Winds of Change: How the renewable bonanza is impacting Colombia's largest indigenous population

For years, colonists extracted coal from the Wayuu people's territory. Now it's been marked as the heart of Colombia's energy transition

The following is a guest post by Rishab Jagetia, creator of the Winds of Change newsletter, who is living in La Guajira investigating the impact of the energy transition on local indigenous populations.

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When walking along the beach of El Cabo de la Vela, in La Guajira, Colombia, during the windy month of January, the power of the wind is inescapable. Known in the Wayúu indigenous people’s mythology as holding Jepira, the metaphysical resting place of all souls for Wayúu, the rocky shores, picturesque cliffs, and constant wind currents from the sea have always had spiritual significance for all Wayúu.

However, these waters also host a myriad of proposed offshore wind projects. For some Wayúu, these projects represent a much-welcomed source of development in times of financial uncertainty and changing traditions. For others, it means losing something irreplaceable: ancestral connections to the land and collective solidarity among families. These next few years will determine which route La Guajira chooses to take.

The green transition is heralded as a positive development worldwide, boosting clean energy resources and dismantling fossil fuel hegemony. But the reality on the ground in many parts of the Global South is very different. Renewable energy demand is driving mining for critical minerals, many of which are found in biodiversity hotspots and the few remaining intact ecosystems on the planet. The energies of the future–solar, wind, hydro–are crucial to fighting climate change, but they still leave negative impacts on the areas they affect.

Rare earth mines, dams, and wind and solar farms are displacing farmers, indigenous groups, and the more-than-human world, just as fossil fuel plants and coal mines have for generations. In the north of Colombia, a region home to the nation’s largest indigenous population, Wayúu people are experiencing the impacts of dozens of proposed wind farms. Despite attempts from the country’s new left-wing government to secure a “just energy transition” – one which does not victimize already marginalized groups – the wind farms have brought waves of social and environmental conflict to Indigenous people. This is after decades of environmental degradation thanks to housing one of South America’s largest coal mines. For the Wayuu people, extractivism and climate change have brought their culture to its knees. Decades of development, both green and brown, have left many without water, energy, and cultural livelihoods.

The Wild West of Colombia

To many Colombians, La Guajira may conjure images of the “Wild West” of Colombia, where unforgiving desert landscapes, extensive coastlines, and indigenous people drinking whiskey are commonplace. The region holds historical and literary importance. Simón Bolivar, most well known for his instrumental role in the independence of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador, originally wanted to put the capital of “La Gran Colombia” in La Guajira. Colombia’s most famous author, Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Marquez, frequently referred to La Guajira in his writing, most famously in his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

La Guajira, Colombia, is one of thirty-two provinces in Colombia, situated in the northernmost part of the country and bordering Venezuela. A region teeming with ecological and cultural diversity, it is home to a large proportion of Afro-Colombians and the Wayúu people. The Wayúu have inhabited La Guajira for at least 3000 years, and their history demonstrates a remarkable resiliency and ability to adapt to changing political circumstances. Over their history, they have transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and are the only lowland indigenous peoples of South America to have adopted cattle-raising. When the early Spanish tried to eradicate Wayúu peoples, they proved to be one of the only indigenous groups able to successfully resist colonization by developing commercial and military relations with Dutch, English, and French traders. Much of the Wayúu’s ability to survive and thrive is due to their cultural adaptability, such as adopting goat grazing in drying conditions.

The arrival of Europeans and their resource extractivism did bring significant changes to Wayuu society. Their traditional lands became hotspots for extraction and inequality, creating a “bonanza economy”, with colonists raiding the territory for pearls and minerals. With the establishment of the Colombian state in 1810, the material realities of the peninsula did not change. Isolated from the capital of Bogota and with easy access to the Caribbean, La Guajira emerged as a center for contraband trade, ranging from Dutch goods from Aruba to gasoline and oil from Venezuela. From salt to talcum powder, coffee to cotton, economic development in the region has almost always taken an unequal path generating wealth for some and poverty and violence for most.

