Displaced and dispossessed: Indigenous communities demand visibility amid conflict in Norte de Santander

When people speak of conflict in Catatumbo, they say it is a ‘conflict that we live’. These living terms are not arbitrary. Catatumbo is a rural region in north-eastern Colombia near the Venezuelan border, where displacement is deeply ingrained into the social fabric. For Indigenous communities – the Barí, Wayuu, Yukpa and Kichwa – the decades have silenced histories of colonial pillage. Today, they find themselves not quite belonging to one nation or the other, tossed between both by enduring inequities and imperilled by ceaseless conflict.

Since taking office in August, President Abelardo de la Espriella has launched airstrikes against guerrillas and militants in the country’s peripheries, acting on a campaign promise of a hardline crackdown. On 10 October, the Colombian military bombed Catatumbo, targeting fighters of Frente 33, a dissident faction of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), near the border town of Tibú. Four people were killed, including a 16-year-old girl.

The airstrikes mark a sharp break with the previous government’s political commitment to negotiating with armed groups, and open a new chapter of violence for Catatumbo. Former President Gustavo Petro had already begun to back-pedal on that commitment: in February 2026, he ordered airstrikes on ELN positions in Catatumbo, the 14th bombing of his presidency.

In January 2025, hostilities between rival guerrilla groups in Norte de Santander escalated into Colombia’s largest mass displacement in recent history. Rebels from the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) and rival group Frente 33 clashed around Tibú, a town near Venezuela known for its oil and palm oil industries and coca farms. More than 100,000 people have since been displaced, with explosive-laden drones killing civilians and making fighting increasingly unpredictable.

Clashes resurged ahead of the 2026 presidential elections, moving south towards Ocaña and surrounding villages. This time, the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), a right-wing criminal group, was moving in from neighbouring Cesar.

‘Even though the government is aware of the situation with the conflict in Catatumbo, it does not take necessary action,’ Ashcayra Arabadora, a Barí leader with the Autonomous Council of Barí Chiefs who is originally from Brubucanina, near Teorama, told FairPlanet in a video call. ‘Confrontations are constant,’ he said through a spotty signal from the Catalaura resguardo, a type of territory over which the Colombian government has granted Indigenous communities autonomous governance.

The toll of conflict Arabadora spoke of is not only from armed clashes.

Indígenas sin fronteras

Known colloquially as indígenas sin fronteras, or Indigenous people without borders, the Barí have ancestral territories that branch out across the mountains between Colombia and Venezuela. The Indigenous struggle for land rights in Norte de Santander has historically been driven by territorial conflict between armed groups and the expansion of extractive companies such as Colombia’s state-controlled oil and gas giant Ecopetrol, in what Arabadora called ‘genocide by petroleum companies’. Oil exploration has displaced the Barí from Venezuela’s Maracaibo region since the early 20th century.

The Barí won recognition of their right to two resguardos in Norte de Santander: Catalaura in La Gabarra and Motilón-Barí in the department’s north. Today, pressures also come from industrial ranching, palm oil cultivation and the coca farming that sustains armed groups such as the ELN and Frente 33.

A guardia indígena, or Indigenous guard – typically unarmed – has prevented the worst violence in Catalaura’s more remote areas, Arabadora explained. But in keeping armed actors out, communities can end up confined within those same borders.

‘There is little mobility,’ he said. Drones are used by armed groups across Catatumbo, with Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office warning of violations of international humanitarian law. People move in groups instead of travelling alone. Food and necessities can pass through Catatumbo, but guerrillas only allow authorised vehicles through checkpoints, at set times, and they check phones.

This is the backdrop to ordinary life in Catatumbo. Despite development schemes under Colombia’s peace process since 2016, the region still lacks public services, and Indigenous communities still lack land titles. ‘It’s always the excuse of conflict or lack of resources,’ Arabadora said, adding that the violation of Indigenous rights is ‘systemic on the part of the national government’.

Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior and the Mesa Permanente de Concertación, the national body for dialogue between the state and Indigenous peoples, did not respond to FairPlanet’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

Belonging for some, not for others

On her journey from Venezuela into northern Catatumbo, María, whose name has been changed for privacy, would sometimes walk for two days at a time before reaching a settlement. A Barí woman in her twenties, she left Venezuela just over five years ago to build a new life in Colombia. She was pregnant as she passed through a trocha, or informal border crossing; such crossings are notorious for kidnappings and enforced disappearances. Travelling with a group helped her feel safe.

María had struggled to find belonging in Venezuela.

‘I honestly thought it would be better in Colombia,’ she told FairPlanet in a call from the Motilón-Barí resguardo. In Venezuelan cities, she explained, Barí people experience discrimination for having darker skin. Small cultural differences also add up. ‘We are more reserved and introverted,’ she said.

