Innovative Strategies of Indigenous Resistance among the Wounaan People of Colombia

THE WOUNAAN PEOPLE of northwestern Colombia's San Juan River are the latest casualty of a violent twenty-five-year reign of terror hastened by the convergence of coca growers, gold miners, paramilitaries, guerillas, and government troops—all vying for control of the waterways and resources along the ancestral stretch of traditional Wounaan territories.¹ Until the arrival of mono-crop production for export, Wounaan's steadfast strategies have thwarted the bloodied battlefields of Spanish colonial impositions, nationalist armies, and Marxist guerrillas. Occupying small thatched huts stilted on posts hovering up to eight feet high along the clearings on the riverbanks, the Wounaan kept to their subsistence livelihoods of hunting, fishing, Werregue Palm basket-weaving, and small-scale agriculture of bananas, pineapples, and yucca. That is until November 2014, when the Wounaan people were forced to leave their village of Unión Aguas Claras along the San Juan River of the Cauca Valley and take up a twelve-month residence in El Cristal Sports Arena in Buenaventura, Colombia.

According to Wounaan spokesman Crelo Obispo, "Paramilitaries kicked us out of land," and for twelve months they worked diligently to "find a peaceful way to recover our own indigenous land."² The Wounaan turned their occupation into a form of civil disobedience and refused to return to their lands without adequate protection and security from warring factions. Although on November 29, 2015, they returned home along the San Juan River, their cultural survival signals a critical humanitarian and environmental emergency in which Indigenous people living sustainable lives have been caught in a resource war for coca cultivation, gold mining, and control of key river tributaries. As an interdisciplinary ethnographer and witness for peace, I had the opportunity to accompany the Wounaan in their occupation of El Cristal and to make visible the distinctive resistance tactics they employed to defend their right to living in their native territories.³

Occupy El Cristal

For a full year, 343 Wounaan people, 63 families, occupied the cold hard floor of the basketball courts, sleeping in multicolored, handwoven hammocks strung beneath the stadium bleachers. One of them was a young wearied mother holding a shirtless eleven-month-old infant suffering from a burning fever and bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. She recalled, "There wasn't any medicine."⁴ Herein lies the crisis. Not only were mothers unable to gain access to traditional herbal medicines, they were also unable to gain access to modern health care. Three somber mothers told me they were running out of adequate food and water sources. Buenaventura officials confirmed the death of two young children, one-year-old Neiber Cárdenas Pirza in December 2014 and a two-day-old baby in June 2014. The Wounaan claimed the deaths were a result of inadequate health care and living conditions in the sports arena. "Our people practice culture, artistry, spirituality and traditional medicine. We need our lands to do so," said Obispo.⁵

The affirmative belief that the Wounaan were "occupying" the sports arena and taking a political stand against their dispossession by violence is key to understanding Wounaan resistance. "We arrived November 28, 2014, and since that time we had been in resistance," Chama Puto said.⁶ Because "the local government hardly did anything, and gave no guarantees of assistance," he urgently called on international help and social advocacy networks to "get meetings with entities who could make change" and affirmed Wounaan ancestral ties to their lands. "Land doesn't belong to the government or police. It belongs to the indigenous," he added.⁷

Although Wounaan Leaders such as Chama Puto are well versed in Colombia's constitutional law, they are fully aware of how constitutional decrees have remained rhetorical discourses because of the government's failure to implement constitutional protections within its infrastructure—an absence of institutional support that has undermined the visionary purpose of the protections. In particular, Article 63 states, "Communal lands of ethnic groups and reservation lands cannot be taken away or attached";⁸ Article 72 states, "Ethnic groups settled in areas of archeological treasures have special rights over that cultural heritage...