Nancy Forero Eusse’s first memory of the little girl was seeing her perched
on top of a mango tree near the canal that ran past their homes in the Colombian
border city of Cúcuta. “It was such a curious thing,” recalls Miss Forero Eusse,
who was about five at the time. “She would hang out in that tree. Not just in
the branches, but high up, right at the top.”
The new arrival was as nervous as she was agile, slow to speak, and with a
sadness in her eyes. She was a street child, she said, who had been taken in by
a local family, only to be forced to work all day and sleep under the stove on
the kitchen floor. Only after she was rescued from her abusers and adopted by the Eusse family
did the girl – who thought she was about 10 years old, and asked to be called
Luz Marina – begin recounting remarkable snippets about her life.
“She started to talk about what had happened before,” says Miss Forero Eusse,
57. “It was incredible.”
An extraordinary story slowly emerged: Marina had been abducted as a small
child, then abandoned in the jungle where she lived alongside colonies of
monkeys, foraging for food and sheltering in trees. Even after she was found by hunters and brought into Cúcuta, her ordeal
continued. She initially lived rough in a park with other homeless children. She
was then taken in by an abusive family who treated her like a slave.
But her odyssey did not end with her adoption by Nancy’s family. For the
little girl up the mango tree is now Marina Chapman, a Yorkshire housewife,
married to a church organist, mother and grandmother, volunteer and enthusiastic
cook of South American cuisine.
It is an inspiring life-story but one that Mrs Chapman has long been
reluctant to share beyond her closest family. She is now, however, going public
with a memoir, to be published next year to raise funds for a street-children’s
charity, and which has already been sold to seven countries after a scramble by
publishers to obtain the rights.
The Sunday Telegraph tracked down her relatives there,
visited her childhood homes in Cúcuta and Bogotá, and travelled to the Catatumbo
jungle, a rebel stronghold where her family believe she probably spent her time
in the wild.
The dramatic narrative reads like a real-life version of the fictional
adventures of Tarzan, the baby brought up by apes in the Edgar Rice Burroughs
classic, and Mowgli, the feral child raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s
Jungle Book stories.
Piecing together what they know, Mrs Chapman and the Eusse family believe she
was born in about 1950, which would make her 62. Colombia had yet to plunge into
its bloody civil war, but abductions for ransom were common and children were
snatched by kidnap gangs. That appears to be what happened to Marina, but the abduction was botched,
says Carlos Velásquez, her adoptive cousin who remains close to her.
In an interview at his textile company near Bogotá, he recalls what she told
him. “Her memory is that she was kidnapped when she was three or four and put in
the boot of a car. The gang who took her drove and drove, but for whatever
reason, they left her by the road and she walked into the jungle.
“She was living near monkeys and she learned from them. In order to survive,
she would imitate them and eat what they ate. She learned to find berries,
bananas, other fruits, even roots.
“She ended up near an Indian village, but they didn’t treat her well and
threw stones at her if she came close during the day. So she waited until dark,
then scavenged rice and leftovers from the village and took it back to the
jungle to eat. She lived in a hollow in a tree trunk. She was all black and
dirty and had long filthy hair and long nails.”
Marina has no real idea how long she spent in the jungle, but it was
apparently at least a year or two. Then one day, she saw a group hunting for
wild birds and parrots.
“She ran towards them. One of them was a woman and she clung to her leg,”
says Mr Velásquez. “The woman looked down at her and seemed to be thinking, what
is this thing with a dirty black face. Marina probably looked like a monkey.
“Then she realized it was a girl and said, 'Put her in the back of the truck’
with the crates of birds. They were driving back to Cúcuta but when she got near
the city, Marina was scared by all the lights and jumped out of the truck and
ran away.”
The account of her life with the monkeys is so incredible that it
understandably prompts questions about its accuracy. But she had relayed similar
details to Nancy soon after her adoption by the family.
