Afro-Colombia denied
Rodríguez, Jaime Arocha
A HUNDRED BLACK LEADERS AND PEASANTS from Colombia's Pacific Coast and northern Cauca Valley gathered in the southwestern city of Cali on May 26 of last year to discuss how the country's new...
...NUMBER 4 (FEBRUARY 1992) "vacant lands" effectively favors the territorial ambitions of a few individuals who can claim no ancestral rights whatsoever...
...The ideas that inspired the struggle for liberation from Spain were inseparable from the trinity of the French revolution: equality, fraternity, liberty...
...de Friedemann, Presencia Africana...
...See Bateson, Mind and Nature and his Steps to an Ecology ofMind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972...
...ConstanzaUssa, "De los Empauta'os a 1930" (thesis, Universidad del Cauca, 1989...
...For example, when the Indians were made "equals," they lost their protected status and with it the communal reserves that the Spanish Crown had recognized in order to prevent the total annihilation of native peoples...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, "Estudios de Negros en la Antropologfa Colombiana," in de Friedemann and Arocha (eds...
...To introduce such a distinction into the constitution would have enshrined Bonilla's thesis that Indians are better organized than blacks...
...The constitution even glorified as the ideal goal of progress the conversion of Colombians into a single "race" that speaks a single tongue and believes in a single God...
...185-197...
...Not surprisingly, the constitution promulgated on July 4, 1991 contains a key contradiction...
...Picking up on Mexican philosopherJose Vasconcelos, Orlando Fals Borda writes in the first volume of his Historia Doble de la Costa (Bogota: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1989, p. 15I1B) of the "cosmic race" to which he attributes a fundamental role in the formation of the anti-feudal society of the Caribbean basin...
...and by] the tenacity which our women have sown in our race" (emphasis added...
...2. Anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann and I questioned representatives from various black groups about why they had not supported a local man, Carlos Rosero, who sought to represent them in the Constituent Assembly...
...I am saddened that an opportunity has been lost to broaden the parameters of the indigenous movement so that it could benefit peoples who, following the Indians' example, today struggle for their own ethnic rights...
...XLIX (1989...
...A HUNDRED BLACK LEADERS AND PEASANTS from Colombia's Pacific Coast and northern Cauca Valley gathered in the southwestern city of Cali on May 26 of last year to discuss how the country's new constitution would affect them...
...Nina S. de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, Herederos del jaguar y la anaconda (BogotA: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1985...
...quantity is the world of analogic and probabilistic computation...
...Despite its limitations, the proposal did away with the distinction between "indigenous peoples" and "ethnic groups" that the Indians had introduced...
...According to this myth, a new race of "equals"-the "mestizo" race-was forged from the fusion of Indians, blacks and whites, despite the rigidity of the Spanish castes, the lack of European women, the paternalistic relations with those of an inferior level, and the search for social advancement through blanqueamiento ("whitening") of offspring.' THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the close association of "mestizaje" and "equality" gave the notion of "liberty" a peculiar meaning in Colombia...
...The new constitution grants and special rights to indigenous peoples, but not to blacks...
...The last comandante of the M-19, Carlos Pizarro, assassinated in 1990 while running for president, wrote in his Tres rectificaciones hacia la democracia (mss., 1989, p. 15) that he was encouraged by "...trust in the virtues of this mestizo nation...
...All that was required was an accusation of having been found "vagando " in the street...
...87-112...
...In places like the Pacific Coast, proIndian individuals, institutions and organizations have struggled continually for the demarcation of territories without taking into account centuries of black occupation.' 8 Many Indian advisers tend to agree with the government's tendency to characterize traditional black residents as invaders or colonos en tierras baldias (settlers on vacant land), and, consequently, to request their expulsion...
...9. de Friedemann and Arocha, De Sol a Sol, p. 199...
...the latter, 30%--hardly insignificant compared to the 2% who are Indians...
...Such policies are what anthropologist H6ctor Diaz Polanco calls "fourthworldist": ones which "unilaterally enumerate the elements of the Indians' vision as an independent and separate proposal," as if their problems were not caused by the same political and economic structure responsible for the problems of other minorities.9 These policies are based Women of t on the premise that Colombia, in the words ethnic status of anthropologist and adviser to indigenous groups Luis Guillermo Vasco, "is not a pluri-ethnic nation, but rather a biethnic one, made up of mestizos and Indians...
...And for blacks, independence meant only that children conceived after the conclusive break with Spain in 1819 would be free.8 The rest continued to be treated by whites as torturable and mutilatable merchandise, as if the old laws were still in effect.' Slavery wasn't abolished until 1851, and many believe that conditions worsened after emancipation, when slavery laws were replaced by those which outlawed vagrancy...
