Auto 004 of 2009

In this Auto, the Court was gravely concerned with the threat that internal displacement posed to the existence of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia. The Court attributed this threat to three main factors: (1) rupture of structures and community disintegration; (2) culture shock outside of their ancestral lands; (3) getting caught in the middle of the violence. 

The disintegration of Indigenous communities is a result of both threats on their ancestral lands as well as threats in their urban settings during and post-displacement. As to the first reason, the occupation of armed factions of Indigenous territories has been pervasive and consistent throughout the armed conflict. Indigenous Peoples’ territories are used as battlegrounds– including the installation and disbursement of land mines, as centers of operation for armed factions, and have generally been occupied by armed actors. 

This has not only generated fear and tension within Indigenous Peoples’ of their safety and wellbeing, but has also resulted in the targeting of Indigenous Peoples by armed actors. The Court found that Indigenous Peoples are frequently accused of being collaborators and informants are thrust into the middle of the conflict between factions. This means that they are not trusted by either armed factions, State factions, or otherwise, given that they are caught in the middle and the various armed groups thus treat them with skepticism and mistrust. 

The targeting results in increased and severe violence against Indigenous Peoples. For instance, the armed actions have systematically used extrajudicial killings against Indigenous leaders who try to advocate for their communities. They have also destroyed homes and crops, limited the mobility of Indigenous people across their lands, stolen food and goods, forcibly recruited minors into the armed operations, forced prostitution of Indigenous women and girls, murdered and threatened teachers and human rights defenders, used Indigenous people as human shields during shooting confrontations, and occupied community spaces, such as schools and community centers. 

Beyond the armed factions intruding into Indigenous Peoples’ ancestral lands, third-party actors engaged in illicit activities on their land have also used the chaos of the armed conflict to occupy Indigenous territory for their illicit profit-making activities. This has been facilitated by the lack of title ownership by Indigenous Peoples to their ancestral territories , which emboldens actors to “invade” said lands for their illegal activities. These include mining, monoculture plantations, and timber harvesting, among others. These activities run counter to the relationship Indigenous Peoples have with their land and thus complicates the ability of these communities to pass down cultural values and knowledge deeply tied with the land. Additionally, this is compounded by their inability to connect and pass down this knowledge when their lands fall victim to over-deforestation and serious environmental harm. 

During the armed conflict, armed factions also used occupied Indigenous land to plant profit-making crops such as coca leaves. This led the State to fumigate large swaths of coca leaf plantations, through the use of planes, which proved seriously destructive to Indigenous Peoples access to food, access to healthy, uncontaminated water, as well as leading to health concerns, including dermatological and respiratory complications. 

The compounded suffering in their ancestral lands led thousands of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia to leave, the majority of them deciding to congregate in urban settings and cities. This in turn has led to new challenges in this new setting. For one, the Indigenous Peoples’ structures– which rely heavily on ties to ancestral lands– are threatened without this important marker in the urban setting. The distance from their lands also complicates their ability to preserve cultural memory and cultural practices because they are unable to farm and eat traditional foods and have no way to perform traditional medicinal practices without their access to lands. This culture shock is transferred onto younger generations living in cities and urban environments, who, without these socio-cultural markers, do not understand the weight and importance of cultural norms such as respect for elders. 

Even beyond the extermination of cultural norms, Indigenous Peoples in urban settings face serious barriers to accessing basic needs because they may not speak Spanish,  may not read and write, may be apprehensive of loud and vast city landscapes, and may not fare well in spaces where they do not know their peers and thus cannot be in solidarity with their communities. 

This is compounded by structural discrimination. The Court found much of the dire and severe situation of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia due to the armed conflict was due to structural discrimination by the State. For instance, even though the State had initiated two projects aimed at understanding the particular situation of Indigenous Peoples displaced by the armed conflict, the Court found that it had taken the State seven years only to design how these programs would be implemented. The Court expressed shock over the “generalized indifference when faced with the horror that Indigenous communities have had to experience throughout the last years– indifference which itself is a disparagement of basic constitutional postulates that govern us as a social state of law based on respect for ethnic and cultural diversity” (our translation). 

Specifically, Indigenous women report having to fight for visibility of their situation. As one Indigenous woman stated during public hearings,

we are left in charge of our families, accepting activities that are not traditional to our cultures, such as domestic work, or in the worst case, even selling our bodies. As Indigenous women, we have to fight to be recognized as displaced persons, to fight to have access to health and education that is not our own, to eat food that is foreign to our culture and our bodies, to see that our families to not disintegrate and our children do not lose our culture.

The Court saw the situation of internally-displaced Indigenous Peoples to affect both their collective and individual rights to life, personal safety, freedom from cruel and inhumane treatment, and dignity. This is on top of the numerous human rights violations that affect the general displaced population identified by the Court in T-025 of 2004. 

Many Indigenous persons, unable to cope with the serious affectations to their existence as ethnic groups, as well as more basic things like extreme poverty, return home, only to be revictimized by armed factions that occupy their ancestral lands. 

Understanding the main priority to be avoiding the extermination of Indigenous Peoples, the Court issued the following orders:

• Within six months, implement a program for the Guarantee of Rights of Indigenous Communities Affected by Displacement, which must include prevention and mitigation aspects to the numerous affectations of human rights suffered by these communities; and
• Specific protection measures for all thirty ethnic groups who are at risk of extinction, including the prevention of internal displacement.