“She told us that she had been kidnapped when she was very young, then
abandoned. She’d lived in the jungle, lived with monkeys, and said there were
bad men who had not treated her well. She always said she was scared of men in
high boots. We don’t know if they were hunters or soldiers or the men who took
her. She was very frightened about those days and didn’t want to discuss it much
then. We were just kids at the time.”
Both Mr Velásquez and Miss Forero Eusse, who had not coordinated their
stories before this newspaper approached them, separately noted that the young
Marina showed both great agility, demonstrated in particular by her penchant for
tree-climbing, and strength, despite her small physique, after her years in the
jungle and on the street.
“I think she just tried to suppress the memories of those experiences for a
long time,” says Mr Velásquez. “But Luz Marina was never the sort to invent
things; she’s very straightforward and honest. If she had not been such a strong
child, it would be more surprising. But when I looked back, she even seemed to
move like a monkey at times.”
To investigate her story further, The Sunday Telegraph visited Catatumbo, a
sweeping blanket of lush foliage ringed by mountains straddling Colombia’s
border with Venezuela. Based on her recollections and its proximity to Cúcuta,
it is here that her family think she lived after her abduction.
What was immediately evident was how challenging it would be for anyone to
survive beneath its soaring canopy, never mind a girl of just three or four. It
is an area of breathtaking beauty but also contains deep dangers, both from
nature and man.
Much of the jungle is still what Colombians call a “red zone”, controlled by
the Marxist guerrillas who have waged Latin America’s longest-running
insurgency. The country’s notorious cocaine cartels also use the cover of the
rainforest to conduct their narco-trafficking operations.
And there are plenty of threats from the animal kingdom, too, as Antonio
Ramirez Rodriguez, chief biologist and Catatumbo veteran, explains from his
state environmental agency outpost. “The predators include eagles, snakes,
tigers and wildcats. In this place, either you eat or you’re eaten.”
So could a small girl have survived in the jungle, learning how to scavenge
for food from Catatumbo’s colonies of small carablanca monkeys? Known for their intelligence as well as their distinctive white faces, the
carablancas grow to a maximum size of 22 inches. “If the monkeys didn’t see her
as threatening or competing, if she didn’t behave in an aggressive manner, then
yes, it is possible,” says Mr Ramirez.
“They are omnivores who eat anything, from fruits and vegetables to insects,
lizards and rats. They organise hunting parties, have social structures, they
protect, help each other and follow a group leader. It’s possible that a child
could have adapted to those structures.”
But while there are recorded cases of abandoned children who have been
brought up by larger primates in Africa, it would be a first in South America
where the monkeys are notably smaller.
Nonetheless, the young girl did manage to survive, only for another dangerous
phase to then begin in her life as a child on the streets. In her memoir, she
will tell how she ran a children’s crime gang during those days. It was from here that the first unnamed family took her in, probably when she
was about eight, treating her as a domestic slave. She would at times seek
temporary refuge by scampering out of reach up the tree where her saviours from
the Eusse family first saw her.
The Sunday Telegraph last week visited the Eusse family home in Cúcuta in a
working-class neighbourhood of small, pastel-coloured dwellings with red-tile
roofs. A single-storey yellow house, which has been owned by the family since
the 1950s, is home to Alberto Eusse, Marina’s uncle and a local musician who
still gives guitar lessons and plays on Sunday nights at a popular outdoor
restaurant despite his age.
It was here that Maruja Eusse, the family matriarch and grandmother of Nancy
Forera Eusse and Carlos Velásquez Eusse, took pity on Marina when she came
pleading for help. Mrs Eusse helped the girl escape and sent her to Bogotá to live with her
daughter, Maria, and son-in-law Amadeo Forero, who soon adopted Marina as one of
their own, alongside their five natural children. Life was already tough for the family, as Nancy Forero Eusse recounts outside
their old home in the poor Bogotá barrio of Bosa. The floors were dirt and there
were no roads, only tracks in those days. Her father, Amadeo, was a taxi driver
and then a manager at his cousin’s textile business. “We were poor, struggling
for money.”
