Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia

This article Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Sharing a border with Ecuador and Peru, the southern Colombian department of Putumayo takes its name from the Quechua term for “gushing river.” For some, its landscapes are a sacred doorway to the Amazon rainforest, a world unfathomably greater than the human. For others, however, this land looks more like oilfields and military bases, optimized waterflood assets and strategic trafficking corridors. This difference in worldview is at the heart of peacebuilding in Putumayo and the Indigenous struggle to reclaim ancestral territories across the Amazon basin.

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, promised to usher in peace and restore lands to the people most affected by conflict, including Indigenous communities repeatedly displaced across their homelands. But in Putumayo, dispersed conflict continues and Indigenous communities have been scattered across 86 reservations as their land claims remain in limbo. Financed by coca farms, the rival Comandos de la Frontera, or Border Commandos, and the Carolina Ramirez Front compete over land and drug trafficking corridors. In the south, where remote villages straddle the border across the Putumayo River, armed groups hold nearly absolute control.

“We want the restitution of these territories from the hands of third parties, like those of the state, campesinos and armed groups,” said Fredy Javier Piaguay Ortiz, Siona (Zio Baín) leader for the Piñuña Blanco Reservation on the Ecuadorian border.

“There is a constant presence of armed groups,” he said, describing an atmosphere of heightened vigilance in these areas. “One has to be very strategic in order to endure these conditions in our territories. … There are no measures that completely guarantee freedom of movement.”

Land rights and special protections for Indigenous communities are entrenched in Colombia’s post-conflict transitional justice measures like the Truth Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and the Victims and Land Restitution Law.

Putumayo has the most applications for land titles, or rights to land ownership, in Colombia. Ancestral territories make up a quarter of all applications in Putumayo to legally recognize the collective ownership and conservation of land that has been under Indigenous stewardship for generations. Over nearly a decade, there has been little progress. The Observatory of the Territorial Rights of Indigenous Peoples reports that some requests have been idle for over 30 years.

Titles alone aren’t enough to measure the efficacy of land restitution, as plots may change hands informally and still end up under the control of armed groups, explained Lina Maria Espinosa, a Colombian attorney working with Amazon Frontlines. But they do give important legal protection.

“It is how Indigenous peoples construct their identity, and a place upon which Indigenous people depend for their collective existence, and to express themselves and their identity,” Espinosa said.

The competition is fierce and much of the land ends up in private ownership. In one of Colombia’s coca-growing hotspots, formalized land titles — that make ownership of previously informally held titles official — can also help access loans and coca crop substitution programs. Campesinxs, or small-scale farmers, have received over half of the authorized land titles from the 7.4 million acre goal set out by the peace agreement. However, vast swathes of land have gone to cattle ranchers who have in turn driven rapid deforestation in Amazonian regions.

Indigenous land restitution does not mean displacing farming communities. It means co-existence. But in the process, both are up against a common obstruction. Oil companies have not been deterred by continued armed conflict waged largely against civilians. Financing Colombia’s war economy at the height of the civil war, the extractive sector has laid claim to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon basin and continues to drive divisions.

Hearts and minds

Mario Erazo Yaiguaje is the former governor of the Siona Buenavista Reservation and is working to advance land restitution at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or IACHR. He is also a member of his community’s Indigenous guard.

There are 12 recognized Indigenous groups encompassing around 51,700 people across Putumayo, including the larger groups of Awá, Camëntsä, Inga, Kichwa and Siona. Among these communities, there are an estimated 350 Indigenous guards, each unique in their customs and centering mandates on protecting their communities, cultures and the lands under their stewardship.

Traditionally unarmed, they legitimize Indigenous authority on their own territories, Yaiguaje explained. All generations and genders participate. Elders pass on ancestral knowledge, language and a sense of social responsibility to youth for their future roles as community leaders amid the industrialization of the Amazon and the pressures of individualistic and consumerist lifestyles.

