Afro-Colombians speak of surviving a war

Afro-Colombians speak of surviving a war

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By Karen Juanita Carrillo

Afro-Colombians living in exile in the United States came to New York recently to talk about how Black communities have been able to survive Colombia’s four-decade long civil war.

“Colombia is a wonderful country – a very beautiful country – that is suffering a conflict that is killing the country,” Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former governor of Chocó, told the audience of mostly students attending the New York University Law school sponsored talk, “The Cost Of Conflict: A discussion about Human Rights Violations against Afro-Colombians,” on Thursday, March 25.
Luis Murillo, Humberto Brown and Marino Cordoba

Murillo gave the audience a little history lesson, explaining that after Colombia officially ended African slavery on May 21, 1851, pressure was on all citizens to pledge faith in “one god, one country, and one language.” But Murillo said those principles were based on promoting Colombia’s white heritage and excluding the nation’s Blacks.

Colombia had a typically Latin American structured racism, Humberto Brown, a U.S.-based Panamanian who works with the Hunter College-based Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiative, pointed out. It was one of a number of nations to create a national identity that made Blacks – nearly 26 percent of Colombia’s population – invisible.

Afro-Colombians were so marginalized that in 1958 the government simply passed a law that denied their rights and declared their traditional homelands part of the national preserve. It wasn’t until the 1993 “Law 70 (Law of the Blacks/Ley de Negritudes)” that Afro-Colombians were granted rights to their homelands, and not until 1996 did Blacks receive their first land titles. “But it was after getting the land titles,” Murillo noted, “that the violence against Afro-Colombians increased enormously.”

“The first community to receive land titles was the one in Rio Sucio, where I lived and worked,” Marino Cordoba, founder of AfroDes (Association of Afro-Colombian Displaced Persons) said. Rio Sucio received its titles on Dec. 13, 1996 – and by Dec. 20, Cordoba said, the community was being bombed and attacked. “From that day on there’s been a constant series of attacks against Afro-Colombians,” he noted: today there are three million internal refugees in Colombia, 40 percent of whom are Black.

Large migrations of Blacks have fled from the guerrilla violence near their ancestral lands. Gov. Murillo was at one point kidnapped and held for 24 hours on a $250,000 ransom by guerrillas – he and his family were among the lucky few able to flee to the United States and request political asylum.

Cordoba and Murillo both said their government’s “Plan Colombia” – its military offensive against rebel guerrillas and paramilitaries, which the U.S. has supported with $3 billion in five years – has only increased opportunities for armed battles in Black communities. Colombian Pres. Álvaro Uribe Vélez is meeting with Pres. Bush this week to ask for an extension of funding for “Plan Colombia” which is scheduled to run out in September 2005. Uribe wants funding through 2009, while Cordoba and Murillo are on a speaking tour urging U.S. citizens to ask their representatives not to support more monies for the project.

“The U.S. intervention in Colombia has led to a situation where only terror defines your existence,” Brown remarked, as he noted that, because of the war, homicide rates in Colombia are among the highest in the world. Brown spoke of how the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa has helped mobilize Afro-Latinos and helped them fight against discrimination and endemic poverty. Durban has become an organizing tool, he said, for confronting the race-based root of meager development and widespread poverty among Afro-Latinos.

“We the Afro-Latinos have not only organized in our home regions,” Brown said, “we have also organized here now. We are here also attempting to forge a unity with people who are attempting to understand our region.” What may seem like a newfound racial identity among Afro-Latinos is simply a clearer understanding of how to survive as a community, Brown added: “It’s not a biological decision [to identify as Afro-Latinos], it’s a socio-political decision. We are defined by how we define ourselves.”