La Guajira Peninsula

In the sun-scorched desert of La Guajira Peninsula on the northern border of Colombia, a girl walks along the dirt road to her “rancheria”, a handful of makeshift homes that constitute her village. The heat of the parched, barren land is broken only by a brittle tree or a few spiny cacti. She has just returned ...

Wayuu indigenous women walk along a dirt street in their community of Albania, Colombia, on Sept. 9, 2015. The Wayuu for centuries have dominated life on La Guajira peninsula, the northernmost tip of South America, first resisting conquest by Spain and since independence freely crossing the ...

While much of the country is fertile and lush, the La Guajira Peninsula is arid and stark. Cacti, thistles and sand dunes dot the region. Water is gold here — and many residents have limited access to that life-sustaining treasure. Rainfall is rare, riverbeds are often dry, and many of the community windmills ...

Authorities along Colombia's Caribbean coast have issued alerts over extreme rainfall that is expected as a consequence of hurricane Maria that is battering the region. From Tuesday until Thursday, authorities from the La Guajira Peninsula to the bay of Uraba, authorities have raised the alert as the rainfall ...

... called the presence of tanks on the countries' joint border a “provocation.” Bogota responded the tanks have been there since 2015. According to Venezuelan state news outlet TeleSUR, its government claimed that Bogota had sent the tanks to the border in the northern La Guajira peninsula on Sunday.

Desert. Not a landscape I had foreseen in the many daydreams I'd enjoyed in anticipation of exploring Colombia. Yet there I was, hurtling along at alarming speed in a rusty jeep that bore evident scars of a cavalier driver. Wizened shrubs and stoic cacti peppered the otherwise parched sands of the Guajira ...

Authorities in the area breathed a sigh of relief as the storm, which triggered heavy flooding in towns along the La Guajira peninsula of Colombia, caused minimal damage overall. Some officials were even grateful for the rain after a multiyear drought in the poverty-stricken area. "Families that evacuated are ...

Councilor for Women of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), and a member of the Wayuu tribe in Colombia's La Guajira Peninsula, explained to a group of us last week in Washington, D.C., 34 of the 102 indigenous tribes in Colombia are on the verge of extinction. According to the United Nations, this ...

Numbering around 300,000, the Wayuu are Colombia's largest indigenous group, but have long suffered from poverty and a lack of infrastructure in their remote community on the La Guajira peninsula. Thousands of ethnic Wayuu people have suffered malnutrition in recent years. Children have been worst ...