History, territory and discourse

For more than five decades, open-pit coal mining has been carried out in the department of La Guajira, Colombia, by one of the largest mining companies in the world. As a result, the ecological order of the ancestral communities, which have been settled there for a long time, has been altered over time; their solidarity economies, their social and cultural fabric, and their political processes have undergone major transformations that transgress their rights and realities. Faced with these dynamics of imposition of certain economic and cultural epistemes on others who already have their own perspectives, the different affected populations have built through history an organisational process, networks of political movements, cultural policies and action agendas that have allowed them to plant resistance in defence of territory, water, ethnic cultures and life. "If today the blood in the veins of the Ranchería River continues to flow so that the land does not stop beating, it is thanks to the fact that we have not stopped mobilising for our mother earth" Jakeline Epiayu.