Making Black Lives Matter in Riohacha, Colombia
September 2, 2015
Making Black Lives Matter in Riohacha, Colombia
by Ajamu Baraka
. . .
The Context of Struggle
Historically, the story of Afro-Colombians is a familiar story for Africans in the America’s who were torn from our land to labor for the European invaders in conditions structured to destroy us individually and collectively. But while African populations in the Caribbean were able to win some degree of national independence with the establishment of national states, however neo-colonial they may have been, that minimum option was not available, short of a generalized social revolution, for the captured and colonized African people in the U.S., Colombia, Brazil and the other nations in the America’s with Black populations.
In Colombia, home to the third largest population of African people outside of Africa, the plight of Afro-Colombians has become even more daunting over the last twenty-five years with the “new” circumstances of internal armed conflict that has engulfed large portions of Afro-Colombian territory, paramilitary terror, and the free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombian.
Massive displacement, state and paramilitary violence, assassinations of community leaders, disappearances and an invasion of traditional Afro-Colombian territories by U.S. and other European multi-national corporations who want the land that Afro-Colombians occupy and the minerals beneath the ground, are the new existential threats. The imposition of these new realities have affirmed for Black organizers in Colombia that Black lives don’t matter to the Colombian authorities and certainly cannot mean much to the policy-makers in Washington D.C. who give unqualified support to the Colombian government.
The Black movement in Colombian has been able to win some of the most progressive protections of collective Black rights on paper, including the right to collective titles of land, ethno-education and the integrity of their independent cultural expressions. However, PCN asserts that the failure of the state to fully implement those legal protections and to reign-in the marauding paramilitary forces aligned with powerful economic forces empties those wins of content and ensures the continuation of the multi-dimension assault on black existence.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/02/making-black-lives-matter-in-riohacha-colombia/