“We are armed with spirituality, valor and courage,” Yaiguaje said. “We demonstrate respect to our community and our territory.” 

Collective responsibilities vary. Territorial patrols take charge of mapping and monitoring environmental data, identifying medicinal plants and tracking animal welfare. Across different reservations, Indigenous guards may coordinate emergency response from pandemic logistics, to mutual aid after floods or landslides.

They are a mediator and buffer for conflict. Members of the guard may accompany community leaders and land defenders in public events or on errands to provide a sense of security amid the persistent threats to their lives. According to internal norms, they may act as an alternative to colonial carceral systems like police or private security to enact justice and reintegrate offenders, including former combatants from Indigenous communities.

Land is more meaningful than just a quantity of acres, Yaiguaje explained, and the Indigenous guard cultivates a spiritual sense of control over homelands that are fragmented across reservations. This sense of wellbeing is critical not only to sustaining the Siona’s cultural and spiritual integrity, but for maintaining morale in a fight against seemingly insurmountable opponents.

“Much of Putumayo has already been licensed for exploration or exploitation,” María del Rosario Arango Zambrano, Colombian human rights lawyer working with the Forest Peoples Programme explained. Companies that have entrenched in the Amazon basin have included Colombia’s Ecopetrol, China’s Emerald Energy, Amerisur and its Chilean successor GeoPark, and Canada’s Gran Tierra.

The fossil fuel economy is in a tenuous place as Colombia is intent on transitioning toward renewable energy. In 2023, Colombian President Gustavo Petro banned new oil and gas exploration in the country. Later that year, Colombia endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Colombia has also pushed forward on enforcing a domestic fracking ban despite longstanding opposition from the oil lobby.

After appeals by the Siona reservations of Buenavista and Piñuna Blanco, the Colombian Supreme Court ordered an injunction on the exploration and exploitation of natural resources protecting 140,000 acres of ancestral Siona lands in 2018. But the urgency of the peace agreement’s immediate aftermath faded. Impeded by Petro’s decrees, oil pioneers scouting Colombia’s northern regions shifted back to Putumayo. “All the interest turned toward Putumayo because they already have licenses there,” Rosario explained.

Some older oil concessions that overlap with Indigenous territories have been dormant or have just started to be developed. Sitting on one of Putumayo’s highest-producing oil fields, GeoPark’s sprawling Platanillo concession is currently in development despite the lack of Siona consent and Colombia’s commitment to protect ancestral Indigenous territories from exploration and exploitation.

Espinosa, who also provides human rights and technical training to the Siona communities of Buenavista and Wisuya, explained that oil companies and armed groups have exploited the state abandonment of these far-flung regions, ingratiating themselves into communities. They do this without regard for continued conflict in Putumayo that is pushing people off their lands, or locking them into forced confinement.

“People know that the only way to maintain their territory is to quietly comply with the extortion of armed groups,” she said. “All those who benefit from the conflict enable the existence of conflict.”

There are repeated reports of oil companies co-opting local authorities like community council leaders to give the appearance of community consent. “Anyone who speaks out against their presence receives death threats or are attacked. But those threats don’t come directly from oil companies,” Javier Gárate, U.S. Policy Advisor at Global Witness explained. Instead, they come from members of armed groups who are integrated in communities, join community assemblies and suss out the most vocal opposition.

“We don’t want any type of extractivism,” said Luis Edinson Gómez López of the Inkal Awá from Puerto Caicedo. Colonial conflict has continued to target the community of roughly 44,000 people living across the traditional Awá territories, spread from the neighboring department of Nariño into Putumayo and Ecuador.

Thousands have been displaced across their ancestral lands since colonial rubber and palm plantations began the privatization of Putumayo the 19th century — subjecting Indigenous people to genocide and enslavement in service of industrial agriculture, to the oil wells that have turned Putumayo into a sacrifice zone. Extractivism began with the Amazon being seen as something to own, divide, sell and discard — all at the expense of one of the planet’s most precious and irreplaceable ecosystems, and with unspeakable cruelty to the people whose lives and hearts have been entwined with the rainforest for thousands of years.

