Indigenous communities worldwide face systematic threats and criminalization for challenging extractivism, agribusiness, narco-trafficking and other territorial incursions. Last year, 177 environmental defenders were murdered for these efforts, the vast majority in Latin America, with Colombia the most lethal country, and the southwestern state of Cauca the deadliest place within it. Since the country’s troubled 2016 peace accord, over 1,300 social leaders have been assassinated. Many of the killings in Cauca stem from efforts to suppress the remarkable organizing power of its Indigenous movement, some 70,000 people strong.

 The most recognized face of their movement is its nonviolent protection network, the Indigenous guardians. Engulfed in the longest armed conflict in the Americas, Indigenous people in the north of Cauca had to devise a way of standing up to the various armed groups operating in their territories. In 2001, they formed the Indigenous Guard in Toribío, where the film takes place. Their nonviolent tactics as a grassroots community force of women, men, elders, and children have now proliferated throughout Latin America. Leaders from Cauca have trained dozens of communities in their sophisticated strategies of unified, territorial defense. They have become a revered national symbol of peace-building and nonviolent resistance against entrenched patterns of violence