Cuerpo-Territorio in Crisis: The Warao, Climate Displacement, and Emerging Human Rights Protections in International Law

The difficulties faced by the Warao, Venezuela’s second most populous Indigenous people, represent with particular clarity the multi-layered realities of environmental and climate-induced displacement. Their ancestral homeland in the Orinoco Delta, once a vast and life-sustaining ecosystem, has been progressively eroded by extractive projects, state-engineered interventions, and ecological collapse intensified by climate change. This slow but devastating transformation has forced the Warao into increasingly precarious mobility patterns, challenging both the resilience of their cultural systems and the adequacy of international legal protections relating to the emerging group of climate refugees.

The trajectory of Warao displacement, from the Orinoco Delta to urban peripheries within Venezuela, and ultimately across the border into Brazil, maps almost seamlessly onto the categories of climate mobility recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) in its recent Advisory Opinion. Their journey has been shaped by gradual environmental degradation. Examples include the salinization of land and ecological collapse caused by the damming of the Manamo River, contamination and ecosystem disruption driven by oil exploitation and other extractive industries, and the socio-environmental violence unleashed when subsistence resources collapsed, which ultimately forced migration into urban centers where poverty, hunger, gender-based violence, and child exploitation became new survival realities (Rosa et al., 2025).

When viewed through the lens of cuerpo-territorio, the Warao experience exposes the depth and intimacy of climate violence. As Cabnal (2018) and subsequent ecofeminist theorists emphasize, body and land form an indivisible whole: both can be occupied, exploited, and dispossessed. For the Warao, the loss of the Orinoco wetlands is not a mere geographic displacement but an injury to the territory-body itself, that severs the interwoven bonds of ecology, spirituality, and community that constitute their collective existence.

Within the IACtHR’s framework, particularly under its intersectional vulnerability analysis (paras. 592, 594–596), the Warao’s situation is doubly precarious. They are Indigenous Peoples with profound territorial and cultural ties (cuerpo-territorio), while simultaneously becoming impoverished migrants subjected to racialized, gendered, and xenophobic discrimination in host societies. Warao women bear the heaviest weight of this double vulnerability: often migrating first, securing income through informal, stigmatized, and sometimes exploitative labor, and facing disproportionate risks of sexual violence and coercion (Rosa et al., 2025). These lived realities mirror the Court’s observations on the gendered dimensions of climate-related displacement (para. 614), illustrating how environmental collapse intersects with structural violence against women, children, and other marginalized members of the community.

The IACtHR’s articulation of enhanced due diligence obligations (paras. 422–425) highlights the failures of both Venezuela and Brazil in addressing these compounded harms. Venezuela has long neglected its obligation to prevent environmental degradation in the Orinoco Delta, permitting extractive industries and ill-conceived infrastructural projects to dismantle Warao ecosystems. Brazil, meanwhile, while offering humanitarian residence, has provided only fragmented and uneven access to culturally appropriate housing, healthcare, and education (Farias, 2025).

The Warao’s case also falls squarely within the IACtHR’s special protection regime for Indigenous Peoples (para. 427). Because their cuerpo-territorio connection binds bodily, cultural, and spiritual integrity to the wetlands, the loss of the Orinoco Delta is not merely territorial but existential. Under the Court’s jurisprudence, relocation should only occur as a last resort, and even then must guarantee land of equivalent ecological and cultural quality, safeguard cultural survival, and respect the voluntary right to return. In practice, however, the relocation of Warao families to urban peripheries in Brazil offers neither ecological equivalence nor cultural continuity, representing a violation of these protections and exposing the inadequacy of humanitarian permits that fail to address deeper territorial needs.

At the global level, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its 2025 Advisory Opinion, took a more cautious stance but nonetheless advanced critical normative pathways. In para. 378, the ICJ recognized that climate change can create conditions in which individuals face a “real risk” of irreparable harm to the right to life, thus engaging states’ non-refoulement obligations. While the ICJ refrained from elaborating positive obligations comparable to those advanced by the IACtHR, its acknowledgment that climate displacement (including cross-border cases) falls within human rights duties is significant (Riemer, 2025). It functions as a “normative bridge,” situating displaced groups like the Warao within an emergent category of climate refugees, even if comprehensive protections such as culturally grounded relocation or ecological restoration are not yet guaranteed.