The Coal Bonanza

In 1975, an affiliate international arm of what is now Exxon Mobil signed an agreement for 32,000 hectares of land with the Colombian government, developing a railroad to connect El Cerrejon, now the largest open-pit coal mine in South America, to a port on the northern coast. The arrival of Cerrejón has been linked to the economic development of La Guajira in the 40 years since its opening, accounting for 57% of the department’s GDP as of 2023 with an annual production of 22 million tons of coal. However, as the testament of many Afro-Colombian and Wayuu communities demonstrate, Cerrejon’s arrival and continued expansion have displaced, contaminated, and irreparably affected many of La Guajira’s most vulnerable populations. Charges range from failing to consult communities during the construction of infrastructure, consuming much of the region’s freshwater flowing from the Ranchería River, and contributing to problems of food insecurity, water contamination, and environmental destruction. Decades of litigation and protest from communities and legal scholars have affirmed communities’ rights to compensation and redress from El Cerrejón’s unjust devastation, but the implementation has been slow and the remediation of El Cerrejón’s ecological damages all but irreparable. As one community member puts it, “There’s no real approach or dialogue with communities in general” from Cerrejón. Cerrejón declined to respond to questions about these concerns. However, according to their website, they have rehabilitated over 5000 hectares of land into woodlands, and engaged in numerous reforestation and conservation projects with surrounding communities.

El Cerrejón, now owned by Swiss company Glencore, represents a common trend starting in the 1980s by Latin American governments: relying on multinational company-driven resource extraction of raw materials and fossil fuels to spur economic development and fund social programs with royalty taxes. But the wealth did not trickle down. More infants die from hunger in La Guajira than anywhere else in Colombia, and the province has the second highest rate of poverty in the country. With many Wayúu communities not having access to water, electricity, or food security, worsened by desertification and drought brought by climate change, NGOs ranging from UNICEF to World Vision have dedicated millions of dollars to addressing the eternal crisis of surviving in Wayúu communities in rural areas. Still, poverty has remained stubbornly high and groundwater levels that provide drinking water have dropped precipitously.

Shifting Sands

The Wayúu have always been known to be resilient, especially in their ability to survive in the water-scarce desert landscapes that characterize much of the Guajira peninsula. However, they have not been immune to the effects of climate change, which has drastically reduced rainfall and increased temperatures. These changes, along with a rapidly growing population (which has reportedly grown 40% between 2005 and 2018) and increased deforestation in critical ecosystems, have led to, in some cases, unlivable conditions that have forced families to flee ancestral lands for urban areas. Mauricio Ramirez Álcarez, who has worked in public planning for the capital city of Riohacha, La Guajira, for more than 30 years, notes that “every year, there is less water and less space”, and that the cities of Riohacha and Uribia have been unable to keep up with the drastic influx of Wayuu migrants coming from the increasingly inhospitable desert. As one woman told me over lunch, “We used to be able to grow the beans we’re eating where I lived up north, but now it’s impossible.”

Migration from Venezuela has played a huge role, with estimates at around 158,000 Venezuelan immigrants living in La Guajira. The Wayúu are a binational ethnic group, as their territory covers both La Guajira, Colombia, and Zulia, Venezuela. In the 1980s, when Colombia was plagued by violence, many Wayúu migrated to Venezuela. Some records report that hundreds of thousands were living in Maracaibo, the second-biggest city in Venezuela. However, when humanitarian and political conditions began to worsen, many Wayúu began to migrate back to their ancestral territories in La Guajira. This migration has exacerbated family conflicts and land disputes, as well as increased pressure on scarce water resources in the peninsula.

However, recent years have brought worldwide attention to La Guajira not for its problems, but for its potential for sustainable futures. As Cerrejón’s contract ends in 2034, La Guajira’s deafening winds and sunny shores are shaping up to be the future of energy in the form of wind and solar. La Guajira’s estimated wind potential, between 15 GW and 25 GW, covers Colombia’s entire installed capacity to date.

As of 2023, a reported 57 large wind farm projects are in various stages of development, 98% of which are in Wayúu territory. Political leaders promise that this energy transition will be different from La Guajira’s extractive past.

At the center of these promises is President Gustavo Petro, elected in 2022 as the first Leftist president in Colombia’s history, whose platform of environmental protection in critical areas such as the Amazon Rainforest, commitment to protecting indigenous rights, and vows to strengthen social programs coincide with the global rise of renewable energy due to declining costs and concerns about climate change. Notably, the Ministry of Mines and Energy has named La Guajira “the epicenter” of the Just Energy Transition and renewable energy in Colombia. In addition, Petro brought his whole cabinet to La Guajira, signing the “Pact for a Just Energy Transition,” which promises “a territory for everyone in La Guajira” committing to advance “environmental, social, and economic justice to achieve peace” with Wayuu leaders and energy companies. He asserted that his ban on new oil exploration would be compensated for by the green energy development happening in La Guajira.

