This video was born from the Wayuu people’s spiritual connection with the sea. As a young Wayuu, I share this bond. The sea is not just water, it is a sacred and cosmogonic being that emanates from our relationship with the spiritual world. Its waves represent the bath that cleanses and heals us, just as our grandmothers do.
But today, this connection is being violated by human intervention, industrial expansion and extractivism, leading to an imbalance in our territory.
Editor’s note
This article is part of Dialogue Earth’s Indigenous Voices fellowship. The eight fellows are Indigenous journalists and storytellers from across the Global South. The fellowship aims to foreground not just Indigenous issues, but also the storytelling, reporting and insights of Indigenous journalists themselves.
For Clarena Fonseca Uriana’s community, near the city of Riohacha in Colombia’s La Guajira department, this imbalance is being experienced in very real ways. In this short film she shares, from a female perspective, the sacred relationship our people have with nature and how we deal with changes to the ancestral cycle of balance and imbalance.
For years, Clarena’s community has watched as the sea has eaten away at their territory. One immediate cause is six groynes built in 2007 to protect Riohacha from erosion, which have changed currents and sedimentation further down the coast. But as she explains, for the Wayuu it is much bigger than this. The sea is angry, she says, “about what is being done to her”.
The Wayuu’s ancestral lands on La Guajira peninsula straddle the border between northern Colombia and Venezuela, making them a binational people. Their territory has a great diversity of ecosystems and types of vegetation. This geographical diversity also generates differences among the Wayuu themselves. There are, for example, the Wayuu of the mountainous areas in the south of the region, and at the coasts, the Wayuu of the sea, known as “Wayuu Apalaanchi”.
La Guajira has often suffered from the impacts of long droughts, which are becoming more extreme because of climate change. Along the shores of the Caribbean Sea though, the Apalaanchi are experiencing an impact of drought that is rarely mentioned: coastal erosion. With the flow of rivers often reduced, less sediment is carried into the sea, leaving the coastline less protected. Wayuu families are today facing displacement. In Clarena’s community, five families have already been forced to move away. The sea has also washed away a cemetery and landing area for fishing boats.
We see this as a direct consequence of the extractivism we already suffer on land due to coal mining and the overuse of water, namely at Cerrejón, one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines, and the Cercado dam, which lie further up the Ranchería River that eventually reaches our coast. This extractive approach, led by the state and multinational corporations, is now spreading to our grandmother, the Sea, and directly threatens the marine ecosystems that sustain us.
In recent years, the region has become a focus for renewable energy extraction as well. The development of megaprojects such as the OFW Astrolabio offshore wind farm, consisting of 55 wind turbines just 2.4 km off the coast of La Guajira, threatens to alter marine environments and the spiritual dynamics that our people recognise in the sea.
Although presented as essential for the so-called energy transition, these projects do not seek to bring energy to local communities, but rather to produce green hydrogen and its derivatives, such as ammonia, for export. They also ignore the sacred nature of the sea, commodifying what for us is a source of life, balance and spiritual memory.
I find it ironic that as the world and the state draw up plans for our territory on the grounds of “global benefit”, La Guajira remains one of the regions with the highest poverty rates in Colombia. Here, between 2008 and 2015, nearly 5,000 Wayuu children died from malnutrition and a lack of drinking water, a situation that a Colombian court ruled in 2017 to be a violation of their constitutional rights. Many years after that ruling, this sad state of affairs persists. This paradox reveals the gap between the rhetoric of development and the daily reality of a people who have been systematically dispossessed.
Now, coastal erosion is dispossessing us again. According to the Institute of Marine and Coastal Research (Invemar), of La Guajira’s 789 km of coastline, 21% (approximately 168 km) is affected by erosion. This figure represents a social and economic crisis that puts the lives of the Wayuu of the sea at risk. Not only are homes and businesses being washed away, erosion also threatens food security by damaging coastal ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows and mangroves, that are essential for the reproduction of fish stocks. This makes it harder for the Apalaanchi to earn a living and educate their children.
But it’s more than this. Every piece of coastline that is lost is not just sand: it is our territory, our history, our culture. For the Wayuu, when the land sinks into the sea, a part of our collective memory and the harmony that balances the world is also blurred. Erosion is, therefore, an open wound; a visible consequence of decisions that prioritise economic gain over respect for natural cycles.
If this extractive logic is not stopped, the Sea, our grandmother, our source of life, could become unrecognisable, and with it our way of understanding the world.
Faced with this emergency, Clarena’s community has been active in raising the alarm. In 2023, they filed a legal challenge against the Colombian government, claiming their human rights were being violated. Proceedings are still ongoing. A few months later in February 2024, Clarena presented their case at a public hearing on climate migration before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management is carrying out a study to find ways to mitigate the situation. One response so far has been to suggest relocation. This measure ignores our cultural roots and favours the colonialist system, by making the problem invisible. As Clarena explained during our time filming with her, relocation would impact “our survival, our self-esteem, our growth, our memories”.
“We would never be the same,” she said.
Production credits:
Direction, script and production by Luzbeidy Monterrosa Atencio, Wayuu Siijono clan
Field production by Lucinda Monterrosa
Cinematography by Valentina Reyes Arias
Sound recording and drone videography by Cesar Ipuana
Editing by Valentina Reyes Arias, Manuel Campos Benítez
Sound design and colour grade by Manuel Campos Benítez
Animations by Carolina Hernández Parra
Animated text by Luis Fuenmayor, Wayuu Epieyuu clan
Special thanks to Clarena Fonseca Uriana, her family and the entire community of La Cachaca III
Music:
“Sunrise on Mars” by Jason Shaw, CC BY
“Beginning” by Jason Shaw, CC BY
Original music of the Wayuu people, recorded by Luzbeidy Monterrosa Atencio
Copyright notice:
This video is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. For a copy of the video file, please contact: [email protected]. A clipreel of the original footage is also available on request.
