“After several hours of unheading and half lost in the savanna of Orocuco, in Colombia, I arrived at the village of some Indians in the center of Los Llanos, east of Orinoco, completely tired. The year 1968 came to an end.” You have written it. Never! Son of the first vicelehendakari of the Basque Government and PNV deputy, Francisco Javier Landaburu, born in the exile of Paris, lost in the Colombian jungle.

Yes! In the late 1950s, my father made a decision. It made him hard, but he always told us it was necessary: it made us adopt French nationality. I didn't want us to be Spaniards. Also my brother Gorka would have told you [see interview with Gorka Landaburu in 2180 of Argia]. Moreover, for us to be Basques, the parents sent us here in summer. His father did not want the relationship with the Basque Country to be broken. I didn't think of it. He, for his part, had decided not to attend for the duration of the Franco regime. It is evident from his political commitment, for being loyal to José Antonio Agirre and for maintaining the representation of Paris. At the end of the 1940s he managed to get us the nationality of France through his friends who were working on the construction of European social democracy. It was not easy! So we were French. He was stateless, according to the UN Statute. My father did not go to the Spanish embassy, nor did he go to the French embassy. He was a stateless man who went to meetings and assemblies in the various countries.

Your father, stateless. You, citizens of France.

Being French gave us facilities to move, opened the way for us to reach the Basque Country. The Franco police would take action against us, those of us who were citizens of France. Spain had too many things to do with France at the time!

The advantage, therefore.

But there were also some disadvantages to the other side of the coin: we had to go to military service, ha, ha. The time of the Algerian war, for example, was very complicated for our older brother, Xabier. He was in Algiers for two years. Xabier returned from the war at the time of our father's death. At the age of 55, our young father, like Agirre, died. It was three years. There is also something to tell… Well, the two of them died suddenly, the two young men. I was already in college. I studied Philosophy first and Linguistics later in the Sorbonne. So it's time to go to military service. Then came a way of doing military service, civil cooperation. Through it, young university students could develop their profession in different countries of the world. There were engineers, doctors, teachers... I was among them.

You spent in Colombia.

I was sent as a philosophy professor to the French Lyceum in Bogotá. Not in vain! I was soon in contact with their universities and, above all, with the University of the Andes, where they had an excellent anthropology department. His director, [Gerardo] Reichel-Dolmatof, of Austrian origin, called me after two or three months: “You’re doing it right, but the time has come to get down from abstraction.” I would be 23-24 years old. “Abstraction.” Young! “I want to make a proposal to you. Here's a lot of languages, a lot of strangers. We have the testimony of the words, at best, but nothing else. Why do you not get to work on it? I’m going to surround you with funding,” “but I’m not interested. I am Euskaldun, I have studied linguistics, because from the point of view of philosophy, that is, from the point of view of universality, I wanted to analyze the functioning of our language and, in general, of the other languages”, “go and look”. She gave me money, she promised me to buy, and she almost kicked me in the back to get me out and do the work, because I had no intention of doing it.

In June, at the ceremony of the Linguapax Prize in Barcelona, he highlighted three aspects that received the request to study Colombian languages and that helped you enter this world. First of all, he was a Basque, son of exiles. Secondly, he was also a French university. Thirdly, you intended to be a linguist.

Yes. Being the son of the Basque Abertzale led me to value my language. In addition, at that time the Basque language was a minority, persecuted and annulled language. At that time of universality I met those farmers and I was, in a way, faithful to the fate of my people. These Indians were, of course, much poorer than the peasants here, and their language did not have the persecution that the Basque country suffered, but in a social environment there was contempt and contempt for their language. It was an illusion.

A romantic illusion?

Yes, yes, a romantic illusion. I wanted to analyze the Basque language, the root of the language, the language despised at that time. Of course, he bore the illusion of the young French. The French have always been salva lovers, they say bon sauvage, as if the mystery of the world were in them. Pure romanticism! Jean Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand and others… What is out of our trend gives us a kind of clarity, we need it. In reality, there is nothing wrong, but sometimes that brings with it a kind of mystification, especially when you want to go too far. Otherness is the attraction that occurs when you want to understand and accept. Maybe that's what happened to me. I was partly surprised by the mystification, but not entirely.

