Guardians of Guaviare: Southern Colombia’s land fight

It’s evening in Cali, Colombia, mid-way through the first week of COP16, the UN’s annual Convention on Biological Diversity summit.

At the back of the public Zona Verde, also known as the Green Zone or “the People’s COP,” a modest booth showcases small baskets and roughly crafted wooden toys. Indigenous leaders and NGOs from across Colombia have gathered here.

As the sky takes on the deep inky indigo of a tropical night, John Castañeda is eager to speak about the impacts of armed conflict on the Jiw Indigenous people in Guaviare. 

Castañeda is the only member of the Jiw community present at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s COP16 with the Organización de la Amazonía Colombiana. We share a bitter laugh over Google Translate not having an option for his language. As with the very existence of his people, the Jiw Jame language is endangered. So, in the Spanish adopted out of necessity by Amazonian peoples across Colombia’s Guaviare region, he explains. 

The Guardians of Guaviare

The Jiw (pronounced “Hue”) are a small Indigenous community in southern Colombia, also known as Guiabero. The 3000 members of this community live along the Guaviare River that snakes between the departments of Guaviare and Meta, settlements driven by a coca economy that, during the 1970s and 80s, turned Guaviare into the heartland of cocoa cultivation in Colombia. The Jiw have been repeatedly displaced by decades of colonial settlement, militarisation by the Colombian state and non-state armed groups, and agro-industrial projects in the lowlands.

Indigenous communities across Guaviare, like the Nükak people, have traditionally practiced nomadic lifestyles, and their survival is intrinsically linked to the integrity of the region’s ecosystems and peoples’ connection with the land. Many, like the Jiw, have now lost this way of life and face continuing pressures from decades of military activities, rural settlement and neoextractivism, which refers to policies by leftist governments in South America that rely on resource extraction (like mining or oil drilling) to fund social programmes. 

Guaviare stretches from the edge of the Amazon rainforest in the south to the tropical grasslands, or llanos, of Meta in the north. However, the department’s stunning landscape is under threat from deforestation driven by agro-industrial projects such as cattle ranching, illicit coca cultivation, and informal palm plantations. Last year alone, Guaviare lost 15.7 kha of natural forest, with San José del Guaviare accounting for 63 per cent of the deforestation between 2001 and 2023. These activities, including legal and illegal road construction, are a major driver of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon, which surged as militants seized land following the Peace Accord.

Securing land tenure is essential for the Jiw people to reclaim their sense of agency and belonging within their ancestral homelands. Since his election of in June 2022, leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro committed to rural reforms  that include the allocation of land titles to Afro-descendent and Indigenous peoples, as well as pastoral settlers and farmers seeking to replace depleted coca crops.

A critical part of the 2016 Peace Accord with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the reforms aim to support marginalised communities, reintegrate former combatants into civilian life, and return land to victims of the armed conflict, under the government’s “Paz Total” plan to guide Colombia’s post-conflict transition. 

The FARC was a guerrilla group that fought in Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict. Established in 1964, it initially sought to address inequality and private sector land grabs but became heavily involved in drug trafficking and kidnapping to fund its operations. After a peace accord in 2016, it officially disarmed and transitioned into a political party, though some dissident factions remain active.

Among the revolutionaries were Afro-descendent and Indigenous people who mobilised to protect their territories and livelihoods, and campesinxs, or pastoral peasants, cultivating small and medium-sized farms. 

Petro’s reforms are also a political lever in negotiations with armed groups including the region’s dominant armed group Estado Mayor Central (EMC), which is a federation of ex-FARC dissidents who currently control the majority of Colombia’s Amazonian regions. 

Rural reforms (Reforma Rural Integral) were a cornerstone of the 2016 Peace Accord signed with the FARC under ex Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Petro’s diplomatic approach reflects a renewed commitment to addressing historical grievances and engaging armed groups in good faith negotiations, as initiated by Santos. This marks a departure from the brutal counterinsurgency strategies of Álvaro Uribe and the increased militarisation under Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque, which bookended the Peace Accord era.

Central to these latest reforms is the promise of three million hectares of land to landless farmers and ethnic groups. Granting land rights has also played a vital role in the demobilisation and socioeconomic reintegration of former combatants in rural areas, providing them with opportunities to build sustainable livelihoods and develop agricultural practices.