Both the IACtHR and ICJ emphasize the importance of international cooperation (IACtHR paras. 431, 433; ICJ para. 364), and the Warao’s cross-border mobility illustrates precisely the legal protection gap highlighted by the courts. While Brazil’s Portaria Interministerial No. 19/2021 provides a pathway to humanitarian residence, it does not explicitly recognize environmental or climate displacement, nor does it guarantee territorial or cultural continuity. Both Courts have suggested that states must move beyond ad hoc, temporary humanitarian permits to develop transboundary protection mechanisms grounded in Indigenous rights, ecological restoration, and cultural survival. Durable solutions must reconstitute the cuerpo-territorio itself, ensuring that migration is not synonymous with cultural erasure.

Viewed through the lens of cuerpo-territorio, the convergence of the IACtHR’s recognition of Nature as a rights-holder and the ICJ’s affirmation of states’ duties not only to prevent but to actively restore the losses caused by ecological harm carries profound significance. For the Warao, whose rivers, palms, and wetlands are kin, these developments echo their cosmology and affirm the indivisibility of human and ecological survival. By extending the horizon of reparations to include not only human suffering but also the environmental and spiritual injuries inflicted on territory-bodies, these rulings sketch the contours of a transformative human rights law. What emerges is the possibility of a jurisprudence that not only mitigates displacement, but confronts the structural violence of climate change, safeguards cultural continuity, and acknowledges that the survival of peoples and ecosystems are one and the same in the struggle for justice in the climate crisis.

Vesper Noschese T. V. Junqueira (they/them) is a Brazilian lawyer, climate justice activist, and Master’s candidate in International Studies and Development at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Their research and advocacy focus on the intersections of climate change, (im)mobilities, and human rights, drawing on decolonial, intersectional, and community-led approaches to reimagine global climate governance. vesper.noschese@graduateinstitute.ch

References:

Arcos, I. S. V., Assis, A. O. Q. M. de, & Melo, G. S. R. de. (2022, November 23–26). Os Warao como deslocados ambientais: Uma discussão a respeito da proteção aos migrantes indígenas venezuelanos no Brasil. In A Conferência da Terra – Fórum Internacional do Meio Ambiente, Evento Virtual: Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável no Mundo Pandêmico.

Brasil. (2021, March 23). Portaria interministerial MJSP/MRE nº 19, de 23 de março de 2021: Dispõe sobre a autorização de residência ao imigrante que esteja em território brasileiro e seja nacional de país fronteiriço, onde não esteja em vigor o Acordo de Residência para Nacionais dos Estados Partes do MERCOSUL e Países Associados. https://www.refworld.org/es/leg/legis/pejec/2021/pt/134678

Cabnal, L. (2018, June 26). Sanar y defender el territorio-cuerpo-tierra (Interview by E. López). Rio Polly Krac.

Farias, R. P. V. P. (2024). Questões socioambientais na dinâmica de mobilidade Warao da Venezuela a Manaus-AM. Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) Revista de la Solcha, 14(3), 618–640. https://doi.org/10.32991/2237-2717.2024v14i3.p618-640

Inter-American Court of Human Rights. (2023). Advisory opinion OC-32/23 of 6 November 2023: Climate emergency and human rights (Series A No. 32). https://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/opiniones/seriea_32_en.pdf

Riemer, L. (2025, July 26). A single paragraph’s promise: The ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change and the understated question of human displacement. Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Blog. https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2025/07/26/a-single-paragraphs-promise-the-icjs-advisory-opinion-on-climate-change-and-the-understated-question-of-human-displacement/

Rosa, M., Tardelli, G., & Roa, S. (Orgs.). (2024). Os Warao no Brasil: Contribuições da antropologia para a proteção de indígenas refugiados e migrantes (2nd ed.). Agência da ONU para Refugiados – ACNUR.