“How is it possible that with money, which is a human invention, you destroy everything that is real — flora, fauna, biodiversity and life itself?” Gómez said. He referred to the “irreparable damage” by extractivism to the existence of 115 Indigenous peoples across Colombia. “This knowledge passes from the heart to the mind, and from the mind to the heart, and is present in every corner of the natural world that is infused with the living spirit.”

It is common for Indigenous land defenders opposing the interests of armed groups and the extractive sector on their territories to be targeted for harassment or assassination. Colombia is the deadliest country in the world for land and environmental defenders, accounting for 40 percent of killings globally in 2023. Nearly half of the victims were Indigenous people.

Gómez has experienced displacement numerous times from Orito, Puerto Caicedo and Mocoa for his opposition to extractivism in Putumayo and has appealed to Colombia’s Victim’s Unit. He spoke of family and members of his community being targeted over the years. Assassinations of Indigenous leaders who staunchly resist both corporate and militant coercion sends a message: “We’ll just find another leader who will agree with us.” In Putumayo, he explained, authorities and community members of the Awá people have been assassinated with impunity, “their cases left in oblivion and unresolved.”

Farther south along the Putumayo River, remote communities like the Siona reservations around the southern municipality of Puerto Leguízamo are more vulnerable to conflict. Oil companies haven’t dug in here. Thick jungle separates one community from another, and territories are entirely in the hands of armed groups. Over the decades of conflict, thousands of people from Siona communities are suspected to have been disappeared into river graves. And in a department that historically had one of the highest numbers of child soldiers in Colombia, forced recruitment reaches into Indigenous communities. Casacunte, Hacha, Piñuna Blanco, Bajo Santa Elena — these are just a few that were named.

Through the National Protection Unit, the Colombian government may send bodyguards or other material assistance for community leaders at risk, but these tend to be individual measures rather than systemic responses to human rights violations. Instead, the Indigenous guard’s human rights training and accompaniment helps, even a little bit, to mitigate displacement, forced recruitment and violence against social leaders in their territories.

Stigmatized and criminalized in Ecuador, the Indigenous guard in Putumayo are a life-affirming moral resistance to a relationship with power that is understood only through the terms of money, coercion, intimidation and violence. This is at a time when communities are losing connection with these values, Yaigauje explained.

The Siona have proposed numerous recommendations to the IACHR to enforce the protection of human rights and fulfillment of promises on land restitution for Indigenous communities across Putumayo. “It’s difficult when institutions don’t come to consultations or visit our territories to see how we live,” he said.

Land back in the Amazon

Five years ago, Indigenous leaders and councils from across Colombia’s most conflict-affected departments including Chocó, Meta, Putumayo and Valle del Cauca, issued a compassionate appeal for peaceful dialogue with the armed group known today as the Border Commandos.

“You are there with your own pains of soul, homeland and life. Our communities understand that condition,” they wrote, acknowledging the failures of the peace agreement that have continued to disenfranchise people from the poorest communities. “We are neither combatants nor want to be. We are lovers of life without weapons. Lovers of the right to justice without weapons.”

Despite the grave risks and billionaire lobbies opposing or attempting to co-opt them, Indigenous communities in Putumayo have been building solidarity beyond borders. Long on the margins, stories of Indigenous self-determination and nonviolent resistance in the most remote regions of the Amazon basin are coming to light.

As it stands, Putumayo is governed like the majority of Colombia, Rosario explained, organized around urban municipalities. This can make it easier for private interests to co-opt government authorities who make decisions for Putumayo that impact numerous Indigenous communities. And reservations cannot be granted in areas where there is already an oil concession.

Compared to the rest of the country’s colonized and settled departments, the Colombian Amazonian departments of Guainía, Vaupés and Amazonas have greater autonomy over self-governance. They are not organized around municipalities, but rather around Indigenous territorial entities that grant communities autonomous governance.

