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href="http://www.aaihs.org/afro-colombians-and-the-peace-agreement-in-colombia/">http://www.aaihs.org/afro-colombians-and-the-peace-agreement-in-colombia/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Afro-Colombians and the Peace Agreement in
Colombia</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Yesenia Barragan -
November 23, 2016</div>
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<p>On the evening of October 2, 2016, the whole world was
in absolute shock. The Colombian people <a
href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37537252"
target="_blank">rejected a historic peace agreement</a>
between the government and the country’s leftwing,
guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC), in a plebiscite by the narrowest of
margins, a matter of barely more than 50,000 votes.</p>
<p>If the agreement had passed that evening, it would have
ended more than half a century of civil war in Colombia.
To be clear, the peace deal would have directly affected
the lives of Colombia’s most marginalized communities
who bear the brunt of the war, among them poor, urban
and rural Afro-Colombians, of which <a
href="http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2322"
target="_blank">78.5% live below the poverty line</a> as
of 2011 (compared to the national average of 49.2%).</p>
<p>Although Afro-Colombians constitute about 10.6% of the
national population, they are disproportionately the
victims of murders (primarily at the hands of rightwing
paramilitary forces) and violent, forced displacements
in the countryside, caught in the middle of fighting
between guerrillas, the state, and paramilitaries often
backed by the state and financed by drug-traffickers and
multinational corporations. According to a government
survey conducted in 2010, for example, about <a
href="http://www.abcolombia.org.uk/downloads/Informe_Desplazamiento_2012_La_Crisis_Humanitaria_.pdf"
target="_blank">22.5% of the displaced population
identified as Afro-Colombian</a>. The figure is
unquestionably bigger, for many fear reprisals and
retributions if they register themselves as “officially”
displaced.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the peace deal was supported
overwhelmingly in predominantly Afro-Colombian regions
like the Pacific Coast where about <a
href="https://www.academia.edu/3557324/Afro-Colombian_Social_Movements"
target="_blank">80% of the population is
Afro-Colombian</a>. With the emergence of rightwing
paramilitary organizations and powerful drug-trafficking
rings beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, the Pacific
Coast of Colombia has become ground zero of the war in
Colombia. In 2013 alone, the government <a
href="http://www.defensoria.gov.co/public/pdf/crisisHumanitariaChoco.pdf"
target="_blank">reported</a> that 63.4% of all
displacements in Colombia occurred in the four
departments of the Pacific Coast. After the plebiscite,
it was revealed that eight of the top ten municipalities
in Colombia<strong>—</strong>with <a
href="http://plebiscito.registraduria.gov.co/99PL/DPLZZZZZRF_L1.htm"
target="_blank">the highest pro-peace votes (more than
93%)</a><strong>—</strong>were located in the western,
Afro-Colombian Pacific region.</p>
<p>Among the municipalities with the highest pro-peace
votes was a small, Afro-Colombian river town called
Bojayá, located in the rural, Pacific coastal department
of Chocó. On May 2, 2002, Bojayá became the <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/08/colombia.martinhodgson"
target="_blank">epicenter of the armed conflict</a> in
Colombia when devastating fighting erupted between the
FARC and paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia (AUC) in their town. On that morning
in May, hundreds of families fled to the town church to
seek refuge from the crossfire. While paramilitary
soldiers hid around and behind the church, the FARC
launched an improvised mortar full of explosives and
shrapnel that hit the church, killing 119 villagers,
among them many children and elderly.</p>
<p>According to an <a
href="http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-37541772"
target="_blank">investigation</a> by the United
Nations, the national army of Colombia allowed
paramilitaries to enter the region without any trouble.
Despite calls for help and an alert from the Ombudsmen,
the army did not appear until well after the massacre.
