The wisdom that Panduro, the indigenous governor assassinated by the Army, took with him

José Peña* knew that he would meet his friend Pablo Panduro, killed three years ago in an army operation. The last time José saw Pablo, or at least saw his body, it was lying on a table at the Legal Medicine headquarters in Mocoa, and, due to the advance of decomposition, he had to struggle to recognize it.  “Today his spirit will come,” José had warned the 40 people gathered hours before the beginning of the ceremony. Panduro was the governor of the Bajo Remanso community, located on the banks of the majestic Putumayo River and inhabited mostly by Kichwa Indigenous people. 

José and those who were neighbors, fellow leaders and friends of Pablo Panduro gathered last March 27 in the community hall. It was the eve of the anniversary of the governor’s death, and they wanted to invoke the spirits and obtain information about his murder, for which 24 soldiers are being prosecuted. Inquiring about the future of the community, which is fighting for the recognition of its lands as an indigenous reservation, was also among the intentions of the meeting. “Just as others go to church and kneel, we go to yagé, our medicine and our spirit guide. With it, clarity will come to us tonight,” said José. 

At dusk, lightning began to illuminate the nearby trees and a drizzle fell on the zinc roof of the hall, located in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Among those present were the authorities of Bajo Remanso and some members of the indigenous guard. They hung a picture of Pablo and strung hammocks between the columns. Then, they turned off the lights and lit a bonfire that would illuminate them until dawn. 

Grandmother Gloria Condo brought the medicine: two plastic bottles filled with a dark liquid that she cooked after cutting the yagé plant, a vine that extends for ten meters around an old tree on her farm. They are the sole sacred plants left in the community and only her grandmother knows how to prepare them. That was the secret that her husband, a renowned taita, showed her before he died.

Like Gloria Condo, only Pablo Panduro knew how to cook yagé and speak the Kichwa language in Bajo Remanso. The governor, moreover, was the only one who could write it. So following the crime against Panduro, the grandmother is the treasure of this community, because the spiritual sustenance of an indigenous people, the elders explain, are their medicine and their language. Without these elements, and without someone to transmit them between generations, their culture runs the risk of extinction.

In Bajo Remanso they have no ancestral authority of their own, so they invited Major Pascual Rivadeneira, from Puerto Nariño, to lead the ceremony. He began studying sacred medicine 20 years ago, after his wife died. Since then, he has been preparing himself alongside other shamans, subjecting himself to different diets and staying away from women. The elder says that yagé is a burden: “Sometimes you don’t want to know anything about the remedy.” But it is also a great power: “It lets us see what has happened, what is going to happen, but if one knows how to read it well, if one knows how to understand.”

Around 9 p.m., Pascual Rivadeneira received the yagé from grandmother Gloria Condo and stood up in front of the community, which had dispersed throughout the hall, and in the darkness they were waiting for the time to come. Illuminated by the light of the bonfire, he told them: “This is for Pablo, to see what happened, and it is also a task so that they respect the life of the indigenous people”. He asked Gloria to accompany him, “because the spirits are going to come, from this and other communities, and some are good and others are bad spirits”. 

The elder lit a tobacco and grabbed a bunch of dried leaves which he shook over the yagé. Then he released the smoke from his throat over the remedy, asked for silence, and called the congregation together. One by one, he gave them all a drink from the same container. He drank last. Those assembled lay down in hammocks to await the effects of the plant. One of them said that in the last few days he had been feeling unwell, not wanting to work. When he was in the bush, he heard the voices of the other peasants, and he became angry, because he imagined that they were talking badly about him.  Every time he feels like that, he said, the yagé cures him, restores his peace of mind.

Hours passed in the darkness and thick silence of the jungle. Every now and then, a flash of lightning illuminated the surroundings. Lying in a hammock, José Peña* remembered Pablo Panduro, with whom he played soccer in the tournaments organized by the communities along the river, with whom he worked the land, fished, got drunk and was the leader of the community. Then, José saw the spirit of Pablo entering the hall. He was carrying a machete in his hand. He could easily recognize him, unlike the last time he saw his corpse laid out on a table. 

-“What are you doing, Pablo?” asked José. 

– “I’m getting my tools ready to go to work. I’m going to plant some rice and cocoa.” 

Pablo Panduro approached his friend.

