<i>Colombian tribe fighting a losing battle to survive </i>
The Nukak-Maku tribe, nomads discovered only 23 years ago who number no more than 600, is struggling to adapt after Colombian guerrillas chased them from their homes deep inside the country's lush tropical forests.
"Llego la plata" ("the money is coming"), someone murmured from inside a palm leaf hut crowded with 10 adults and two dozen children thrown into an unfamiliar world.
Handed bread and panela, a block of unrefined whole cane sugar which is rich in calories, tribesmen seized the food before one woman suddenly asked for "Coca-Cola".
Albeiro Riano, a doctor trying to improve the living conditions of the Nukak people, told AFP that expressions like "Llego la plata" and "Coca-Cola" showed how the tribe was losing its cultural values.
Wembe, chief of this small clan of 30 living in Agua Bonita, near the south-central town of San Jose del Guaviare, complained that food was growing scarce.
"Hunting, fishing, it's all really lacking," he said in broken Spanish.
His clan no longer has any blowpipes to hunt monkeys, especially prized by the Nukak for their meat.
And diseases have plagued the group. "Malaria, the flu, diarrhea, amoeba," said Wembe.
The Nukak, driven from their homes by Marxist FARC guerrillas, have been forced to leave the depths of the jungle.
Only 600 members of this endangered tribe remain and "99 percent no longer live on their original lands, the worst thing that could ever happen to them," said Riano.
Their neighbors reject them and barely consider them human, he added, noting that some women have fallen into prostitution while the men have "become modern slaves in the region's huge coca fields."
The discovery of the Nukak, in 1988, was hailed by anthropologists, who paid tribute to the significant knowledge of the hunter-gatherers in zoology and botany. Now there is anger about their predicament.
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