Drones hover low over coca fields in Catatumbo, a remote region in northeastern Colombia along the border with Venezuela, tracing invisible lines of control across the land. They are joined by rumours circulating on social media, naming alleged collaborators, announcing new allegiances, warning of imminent violence. Together, drones and rumours kill arbitrarily: they determine who can move, who must flee, and who disappears. This is the texture of war in Catatumbo today.
The fragile border region has experienced a sharp escalation of armed conflict since early 2025, as multiple illegal armed groups, including the ELN, dissident factions of the FARC, and elements linked to the Clan del Golfo, vie for control of territory long marked by weak state presence and lucrative illicit economies. Civilians have been displaced, confined, and threatened with violence, including forced recruitment and targeted attacks. Local communities report that armed actors’ actions have disrupted food production, limited mobility, and hindered access to basic services, while official humanitarian relief remains scarce. These conditions have left communities to rely on their own initiatives and networks for survival Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
Last year’s humanitarian emergency briefly pushed Catatumbo into the national spotlight. Slogans such as ‘Al Catatumbo Nada lo Tumba’ (nothing can strike down Catatumbo) were painted on walls across Colombia in a loud and clear show of solidarity. The government declared a ‘conmocion interior’ state of emergency allowing for exceptional humanitarian measures. By April 2025 it had ended, but the violence had not. On January 3 2026, the collapse of the Maduro regime in neighbouring Venezuela acted as a further trigger for unrest.
According to estimates by OCHA and the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 100,000 people have been displaced from Catatumbo since January 2025. As armed actors continue to fight for territorial control, and exceptional humanitarian relief is shrinking, the responsibility for survival falls back onto those who live on and from the land itself.
Catatumbo’s ‘care-land’ history
Humanitarian relief is not delivered to Catatumbo; it is improvised from within the land. Here we trace the terrain of survival that shows how humanitarian care operates when merged into a land, fractured by violence and sustained through its connections.
In Catatumbo, care and land are inseparable. Access to food, health, protection, and dignity depends on the ability to inhabit, move through, and claim territory under conditions of violence. For the local Peasant Farmer Association Ascamcat, the guiding principle remains: “Life, dignity, land tenure, and permanence in the territory”.
Returning to care-land
Catatumbo sits at the crossroads of multiple crises. It is one of the world’s most productive coca-growing regions, a strategic corridor along the Venezuelan border, and a territory where state presence has long been fragile. It experienced egregious violence during the ongoing Colombian armed conflict, including mass executions and furnaces built to dispose of bodies. Left largely to its own devices, local institutions have long relied on a patchwork of humanitarian programmes, community organisations, and civil society platforms to fill persistent gaps.
As a result, responsibility for care and humanitarian relief has been returned to the land itself. Homegrown initiatives such as the Zona de Reserva Campesina- legally recognised rural reserve zones created under Colombian law to support small‑scale farming and campesino territoriality; and the Pacto Catatumbo have played a central role: stabilising rural livelihoods, formalising land rights, and anchoring development plans in community priorities. Human rights defenders and regional civil society organisations including Ascamcat, describe these arrangements as uneven and incomplete, yet indispensable; systems that made life bearable without ever delivering security or peace. In crises, these initiatives are the only option that enables humanitarian care to work at all. The fragile ‘care-land’ they sustain is now under acute strain. As fighting intensifies, it is at breaking point.
Fracturing care-land
In Catatumbo, armed clashes between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissident factions of the former FARC have escalated. Criminal groups, from the region-wide Tren de Aragua to local youth gangs, further fuel the violence. Drones and social media intensify these dynamics. In Catatumbo, bomb’s fall from the sky and mines are placed in the ground. The fractures ripple through care systems.
Access to medical and humanitarian supplies is increasingly blocked. Ambulances cannot reach remote areas, roads are mined, and infrastructure like schools, clinics, administrative offices is neglected or destroyed. Local contacts or staff from regional humanitarian networks report that billions of Colombian pesos are spent on arms while essential services languish. These blockages are embedded in the region’s topography, shaping who can survive.
Care networks are breaking down. Local, legally-recognised community organisations such as the Juntas de Acción Comunal (JAC) are disintegrating. Social leaders are fleeing or disappearing, and with them the work they sustained. Families abandon their homes with little more than the hope that aid awaits in shelters and registration centres in towns near the border with Venezuela such as El Tarra, Tibú, Ocaña, or the departmental capital, Cúcuta. Some remain to protect land, crops, or elderly relatives. The fractures run deep.
Connecting care-land
Yet continuity of care is patched together across Catatumbo. Families, neighbours, and local organisations improvise systems of mutual support that extend beyond village boundaries and displacement routes. Community leaders coordinate relief, share information, and maintain connections between rural areas and shelters in nearby cities. Care here is fragile and constantly renegotiated, yet it persists.
The Mesa Humanitaria, established in 2018, illustrates how such care is coordinated under these conditions. As a recognised governance platform in Colombia, it brings together Indigenous resguardos, women’s organisations, municipal authorities, and international observers to negotiate access to humanitarian aid, document violations, and coordinate relief in areas otherwise cut off. Through the Mesa, strategies emerge to distribute food and medicine, verify incidents of displacement or violence, and advocate for basic rights.
While formal, the Mesa depends on informal practices and social ties: neighbours checking on one another; connections between those who have fled and those who stayed; the sharing of scarce resources; exchanges of information about risks and safe passage; pooling medical supplies; or collectively monitoring landmines. These connections hold care-land together across fractures, weaving humanitarian action into the terrain itself. Any engagement in Catatumbo must work with these connections rather than around them.
Care-land at stake
Today, this care-land is under direct threat. Armed groups, shifting geopolitics along the Colombian border with Venezuela, where conflict dynamics between armed groups extend across the frontier, the shadow of US interventions, and a diminishing humanitarian presence erode the fragile conditions under which care can be sustained. What remains is not continuity secured by institutions, but care unevenly patched together across fractured territory. Humanitarian relief in Catatumbo is neither stable nor assured. It is living on the brink of violence and abandonment. Hanging on, as one human rights activist puts it, by little more than half a hope.
Silke Oldenburg a reçu des financements du Fonds National Suisse (FNS) de la recherche scientifique et fait partie du projet de recherche « The Future(s) of Humanitarian Design ».
Anna Leander a reçu des financements du Fond National Suisse pour le project 'The Future of Humanitarian Design' (CRSII5_213546)
Nora Doukkali a reçu des financements du Fonds National Suisse (FNS) de la recherche scientifique et fait partie du projet de recherche « The Future(s) of Humanitarian Design ».
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
