"Guajiro law," a Colombian police officer told me, "is a complicated law.” From that man's perspective as the commander of a small detachment of Colombian National Police stationed in the Upper Guajira, the customary law of the Guajiro Indians is indeed complicated in its applications.
The commandante was speaking experientially. For while the major principles of Guajiro law are not markedly complex or subtle when stated as analytical abstractions, the application of those principles in the strategies and tactics for resolving disputes gives the appearance of complexity. In its living applications, Guajiro law can understandably render a non-Indian policeman's lot less than happy--complicated, in fact. The National Police in Guajiro territory are charged with maintaining order, and it is their policy to support Guajiro customary law insofar as invoking that law contributes to the management of conflict. But because applications of customary legal principles are affected, sometimes starkly, sometimes subtly, by the vagaries of self-serving calculations and emotions, disputes among the Guajiro may occasionally strike some outside observers as more disorderly than they actually are.
What the comandante called "a complicated law" is focused on acts that, in the Guajiro view, normally cause grief to individuals and groups of persons and for which redress of one sort or another is culturally deemed appropriate. And the Guajiro inventory of liabilities is quite extensive--remarkably so, in my opinion.
The Guajiro and the Guajira
The Guajiro are one of the largest Amerindian populations in lowland South America, numbering well over 100,000. Their language is a member of the Arawak family of languages, and in that language they call themselves Wayu, which can be translated as "human beings.” Their cultural heartland is the Guajira Peninsula, although many Guajiro now live outside the peninsula proper. A sizable population of Guajiro, for example, resides in Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city.
The Guajira Peninsula is the northeast extension of the South American landmass. Situated between 11 degrees and 12 degrees 28’ north latitude and 71 degrees 06' and 72 degrees 55' west longitude, the Guajira is bounded on the east by the Gulf of Venezuela and on the north and west by the Caribbean Sea. Roughly 80 percent of its 15,380 square kilometers belong to Colombia and 20 percent to Venezuela.
Some of the Guajiro legends that I recorded suggest that the ancestors of the contemporary Indians originated in a distant and well-watered land. When their ancestors entered the semiarid Guajira Peninsula, Guajiro oral traditions maintain, they found there small groups of people dependent on hunting, gathering, fishing, and a decidedly limited horticulture. These early inhabitants, informants conjectured, were either driven out the peninsula or absorbed into what eventually became the Guajiro population.
Historical records indicate that Europeans used some of the Guajira's resources early in the sixteenth century. They first traded with the Indians to acquire fresh water for their ships. They began to take pearls along the north coast in about 1525 and later traded for dyewoods (palo brasil and divi-divi), mother-of-pearl, and, as
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