International Mission will visit La Guajira and Sierra Nevada to assess social situation in these areas

From April 1 to 7, parliamentarians from the United Kingdom and Ireland will participate in the Mission for Life, to verify the territorial rights situation in La Guajira and the Sierra Nevada. The main objective of the Mission will be to know first-hand the human rights status and the fulfillment of national and international commitments for the protection of the ethnic territories of southern La Guajira and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

In addition to the presence of officials from these European countries, the international observation will include the participation of delegates from international embassies, the UN and British NGOs such as ABColombia and Christian Aid from Ireland, who will be accompanied by Colombian organizations gathered in the La Guajira le País Platform and Friends of the Sierra.

A statement from the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers' Collective, who will accompany this mission, highlights that: “The persistence of the armed conflict and expansion of extractive activities and megaprojects in three departments: La Guajira, Cesar and Magdalena, continue to condemn the physical and cultural extermination of the Indigenous Peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Gonawindua: Arhuaco, Kankuamo, Wiwa and Kogui; as well as the Wayuu People and various Afro-descendant communities of La Guajira.”

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A 2022 report by the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), notes that “Colombia's indigenous peoples suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty that prevent them from exercising their social and economic rights. In 2021, at least 32 boys and girls under the age of five — mostly from Wayuus indigenous communities — died in the department of La Guajira.”

The activities of the delegation will begin on Saturday, March 2. On that day, they will hear from the Afroguajira and Wayuu communities, “who have historically been affected by coal mining in southern La Guajira, as well as organizations that are resisting the expansion of the extractive frontier,” the visit document states.

Meanwhile, between April 4 and 5, they will meet in the community of Makúmake, Rio Seco (Cesar), with traditional authorities and the Self-Government of the Kankuamo People, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kogui. In this space, it seeks to create an intercultural and intersectoral dialogue with government entities of the regional and national order, with the aim of finding routes of action to guarantee the life and good life of indigenous peoples.

The same HRW report highlights the absence of the state in this department, in order to meet the basic needs demanded by the community, “the inadequate response of the authorities to prolonged droughts in the department of La Guajira, has impaired the access of the Wayuu indigenous communities to food and water and has increased the rates of deaths due to child malnutrition”.

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A report by the Commission for the Observation of the Humanitarian Crisis of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta indicates that there were 44 forced disappearances, 166 extrajudicial executions, 92 cases of torture and 52 cases of abduction in this area of the country between 1998 and 2002.

There are also data on two massacres in 2002, in which 12 indigenous Wiwas were killed, resulting in the forced displacement of 1,300 indigenous people from that community and that of 300 people from the communities of Sabana Grande, Potrerito, El Machín and Marocaso.

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