-“I am very happy that you have come to visit me,” he said, and then disappeared. 

******

Pablo Panduro, 49 years old, was killed on March 28, 2022 during an army operation in which eleven people were killed, and which was carried out against the Border Command, a FARC dissident group that controls, at the point of a gun, most of Putumayo. The soldiers broke into the village of Alto Remanso in the morning, where several neighboring communities were celebrating: they had organized a weekend-long gathering to raise funds to build a community road. 

The soldiers unleashed indiscriminate fire on the small hamlet. According to the Attorney General’s Office, during the two-hour operation, they fired more than 1,600 bullets and activated at least 14 grenades, in the middle of a gathering where – although there were some members of the Border Command – there were, above all, dozens of civilians, including children. 

According to the military, all those killed in the operation were members of the armed group. This was stated by then-President Iván Duque and his Defense Minister, Diego Molano. Today it is known that they lied. VORÁGINE, in alliance with Cambio magazine and El Espectador newspaper, was in Alto Remanso three days after the events. The investigation of this team of reporters showed that, contrary to the official versions, the Army had manipulated the bodies of the victims before the CTI (Colombia’s Technical Investigations Unit) arrived to carry out the urgent gathering of evidence. They also established, through some 30 testimonies that were contrasted with expert documents, that Governor Panduro, Ana María Sarria and her husband Divier Hernández did not belong to the dissidents and never wielded weapons at the time of the advance of the authorities. All this is reported in the chronicle El operativo del Ejército manchado con sangre de civiles (The Army operation stained with civilian blood).

According to the judicial investigations that progressed over months, eight of the victims were civilians. A military report came out about Pablo Panduro in which he was accused of having a rifle at the time of the operation, and of being a dissident identified as alias “Pantalón” (Pants). Everyone in the village knew that this was not an alias, but a nickname he had been given because when he went out to work in the fields, he used to wear very wide pants that his fellow workers found amusing. 

In 2024, the Attorney General’s Office charged 24 members of the military, among them a colonel, as responsible for the murders. Regarding Pablo Panduro, that entity presented documents that accredited that he was an indigenous governor and that he had been exercising social leadership for years. It also presented forensic reports that ruled out the presence of gunpowder on his body or clothes, indicating that the governor did not fire any weapon. Another report shows a high concentration of alcohol in his blood, which would show that Panduro was so drunk after the gathering that he did not pose any danger to the soldiers. 

The Love of Pablo Panduro

The morning after the taking of the yagé, Fidelina Joven, Pablo Panduro’s wife, entered the community hall where the ceremony had taken place. She was wearing a black flowered dress and her hair was tied back. Holding her hand was Keylor, her three-year-old grandson, who never leaves her side and became her greatest companion after the governor’s death. Pascual Rivadeneira, the ancestral authority, received them. He waved the bouquet of dried leaves around their bodies while he said a prayer and blew tobacco smoke on their backs. In this way he protected them from malviento, a disease that abounds in the region, which is contracted when arriving at a contaminated place, house or river, and causes vomiting, diarrhea and headache. 

Fidelina recalled that Pablo also knew how to cure malviento, and that he attended to anyone who asked him, without ever charging anything. “By this time they had already killed them all,” suddenly said one of those present in the room. It was almost 8 o’clock in the morning, exactly three years after the massacre. Then, Fidelina Joven, 72 years old, began to recall her love story:

My family is from Florencia, Caquetá. There we had a farm with a mill to make panela, we had cattle, livestock and some very beautiful horses that you could ride bareback and you didn’t even feel that they were walking. But they were looking for my father for revenge, so we sold everything and came to Putumayo when I was 12 years old. 

I had a first husband, who is the father of all my nine children. But he was a real pain in the ass, he beat me a lot, he wanted to kill me. Until the day came when I couldn’t take it anymore. My children were already grown up, so I left there and came here. I worked as a cook on a farm where Pablo came to work. That’s where we met. He was 28 years old, I was 48, and we moved in together. 

Pablo, on the other hand, was not angry. Sometimes, when I got angry, I would scold him, and he would keep quiet, go away, and after a while he would come back and tell me: “old lady, is his anger gone?” We lived quietly, just the two of us, because I had no children with him. We spent our time working: we grew bananas, corn, we had a hectare of cocoa, we fished by the river. 

