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January 21, 2021
Enrique Chimonja Coy was born to a campesino family in the south of Colombia in the 1970s. They lived in the
macizo Colombiano, an important water source where the Amazon meets the Andes. As a boy, he woke up before dawn every day, fed the horses, ate breakfast, and then went with his father to help him log timber, which was his family’s primary source of income. They didn’t use chainsaws or “technologies of today” as Enrique put it, but traditional hand tools that allowed them to exploit their environment without destroying it.
“This was how it was those first years of my life, a campesino life, a life in harmony with the territory, before it was interrupted by the conflict,” says Chimonja.