...After the members of the M- 19 guerrilla movement put down their arms and returned to civilian life, they formed the M-19 Democratic Alliance (Alianza Democratica M-19), which now constitutes a significant political force...
...The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) andadissidentfaction of the EPL-which make up the Sim6n Bolivar National Guerrilla Coordinating Body (CNGSB)-have yet to sign peace agreements, though they have held talks with the government...
...IN A MAY 1990 PLEBISCITE, COLOMBIANS voted to replace the 1886 constitution with a new charter...
...Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, "Hacia una Naci6n para los Excluidos," Magazin Dominical del Espectador (BogotA), No...
...Luis Guillermo Vasco, "El Movimiento de las Autoridades Indigenas del Sur Occidente," lecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota...
...Finally, Bonilla denied the importance of the clandestine political organizations that blacks have maintained since the sixteenth century to rally their gods and other allies and to plot against their rulers...
...Afro-Colombia Denied 1. As a result of the March 1984 peace treaties between the Revolutionary Armed Forces ofColombia (FARC) and the government of President Belisario Betancur, the Patriotic Union (UP) was founded, independently from the Colombian Communist Party...
...This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between one integer and the next...
...In light of multinational plans to mine the forests, subsoils, rivers and seas of the entire coast, preserving this old notion of he GOelmambi River region...
...For many, the fusion of"the three races" was not only a source of equality, but of supernatural strength...
...The compromise proposal was published in Revista Colombiana deAntropologia, Vol...
...Diversity is the primary source of dissent without which democracy is a hollow exercise...
...An outstanding recent example was the May 26, 1987 civic strike in Quidd6, the capital of El Choc6, a province on the black Pacific Coast...
...When the Constituent Assembly met the following April, Guambiano Indian Lorenzo Muelas, leader of the Movement of Indigenous Authorities of the Southwest, standing with Orlando Fals Borda, pioneer of modern sociology, researcher, writer and member of the M-19 Democratic Alliance, read a new proposal titled, "On Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Groups...
...At the opening session, indigenous organizations revived a line of argument made originally by Victor Daniel Bonilla, an academic who for many years has acted as the Indians' adviser...
...7 (1989...
...6 For all it became the source of a fundamental myth that sustained the official ideologies of the new nations being born: that mestizaje (race-mixing) was the route to freedom...
...and Comisi6n de Estudios sobre la Violencia en Colombia, Colombia: Violencia y Democracia (BogotA: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1987), pp...
...6. Javier Ocampo, "El Proceso Politico, Military Social de la Independencia," Manual de Historia de Colombia, vol...
...After long hours of bitter debate, the preliminary sessions of the Constituent Assembly came up with a compromise proposal, agreed to by the Indian and black organizations which took part, as well as their advisers and lawyers and those of us who participated as concerned academics...
...There the large haciendas were not economically viable without the indigenous labor concentrated in the reserves...
...and because the jump is missing...it is impossible for any quantity to be exact...
...Due to their political connections and knowledge of laws protecting colonists' rights, these "white" people have obtained land titles that blacks have been unable to secure during the last 200 years...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS I nPNOll\n'll m'ln7nl r\lnmnnEFUSAL TO RECOGNIZE AND GRANT ETH- nic status and rights to Colombian blacks is neither new nor exceptional...
...It allowed for distinguishing degrees of physical diversity, correlated with degrees of cultural diversity...
...Ascendancy was characterized by terms like tentenelaire (literally "grope-in-theair") for the child of a quinterdn and a cuarterona, and saltatrds("leap-backwards") for the progeny ofa quinter6n and a mulata...
...Ethnicity," they claimed, should be reserved for the traditional residents of Colombia's Caribbean islands, San Andr6s, Providencia and Santa Catalina...
...4. Nina S. de Friedemann, Presencia Africana en Colombia (Mexico, forthcoming...
...The founder of the National Maroon Movement, Juan de Dios Mosquera, told them that, like the previous 1886 constitution, the new charter would fail to protect the rights of the descendants of slaves brought from Africa between the sixteenth and the midnineteenth centuries...
...3. These were analogical and probabilistic systems, as opposed to fixed digital ones...
...In other words, to accede to such rights one must neither perceive oneself as different, nor declare oneself to belong to a different people...
...See Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, "La Ensenada de Tumaco: Invisibilidad, Incertidumbre e lnnovaci6n," AmLrica Negra (Bogotd), No...
...they denied that the majority of black Colombians had any ethnicity at all...
...8. Alvaro Tirado, Introduccion a la Historia Econrmica de Colombia (Bogota: La Carreta, 1978), p. 64...
...5. Nina S. de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, De sol a sol: genesis, transformaci6n y presencia de los negros en Colombia (Bogota: Editorial Planeta de Colombia, 1986), pp...
...In the case ofquantity there is no such jump...
