The Wayúu in Colombia and Venezuela : Dying of Thirst

After many years of exclusion and poverty, the Wayúu community in Colombia and Venezuela has been fighting for their voices to be heard. The people of this community, located on the desert peninsula of La Guajira at the northern tip of Colombia and the territory shared with Venezuela, is faced with a combination of hunger, malnutrition, and thirst.

The main reason? The river that runs through the region was dammed and its water privatized for surface coal mining and industrial scale agriculture. Children are especially vulnerable to this deadly situation. The community filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in an effort to force the Colombian government to free up the flow of water. Their petition shines a light once again on a subject that has appeared in the news on and off since mid-2014. Defenders of the community have made many calls for humanitarian assistance programs, grants and projects to help these indigenous people, but few have become reality.

The Wayúu are the largest indigenous group of Venezuela and Colombia. They represent about 11% of the population of the Venezuelan Zulia state and close to 45% of the department of La Guajira.
Writing for Canarias-Semanal.org website, Juan Andrés Pérez Rodríguez argued that mainstream media has not paid enough attention to the urgent issues of this community:

As the corporate media have their well-defined and targeted information priorities (especially against Cuba, Venezuela and other countries that do not align with the West), you will not know that the indigenous nation Wayúu, the largest of Colombia, is dying of hunger and thirst because the mother river of the region has been laid with a dam and its water privatized for the agricultural industry and the exploitation of the coal mine Cielo Abierto, the largest in the world. For the same reason, you surely will ignore the complaint that this community has filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as part of Organization of American States, headquartered in Washington, for the violation of their fundamental vital rights.

The post ends with the trailer of a documentary produced by Colombian journalist Gonzalo Guillén, entitled The River That They Stole. The film, which the indigenous community presented as legal evidence in that complaint, paints a disturbing piccture of the situation in the region using testimonies from both victims and perpetrators.

On February 6, Javier Rojas Uriana, legal representative of the Association of Traditional Indigenous Authorities of the Wayuu Shipia Wayuu (ATIAWSW), along with five other leaders petitioned the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to issue emergency cautionary measures to the Colombian government to allow for the community to regain access to the river in an effort to prevent further deaths and suffering.
According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Ombudsman of the region, in the last three years at least 5,000 Wayuu children have died of starvation and more than 37,000 Wayuu children are suffering malnutrition in the desert area of La Guajira, home to the community. Wayuu observers assert that the number of child deaths is closer to 14,000.
In response to the tragedies in the Wayuu territory, the Colombian government funneled copy 5 million dollars to the area for food and nutrition but the money did not reach the Wayuu community due to corruption asserted Uriana and other leaders.