The Siona are advocating for greater self-governance through the constitutional framework of their territories, Yaiguaje explained. As in other Amazonian departments, Indigenous communities in Putumayo want full authority to say no to extractivism and militarism, without depending on municipal governments co-opted by oil companies or armed groups.

The gravity of restoring land and self-determination to Indigenous communities in Putumayo has been underscored by a landmark ruling by the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2009 that found Indigenous communities at serious risk from conflict, extractivism and fragmentation of their territories. In the years since, U.N. officials have repeatedly urged the Colombian state to reform policy around extractivism and “megaprojects” to comply with Indigenous rights to consent and existence as peoples. They have repeatedly stressed that the uncertainty of Indigenous land claims has exacerbated the impacts of armed conflict. Some groups like the Siona and Awá continue to be considered as in imminent danger of physical, cultural and spiritual extermination from continued conflict and displacement.

The Siona have formally opposed “any kind of prospecting, exploration and exploitation activities for crude oil” within their ancestral territories for a decade and have demanded the Colombian state respect the Constitutional Court ruling and human rights recommendations. They have focused on lobbying the Colombian state and international human rights authorities to end oil development in ancestral territories and halt corporate land grabs in the Amazon. GeoPark has seen the strongest pushback to date.

In August 2024, the IACHR found that violations of human rights, threats to Indigenous cultures and the impacts of armed conflict have persisted since 2018, extending the call for Colombian state accountability.

Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, shared how the organization has supported Siona campaigns for land rights and ending extractivism in the Amazon basin. This has included targeted campaigns against the oil company GeoPark and its predecessor Amerisur. In 2021, the Buenavista Reservation successfully pressured the United Nations Development Program to suspend a regional economic development partnership with GeoPark, given the Siona’s explicit lack of consent.

While other oil companies have started to come under greater scrutiny, GeoPark investors were warned about violations of Indigenous rights and destroying the Amazon rainforest. In 2023, a court case led by campesinxs against Amerisur (now GeoPark) illuminated the environmental risks, and harm to workers and communities from operating in what is effectively a conflict zone.

“International investors must understand that the specific context in Putumayo, and Colombia’s broader history, render it virtually impossible for GeoPark/Nueva Amerisur or any company whose business is the extraction of natural resources to do so without some kind of financial relationship with illegal armed groups operating in the same region,” Amazon Watch wrote in a risk alert.

Campaigns in Putumayo have struggled to reach international awareness, but wider alliances have been made with legislators in Amazonian countries through the Parliamentarians for a Fossil-Free Future. This coalition is investigating the relationships of oil companies with illegal armed groups and state forces, and are lobbying to put an end to oil drilling in the Amazon. U.N. officials are actively collecting testimonies on the impacts of extractivism in Putumayo as negotiations on the global Treaty for Business and Human Rights advance. 

But recovering ancestral lands remains at the heart of Indigenous strategy of change in Putumayo.

“These processes, as we say in North America, Land Back, are playing out around the Amazon,” Miller said. “And certainly in Putumayo, where Indigenous peoples are working to get that recognition, that’s fundamental for their wellbeing and the survival of their people — and it’s also fundamental for the survival of the Amazon.”

To date, Colombia’s peace process has served the interests of corporations over the interests of people who are trapped in poverty and dispossessed from their own homelands. Nearly six decades of conflict have left deep scars. But spirits are unbroken as ancestral practices of nonviolent governance and relationship with homelands are being reignited on the pathway to peace.

“We have taken care of our own for millenia and continue to live in a harmonious way,” Gómez said, speaking to countries defending corporate interests without care for Indigenous right to consent. “At no point in time have the Indigenous peoples of Colombia invaded your territories and robbed you of resources. If we haven’t done that, why then come and contribute to the extermination of our peoples?”

This article Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/inside-the-indigenous-land-back-movement-in-colombia/