Colombia’s wind farms bring promising and pain for the indigenous group

When José Luis Iguarán steps outside his house in La Guajira, North Colombia, he gets a line of 10 towering wind turbines that extend over the terrain to the Caribbean Sea.

The indigenous group Wayuu, to which Mr Iguarán belongs, has lived for centuries on the dry peninsula, goats hats, care of crops, mining salt and fish.

With some of the most powerful winds in Colombia, La Guajira has now become the epicenter of the shift of the land of fossil fuels to renewable energy.

But this green ambition has confronted both resistance and reflection with the locals, whose territory is deep connected to culture, tradition and a profound relationship with nature.

“You wake up and suddenly you no longer see the trees. Instead you see the turbines,” says Mr. Iguarán.

His community now shares his country with Guajira 1 – one of the two operational wind farms in Colombia. Another 15 wind farms are currently under construction in La Guajira, and there are plans for dozens of more.

“At night the sound of the turbines disrupts our dreams. For us, dreams are holy,” adds the Lord Iguarán.

The Wayuu, which has around 380,000 in Colombia and extends to Venezuela, has various traditions and beliefs. Dreams are a bridge to the spiritual world, where they receive messages from their ancestors who are interpreted within the family.

Despite the cultural disruptions, Mr Iguarán says that his community has benefited from Guajira 1. The energy company behind it has paid the Colombian company Isagen to have access to clean drinking water, better roads and sturdy brick houses that have replaced some of the mud and cactus.

Isagen, which is owned by Canada’s Brookfield, also pays three local communities an annual fee for the wind farm to be there, a percentage of the annual electricity income and 20% from the sale of carbon credits. These are purchased by companies that want to compensate for their CO2 emissions.

Mr. Iguarán believes that such energy projects can help bring vital development to the second-poor region of Colombia. But not everyone shares their enthusiasm.

“The wind farms produce clean energy, but they create division in the Wayuu communities,” explains Aaron Laguna, a Wayuu Visser, who lives in the coastal village of Cabo de la Vela.

His community is currently consulting about a wind farm that is being built nearby. He has hit others by projects that complain about a lack of transparency, poor compensation, a lack of respect for cultural norms and corruption.

“Bad negotiations are made and the means given (to us) are not properly managed by the locals,” he adds.

These concerns have led to disputes with energy companies and even conflict in Wayuu communities. Some oppose the projects, while others feel excluded from negotiations that can bring them benefits.

“There is still this idea that if it is green, it is automatically good,” says Joanna Barney, director of environment, energy and communities at Colombian Think Tank Indadaz. It has extensively investigated the energy transition and its effects on the Wayuu.

“In Colombia … there is no solid legal framework to properly assess the environmental effects – and the social effects are immeasurable.”

In December 2024, the Spanish company EDP Renováveis ​​plans for two wind farms in La Guajira, said that the projects were no longer economically viable.

A factor was the doubling of local indigenous communities that said they would be affected and therefore need compensation, from 56 to 113.

The EDP decision followed at the exit of May 2023 of the Italian multinational enel from another planned wind farm in the region. Enel attributed his departure to “constant protests” that stopped construction more than half of the working days between 2021 and 2023.

Guajira 1 was also marred by roadblocks, a common way to protest in La Guajira when the locals feel unheard of.

And think tank Indadaz has included cases of attacks against employees of the energy companies, including armed robberies and abductions. And in some areas it has found cases of relocation and violence between local communities that do not agree on neighboring wind farms.

“We call it the ‘wind wars’,” says Mrs. Barney.

For Colombian anthropologist Wieldler Guerra there is a clear broken connection between the Wayuu and the wind farms.

“There are two worlds talking, and they did not succeed in understanding each other,” he says.

This gap extends to the way they perceive the wind – the element centrally in these projects.

“For the Wayuu, the wind is people. It’s not the wind, but the wind. There are eight different winds in Wayuu culture, mythological and ancestral beings with different temperaments that form the surrounding environment and must be respected.”

Companies and the Colombian government, on the other hand, see wind as an resource for utilizing environmental progress, profit and to meet the energy needs of the country.

Although Colombia has a relatively clean domestic electricity matrix, with almost two-thirds from hydro electricity, the country remains vulnerable to low reserve mirrors, which creates a risk of energy shortages. Wind energy currently contributes only 0.1% of the energy mix.

For energy companies that invest in the region, the risk of conflicts with the locals is a worrying prospect.

Such a company, Aes Colombia, develops the largest wind energy cluster in the country in La Guajira, with six wind farms.

The company insists that it maintains an open dialogue with communities, offers fair compensation and guarantees benefits such as clean drinking water and shares in carbon credits.

But it says that good community relationships are not enough.

“We cannot do these projects alone,” says Federico Echavarría, general manager of Aes Colombia. “The government must help resolve conflicts between communities.”

On the windy beach in Cabo de la Vela, the Lord Laguna says that La Guajira has been historically neglected by the state.

Education and health care are poor and most rural communities have no running water.

Some people still walk for hours every day to collect water from Jagüeys – reservoirs filled with rainwater.

His community has a small saltwater treatment plant that produces fresh water and wants the company to plan to build the nearby wind farm to expand it, so that more locals benefit.

Despite the conversation about progress, he points to a continuing paradox. “The worst thing is that we don’t even receive a single kilowatt of the electricity produced here,” he complains.

The plan is that the electricity of the wind farm is sent elsewhere instead, and that the village will continue to trust in generators, at least in the medium term.

Although the future may look rosy for clean energy, many Wayuu are still afraid that they will stay in the dark.