Colombia "Wayuu Tribe" 2023

TEAM5 will be deploying on February 8-17th, 2023 to the lost "Wayuu Tribe".

The Wayuu indigenous people of La Guajira, at the northern tip of Colombia, have gone through major social and ecological changes over the past three decades that have happened more quickly than their ability to adapt to them.

More than 270,000 Wayuu live in La Guajira, organized into 23 clans. However, tracking their population as well as their deaths is nearly impossible. Due to the lack of an official census, most of the Wayuu communities don’t keep an official count of births or deaths. That means that, without official figures of deaths related to malnutrition and coal dust pollution, it is difficult for NGOs and journalists to draw international attention to the humanitarian crisis.

Wayuu activists and aid groups, however, blame the deaths of thousands of children, and the elderly as well, over the past decade on malnutrition and a lack of basic medical care.

The Wayuu say that increasingly longer droughts have meant that the streams feeding the aquifers and wells supplying water to the community have gotten drier than usual, making any kind of meaningful farming impossible.