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Colombia's Universidad Tecnológica
del Chocó "Diego Luis Córdoba."
Photo: Francisco Moreno Mosquera |
Black Colombians Fight
For Land and Rights
By Karen Juanita Carrillo
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writer
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| In February 2003, James Steele
of the United Negro College Fund paid a visit to a couple
of Afro-Colombian communities. Steele works with the Global
Center of the UNCF and who serves as the director of the Institute
for Latin America and the Caribbean. When he traveled next
to Quibdó, the capital city of Chocó state,
Steele says he came across a marvelous sight: "You travel
into the city of Quibdó and it's in this area that's
surrounded by jungle. So it's isolated. And all you see are
Black people. It's just Black people! It's like Harlem or
Anacosta was 15 years ago, before gentrification set in. I
mean, they’re poor—but they’re that example
of how you can be poor but you don’t have to lose your
pride. All I remember is this image of people walking. Lots
of people walking."
The area is severely underdeveloped, and many
of the states’ tax dollars paid to the central government
do not find their way back to Chocó when it comes time
for jobs or basic infrastructure plans to be put into place.
Although it was originally established as a gold mining area
that brought colonial Colombia millions in riches, Chocó
state was never fully developed because Blacks, Indians and
only a few working-class whites lived in the area.
Dr. Steele says that he will be writing up
his report about his visit to Colombia's Black communities
in the next few weeks. He's hoping that the report will help
historically Black schools in the United States to recognize
and begin to remember their Latin American cousins. Many of
the schools that work with the UNCF apply for grants that
link them with schools in Africa or Asia or Europe when they
plan to do faculty and student exchanges, or when they work
on scholarly projects. Now, with the recognition that there
are historically Black universities in Latin America, UNCF
schools have new places to partner with. "We’re
making an effort to focus on Latin America,"Steele adds.
"We really hadn’t focused on Latin America in the
past because Black folk were told there were no Blacks in
Latin America. So this has been an awakening, and for many
schools it will help them in their efforts to broaden their
outlook." — Karen Juanita Carrillo |
"The reconstruction of Bojayá has not started yet,"
Francisco Moreno Mosquera, the English language professor at Colombia's
Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó, reported last June.
But reconstruction or not, the Afro-Colombians who once lived in
Bellavista, the main town in Bojayá, Chocó, were not
looking forward to returning to their old homes.
Bellavista's 11,000 residents were run out of their homes in May
2002 when fighting between Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) guerrillas and United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)
paramilitaries led to the deaths of hundreds of Bellavista's citizens
who were caught in the crossfire.
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School children at Chocó. |
Although there had been ample warnings to the Colombian government
that any attempts to root out the nation's guerrilla armies would
lead to battles being waged dangerously close to where civilians
live, a four-day clash between Marxist-oriented FARC guerrillas
and right-wing AUC paramilitaries—who tend to have government
support in defeating the FARC—led directly to a massacre in
Chocó.
Injuries Throughout History
The nearly 11 million Blacks of Colombia have been forced to abandon
traditional homelands along the country's Pacific coast as encroaching
paramilitary battles have threatened their lives. As a result of
the continuing strife in the country, Colombia's paramilitaries
often work hand-in-hand with right-wing forces in the country ,
fighting battles in a war that began in the middle of the last century.
The near 40-year long political war in Colombia began when the National
Front took over the government and began excluding the voices of
right- and left-wing political parties. Their continuing battles
for power, against each other and against the sitting government,
have led to an average of 12 political killings every day, according
to the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange. Since
1990, thirty-five thousand people have died and more than 1.8 million
Colombians have been displaced from their homes.
But whatever numbers you quote to depict how badly Colombians have
suffered due to the civil war, double them when referring to Afro-Colombians,
Luis Gilberto Murillo, the currently-exiled former governor of Chocó,
says. Often, grassroots Afro-Colombian human rights proponents and
progressive political leaders have become the military targets of
the guerillas in Colombia. Murillo, himself, was at one point kidnapped
and held for 24 hours on a $250,000 ransom. Realizing that the Colombian
police would do little to protect him, Murillo and his family were
among the lucky few able to flee to the United States and request
political asylum.
