In May 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued a landmark ruling recognizing the Je’eruriwa People as a subject of collective reparation and ordering their immediate inclusion in the Unified Registry of Victims, after more than 70 years of dispossession and displacement.
This recognition would be key to advancing their relocation and access to their territory. However, months after the decision was made, it has still not been implemented. Thus, for the Je’eruriwa People, legal recognition has not yet translated into effective access to land, reparations, or guarantees of survival as an indigenous people.
Displacement and territorial rupture
For Ipurepi (Oswaldo Rodríguez Macuna), traditional authority and leader of the Je’eruriwa People, the displacement of the Je’eruriwa People is part of a continuous process of dispossession that began in the 1960s. Since then, he says, the continuity of their territorial life has been interrupted by systematic attacks that today place them at risk of physical and cultural extermination.
One of the most critical moments occurred in 1986, when an armed incursion by the armed group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) forced the community to abandon their ancestral territory in the Colombian Amazon. The loss of the territory implied much more than a physical uprooting; it meant the rupture of their way of life, their spiritual practices, and the knowledge that sustains their identity.
Ipurepi says: “There are five of us who know everything about my culture, the harmony with our Mother Earth, our form of government. My father passed on to me the sacred knowledge that teaches how to cure illnesses, to understand the weather, and to regulate the use of nature”. This knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, is their most valuable legacy and, at the same time, what is most at risk, as they depend on the territory to exist.
Institutional denial of land rights
In the midst of this situation, the community rebuilt its organization by retaking traditional structures: ritual spaces, ecological calendar practices, and rules of coexistence that determine the moments of guidance for women and children, permitted foods, and ways of relating to other sectors of society. This effort allowed that, in 2017, the Ministry of the Interior to officially recognize the Je’eruriwa People as an indigenous ethnic group, a fundamental step in their struggle for truth, justice, and reparation.
As a result, the community initiated legal actions before the National Land Agency and the Unit for Attention and Integral Reparation to Victims (UARIV) to demand their relocation and recognition as victims of the armed conflict, a necessary condition to access collective reparation measures. However, between 2018 and 2022, the UARIV denied their registration in the Single Registry of Victims, arguing that their recognition as an indigenous people was recent and even confusing their identity with that of another indigenous people in the region. This denial had direct consequences, as it prevented them from receiving the protection and reparation to which they are entitled.
The judicial process, a tool for recognition
Faced with these obstacles, the Je’eruriwa People went to court and filed a request for direct revocation in 2023, which was rejected again in 2024, prompting the community to file a tutela action to denounce the violation of their collective rights, especially self-determination.
On May 14, 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled in their favor in a landmark decision that recognized the UARIV’s error and reiterated the autonomy and identity of the Je’eruriwa People. Consequently, the Court ordered their immediate incorporation into the Unified Registry of Victims as subjects of collective reparation and ordered that mechanisms for humanitarian attention, relocation, and the guarantee of rights be put in place without delay.
This ruling represented a fundamental step towards the recognition of their right to territory; however, as in many cases, implementation has been blocked: registration in the Unified Registry of Victims is still incomplete, and the necessary measures to move forward with their relocation have not materialized.
The responsible entities have delayed the process, alleging administrative and budgetary reasons.
Even more serious: when the community made progress in identifying a property for their relocation and in complying with all the technical requirements, verification visits, and documentary records, the process was halted by the opposition of the municipal mayor, without any legal basis and without jurisdiction over the territory.
Revictimization and territorial blockade
The lack of implementation has been accompanied by new acts of institutional violence. The community has faced public acts of discrimination, threats against its leaders, and continuous institutional rejection without legal support. Thus, what should be a reparation process has become a prolongation of dispossession.
In practice, the denial of access to land and the delay in implementing the ruling perpetuate the vulnerability of these people.
This type of institutional blockade reflects broader patterns, documented by the Legal Defense and Shelter Fund (LDSF), in which indigenous peoples face not only territorial dispossession but also systematic obstacles to exercising their rights, even after obtaining legal recognition.
In this context, the LDSF has supported the Je’eruriwa People through the Yira Castro Legal Corporation. This accompaniment has enabled the community to legally monitor the implementation of the ruling, strengthen its organizational capacity, document the territorial and legal processes, and promote advocacy at the national and international levels. These actions have been key to sustaining the defense of the right to land and demanding compliance with the ruling.
Today, the main objective of the Je’eruriwa People is clear: that the sentence is implemented and that the process of access to their territory advances without further blockades. In this way, the community will have the possibility to rebuild its collective life, transmit its knowledge, and ensure its continuity as a people.
