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On June 19, 2022, newly elected President Gustavo Petro addressed thousands of followers in Bogotá who were celebrating his victory. This was the first time in modern Colombian history that a left-wing candidate had won the nation’s highest office. His victory came after years of corruption scandals, violence against environmental defenders and signatories of the peace accord, street protests, and growing discontent with previous center-right governments.
Backed by a range of Indigenous, Black, peasant and workers’ organizations, Petro and the vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez—an acclaimed Afro-descendant environmental activist—emphasized throughout their campaign the need to reimagine the relation between nature, the economy, and Colombian society. Among other things, they promised to ban fracking, place a moratorium on new oil exploration contracts, and boost renewable energy production. During his speech that evening, Petro reaffirmed his intention of leveraging a “just energy transition” in the Americas and disentangling Latin American progressivism from its reliance on fossil fuels, a harmful legacy of the Pink Tide of the 2000s.
The wind rush
Colombia, despite its negligible carbon footprint, has suffered the effects of the coal and oil industries in profound though uneven ways. To break away from this legacy, Petro has envisioned a plan that depends heavily on the wind of La Guajira—a coastal region located in the northernmost tip of Colombia. This is one of the windiest places in South America and is also the ancestral territory of the Wayuu, the largest Indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela (with a combined population of about 790,000).
The Wayuu are almost evenly split across urban and rural areas of the dry tropical forest that spans through most of La Guajira. Their main economic activities go from goat grazing, fishing, artisanal salt mining, small-scale agriculture to cross-border commerce and salaried jobs in the tourist industry, bureaucracy, and energy and mining companies. They speak Wayuunaiki and have about 30 matrilineal clans that shape their heavily decentralized political life. As dwellers of the poorest department in Colombia (with a poverty rate of 67 percent), the Wayuu have insufficient access to basic infrastructure, including electricity, as well as drinking water, food, and healthcare.
La Guajira has a layered history of natural resource extraction, from the colonial capture of pearls to recent coal mining and natural gas ventures. Undoubtedly, centuries of extractivism have left a painful mark on Wayuu land. Such undertakings have not just unleashed forms of dispossession and violence against Indigenous communities. They have also perpetuated the view that La Guajira is a sacrifice zone, whose main function is to provide natural resources for the rest of Colombia and the globe. Now, amid the urgency of the climate crisis and the vulnerability of the country’s hydropower network (which sustains 70 percent of the electricity demand), La Guajira has been assigned a new task: leading the country’s transition to renewable energy sources.
To capture this eolian “resource,” the previous government of Iván Duque (2018–2022) approved the construction of 16 wind farms in 2022, but another 41 are being planned. According to a report by the NGO INDEPAZ, the wind farms are backed by 19 national and transnational companies whose total investment amounts to six billion US dollars. Nearly all of the 2,500 wind turbines will sit on Wayuu land.
Colombia is not alone in its vigorous push for renewable energy. Latin America has been a world leader in low-carbon energy and, according to the International Energy Agency, wind power will likely generate between a quarter and a third of global energy by 2050. Yet what distinguishes the Colombian case is that most of the low-carbon infrastructure will occupy the Resguardo Indígena Wayuu de la Alta y Media Guajira, one of the largest Indigenous territories in that nation (with a little over one million hectares). While these spaces are collectively owned and cannot be privatized, the scale of the infrastructure, the corporate nature of the projects, and the sweeping indifference toward Indigenous transition agendas could trigger a new form of climate colonialism over the Wayuu’s territory and wind.
So far, the evidence is not encouraging. Human rights organizations have decried that prior consultations are being carried out hurriedly, without the adequate support from independent experts and under deeply unequal conditions (including an epidemic of child malnutrition). The wind rush has also brought about internal conflicts and physical violence. Wayuu families have experienced a spike in disputes over who deserves to have a seat at the table when negotiating with energy companies. Threats against Indigenous environmental defenders have also proliferated, while proposals have recently been put forth (so far unsuccessfully) to militarize Indigenous land to shield energy infrastructure.
Wind turbines are also entangled in other forms of environm