The Battle over Black Freedom in Colombia
The Battle over Black Freedom in Colombia
By: Yesenia Barragan
Published 16 May 2015
What the Afrocolombian leaders of La Toma are doing is taking matters in their own hands to resist the agents of death.
The 21st of this month marks the annual Afrocolombian Day (el día de la Afrocolombianidad), commemorating the final abolition of slavery in Colombia, decreed 164 years ago on May 21, 1851. Across the country this month, cultural and educational programs, festivals, and other public events will be held in honor of the contributions of the nation’s Afrocolombians. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1991 that the Colombian constitution officially recognized the Black population of Colombia and the nation itself as “pluriethnic” and “multicultural,” transforming the nearly two-century old perception of Colombia as a strictly “mestizo” nation in the process of continual whitening. For many, the día de la Afrocolombianidad is viewed as a moment for Afrocolombians to, as El Mundo recently wrote, “commemorate their freedom.”
But what does it mean to celebrate Afrocolombian “freedom” when Black life is continually rendered expendable in Colombia?
Quality of life indicators for the 4 to 10 million Afro-descended Colombians more than a century and a half after the abolition of slavery are staggering. According to a 2011 report in Americas Quarterly, 78.5% of Afrocolombians live below the poverty line, as compared to 49.2% of the general population. Only one Afrocolombian out of every 50 graduates with a university degree. Caught in between the long-standing violent conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries, domestic and multinational corporations, and the government’s military forces, poor Afrocolombians constitute a disproportionate number of internally displaced peoples. In one finding, nearly 52,000 Afrocolombians were displaced in 2012 alone. As has been documented time and time again, when Black activists and communities in Colombia self-organize and collectively resist this existential crisis, their lives are routinely threatened.
Governmental officials, past and present, have also perpetuated the long legacy of anti-Black racism. In August 2013, for example, a few days before Colombia’s historic first Afrocolombian Congress, the current president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, publicly claimed that the legal mechanisms of “prior consultation” and “public councils,” created after the 1991 Constitution to protect Afrocolombian territories, were “a headache” and “a very perverse instrument to delay the progress of the country.” In the eyes of the Colombian state, these hard-won rights of the Afrocolombian movement continue to inhibit the nation’s so-called “progress.” Most recently, in March 2015, Senator Paloma Valencia proposed creating a quasi-apartheid system in her department of Cauca when she proposed dividing the region into two departments, one for the indigenous population “so that they can have their strikes, demonstrations and occupations” and another for the pro-development “mestizos,” while the Black population would have to figure out for themselves where they would prefer to live.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Battle-over-Black-Freedom-in-Colombia-20150516-0009.html