Álvaro Laiz

The Orinoco Delta was first colonized by the humans back in Medium Neolithic. 8.000 years ago the Warao, one of the last native south american people, have taken shelter inside its mangrove swamp labyrinth. Deep in the swamps it is still possible to make out a world ruled by spirists where small isolated native communities struggle so survive. The existance of ancient animistic rites and the acceptance of transgender people among the warao society could be the last remains of those old pre-Columbian traditions, never photographied before. But this universe is quickly vanishing: a few independent investigations indicate that a range in between 40% and 80% of the Warao tribe are infected with HIV. On the other side, the high levels of infantile mortality are extreme. One out of two newly born does not reach the age of three. The unrestrained progress, the lack of a united educational and reproductive sexual responsability plus the peculiarities of their cosmology, where illness representates the evil spirits, contributes to the creation of a potencially fatal scenario to the Warao tribe and the dissappearance of those old traditions.