Around a fire in a ceremonial hut in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Arhuaco people make a pledge. Tying traditional cotton threads around their wrists, they promise to guard the land beneath them – and then they ask for protection.
“Our culture has been preserved for thousands of years,” says Ati Quigua, an Indigenous leader. “We are a peaceful community, but now violence is coming to our land.”
The Arhuaco are profoundly spiritual, with a belief system centred on worshipping and defending the Earth. They descend from the Tayrona, an ancient civilisation brutally subjugated by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. The survivors retreated to the upper valleys of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada, the world’s highest coastal mountain range, but in the centuries since they have endured waves of intrusion – from settlers carving up their lands to Catholic missionaries who tried to quash their traditions.
Now another force has reached their mountain, and the Arhuaco fear it could lead to their final erasure.
“All of the actors have arrived: the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, the drug traffickers,” says Quigua. “They are taking control of our areas and interfering in our local assemblies. They set curfews, telling us when we can and cannot walk in the territory. They want to use it as drug-trafficking corridors.”
Across Colombia, violence is surging. Illegal groups are battling for control of the country’s illicit economies, including key drug-trafficking routes and coca-growing regions. The 2016 peace deal with the guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) has also begun to unravel, allowing splinter factions to move into the vacuum it left behind. The scramble for gold and other illicit minerals has only deepened the bloodshed.
In the first three months of 2025, the number of violent incidents in Colombia increased by 45% compared with the same period last year. Recent attacks have seen scores killed and injured by car bombs and drone strikes across the country. The government has struggled to quell the violence, particularly in remote rural areas.
Few places illustrate this vulnerability more clearly than the Sierra Nevada. Despite its Unesco Biosphere Reserve of Man and Humanity status and recognition as the most irreplaceable ecosystem on Earth in the journal Science, the mountain range has become a strategic prize for traffickers, who exploit its limited state presence, porous borders and routes leading directly to the Caribbean Sea.
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For the Arhuaco, the consequences have been immediate and devastating. Quigua says non-state armed groups have attacked their sacred capital, and in other territories “burned all our traditional work, our sacred objects”. “It is a spiritual violence, a violence to gain a foothold in our territory,” she says.
Dwiarinmacku Alfaro Kwimi, a 22-year-old spiritual leader, describes the escalating violence as a war against nature. “The territory gives us the nourishment we need to survive,” he says. “We are connected to every living being – plants, animals, the sun – in the land. We must defend it.”
These warnings have been heard by international rights groups, with the UN reporting that the five Indigenous groups living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta – the Kogui, Wiwa, Kankuamo, Arhuaco and Ette Naka – face “physical and cultural extinction”. Their combined population is approximately 54,700 people.
Scott Campbell, Colombia’s representative for the UN high commissioner for human rights, says this risk is “an ongoing tragedy that we can and must prevent”.
“Violent actions of non-state armed groups against the Indigenous peoples in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mean they cannot travel within their territory, hunt or carry out their ancestral practices in their sacred places,” he says.
Campbell says armed groups are using unconventional explosive devices and installing anti-personnel mines in the Sierra Nevada, posing an additional risk. Members of the Wiwa community have been injured by these devices in recent months, he adds.
Hundreds have been forcibly displaced in the past two years, and hundreds more confined to their homes. Indigenous leaders say assassination attempts have increased, while Cinep/Programme for Peace, a Colombian research organisation, reports that some victims have been tortured, dismembered and displayed in public spaces in a bid to instil collective terror. Cinep also reported clashes between two armed groups in June last year, which involved hundreds of fighters and led to the confinement of at least 400 Wiwa families, the killing of a 16-year-old and the kidnapping of a 15-year-old.
Quigua says that when 200 people were recently displaced, those who spoke out were targeted. “One man was given hours to leave. The armed group said they would kill him if he said anything more,” she says.
Luz Helena Izquierdo, an Arhuaco elder, says paramilitary groups have warned community leaders “to be careful because they are clearing the territory”. “They are killing people who are not welcome,” she says.
Another tactic is also now being deployed: as tensions escalate, armed groups are turning to children to fill their ranks. The Colombian ombudsman’s office reported 43 alerts of recruitment registered in 2021, 384 cases of forced recruitment in 2023, and 651 cases in 2024.
It is a figure experts say vastly underestimates the real toll: many families stay silent, afraid of the consequences if they speak out. And Indigenous groups have been the hardest hit, accounting for almost half of the UN’s verified cases.
“They have started taking our children, recruiting them,” says Quigua. “Our people have seen some who left in the mountains in camouflage, with rifles. It’s a cultural invasion.”
The children are used as informants, tasked with surveillance, intimidation and upholding the group’s laws in her community, or fighters – often as frontline soldiers to protect the more experienced members. Sexual violence is also rife.
“The groups have learned how effective children can be in consolidating their control over territory,” Campbell says. “Especially the Indigenous kids, they’re excellent scouts, intelligence-gatherers, they know the turf really well.”
The battle for survival is not just being fought against the armed trafficking groups – mining interests are also at play.
“There are constantly new projects: copper mining, farming palm oil, building hydroelectric dams. They even want to mine gold on our sacred sites,” says Quigua. “The landscape deterioration has already begun – they have wounded our mountain.”
That wound is borne out in the data. According to the National Mining Agency, there are 124 active mining titles and 88 overlapping mining applications within the Sierra Nevada’s ancestral territory boundary, known as the Black Line. The agency says it “fully recognises that mining activities in ancestral territories represent a challenge requiring a careful balance between the country’s economic development and comprehensive protection of the fundamental rights of ethnic communities” and follows Colombian law.
Indigenous leaders say they have faced death threats for speaking out against environmental destruction, and at least three have survived recent assassination attempts.
Colombia has suffered the highest number of murders of environmental defenders for three years in a row, according to a Global Witness report. “People are afraid. We live in constant fear,” says Quigua. “Colombia is a very dangerous place for those who defend it.”
But the communities of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta say that if they do not speak out now, they could soon cease to exist. Quigua says: “We are convinced that, if not, within two generations, our future is over.”