However, in a department where 70% of the population lives in energy poverty and where most communities lack electricity access to begin with, very few of these large-scale wind farms will directly provide electricity to the nearby communities. Instead, due to the high costs of connecting communities to the high voltage production of their turbines, companies plan to export electricity through large-scale transmission lines to the national energy grid. The Petro administration is tackling this with an ambition to create 361 “Energy Communities” in La Guajira where decentralized solar power is being installed. The region’s wind, though, which has long been central to the Wayuu’s culture, traditions, and spirituality, is being harnessed for people in the interior of the country who won’t be touched by the impact of these huge-scale energy projects.

Wind: The New Bonanza

For all the promises of a Just Energy Transition in La Guajira, the results have been mixed. On the one hand, Petro respectably inaugurated 80 Energy Communities in La Guajira in 2024, with hundreds more in the planning stages. However, multiple companies, including Celsia, ENEL, and Renovatio have already indefinitely suspended projects, citing elevated costs, environmental permitting, and unanticipated delays.

Partly due to the desire to avoid the same destruction suffered by communities never consulted by Cerrejón in the 1980s, the 1991 Colombian Constitution strengthened rights for Indigenous peoples, while also ensuring that any community affected by any sort of development project such as mineral extraction or wind farms has the right to be consulted, informed, and given options to participate in decision-making. This policy, known as consulta previa or prior consultation, has guided all wind infrastructure development, where in theory the Colombian state should guarantee that companies engage in extensive dialogue with communities about the impacts of the project, mitigation measures to reduce environmental damage, and sign contracts with affected communities for compensations. Only in cases “that have the potential to endanger their ways of life” through displacement or activities that have a “high social, cultural, and environmental impact in an ethnic community” qualify for FPIC, or free, prior, and informed consent, which is the gold standard of community engagement ensuring the right for communities to veto projects.

One does not have to travel far in La Guajira to understand the problems with the process.

In a report from UPME about the failure of the Italian company ENEL’s Windpeshi project, they noted that up to 50% of ENEL’s construction days were met by blockades and protests from communities that claimed to not have been consulted. More importantly, the 13 communities consulted in the project increasingly had territorial disputes and intrafamilial wars. Community leaders disagree about the role that the company had in provoking new conflict, but most agree that “the absence of the state,” the presence of “sold out NGOs,” and a “one-sided dialogue” that failed to “get to know the owners of the territory” worsened “internal community conflicts.”

As the energy transition marches ahead in La Guajira, family divisions have become more common, violence more prevalent, and money more abundant for the few as the vast majority survive in precarity. For all the talk of promoting justice and equity, the energy transition, as it currently stands, replicates the dynamics of past bonanzas justified under the banner of sustainability.

Wayúu communities, or rancherías, are typically around 4 to 5 houses spread out across a territory and increasingly are found in areas subject to the proposed placement of wind turbines, transmission lines, and transit roads. Many communities report that they were never consulted by companies, never told about their rights to prior consultation, and never given any information about the project. One community leader, Fernando, whose last name will be withheld for identity protection, notes that most Wayúu authorities “don’t understand technical language–-what a prior consultation is, what a company does, what environmental or social impacts are”, and this “creates an imbalance” between the community and the company.

While many communities blame companies for their lack of clarity, they also point out the absence of the Colombian state as a culprit. DANCP, the national agency responsible for prior consultation, is legally obligated to guarantee the right to prior consultation by educating communities on their rights. Yet, multiple barriers have hampered this process. For one, there are thousands of these consultations occurring over the country, which pose logistical difficulties in coordinating personnel across dispersed and inaccessible territories. This is worsened by, as one former community leader mentioned, the fact that “companies are not responsible for covering the needs that may exist in the territory concerning water, health, education, and infrastructure” but rather the Colombian state who has been historically associated with neglect and absence from the territory.

There has also been a scramble to secure the cash flow from these projects, causing rifts, power struggles, and territorial disputes in communities. In some cases, family members report that their “traditional authority”—their politically appointed figure for dealings with the state—has signed agreements with companies to cede territory for wind farms while keeping the compensations for themselves. This rupture is far from abnormal. As one Wayúu community leader noted, “A project creates a disparity within the family because the one who is progressing economically quite a lot from the project takes advantage of the rest of the people in his community”. In one community I visited, family members reported hearing four years after the signed agreement between their authority and the company, in which they received no benefits.

Third party mediators from NGOs and collectives formed by Wayúu young leaders have also been found to take advantage of communities, keeping any company benefits for themselves. One university student mentioned that he was planning to create one such collective to provide genuine assistance to Wayúu communities, only to realize that his collaborators just “were in it for the wrong reasons.”