Amid sometimes competing interests between land claimants, Jiw people have denounced the misrepresentation of their calls for land restitution as seeking eviction and the loss of rights for campesinxs.

“In our territories, we have coexisted with campesinos for a long time,” Castañeda explained, highlighting the need for conservation strategies and sustainable development rooted in Jiw ways of life. “We have collaborated with different organisations such as the UN, governments, and other entities, but the projects that [reach our] territory are scarce. The majority of them are not focused on our way of living, even though in recent years our way of life and customs have been changing.” 

But what does land truly mean to a people whose territory remains torn by conflict ?  

Between landmines and land rights

Peace is still not a reality in Guaviare. 

The Colombian military, or Ejército, has bases along the Guaviare River near several Indigenous reservations including El Barrancón, El Refugio, La Fuga and Panuré. Hundreds of Colombian soldiers continue to be deployed across Guaviare to recover control over areas that are held by militants.

Castañeda shares his discomfort with a military base being in close proximity to civilian and Indigenous populations. While deployment of the State is part of the implementation of Colombia’s commitments on civilian security, Castañeda sees the area’s militarisation as an encouragement of continued conflict between armed groups and the state. Despite decades of staking the right for peaceful existence, Indigenous peoples like the Jiw have not seen lasting demilitarisation of their territories. 

Castañeda describes how, in the small campos across Guaviare, armed groups are actually gaining power and Indigenous communities are losing even more agency and mobility in their own lands. “Before, we had to pay taxes to only four groups. Now we have to pay twelve groups,” he said, referring to the extortion practiced by militants. “The Indigenous people who work the land don’t want to leave their houses. They don’t want to leave their territory.”

Roads can be treacherous with both the Ejército and militants manning checkpoints. Even activities as routine as fishing up the Guaviare River require permission; without it, locals risk being accused of aligning with rival armed groups.

Even if there was freedom of movement, Guaviare is still plagued with anti-personnel mines and unexploded ordnance from the FARC era: indiscriminate weapons that are banned by international law under the Anti-personnel Landmines Convention, or Ottawa Treaty. 

“All landmines installed by [non-state armed groups] are home-made improvised explosive devices,” said Oliver Ford, Colombia director at the humanitarian demining organisation HALO Trust, to FairPlanet. He explained that humanitarian demining organisations are restricted from neutralising explosives that are considered to have strategic value for armed groups: “it would be interpreted as interference with their strategy and would result in our expulsion from the region.”  

Colombia had committed to a process of neutralising all mines under Article V of the Ottawa Treaty by December 2025, but is in the process of delaying the deadline another year.

“This is perfectly normal, and part of the process for signatory countries,” Ford said.

The full impact of anti-personnel mines and other explosive devices in Guaviare is hard to measure. There is a longstanding lack of data from the department. What is known, however, is that 12,400 people across Colombia are known to have lost their lives to landmines since 1990. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), the number of people at risk of explosives in Colombia grew by almost 17 per cent over the last year. ACAPS has reported that the proportion of children being killed by landmines has increased over the last decade. Now, two-fifths of victims of mines and unexploded ordnance are children, who play amidst the remnants of past battles.

The Miraflores municipality of Guaviare is among the regions where residents are most in danger of harm from explosive ordnance in Colombia and Jiw ethnic territories were among the most affected by mines and explosive devices between 2006-2021. The presence of landmines in Guaviare also continues to affect freedom of movement for Nükak peoples.

This past August, the Colombian military reported 2,622 anti-personnel mines in the departments of Meta, Caquetá and Guaviare in 2024 alone. In September, the ejército conducted an operation in Guaviare that reportedly deactivated 78 of them.

Many Jiw people and other members of small Indigenous communities displaced to San José del Guaviare, or farther north to Bogotá, had never experienced urban life before, where their options for survival are limited.

Castañeda came to Cali, the host city for this year’s UN biodiversity conference, from the municipality of San José del Guaviare, which borders Meta and the ejército bases. Fear and insecurity stemming from the region’s continuous armed conflict has displaced many people.