...They could not have been unaware of the multifaceted ways in which blacks have adapted to the fragility of Pacific Coast ecology...
...1 2 The agitation for a new constitution began in January of the previous year, when the M-19 made it one of their conditions foraccepting President Virgilio Barco's peace offer...
...For the first time in Colombia's history, a national public body included representatives of ethnic, religious and political minorities: a Guambiano and an Emberi Indian, an evangelical pastor, and nearly three dozen ex-guerrillas from the April 19th Movement (M-19), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) and the armed Indianist group Manuel Quintin Lame...
...Finally, it broke with the restrictive vision of ethnicity, such that state programs in ethno-education and ethno-medicine could now be imagined outside of Indian communities...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, Criele criele son: Del Pacifico Negro (BogotA: Editorial Planeta, 1989...
...See William Ramirez Tob6n, "Nuevas Ceremonias de Paz," Andlisis Politico, No...
...Quantities are the product of measurement...
...They added that others had chosen to support the candidates from the Patriotic Union or the M-19 Democratic Alliance, also under the assumption that these parties would support black issues, particularly territorial disputes on the Pacific coast...
...N]umber is the world of pattern, gestalt, and digital computation...
...Not even the guerrilla insurgency discovered that by underscoring homogeneity, the concept of mestizaje makes diversity invisible, negates the right of dissent, and allows for the exclusion of anyone who strays from the "norm...
...Article VII defines the pluriethnic and multicultural character of the Colombian nation...
...Using such binary acrobatics, the elites sought to elide the existence of the descendants of African slaves who, due to geographic isolation or political resistance, did not have children with either whites or Indians, just as they denied the identities of other Colombians impregnated with African-American culture...
...Colonial titles to communal lands were ratified, and autonomous Indian self-government was conferred...
...Victor Daniel Bonilla, "Todos Tenemos Derecho, pero No Todo Es Igual," Derechos Humanos y Modernidad (Cali, 1989...
...l rllalnatulI Ill uf 0 OlUMRciat Indians (ONIC) say, "We signed onto it, but we won't keep it...
...XXVIII (1991), pp...
...Until 1991, the law recognizing indigenous rights was the exception to the constitutional order adopted in 1886...
...Slaves who acquired their freedom, without capital or tools, left the sugar mill where they had worked from dawn to dusk, only to be immediately forced back in...
...The racial nomenclature may have disappeared, but the discriminatory conduct associated with it has not...
...2, (Bogoti: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1979), p. 23...
...Although I greatly sympathize with indigenous movements, it is frustrating to find once again that the mechanical transfer of legacies-such as the one that was born when liberty was linked to equality and fraternity-gives rise to simplifications that mask Colombia's cultural diversity...
...Un siglo de investigation social: antropologfa en Colombia, (BogotA: Etno, 1984), pp...
...3 black control over much of the valleys of the Magdalena, Cauca and Patia rivers, as well as the Pacific Coast...
...Gregory Bateson, MindandNature (New York: Bantam, 1979), p. 51...
...As was pointed out during the discussion, the lack of anthropological, historical and sociological studies of black Colombians, particularly regarding politics and territoriality, as well as anthropologists' tendency to study only Indians, distorts the image of blacks' capacity for organization and political action...
...Moreover, it facilitated the recognition and conservation of diversity-a diversity that began to wither in the early nineteenth century as soon as Latin America's independence movements took shape...
...1, pp...
...14, (1991), and "La Liebre y el Galgo Corredor: La paz actual con el M19," Andlisis Politico, No...
...As with so many black leaders of the past, the leader of the strike, a man who took the name of Kunta Kinte, was "disappeared...
...VOLUME XXV...
...One of the preparatory steps leading up to the actual constitutional convention was an October 1990 meeting of the Subcommission on Equality and Ethnic Rights...
...329 (1989...
...The diversity of non-Indians has been made invisible by the diffusion and consolidation of the idea that Colombia is a nation of mestizos and that mestizaje represents a democratic force...
...Today, these interests are showering the state with petitions for title to lands on which others have labored for centuries...
...de Friedemann and Arocha,Desolasol...
...However, as soon as individual Indians became integrated into national society-that is, once they became mestizos-they gave up these rights...
...Over the next six months, public roundtable discussions held in Bogoti's Capitol building returned continually to the task of trying to imagine an inclusive nation...
...He also negated the significance of 300 years of subversive flight known as cimarronaje, or "marronage," by which runaway slaves established -tl, NaslJa...
...Attempts to disperse private property more widely, by appealing to citizens' rights to equality, were blocked by the agrarian structure that held sway in regions like the Cauca Valley...
...Such consequences became glaringly apparent over the past two years during the process of writing a new constitution...
