Excerpt: “Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia” by Lital Khaikin, Waging Nonviolence
Photo: Siona leader Mario Erazo Yaiguaje and Amazon Frontlines lawyer Lina Maria Espinosa during a community assembly. Photo by Amazon Frontlines.
Montreal-based journalist Lital Khaikin writes about the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia in Waging Nonviolence.
Khaikin begins her article by setting this crucial context: “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.”
She highlights: “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.”
Indigenous Guards protecting land defenders
Khaikin also notes: “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.”
“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.”
Extractivism threatens Indigenous communities
The article quotes María del Rosario Arango Zambrano, Colombian human rights lawyer working with the Forest Peoples Programme, who explains: “Much of Putumayo has already been licensed for exploration or exploitation.”
It also quotes Javier Garate, a policy adviser with Global Witness (and a member of the Peace Brigades International-Canada Board of Directors), who notes about the resistance to corporations in the Putumayo region: “Anyone who speaks out against their presence receives death threats or are attacked. But those threats don’t come directly from oil companies [instead they come from members of armed groups].”
And the article quotes Andrew Miller of Amazon Watch (and a member of the National Coordinating Committee for PBI-USA) who comments on the importance of Indigenous peoples recovering their ancestral lands: “These processes, as we say in North America, Land Back, are playing out around the Amazon. 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 read the full article, go to Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia: Despite facing existential threats, unarmed Indigenous guards are at the forefront of the struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands and end oil drilling in the Amazon (Lital Khaikin, Waging Nonviolence, April 30, 2025).
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