[2] A related group, sometimes considered a sub-tribe of the Guahibo, are the Playero, whose population, estimated in the early 1980s at 200 people, live along the Arauca River.

[4] From the late 1700s until at least 1970s, Guahibos and the related Cuiva people suffered severe, if sporadic, violence at the hand of Colombian and Venezuelan colonists.

Episodes of violence included an 1870 massacre of over two hundred Guahibos organized by Venezuelan hacendado Pedro del Carmen Gutiérrez.

[5] Hunting parties were organized to target the indigenous people over this period, a phenomenon portrayed in José Eustasio Rivera's 1924 novel La Vorágine.

[5] In 1912, Colombian military officer Buenaventura Bustos wrote a letter reporting the situation: "The ‘civilized’ decimate them with bullets and pursue them without mercy, wheresoever they are, because they have an intimate conviction, and this they say without Christian shame, that they can murder savages as if they were killing beasts.