He read the Bible every night. He would put on his glasses and shine a flashlight on the letters; I would lie down next to him and fall asleep. Then he would say to me, “You snore so well when I read the Bible to you,” and he would laugh. He was a catechist, preparing the children for first communion and confirmation. He also taught them their mother tongue. 

Sometimes people would say, “he’s a fool, he doesn’t know anything.” They said it because he was quiet, but he was always aware of everything. I would arrive at a meeting with the community and I would hear: “Pantalón doesn’t talk, how are we going to make him governor, this and that”.  Then I would go out to defend him with my own words and even with shouts, and I would answer them: “he speaks what he should speak, he does not raise his voice, he does not take anything away”. 

Once I told Pablo: “I already had my children, I am not going to have any more. If you want yours, that’s fine, let’s split what we have and each one of us can go. Then you can look for another woman to have your children.” And he answered me: “I love you very much and I do not intend to leave you, nor do I want you to leave me”. He was a very good husband, one of those that you can’t find anywhere, and I, who came from that other husband who beat me, with him I found a blessing from God. 

When he was killed I was not there. I had gone to Puerto Leguízamo to file some paperwork for a surgery, because I was sick in the womb. When you get old, your mind comes to you and you know things, so I told him: “Old man, you go to the community gathering, because you are the governor, but don’t drink so much because there may be some danger, that Remanso is threatened”. He told me: “No, old woman, I am not going to drink”. But he started to drink on Sunday. He was like that. He would get drunk and fall asleep in a chair, and I would go and bring him to the house. But since I wasn’t there, who was going to bring him from there? Well, nobody. When I received the news that he had been killed, it was about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. 

They took my statement. A captain or a lieutenant, I don’t know, told me it was to find out if the dead were peasants or guerrillas. They had given my husband an alias, and they said he had carried out an attack in Bogotá. I did not understand why they were saying that. They asked me what he did for a living. “Well, he was a peasant,” I told them. And what weapons did he use? “Well, a machete, a shovel and an axe.”

A cross in a pool of blood

That same morning – the morning of the massacre anniversary – a priest arrived down the Putumayo River and disembarked next to the old 15-meter sapote tree that distinguishes Bajo Remanso. The community gathered in the same community hall where, the day before, they had taken yagé. There they celebrated a mass, more than for their own customs, because they knew that Pablo was a devout Catholic and would have wanted it that way. Fidelina Joven sat in the front row. While they prayed, in Alto Remanso, the neighboring community where the massacre took place, Rodolfo Pama was nailing a balsam wood cross of a meter and a half. He nailed it into the ground where he saw the spilled blood of his 16-year-old son Santiago, killed in the same operation that took Pablo Panduro. 

After his son’s murder, Rodolfo Pama dedicated himself to investigating the massacre. He collected testimonies from neighbors, compared them and filled in the gaps in the stories with the information he later obtained from the Prosecutor’s Office. Today, he knows by heart how the eleven were killed. On the anniversary of the massacre, the peasant walked through the hamlet, made up of some 30 houses, most of them made of board and zinc, while explaining how the soldiers moved, where each of the dead fell, where the bullets entered their bodies. 

As they passed by a ravine by the river, Rodolfo said, “the president’s wife was lying there. She bled to death, she convulsed, she was shot in the groin”. He was referring to Ana María Sarria, 24 years old. She had two children and was two months pregnant. Then Rodolfo stood in the middle of the concrete basketball court of the hamlet: “Here the governor fell,” he said, referring to Pablo Panduro: “He was very drunk, he raised his hands and said: ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ They shot him eleven times. Later, he appeared dressed in a clean camouflage uniform with a rifle lying next to him. The trail of his blood showed that he had crawled on the ground before he died. I don’t think anyone could move after being shot so many times,” said Rodolfo, insinuating that the governor could have been shot again after he was wounded.

Next to the court is the community hall where the gathering was held. Rodolfo entered the place and remembered that he passed by there the night before the massacre, and his son was asleep on a bench. He thought about taking him home, but left him. That was the last time he saw his son. The next morning, when he heard the soldiers’ gunshots, Rodolfo went out to look for Santiago throughout the village. One by one, he came across the other dead bodies, but he could not find his son. The neighbors told him that he had hidden with them in a house, and that he was desperate. They told him: “Santiago, stay still, hide here”, and he answered that he had to leave, that he had to look for his father. “My son was the last one they killed,” Rodolfo related.

