The binationality of the Wayuu people: the pending debt of Venezuela and Colombia

In this second entry, we show why understanding the territory from Wayuu’s thought is essential to overcoming the humanitarian crisis suffered by these people. The Wayuu have known how to survive the colonizing processes as their permanence in their territory precedes the creation of the states, their legal and political relationship with Venezuela and Colombia is in their memory, their cosmology, and their forms of development as an indigenous people. Nowadays, the precarious living conditions in the Venezuelan and Colombian La Guajira threaten the existence and good living of the Wayuu people and hinder their access to Human Rights.

No access to rights in Colombia and Venezuela

The development of life for the Wayuu on the Venezuelan side has worsened in the context of the so-called Complex Humanitarian Emergency: the fall of the democratic institutional framework in Venezuela has led to the collapse of the institutions, which cannot provide the minimum health, food, and education services. In this context, the Wayuu people have been one of the most affected population groups at a humanitarian, economic, and social level.

Amid this emergency, the number of Venezuelans who have fled their country reaches 7,131,435 people worldwide, according to data from the Regional Platform for Interagency Coordination for Refugees and Emigrants from Venezuela. Colombia has received almost 2.5 million Venezuelans in its territory, with La Guajira being the fifth department with the largest Venezuelan population in Colombia, with 150,806 people, of which 56% have irregular status.

It is important to note that the population on the border of La Guajira on the Colombian side in 2018 was 380,460 people self-recognized as Wayuu, according to data from the Census of the National Administrative Department of Statistics, while this population in Venezuela was 413,437, according to the 2011 National Statistics Census.

Despite these numbers, neither the interagency platforms nor the Colombian or Venezuelan governments manage statistics focused on the migration of indigenous peoples. Thus, following the patterns of structural discrimination between the colony and the republic, the Wayuu suffer a double vulnerability by being refugees and indigenous people without intercultural attention according to their language, worldview, and interrelation with the territory.

According to José David González, a cross-border Human Rights defender, “there is taking place a migration never seen in the history of La Guajira because the majority of the Wayuu have migrated to the department and left their homes, territories, and habitat due to insecurity who live.”

The social reality of the Wayuu people has worsened because of the precarious conditions on the Venezuelan side. According to data from the ENCOVI 2021 pollster, 98% of the population is in poverty; and 86% is in extreme poverty. In terms of food security, the dependence of Wayuu families on the Venezuelan Government’s food programs through Mercal or the Local Supply and Production Committee (CLAP, as said in Spanish) has increased. The first is a government program that provides supermarkets with low-cost food to individuals, while the latter distributes food directly to the communities.

According to reports from the Zulia State Human Rights Commission (Codhez), the CLAP food program should be free of charge as established by the government. However, reality indicates that it must be paid by Wayuu households in Colombian pesos because the bolivar is no longer accepted as currency at the border on the Venezuelan side. In addition, in terms of health, the Binational Hospital Dr. José Leonardo Fernández, located in Paraguaipoa, has been one of the most affected by the Complex Humanitarian Emergency.

The Wayuu arrive in Colombia to seek refuge from these calamities but crashes with a wall that prevents them from accessing social services and fundamental rights: the Colombian State has not embodied the binationality of the Wayuu people. Therefore the Wayuu Those who enter La Guajira from the Venezuelan side are treated as migrants, as if they were foreigners in a territory they have inhabited since pre-colonial times.

A joint report by the University of La Guajira and the Human Rights Center of the Andrés Bello Catholic University highlights that the Wayuu who arrive from the Venezuelan side cannot access health services and that hospitals only give them in emergencies cases if the person has not their migrant documents. In addition, the care services do not have an ethnic and differential approach.

Wayuu people interviewed for this study stated that they prefer to opt for the Single Registry of Venezuelan Migrants —the legal protection mechanism for Venezuelan migrants and refugees. In this way, they assume the immigration regime for foreigners to access health and financial services, and job offers, among others, since there is no possibility that they will resort to a mechanism to demand their binationality.

On the other hand, although the Wayuu children who arrive from Venezuela can attend classes in the rancherías without being asked for documents, the truth is that they are long distances from their informal settlements. In addition, the biggest problem they face is that after completing their school studies, since they do not have Colombian nationality, they cannot access an educational title that supports their advancement to higher studies, which limits their development capacities.

Finally, the non-regulation of the Wayuu indigenous population on the Colombian-Venezuelan Guajira border may result in involvement in organized crime networks. A CrisisGroup report alerted about dismantling criminal networks that subject underage boys and girls to sexual slavery and human trafficking in the border area of La Guajira; those organizations also recruit poor indigenous people for other illegal businesses.

Reclaiming the origin to guarantee the future

With the resumption of bilateral relations between Colombia and Venezuela, the possibility of urgently adopting treaties and public policies that recognize the binational nature of the Wayuu within the framework of the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples opens up. Today, Colombia and Venezuela declare themselves pluriethnic and pluricultural states in both national constitutions, and they recognize the territorial rights of indigenous peoples beyond the geographical delimitation of physical space.

So one way to protect indigenous identity would be to translate into reality what is sad in the Carta Magna of both states. Ensuring the rights of the Wayuu, the most numerous indigenous people in both nations, not only restores the original dignity of their clans but also opens the door to strengthening the rights of indigenous peoples of the world.

Numerous sedentary, nomadic, and semi-nomadic indigenous peoples are found in border areas and reaffirm themselves as plurinational because they have lived in their territories since before the Spanish Colony and whose ancestral territories were marked by political-administrative dividing lines due to the State Constitution, ignoring their Laws of Origin, promoting xenophobia due to their presence and imposing barriers to the exercise of their cultural identity. First Nations have exercised this type of jurisdiction in the day-to-day practices of their traditional authorities since pre-colonial times. It is the case, for example, of the Wallmapu, which for the Mapuche people covers territories between Chile and Argentina.

Today, the high level of Wayuu migration from the Venezuelan side has revealed that the department of La Guajira presents serious humanitarian needs, aggravated by the arrival of the Wayuu people in search of a more dignified life. Access to social health, education, and food services are precarious in La Guajira, and to this is added that the Wayuu who come from Venezuela cannot demand these social services due to the delay in the legalization of their immigration procedures and the type of status they have, which further aggravates the humanitarian situation of the Wayuu people between the two countries.

In this context, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, through ruling T-302 of 2017, declared the State of Things Unconstitutional in La Guajira. For the Court, the violation of the human rights of the Wayuu people was verified in a structural and systematic manner by action or omission of the Colombian State in matters related to drinking water, food, and health services, among others, to the point of putting into question risk their physical and cultural survival.

If the governments of both countries do not address this situation with comprehensive plans that recognize the legitimacy of the Wayuu people to identify themselves as subjects of binational law with differentiated protection, the humanitarian emergency in La Guajira will continue to cost lives, and the survival of this ancestral people will be at risk. This would imply guaranteeing their right to identity by establishing urgent measures such as, for example, the opening of registry offices managed with an intersectional approach that includes the associative and family systems of the Wayuu people and guarantees that decisions respect their rights.

Traditional Wayuu authorities proposed the creation of a Special Registry for their families that consider clan membership and matrilineal descent to recognize their binationality. This mechanism could prevent the cases of double registration that abound in both Venezuela and Colombia since many Wayuu families have their documentation in both countries. However, one country registered them with the name of their caste, while the other, with another assigned last name.

The implementation of the demands owed to the Wayuu indigenous people would be a recognition of their contribution to the cultural diversity of humanity and a historical reparation against the dispossession and structural racism that continues to be experienced both in Colombia and Venezuela.

Read the first part here