Collectivizing Resistance: Afro-Descendent Communities in Colombian South Pacific Region Plan to Convene for their Rights

September 18, 2008

Collectivizing Resistance:
Afro-Descendent Communities in Colombian South Pacific Region Plan to Convene for their Rights
By Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

From October 1-4, 2008, nearly a hundred different groups, including national advocacy organizations and community councils, will be represented in Tumaco, Colombia, at the First Assembly of Black Community Councils of the Colombian Southern Pacific Region. The aim of the assembly will be to build solidarities across the region and to facilitate collectively structured forms of participatory democracy in resistance to the daily forms of violence confronted by Afro-Colombian communities. These communities face systematic displacement, arbitrary detainment, extrajudicial killings and massacres. The Assembly has announced that they will convene “toward a consolidation of territory with autonomy and self-government” in the face of state, paramilitary and guerilla aggressions ballasted by the structural racism and historically systematic, institutional marginalization and targeting of Black communities within Colombia. They write, “Despite the situation generated by the armed conflict internal to the country, the Black communities resist annihilation and we continue a permanent labor to recreate life, self-affirmation, and [libertarian] identity inherited from our ancestors.”
In 1993, Colombia instituted Law 70, which recognized the right of Black Colombians to collectively own, occupy, and subsist off of their ancestral lands. Additionally, the law was ratified in order to “establish mechanisms for protecting the cultural identity and rights of Black Communities of Colombia as an ethnic group and to foster their economic and social development…” Almost fifteen years later, according to a 2007 report filed by a delegation from the Rapoport Center at University of Texas at Austin, School of Law, Law 70, though progressive in its aims, has not been upheld by the Colombian State. “[I]ts realization has been hampered by a number of obstacles, including pervasive systemic discrimination.” Included in these obstacles are the infiltration of Afro-Colombian lands by agro-export businesses, tourism mega-projects, and targeting by paramilitary violence- for which the state offers no protection.
A 2002 massacre at Bojayá, where 119 Afro-Colombian civilians were killed, and another 98 injured, left these communities in the wake of one of the worst massacres in 40 years. Despite organizing efforts to demand justice, massacres, disappearances, and forced displacement of these communities are still rampant as effects of Colombian state practices, military funding through U.S.-backed Plan Colombia and violence between factions in Colombia’s internal war.
While estimates put the Afro-Colombian population at between 20% and 70% of the country’s people, of Colombia’s four million internally displaced, Afro-Colombians make up about two thirds, and remain economically among the poorest in the country. The ratification of Law 70 marked a milestone for Afro-Colombian rights as it officially outlawed race-based discrimination and offered Colombia’s Black communities recourse to their rights. That it has not been upheld remains part of the larger network of problematics within the Colombian justice system, particularly as the last couple years have seen the exposure of government-paramilitary alliances.
Plans for the Assembly as part of the efforts to further collectivize Afro-Colombian struggles for rights, arise amid collusions between the Bush and Uribe Administrations to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement which would allow for further state legitimation of protracted violence against Afro-Colombian communities in the name of economic expansion. Already, Afro-Colombians are forced to reckon with the continued impunity of paramilitary forces in the perpetration of violence against their communities and their allies. For example, in Curvaradó (Chocó), paramilitaries have “violently and illegally usurped” land within Afro-Colombian collective territories, and specifically, “the paramilitary group “the Black Eagles” have been threatening members of the Inter-Church Peace and Justice Commission, a human rights organization that works with Afro-Colombian community council leaders to ensure” that these territories are fully and justly returned to their rightful holders.

To join others in signing a declaration of solidarity with the First Assembly of Black Community Councils of the Colombian Southern Pacific Region, go here:

http://www.petitiononline.com/1BCCC/petition.html


For more resources:

Proceso de Comunidades Negras de Colombia
www.renacientes.org/

Comisión Intereclesial Justicia y Paz
http://es.geocities.com/justiciaypazcolombia/

Article: Why Afro-Colombians Oppose the Colombian FTA
http://www.bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=11096

Afro-Colombian News
http://www.afrocolombians.com/Afro-Colombian%20News/Main%20Page.html

U.S. Office on Colombia
http://www.usofficeoncolombia.com/Afro-Colombian%20Groups/