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.
