“It’s a healing of the body and soul,” says Hortimio. He’s talking about yopo, a mixture of Amazonian plants traditionally used as snuff. Hortimio is a Piaroacommunity leader and land defender in his thirties. He lives far outside of cell service. We’ve been playing a game of telephone for weeks when he suddenly answers his phone on his motorbike en route to the hospital with his ten-month-old daughter. In the middle of it all, he begins to share how his people, the Huottüja in their native language,could lose their land and “everything that has to do with the practice of shamanism, healing and the management of ancestral medicine.”
Yopo snuff is made from the seeds of the Anandenanthera peregrina tree. It contains three powerful psychedelic compounds: bufotenin (5-HO-DMT), 5-MeO-DMT, and N, N-DMT. In Piaroa communities, the snuff is forcibly blown or sucked up your nostrils with a bamboo or birdbone pipe. No one knows exactly how long the tradition has been alive in Piaroa communities, who have long called banks and tributaries of the Orinoco River, which flows through modern-day Venezuela and Colombia, their home. Lately, their traditional territory has taken on a different name: the “Orinoco Mining Arc.”
President Nicolás Maduro designated the region—a Portugal-sized section of the Amazon rainforest—a “strategic development zone” in 2016, hoping to increase Venezuela’s mineral exports amid growing economic crisis. Venezuela is South America’s largest petroleum producer, but the country has faced a decline in both oil production and cost, as well as sanctions imposed by the United States after Maduro’s re-election in 2018.
Hortimio and others warn that the psychoactive snuff and their cultural traditions exist in a precarious state. The same fertile soil that breathes life into A. peregrina and the dense canopy of the Amazon is also rich in gold, diamonds, and other minerals like coltan, which is used in electronic devices. “All of this is being lost because of globalization; the new generation is no longer interested because this globalization, this culture, has imposed itself more than ever; it is contaminating our culture,” he says.
What is Yopo, the Plant?
A. peregrina and its nearly identical cousin Anandenanthera colubrina have a wide distribution throughout the Orinoco basin and beyond, likely from humans transporting seeds. Within the Orinoco region, the trees flourish in the tropical savannah “cerrado” environment that stretches into Brazil, where the tree is commonly known as angico and paricá. The trees also grow well in the Caribbean. According to ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, the plant was likely spread around other parts of South America by invaders from the Orinoco. Reaching over 20 meters (60 feet) the trees have a rough horn-like bark and produce clusters of white flowers before dropping large amounts of seed pods resembling beans.
Ethnobotanist Johnathan Ott writes in Pharmacotheon that the primary alkaloid in A. peregrina is bufotenin, with smaller amounts of 5-MeO-DMT and N, N-DMT. Bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT are potent psychedelic compounds also found in the secretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad. All compounds are naturally occurring tryptamines, like psilocybin found in magic mushrooms. Yet, unlike psilocybin mushrooms, the yopo experience can involve intense visuals, as well as a “purge,” which often causes vomiting.
READ: Mining and Poaching Threatens 15,000-Year-Old Peyote Tradition in Mexico
Yopo, like ayahuasca, is utilized for not only healing but also shamanic warfare. Rodd participated in a battle to save the village from sorcery with the shaman he was apprenticed to, Don Jose Luis. Detailed in Piaroa Sorcery and the Navigation Effect, Rodd describes using yopo for visions contributing to the defense of a village under attack by a malicious shaman. While chewing ayahuasca vine to enhance perception and potentiate the effects of yopo, Rodd does battle with his huräruä, a shamanic pig tusk weapon, to defend against Märi, malicious spirits working on behalf of an enemy sorcerer. “There are other agents, of course, lifeforms, some of whom happen to be these other shamans, and others happen to be our spirits that you want to avoid.”
Amazonia is a complex world. Relationships of cause and effect exist between plants, animals, rivers, and mountains, each with its own story and character. Rodd writes, “Training to use yopo is a process of learning to see relationships among people, the environment, and feelings.” Piaroa shamans learn to navigate all this with “Maripa” which is an “orienting knowledge of the forces that underlie death, life, change, causation, and existence in the Piaroa world.”
“It was always about someone or someplace or some animal. But generally about some or some relationship, a person that lived there that we were trying to understand.” Rodd says the approach to yopo was far less about individual experience and more relational. When Don Jose Luis heals a village from sorcery, he interviews nearly the entire town for a general mood and social dynamics while using yopo to divine necessary details. “Part of the work that they’re doing all the time is keeping tabs on everyone and understanding how people are.”
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Preserving the Future of Yopo & The Guardians
“For us, being here in the jungle, we always know our position is for the defense of the territory, for the defense of culture. Because with this globalization we see that the ancestral knowledge is already being lost,” says Hortimio.
A report prepared for the 40th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council suggests that, despite constitutional laws guaranteeing protections for Indigenous peoples in Venezuela, increased mining operations are destroying large sections of the Amazon rainforest, the traditional lands of many Indigenous communities. The UN report cites evidence that the area has also attracted criminal organizations who operate mines illegally.
Martinez discusses another factor. “Younger generations are leaving their territories to move to the cities,” he says, “Fortunately, there are still a few young apprentices that are learning from the hands of The Guardians of their traditions in order to keep and protect the spirit of the Grandfather of the Jungle.”