The third agent on your way back then, the desire to be a linguist.

Andre Martinet's linguistics, who was a professor at the Sorbonne, were also structuralist. The language was shown as a closed system, it was completely structured, it was completely compact. As I said, I went from French lyceum to college, and when I started studying Colombian languages, I realized that European linguistics didn't work for me. European linguistics were built on ancient texts. They were Indo-European texts, written literary texts. As for me, I was interested in the societies that lived in orality. In this situation I had to resort to American linguistics in search of light. There, they were excellent linguists who had already travelled the way I wanted to go: [Ranz] Boas, [Edward] Sapir and others. Also then, Benjamin Whorf's romantic philosophy dominated. In other words, he said that language represents the culture and mentality of a people.

With this thought you went to work.

Yes, the linguistic situation of the indigenous people was not that of the Basques, the one thought by the romantic French of the non-Indian era, the language was not what the structuralist linguists of the 1970s believed... By then some already talked about the relationship between languages. Others were already saying that language is not a closed organism, not an essence, but a very changing historical process.

Language, the historical process?

Yes. Now it's said that language looks like an animal species, that every individual has their system. They referred to the idiolects. That language, in fact, doesn't exist, that each one has its strategies, that most people, or at least many, are bilingual, and with whom we work, that we change the language system, that we adapt it. This will certainly help us understand why languages change, why they come into contact, why words and structures lend each other ... When, at that time, we thought that Euskera was a pure essence, for example, almost falling from heaven, these issues were not understandable to us! These historical phonetic research carried out by Koldo Mitxelena and those made from Martinet! That has changed. Today we know that language is not a monolith, nor a mirror of the spirit of the people, although the Germans believed it that way. Little by little we realized that the “salbaia” was not the source of truth, that the situation of the Basque country was not that of the languages, which there were no possible comparisons.

All the guesses were against you…

Yes. Over time, I became nuanced, learned, especially by force of practice, living with indigenous people, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and seeing that they had a lot to teach us.

He has made the way, then, since 1968. You have studied the languages of the ethnic groups of Colombia as nobody else. I have read 68 languages, one million speakers, among the 46 million Colombians.

The situation is diverse and complex. Diversity, because there are multiple situations. You have thirteen language families. That is terrible! Among them, eight isolated languages, the same as the Basque language. There are no trees, there are branches. Slag, if you want, vine... Finally, we tend to say so, to use metaphors when we don't know how to explain a reality that we don't understand. The honest scientist knows he doesn't know. It approaches, it fails, it fails, the system it has built doesn’t work for it… That’s how the scientist works.

You say that the language…

Yes, the genetic variety of scum. They're all very different. This great diversity is due to the geographical situation of Colombia. Colombia is on the way out of the conflict between the two United States and, therefore, all the peoples passed through there. Many of them stayed there. This huge variety of origin is there. On the other hand, diversification is not small either, the country is also ecologically very varied and the territory is full of thermal deposits. We're under the equator, on one, and we go up to 6,000 meters on the other! Here you have everything: stepa, savanna, two oceans, three mountain ranges, tropical forests…

Plurality.

In Colombia, we have biotopes that are and are not, all or most of the ecological systems that exist on the planet. In each of these thermal deposits, we have societies that have developed over millions of years and that have developed and modified their own languages. You have a unique lab to see what the human being is. Colombia, Kenya, New Guinea… There are several countries in the very unusual world where the adaptive capacity of the human brain is particularly appreciated, where it creates and modifies symbolic systems, to the point of conceptually inventing entellar technology. Because, after all, understanding is a technology. Thus, the way of thinking time and space, the way of classifying beings, the way of forming processes… is totally varied and, consequently, there is a fascinating expansion of the human brain, materialized in languages.