In Wayúu mythology, the legend of Wale´kerü, or the “Weaving Spider”, tells the story of the origins of weaving for Wayúu women. In Wayúu matrilineal society, the woman is the base unit of family organization, and their woven mochilas (bags), chinchorros (hammocks), are an expression of identity. Like spiders, Wayúu culture is built upon the social ties and networks of reciprocity that govern families. With an oral tradition of language, agreements are typically negotiated not by contracts, but by spoken word and trust. Interfamilial conflicts and territorial disputes have always existed for the Wayúu, but an underlying set of principles and customs have been the pillars of conflict resolution. Now, with increasing influence from “Western” society, a younger generation that increasingly speaks Spanish more than the native language of Wayúunaiki, and the possibilities of vast wealth concessions from multinational companies, this web, once durable and undeniably characteristic of Wayuu solidarity and reciprocity, is coming apart.

The Problem of Consent

Long characterized as the ungoverned Colombian “periphery”, the institutionalization of La Guajira and Wayuu people with the establishment of Indigenous resguardos (collective territories), and the progressive, multicultural constitution of 1991, has both given opportunities for Guajiros to participate in the national political stage and also weakened Wayúu legal institutions. While the recognition of traditional authorities across ethnic groups in Colombia has given political representation to otherwise excluded peoples, its one-size-fits-all approach does not adapt to the specific political and social structures that govern peoples like the Wayúu. Many Wayúu see the ancestral authority, or the maternal uncle, as the authority around familial matters, with women playing a stronger role in conflict resolution. However, with the establishment of a traditional authority, many university-educated Wayúu that no longer live in their ancestral territory have gained privileges to negotiate on behalf of their communities. While in most cases this authority figure has the community’s interest in hand, many people have reported that their traditional authorities have been “sold out” to private interests.

New traditional authorities have also emerged as families have divided themselves in efforts to gain access to government resources. This process, often occurring between siblings and cousins, has politically fragmented the territory and ruptured the traditional governance system of Wayúu culture. Conversely, many communities historically lacking access to formal education and government support remain out of the government’s database, leaving them ineligible for many social programs and not consulted in energy infrastructure decisions. What might have been a few hundred communities of extended families decades ago has exponentially increased due to population growth and increased division between families. A report in 2017 from the La Guajira government registered over 3000 Wayúu communities, which has only increased in the years since.

The Wayúu are collective territorial owners of their resguardos, meaning that the concept of private property has never governed economic and social relations. While families had general ideas of where one territory would end and another would begin, these fluid borders were not of much importance. However, with the entrance of wind energy companies coming to specific pieces of land and promising compensation to its ancestral owners, many families have begun to fight, sometimes violently, over territorial domain.

There is no shortage of actors trying to work on improving the implementation of prior consultation and the energy transition in La Guajira. In November of 2024, The Ministry of Interior, and its national director, Álvaro Echeverry Londoño, co-hosted an event to hear community voices that could shape better prior consultations. Noting that “prior consultation is not in its best moment in history,” Echeverry vowed to “construct a new plan of action…together” with community leaders. Some community voices responded with cautious optimism to “rebuild trust between state development and environmental protection”. Others made internal pleas that the Wayúu people “cannot continue with indifference”. Finally, some expressed discontent with the energy companies’ arrivals, with one person saying that “La Guajira does not want Colombia's vision of development”.

There seems to be more hope around the second arm of Petro’s energy transition, which is the implementation of energy communities. In one such event in January 2025 named “Collaborative Efforts for a Just Transition,” the University of La Guajira, representatives from the municipality of Uribia, La Guajira (where most projects will take place), community leaders, energy companies, and international NGOs came together to articulate how these institutions could collaborate to expand small-scale solar access for unconnected communities in Uribia.

As Ricaurte Uliana, a community leader from Jisenterra notes: “Thanks to receiving electricity, the kids can study at night. Women can work on artisanal crafts, strengthening our economy.”

However, many are still concerned about the role out of yet another mass industrial project in the territory. “Around ten years ago, we had a similar conversation about how to support communities through mining and fossil fuel projects,” said Nashry Ahgui of the Foundation of Peace and Reconciliation. “The only difference is that we’re talking about renewable energy, not oil or coal. And yet, 10 years later, even though the government has an impressive plan and Colombia is full of methodologies for better dialogue between communities, companies, and governments, none of it is going to matter without trust. If there’s no trust, nothing will really change.”

The reality of the energy transition, for most Wayuu people, means that the future of their land, culture and wellbeing is still up in the air.

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