Her mother Maria, a frail 86-year-old who spends most of her days surrounded
by relatives in a wicker rocking chair, and her father Amadeo, 83, and in
failing health, treasure the memories of the little girl they took in as one of
their own. “Luz Marina was a lovely, well-behaved girl who always helped me with
the chores,” says Mrs Forero Eusse. “She was happy and honest and always wanted
to be of use. She was a pleasure to have in the house,” says her adoptive
mother.
Her sister Elena had meanwhile married Pedro Velásquez, a textile trader. And
when Marina was in her mid-teens, they offered her a job as a housekeeper and
nanny for Carlos and their other children.
“Marina worked for us for about 10 years in Bogotá,” says Mr Velásquez. “Then
my Dad’s textile business went bankrupt and he decided the family should move to
Yorkshire. He always loved England and he had already sent two of my sisters to
study at university in Bradford, and then sent me to study English there, too.
Marina was part of the family and he asked her to come to look after the
children and she accepted.”
The textile industry was still flourishing in Bradford at the time. Mr
Velásquez looked for work while his children studied, and Marina – with no
formal education and little grasp of the English language – stayed at home to
help cook and clean. Despite Colombia’s strong Catholic roots, the deeply religious family
worshipped at the newly-formed evangelical Abundant Life church in Bradford, a
short distance from their four-bedroom home in Shipley. They had hoped to start a new life and settle in England, but within months,
the family were beset by more financial troubles as Mr Velásquez failed to find
work in the textile business. He returned to Colombia with his wife Elena and
some of their children, but others stayed in England to finish their studies.
Two daughters soon married British husbands.
Luz Marina also had other plans. She had fallen in love with the church
organist, John Chapman, a quiet, 28-year-old bacteriologist, even though neither
of them spoke the other’s language. Their wedding in 1979 was an intimate ceremony at the church, though some
members of her adoptive family attended. The Chapmans began married life in the
sleepy town of Wilsden, where they had their first daughter Joanna in 1980 and
their second, Vanessa, three years later. Marina began slowly learning the language and the culture, but made sure not
to forget her own, teaching Spanish to the girls and recounting stories from her
childhood. According to her publishers at Mainstream, that included showing them
how she could scale trees and catch wild birds and rabbits with her bare hands.
She later worked as a cook at the National Media Museum before making the
decision to work with children, in part to make up for missing out on much of
her own childhood. She took a childcare course through the Rathbone charity in Bradford while
working part-time at a nursery where her daughter Joanna was manager. She also
became heavily involved in fund-raising for her church, and supported the
charity, Substitute Families for Abandoned Children. Rachel Knox, a Rathbone childcare training adviser, remembers Mrs Chapman as
a sensitive figure who had a natural affinity with children.
“When I met her I thought she was incredible. I was amazed at what she’d been
through, her life story is like a TV drama,” says Miss Knox.
“I couldn’t believe it when she said she’d never been to school. Marina is
such an inspiration. She shows what can be achieved with determination and hard
work when it seems the odds are stacked against you.”
Former neighbours meanwhile recounted how she had fitted in to the community,
despite her struggles with the language. “It’s hard to reconcile what she must
have gone through as a child with the confident woman everyone knew,” said Janet
Robson. “She was always the beautiful, exotic-looking woman who brightened up
the street. She was a doting mother to her two baby girls and would always be
cooking for everyone, which made her very popular.”
In Allerton, where the Chapmans now live, her neighbours have no idea of her
past, other than that she grew up in rural Colombia. It was her daughter Vanessa James, 28, a composer, who persuaded her mother
to turn her story in a book. The Girl With No Name will be published in April.
But in Bradford, she is better known for once cooking a quiche at a local
fair for the Duke of Kent, who apparently declared it the best he had ever had.
Indeed, she recently started her own business called Marina Latina Food.
“Marina has been cooking since she was tall enough to reach a cooker!” she
writes on its Facebook page. “You’ll never forget your first 'Marina’
experience. Mama Mia!”
For a woman who once had to forage in the jungle with monkeys simply to
survive day-by-day, it is perhaps no surprise that food is such a passion.
Philip Sherwell, Cucta Colombia
