of the Epinayu (Weasel) tribe.

Price of Peace. Good form among battling Guajiros requires that a warrior ride up to the enemy, dismount and shoot his own horse first, to show self-confidence. In spite of such horsing around, the Blackbirds and the Weasels managed, in two years, to kill 41 of both tribes and rustle countless livestock. A fortnight ago, fed up with fighting, they decided to try again to work out a peace.

Men from each tribe, dressed in necklaces, dirty shirts and bright loincloths knotted in front, met on the broiling plain. The aggrieved Weasels demanded 4,000 goats for Aguilar's death, plus war reparations. The Blackbirds balked at so costly a fine. Both factions then agreed to stage a man-to-man combat between Murderer Velasquez and a Weasel named Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse came out of the fight wounded and sulking, and threatened to commit suicide to distress the Blackbirds. At this impasse, last week the Guajiros appealed to the Venezuelan government to negotiate a peace. Pending arbitration, an uneasy truce settled over the Guajira plains.

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