“My family was no exception,” shared Castañeda. “We, along with my mother, arrived in San José del Guaviare without knowing anyone and began to adapt to another way of life. This experience was not easy at all.”

Both in their own towns and if they manage to leave to big cities, girls are more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation by soldiers and entrapment into prostitution. The Colombian Institute for Family Welfare has collected 378 reported cases of sexual abuse against Indigenous communities in Guaviare, including Jiw and Nünak peoples, just between 2018 and 2020. 

As for the boys in Guaviare, they go to work in Meta’s oil and gas fields, face recruitment as child soldiers, slaughter by guerrilla groups, or get caught in the drug trade. There are few viable choices for a livelihood in a region that still hasn’t laid down arms. 

At COP, a song suddenly erupts: “a la montaña iré en busca de la razón, a la montaña iré con ganas de sanar mi vida iré.” Every few minutes, another group of children, young women or shy couples sit around us. They shake rattles, compare beaded jewelry, cheerfully argue, stare into phones. A harmonica trails. 

In these moments of peace, conflict is just a topic of conversation and complexity is found in an embroidery pattern. 

Beyond survival

For Indigenous communities that are most affected by armed conflict in Colombia, the protection of tradition is critical to both the conservation of environmental integrity and a transition toward peace. 

For the Jiw, however, progress has been slow. 

For nearly two decades, the Colombian state has recognised that the Jiw Indigenous community is at risk of social and cultural extinction. In 2009, the Jiw were classified as one of 30 endangered Indigenous groups in Colombia. In 2012, the Constitutional Court passed an order on the need to adopt urgent precautionary measures for the protection of the fundamental rights of the Jiw and Nükak peoples. Seven years later, under Iván Duque’s administration, the Constitutional Court found that the situation of vulnerability for the Jiw had worsened. 

Today, the Jiw are still struggling for self-determination and visibility amid the militarisation of Guaviare, the exploitation of children, the lack of economic opportunities outside of extractivism and armed conflict, and the stresses of having to adapt to customs and sedentary lifestyles that are in polar opposition to traditional livelihoods.

At COP16, numerous Indigenous governments and human rights organisations advocated for conservation policy that uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples to live as they choose —in harmony with nature.

Indicators are an important tool to measure how states are progressing on meeting biodiversity targets and human-rights based commitments. The CBD’s adoption of a traditional knowledge indicator on land use can track the preservation of Indigenous livelihoods, cultures, changes in land use and tenure and meaningful involvement of Indigenous peoples in political decision-making. 

Stefania Carrer, litigation and advocacy officer at Minority Rights Group (MRG) who assisted in the COP negotiations, told FairPlanet that “the inclusion of specific indicators on human and Indigenous rights would be the only way to measure states’ progress and actions on these fronts.”

Even with progress in developing tools for holding states accountable for preserving Indigenous rights in conservation policies under the CBD, many Indigenous communities in Colombia had no access to politicians or donors in Cali. And while there was consensus around the adoption of the traditional knowledge indicator at COP16, Carrer explained, no agreement was reached on the overall Monitoring Framework. This work has been left for next year. 

“To be honest, the draft text does not look very promising in this respect, but the conversation is still open,” she said.

As stages in Cali were dismantled and political leaders, international funding organisations and representatives of big global NGOs headed to Azerbaijan for climate negotiations, Indigenous leaders from across Colombia turned homeward. For many, this was their first COP, allowing them the chance to speak to a global audience about the injustices carved into their lives and threatening the Amazon. For just as many, however, the homes to which they return are places of exile.

A photo from Castañeda appears on my phone: a bus designating its origin as Cali shows that he has gone home.  

“I feel that COP16 is the first time many communities made themselves known,” he wrote, readying for more advocacy on Jiw social and cultural rights around Bogotá in the coming weeks. “For a long time, we have been in near abandonment. For a long time we have fought to take care of our territory, our culture, our way of life, our ancestors. For a long time they have had us in total oblivion.” 

Editor’s note: campesinx(s) is the gender-neutral term used for campesina / campesino. 

A Map showing Indigenous reserves near San José del Guaviare and Barrancón via Amazonian Scientific Research Institute SINCHI.

Picture by Alev Takil