Black Colombians
Only recognized as a distinct ethnicity since the 1991 version
of Colombia's constitution, Blacks in Colombia have lived through
years of neglect. In Colombia, where an estimated 36-40% of the
population is of African descent, Black people rank high in unemployment,
illiteracy, infant mortality and fatalities from otherwise curable
diseases.
Afro-Colombians are on the bottom of Colombia's social ladder,
Murillo says, because his country still suffers from the impact
of colonialism and slavery. After African slavery was abolished
on May 21, 1851, Black Colombians began forming communities along
the country's Pacific Coast region. Joining with these palenques—communities
of self-liberated Africans—freed Blacks helped develop the
lands in the country's low river-bed areas. Indigenous Colombians,
with land grants from the Spanish crown, moved to the mountainous
areas. And mestizo, or self-styled "white" Colombians,
lived in the major cities.
Initially it was sugarcane crops and the desire to mine for gold
and silver that brought mestizos to the Afro-Colombian areas. Later,
coffee, banana, marijuana and then coca leaf cultivation brought
more land developers. With the 1991 constitution recognizing Afro-Colombian
culture came the first official land grants to Black communities
in the Pacific coastal areas. Today, these rich land areas are desired
for their bio-diversity.
Yet even with their land grants, in recent years, large migrations
of Blacks have had to flee from the guerrilla violence near the
Chocó area . In Colombian cities, they have formed shantytowns—one
in Cartagena is named "Nelson Mandela"as a symbol of struggle—where
they eke out a living on the margins of society. These new city
dwellers are living only a grade above their families in the rural
homelands: Both communities need to find a way to have their lands,
and their lives, protected by the Colombian government.
And, so far, they have not found a way.
Bojayá Church Massacre
On May 2, 2002 some 119 civilians, the majority women and at least
50 children, were killed, while 98 others were injured, when the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dropped a home-made
mortar bomb onto a Bojayá church where as many as 300 people
had taken refuge from area fighting. The Bojayá church massacre
was widely reported in the media: Pope John Paul II spoke of his
"sadness" after hearing "news of the cruel act committed
by the guerrillas." The then-Colombian president Andrés
Pastrana labeled the bombing a "genocidal massacre"and
called the FARC a terrorist organization, and a threat to the nation.
Amnesty International termed the killings "a grave violation
of international humanitarian law." On Tuesday, May 21, 2002
the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia
issued a report that said the 119 deaths could have been prevented,
had the government heeded the desperate warnings sent out by Chocó
area human rights activists.
To combat future deaths, the U.N. report said the government ought
to find out which of its officials are cooperating with AUC, and
have them brought to trial. The government should also, the U.N.
noted, work with Afro-Colombians to end discrimination and governmental
neglect of Blacks in the country, as a means toward supporting Black
efforts to defend their lives in the nation's war-ravaged rural
towns.
Yet those who've suffered through years of guerrilla fighting in
Bellavista and in other villages in Chocó, the poorest state
in Colombia, aren't expecting anything to change soon. Among the
nearly 3,000 who have lived as refugees in Quibdó for months
now, Prof. Moreno Mosquera says that there are many who "want
their town to be established in a different place—in some
place where they would feel safer, some place farther up the Atrato
river."
Bojayá's parish priest told the Colombian newspaper El
Tiempo that the town's people have little faith in promises
of protection from the government. "Many institutions, persons
and organizations (even prisoners) have been giving what they can
to help to the cause of the displaced innocent victims of this genocide
war," Prof. Moreno Mosquera noted. Those few who have returned
to Bojayá have gathered the fragmented remains of the roof
of the bombed-out Bojayá church and placed it prominently
in the center of the town as a remembrance of those who were killed.
It serve as a reminder of the Colombian government's promise that
such acts will not happen so easily again.
Humanitarian aid (medicines, clothing, food) is desperately
needed in Chocó. If you would like to help, please send supplies
directly to the victims. Please mail care packages to: Diócesis
de Quibdó, Palacio Episcopal, Carrera 1, Quibdó (Chocó),
Colombia.
-- March 28, 2003
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