Wanting to stay connected to her culture, she came to Motilón-Barí. But as much as she brims with an independent and contagious candour, María still grapples with a sense of belonging. Even in a Barí community, discrimination did not end. Those who come from Venezuela are seen as Venezuelans first and Barí second. They are not fully accepted into ancestral communities, she said, because ‘we aren’t from here’.

María is also still waiting for documents to regularise her status.

In Colombia, the Temporary Protection Permit (Permiso por Protección Temporal, PPT) grants Venezuelan migrants regularised status for ten years, including access to healthcare and social services, if they arrived before the end of January 2021. But to get a PPT, people face many barriers, including needing Venezuelan documents and sufficient funds. And since 2023, only minors in school and their guardians have been eligible, with other adults restricted to the regular asylum system.

For undocumented migrants in Catatumbo, conflict only creates more trouble.

Decades of state neglect have entrenched healthcare inequities. It is a well-worn pattern, recalling how colonial Spanish and revolutionary armies in Venezuela exposed Barí communities to epidemics that decimated them.

Encompassing part of a national park, the Motilón-Barí resguardo is one of Norte de Santander’s most remote communities. Healthcare in the north is rudimentary, lacking medicines (or refrigeration) even for ordinary illnesses such as fever or flu. Complex treatment for cancer or brain injuries, and specialised tests, require travelling to Tibú, Ocaña or even Cúcuta.

Simply filling a prescription can expose people to conflict – if they even have the documents to get care.

Common struggle

Some villages in Catatumbo have no names and are known instead by numbers, such as El Kilómetro 25 and others along the road from Tibú to La Gabarra. Because they sit on the margins of larger settlements, they can be among the hardest hit by conflict and invisible to the outside world. Medical teams struggle to reach some of these communities, Carmen Elena García, director of the local peace organisation Madres del Catatumbo por la Paz, told FairPlanet from Tibú.

Campesinos, or smallholder farmers, are especially at risk, she said. ‘They can be killed because they are assumed to be associated with the ELN.’

‘It’s very difficult in the region because the confrontations are between families,’ García explained. Between Colombia’s military conscription and guerrillas recruiting Indigenous children, combatants ‘can come from the same families among those of us who live here’.

With Colombia’s displacement crisis named one of the world’s most neglected and global humanitarian cuts shuttering programmes, regions like Catatumbo risk falling through the cracks. But some have mobilised local aid to tackle deep precarity.

In 2025, resources for Catatumbo’s emergency response came from the Secretariat for Victims, Peace and Post-Conflict in Cúcuta. ‘Nobody expected a crisis as big as that in Catatumbo. What was intended for one year was used in two months,’ Paola Marcela Segura, a senior programme manager for economic and development coordination at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told FairPlanet in Cúcuta, where the organisation’s headquarters runs a clinic and liaises with its Catatumbo operations.

‘Confinements are an invisible crisis,’ Segura added, estimating that more than 6,000 people across Catatumbo experienced confinement in 2025, triple the previous year’s figure. Cúcuta absorbs the shocks of the conflict: it received more than 25,000 of the more than 60,000 people displaced from Catatumbo in the first half of 2025, while also absorbing migration from Venezuela.

Criminal organisations commonly use gota a gota (‘drop by drop’), a form of loan-sharking, to exploit people in desperate straits, Segura said. It is a bitter lifeline for undocumented migrants and people without bank accounts. The IRC supports a ‘savings group’, a microfinance scheme that pools money for families or specific causes and localises part of the humanitarian response, Segura explained.

But it is a sticking-plaster solution to systemic inequity in Catatumbo.

Amid renewed instability, Indigenous peoples in Norte de Santander continue to call for regularised immigration status, public services and land rights.

‘As Indigenous communities in Latin America, we are one great nation. We don’t have limits, regardless of the politics,’ Yulieth Prado, an Indigenous Wayuu leader, told FairPlanet in a call from Ocaña. Originally from the Venezuelan Guajira region, Prado was displaced five years ago by violence in Tibú. She now lives in Ocaña, advocating for Wayuu rights after decades of war and paramilitary violence.

Prado called on the Colombian government to uphold the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law for people displaced by conflict, including landless Indigenous peoples ‘in a system that does not provide the necessary assistance that should be there’.

Only the Barí have resguardos in Norte de Santander, leaving the Wayuu and the Yukpa effectively landless. And without PPTs, undocumented Wayuu, Barí and Yukpa people across Catatumbo struggle to access healthcare, and need ID and permission from Indigenous authorities to leave the territory for any reason.

Prado wants greater unity in Indigenous land struggles in Norte de Santander. ‘We aren’t in opposition. We aren’t different in what we’re going through,’ she said.

‘We don’t have to constantly live at the mercy of others. We are the rightful inhabitants, while the others are guests.’