Afro-Colombians: 'Invisible' People Strive to Survive War, Racism
Saeed Shabazz, Apr 16, 2004
NEW YORK-- Luis Marillo, an Afro-Colombian activist living in the United States as an expatriate estimates that a little over a one-fourth of Colombia’s 40 million people are Black.
But despite their numbers, he said, Blacks are invisible in the society. “We are struggling for visibility,” Marillo told students at a recent forum at New York University. “Colombia is a very beautiful country, but it has a negative impact on Afro-Colombians.”
Marino Cordoba, who also was forced from his native Colombia because of activism, added that Blacks in South American countries are “still looking for their place at the table” even with their long history in these nations.
Blacks in Colombia are mostly concentrated in the Pacific Coast and struggle to survive, said Cordoba. “The killing of Blacks in Colombia goes unnoticed by the media, also unreported is the issue of displacing Blacks from their land,” he said.
According to Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, Rutgers University professor of African studies, anthropologist and author of the highly acclaimed book “They Came Before Columbus,” pointed to where the Black presence in Colombia originated. In one lecture, Van Sertima cited the mid-19th century work of French scholar Brasseur de Barbong. The Frenchman noted that Cartegena was one of the largest slave ports in the western hemisphere leading into the 17th century, according to Van Sertima. Other analysts estimate 4,000 Africans arrived in South America each year during the early 1600s, Van Sertima added.
Ingrid Vaicius, a Colombia Project Associate at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., said the “invisibility” of Colombians of African descent stems from their staying to themselves on the Pacific Coast. And, she said, the Colombian government does not want to admit that its poorest and most marginalized citizens are Black.
“The secret is out now because of so many Blacks being displaced from their farms and turning up in cities such as Bogotá, the Colombian capital. They have the worst education, and now they are at every stoplight begging and this is causing people to question why this is happening,” Ms. Vaicius explained.
Slavery in Colombia was abolished in 1851 but discrimination remained. By 1991, the struggle of Afro-Colombians resulted in constitutional recognition of some land rights and some cultural rights, similar to rights extended to indigenous people. But the land where Afro-Colombians are concentrated is not only valuable but also the battleground for competing armed groups. That leaves unarmed Afro-Colombians often caught between leftist rebels, right wing paramilitary groups and government forces.
According to Mr. Cordoba, the violence became widespread in 1993, as Blacks became more strident in arguing for their political rights. It was relatively easy to simply kill or displace people and seize land.
“We still have not been able to fit into the political structure in Colombia in a significant way, therefore we cannot argue our issues,” Mr. Cordoba said.
International groups have often cited Colombia’s struggle over land and the violence that surrounds it:
“Colombian peasant movements and organizations are suffering an escalation of violence inflicted by the state paramilitary forces that has resulted in killings, detentions and the displacement of peasants, Blacks and Indigenous people,” the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform: Emergency Network wrote in a January 2004 report to the Food First Institute for Food Development and Policy located in California.
The report said the government was carrying out a “process of re-concentration of land.” According to the report, peasants have resisted the violence and are organizing themselves to try to keep their land. The report added that close to two million Colombians have been violently expelled from their land.
In 2003, the Bogotá office of the United Nations Commission for Human Rights concluded that guerillas were directly responsible for the deaths of displaced persons. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Internal Displacement, over 200,000 Colombians were forcibly displaced in the first eight months of 2002.
In 1999, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination welcomed a report from the Colombian government that recognized “Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities continue to be the victims of systemic racial discrimination, which has resulted in their marginalization, poverty and vulnerability to violence.” It also applauded constitutional measures that prohibit racial discrimination.
But the UN committee also said violence in Colombia was largely concentrated in areas where indigenous and Afro-Colombian people live and government's “tactics in fighting the drug trade have led to a further militarization of these regions, creating an atmosphere that is conducive to human rights violations and the destruction of cultural autonomy and identity.”
Other concerns were the assassination of Afro-Colombian leaders, ethnic and racial stereotypes in the media, housing segregation, extreme poverty, and "social cleansing" in cities that targeted Afro-Colombian prostitutes and street children for murder.
“The violence and displacement of Blacks in Colombia is due specifically to the fact that they own some of the most mineral rich land. The Pacific Coast region of Colombia is [also] incredibly rich in bio-diversity,” said Humberto Brown, a Panamanian activist that appeared on the NYU panel.
Africans in the Latin America are organizing to combat genocide in Colombia, said Brown. A group that calls itself the “Global Afro/Latino Initiative” was started in the three years leading up to the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001, he explained.
“It is a unity network of all the Black organizations in Latin America and groups which represent Afro-Latinos living in the United States. We are coordinating efforts in the areas of human rights, development and education,” Mr. Brown said.
“With this initiative we can better address the problems that Africans in the Latin America Diaspora face,” Mr. Brown added.
He and the other two activists also pointed out that U.S. foreign policy and militarization of the fight against drugs through “Plan Colombia” has displaced huge numbers of Blacks. “Plan Colombia,” started in 1999 under President Bill Clinton, was launched to stop cocaine production by supplying the Colombian government with helicopters and other aircraft to spray fields as well as military assistance. The U.S. gave $2.5 billion of aid.
Critics say the operation has clearly caused more harm than good, with the brunt of Plan Colombia borne the backs of farmers. They complain that insecticides sprayed to kill coca plants often destroy food crops. Many also suspect the U.S. wants access to Colombia’s oil reserves and natural resources, like gold, silver and copper.
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