...In the meantime, leaders of the National Maroon Movement report that hundreds of families of African descent are losing their lands to migrants from the departments of Risaralda and Antioquia, attracted by a new road linking the city of Pereira with the Pacific Ocean...
...These guerrilla organizations were being reincorporated into civilian life after signing separate peace treaties with the state between January 1989 and February 1991...
...7. The previous calculation of probabilities, the delineation of quantities and the formulation of analogies were replaced by a simple process of addition...
...What's more, Transitory Article 55 maintains that these black communities "...have been occupying vacant lands...
...The crowd was anxious to know why the progressive politicians they had elected to the Constituent Assembly -among them, regional Indian leaders, and members of the leftist Patriotic Union Party (UP) and M-19 Democratic Alliance-had not defended black rights.' But these politicians did not even bother to show up, leaving their advisers to face an avalanche of criticism.' This misadventure and the exclusive character of the new constitution both stem from the enduring legacy of socio-racial castes predominant in the Spanish colonies...
...for others, it was the excuse...
...The former constitute 10% of the population...
...507-572...
...For this reason, combined with the belligerency with which some of the communities defended their communal rights, Indians' historical and cultural identity, as well as their territorial and political rights, were once again recognized in 1890...
...Theirargument idealized "indigenous peoples" to the disadvantage of "ethnic groups" in such sensitive matters as political autonomy, the exercise of traditional communal territorial rights, the consolidation of unique familial, social and community organizations, and the rational management of the environment...
...However, Transitory Article 55 conditions the ethnic rights of "...the black communities [of]...the rural riverbanks in the Pacific basin" to the future recommendations of a parliamentary commission, which has not yet been formed even though the new legislature was seated in mid-January...
...6 And it broadened the concept of ethnic territory to make room for the communities that line the rivers of the Pacific Coast...
...Muelas and Fals not only reiterated the distinction voted down during the preparatory sessions...
...Pacific Nevertheless, at the final preparatory session I overheard several members of this one "have been occupying vacant lands...
...H6ctor Diaz Polanco, "Etnifas y Democracia Nacional," Ameirica Indigena, Vol...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, Ma Ngombe: Guerrerosy Ganaderos en Palenque (BogotA: Carlos ValenciaEditores, 1987...
...The term negro ladino not only specified "racial purity," but also indicated that the person was of Spanish or Portuguese culture...
...This taxonomical system helped sustain a vertical society of socio-racial castes so rigid that Indians, blacks REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Jaime Arocha Rodriguez teaches anthropology at the UniversidadNacional de Colombia and is an editor of the journalAm6rica Negra(UniversidadJaveriana, Bogotd).or mulattos who failed to use the prescribed dress or dared to kneel in Church pews could be sanctioned with the full weight of the law...
...In spite of the failure of these treaties and the numerous assassinations of a significant number of UP militants and two of its presidential candidates, the party continues to participate in electoral politics...
...105-109...
...Neither did he consider the solidity of black organization evident in those regions...
...183-191...
...20 This fiction is the result of a tradition of binary calculations that the onetime insurgents who became delegates to the Constituent Assembly did nothing to challenge...
...The Constituent Assembly elected the following December was unique...
...For some, the importation of these ideals by Antonio Nariflo was the cause of the 1810 declaration of independence...
...They answered that since the indigenous and left-wing candidates had more money and better connections to the media, they decided to support Emberi Indian leader Francisco Rojas Barri...
...Such digital sleight-of-hand cannot be understood unless one accepts the notion that convictions can determine perception...
...Arocha, "Hacia una Naci6n para los Excluidos" 19...
...This notion is based on the belief that equality of rights is not compatible with the conservation of identity...
...Betweentwo andthree there is ajump...
...Gregory Bateson wrote, "Numbers are the product of counting...
...The educational and other systems by which Colombians are socialized have proven very efficient in this regard...
...5 Yet it was progressive in the sense that it lent support to people's identity in daily and political life...
...In a 1989 article, with the emblematic title, "Todos Tenemos Derecho, Pero No Todo Es Igual" ("We All Have Rights, But Not Everything Is Equal"), he argued that only Indians-and not blacks-have territorial, historical, social, legal and political credentials to merit recognition of rights concordant with their identity.' 4 Bonilla failed to note that blacks have exercised territoriality in communities on both coasts, in the Patia Valley and on the northern plains of the Cauca River, as demonstrated by several ethnographic censuses...
...The Spanish and Portuguese developed an intricate series of denominations to classify people according to shades of skin color, shapes of noses, type and color of hair and eyes, and stature, set up to determine how close or far each type was from white Europeans.' Words like quinter6n or cuarterdn were invented to denominate the descendants of whites who had a fifth or fourth part black "blood...
...The essence of the 1886 charter boiled down to an either/ or proposition in which "people" equalled mestizos, and "not people" equalled Indians...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 4