Around four in the afternoon, almost nine hours after the operation began, he found his son’s body. Santiago was lying on the road leading to his house. Rodolfo had already looked for him there, where he’d seen a pool of blood, but couldn’t find him. That’s why he believes the soldiers threw the body into the river to cover up any traces of the crime, and then put it back there. “My son was lying there, all wet. You could see a gunshot wound to his abdomen and a cut on his arm. I picked up his body and started screaming.”

Three years later, traces of the massacre are scattered throughout the village. Rodolfo has etched in his mind the inventory of every place and every house where a bullet struck. There are impacts in a stove, a refrigerator, a water tank, the plank walls, the trees, the basketball court’s backboard, and the glass frame of a photograph of a man from the community. The shot entered the subject’s heart.

The narrow cement road that runs through the village is another reminder of the massacre. The communities had organized the gathering specifically to raise funds to build this road, which would connect Alto Remanso and Bajo Remanso. “That slab is covered in blood,” says Rodolfo. A year after the massacre, when families who had abandoned the communities began to return, construction resumed. Today, they are only a kilometer away from finally connecting the two villages.

Pablo Panduro’s Dream

In Bajo Remanso, the tribute to Pablo Panduro continued. About 40 people, waving small white paper flags, marched toward the governor’s house. They walked parallel to the Putumayo River, whose waters had dawned green and calm, passed under a flowering apple tree, and then along the path leading to Alto Remanso. Finally, they stopped in front of the two-story house and dispersed among the cacao trees planted by the governor. “I feel really bad about coming back here,” said Fidelina Joven—who left her home after her husband’s murder—while persistently rubbing her face, as if trying to erase her unconcealed sadness.

Yarley Ramírez, a friend of Pablo’s who took over as governor of the town council after the assassination, stood in front of the house with the governor’s staff of office: a stick made of smoked wood, covered with a ribbon bearing the national colors, with several wild boar tusks and a small cross tied to one end, along with a hand-carved smiley face. Yarley raised it and showed it to the community: “Here is our governor’s rifle; this was the weapon he carried,” she said.

Next to Pablo’s house, Yarley pointed to a piece of land and explained that the governor was going to donate it to the community so they could build a healing space there, a place they would use only for sacred ceremonies. Yagé vines would be planted around it. Panduro had been learning from the shamans for several years, and one of the community’s aspirations was for him to become their taita, their healer. After his death, there is no one left in Bajo Remanso who possesses such advanced knowledge and who could become an ancestral authority. Nor is there anyone left who could teach the children the Kichwa language.

“The governor’s death almost destroyed this community. The people dispersed, they wanted to leave, this could have become a ghost town,” Yarley said. Two weeks after the assassination, she had to assume the governorship. Her work focused on trying to prove that Panduro wasn’t a criminal and seeking recognition of the Bajo Remanso lands as an Indigenous reservation. “That was the governor’s dream,” Yarley said.

That same morning, at the commemoration of the three-year anniversary of the massacre, an official from the National Land Agency arrived in Bajo Remanso to bring them news. The community gathered once again in the hall. There, the agency’s representative spoke and told them that the process they had promoted for so many years was almost complete. He promised that in two months, Bajo Remanso would finally be recognized as an Indigenous reservation. Those gathered applauded upon hearing him speak.

That was Pablo Panduro’s last action for his community. After his murder, Bajo Remanso began receiving attention from government institutions that had previously ignored the small hamlet nestled in the jungle. This visibility reactivated procedures that had been stalled for more than 20 years. “It is painful and sad that, due to the death of our governor, our community will finally be established as a reservation. This will be in his honor,” Yarley said.

The commemoration of the massacre, like the gathering where the governor was killed, ended on the third day. Fidelina Joven sat on a wooden bench on the banks of the Putumayo River. She gazed at the calm waters, while little Keylor circled around her, as if his grandmother were the only thing he had in his life. The boy fits the woman’s description of her husband: calm and quiet, yet attentive to what was happening around him. Fidelina and her grandson waited for the boat that would take them to their new home, as she was no longer able to stay long in Bajo Remanso, where every tree and every piece of land reminded her of Pablo Panduro.

*Name changed for security reasons.

**This report was produced with support from Amazon Watch.