About 5,771 people, the majority from Bojayá and
surrounding villages, were forcibly displaced to the
capital of Chocó in that single month of May alone.</p>
<p>Bojayá is undoubtedly one of the central sites of
Colombia’s long and tragic history of war and armed
conflict. And despite this, or perhaps, better yet,
because of it, this small, rural Afro-Colombian town had
the fourth highest percentage of peace votes in the
entire nation at <a
href="http://plebiscito.registraduria.gov.co/99PL/DPL17011ZZZZZZZZZZZZ_L1.htm"
target="_blank">95.78%</a>. A few days after the
rejection of the peace plebiscite, the victims of Bojayá
<a
href="http://memoriasdelatrato.org/index.php/component/k2/item/220-bojaya-y-atrato-medio-urge-respetar-el-si-de-las-victimas-frente-al-acuerdo-de-paz"
target="_blank">released a collective statement</a>
demanding the country respect and ratify the peace
agreement. “We, the victims of Bojayá, have suffered the
brutality of the war and for that reason we voted YES to
Peace,” they declared.</p>
<p>Much was at stake for poor, rural and urban
Afro-Colombians in the peace deal. Besides ending the
formal war between the FARC and the government, the
final peace agreement included an “<a
href="http://www.onic.org.co/comunicados-onic/1414-capitulo-etnico-incluido-en-el-acuerdo-final-de-paz-entre-el-gobierno-nacional-y-las-farc"
target="_blank">Ethnic Chapter</a>” that explicitly
recognized that the injustices inflicted by black and
indigenous communities were the historic “product of
colonialism, slavery, exclusion, and dispossession from
their lands, territories, and resources,” and guaranteed
protection, participation, and self-government to these
communities. This inclusion was the product of concerted
organizing and mobilizations by various Afro-Colombian
organizations including the Afro-Colombian National
Council of Peace, the Association of Small and Medium
Miners of Chocó, the National Coordination of
Afro-descendent Organizations and Communities, <em>Chao
Racismo</em>, and other black and indigenous
organizations. In <a
href="https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/comunicados/comunicado-conjunto-no-78-la-habana-cuba-27-de-junio-de-2016"
target="_blank">June 2016</a>, representatives of
these groups met in Havana with FARC leaders and
government peace negotiators to demand the inclusion of
an “ethnic” focus in the accords.</p>
<p>On <a
href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/12/501863434/colombia-farc-rebels-announce-a-new-peace-deal"
target="_blank">November 12, 2016</a>, about a month
or so before the lifting of a ceasefire between the FARC
and the government set on December 31, 2016, both
parties announced that they had reached a new peace deal
that integrated changes and proposals from the
opposition. The new peace deal will not be put up to
another national plebiscite, but will now be <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-colombia-peace-idUSKBN13E0LI"
target="_blank">debated and voted in the Colombian
Congress</a>. Fortunately, for so many Afro-Colombian
families, organizations, and communities, the hard-won
“Ethnic Chapter” <a
href="https://www.mesadeconversaciones.com.co/sites/default/files/12-1479102292.11-1479102292.2016nuevoacuerdofinal-1479102292.pdf"
target="_blank">remained in the final version of the
peace agreement</a>.</p>
<p>As Afro-Latino writer and Divinity Student at Duke
University Daniel José Camacho <a
href="https://twitter.com/DanielJCamacho/status/798738459796140032"
target="_blank">wrote</a>, “I’m inspired by the
Colombians who didn’t let the plebiscite results stop
them.” In the wake of our own national shock in the
United States earlier this November, perhaps the
struggles of Afro-Colombians who continue to mobilize
and organize despite the highest of odds against them
can offer some guidance.</p>
<hr>
<p><a
href="http://www.aaihs.org/contributors/yesenia-barragan/"
target="_blank"><strong>Yesenia Barragan</strong></a>
is a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in
Colombia, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic/Pacific
worlds. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American and
Caribbean History from Columbia University. She is
currently a <a
href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/sof/fellowships/postdoc.html"
target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.dartmouth.edu/sof/fellowships/postdoc.html&source=gmail&ust=1469982651658000&usg=AFQjCNGOVqXYtNrN3Kcmp3t9cPT1TKbvYQ">Postdoctoral
Fellow</a> in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth
College. Follow her on Twitter <a
href="https://twitter.com/Y__Barragan" target="_blank">@Y__Barragan.</a></p>
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