Afro-Colombians: Caught in the Drug War’s Cross-Fire
by Hishaam Aidi
Colombia President Andres Pastrana met with President Bush in Washington late last month to discuss a new trade deal with the United States and the disbursement of a $600 million aid package that would make Colombia the third largest recipient of US funds, after Israel and Egypt. But the meeting did not include a discussion of the plight of Afro-Colombians and the disproportionate number of blacks and indigenous people displaced by the country’s 37-year-old conflict. Those concerns were raised instead in New York, at a two-day event held February 23 and 2. The symposium, “Black Colombians Under Fire,” sought to raise awareness about the predicament of black Colombians in the region of Choco.
The New York-based Colombia Media Project, which co-sponsored the event with the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, has organized trips to the Choco region in Colombia’s rain forest as part of a solidarity campaign with the country’s indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
“It is Black History Month and we are here to talk about a sector of the Colombian community not talked about, and to celebrate a struggle waged for years for cultural rights, land rights and human rights—as part of a campaign launched by Afro-Colombian leaders to call attention to what’s happening in Colombia,” said Manuel Jaime of the Colombia Media Project, addressing a packed theater in the American Museum of Natural History.
The situation facing Afro-Colombians is complex. For starters, just how many Colombians can claim African descent is itself a controversial topic. A 1997 United Nations report estimated that Afro-Colombians make up about 18 percent of the country’s population, or approximately 6 million people. The Colombian government, however, offers a more conservative number, claiming that blacks and native Colombians together make up only 930,000 or 2.75 percent of the population, while a study by the Inter-American Development Bank, adopting a broader definition of Afro-Colombian, estimated that 30 percent of Colombia’s population was black.
Most Afro-Colombians live along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and reside primarily in the cities of Cartagena, Medelin, Qibdo, Cali and Baranquilla—cities squarely in the war zone between the state and various rebel groups, of which the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is the largest, with about 18,000 guerilla soldiers.
The Colombian civil war has taken an estimated 35,000 lives in the past decade and has now become inextricably linked with the country’s vast and notorious narcotics trade. The rebel groups have allied themselves against the government with the drug bosses, who control vast regions of Colombia, defending their strongholds with an estimated 11,000 paramilitary troops. Money from the drug trade—mostly coca, the source crop for cocaine—helps fuel the opposition, especially FARC, which levies a coca tax on growers in exchange for protection from attack.
According to a recent article in The Nation, “the indigenous population of the targeted southern region is already paying an elevated price. Right-wing paramilitaries have recently expanded in that area and are challenging the FARC not only for territorial control but also for collection of the coca ‘tax.’”
Also caught in the crossfire are Afro-Colombians. The UN Commission on Human Rights reported in 1999 that thousands of people in black communities in Colombia faced displacement due to the country’s warfare.
“Large numbers of Afro-Colombians reside in some of the most conflictive areas of the national territory,” the report read. “[I]t is safe to generalize that terror and violence as practices by all of the contending forces in Colombia have taken their greatest toll on the Colombians living in extreme poverty—a disproportionate number of whom are black citizens. The Commission was able to observe that the majority of the internally displaced populations residing in shelters and camps in the area consisted of black persons.”
It’s important to publicize this situation, says Victoria Maldonado of the Colombia Media Project. “We have been working since 1993 to raise awareness of the situation in Colombia,” she says. “We’re trying to bring voices from the civilian population to the United States. Afro-Colombians are living in areas rich in natural resources—oil, gold, uranium. Different parties are fighting for the control of these territories and the government is trying to build megaprojects of development—dams, canals, the Pan-American highway. There are a lot of interests in the Pacific Coast area—a jungle area with the highest biodiversity in the world. For the past 5-6years paramilitaries have been carrying out a program of depopulation, driving out people opposed to their programs.”
Colombia’s 1991 constitution recognized the Afro-Colombian community as an ethnicity with cultural, territorial and governing rights. By law, Afro-Colombians in the province of Choco, created in 195, have the right to control the land and waterways where they live. Calls for self-administration, however, have not been recognized. And despite the abundance of resources, and hard work of Afro-Colombians, most live in desperate poverty.
“Everything that leaves Colombia, including products of the mines, has been largely produced by black hands,” said Carlos Rosero, an Afro-Colombian who spoke at one of the weekend’s events. “But still we have nothing.”
“If we own the land, we should also own the subsoil and its resources, but the government does not recognize that,” wrote Luis Gilberto Murillo in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Murillo, who also spoke at the conference, was kidnapped in 1998 by paramilitaries after speaking against the war and declaring Choco a neutral zone. Forced to flee Colombia in July 2000, Murillo now resides in Washington, DC with his family.
Addressing his audience through a translator, Murillo said, “We cannot delink ourselves from the legacy of slavery. Despite the African ancestry of many [Colombians], we suffer from an intense invisibility. In Colombia, between 36 and 3 percent of the population is African. In Colombia, the area where Africans reside is called ‘the black belt,’ which stretches along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Since 1520, when Africans were first brought to Colombia as slaves, we have been part of the history of struggles, the struggle for liberation—since the 16th century there have been communities of free and escaped slaves known as ‘palenques’—and the struggle to build the nation of Colombia. It is painful when they talk about the building of a Colombian identity and nation, without recognizing the people of African ancestry.”
Murillo’s address laid out some of the dismal facts facing Afro-Colombians today, contrasting them with the rich historical legacy of black communities in the country. “Afro-Colombians participated in the struggle for the freedom of Colombia with Simon Bolivar and in other parts of Latin America. Three out of every five soldiers in Bolivar’s army were African. The navy in Colombia was founded by an African, but ironically today we’re not allowed in the navy.”
Today, he said, “85 percent of Afro-Colombians are poor, earning less than $500 a year as compared to 1700 for non-blacks; 32 percent are illiterate as opposed to the 15 percent for the rest of the population; 49 percent of black children go to school, compared to 80 percent of the national average; only 38 percent of black Colombians go to high school as compared to 66 percent of the national population; and finally 2 out of every 100 Afro-Colombians who finish high school go to college. This situation exists in much of Latin America, not only Colombia.”
Murillo said that the war has created 1.8 million internal refugees, most of them black, and militarized the areas inhabited by Afro-Colombians. “The conflict in Colombia is not guerrillas versus the state. It has deeper roots. It’s difficult to bring peace to a country without a politics of inclusion, and with a history of intolerance and exclusion.”
In this context, the drug war is just the latest skirmish in a battle that goes back centuries. “The problem is not just about peasants producing coca,” Murillo said. “Fumigation [a widespread policy to wipe out coca fields] is not a solution. It destroys the environment and poisons the soil and other legitimate crops, instead of building schools and providing services; the plan militarizes, it brings battalions and deepens the conflict. Without state support, peasants have no choice but to raise coca leaves.”
Last summer, the US Congress approved a $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid to help stop the flow of drugs. The State Department’s annual report on anti-narcotics operations around the world, released last month, showed that despite the aid package, the areas under coca cultivation in Colombia had grown 11 percent, to almost 336,000 acres. Commenting on the report, Stephen E. Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told the New York Times, “What we have is more of a mess in Colombia than what we started with.”
The mess, speakers at the New York event seemed to agree, would take more than short-sighted drug war policies to untangle—the roots are simply too deep.
“Slavery was ended in Colombia in 1851, but our promise of freedom was never fulfilled,” said Murillo. Since 1852, a process of “invisibility” has been in effect and the model of Latin America that has been exported has excluded the different roots. Latin American history is a dialogue between indigenous, Spanish and African people.”
[First published: March 14, 2001]