#CHOCO COLOMBIA SERIES#

In short, Chocó has suffered not just systematic racism at the hands of the Colombian state, controlled by both white and mestizo Colombians, but also the brunt of neoliberalism development for years, according to Nuñez Ciceros as the country seeks to fit into the North American and European definition of development and/or committing to “advancing the white race”, as some people from Central and South America would say. There are also other visible forms of violence, including large-scale corporate mining (gold and platinum) carried out by Canadian, US, and Brazilian companies, and illegal mining by armed groups according to the locals and ethnographic studies done by Lara-Rodríguez. These economic challenges are exacerbated by the presence of armed groups led by leftist guerrilla groups, including the National Liberation Army (ELN) and right-wing paramilitary groups who are interested in controlling the drug trade and arms trafficking on the Atrato River in the region. These departments over the years have struggled with economic poverty conditions, with the Chocó Department at the lowest of the economic poverty ladder. If you want to see how racism manifests itself, you have to look at Chocó and other predominantly Afro-Colombian departments such as Cauca, Valle del Cauca, or Bolivar. The department is naturally endowed with economic and mineral resources such as gold and platinum, Choco and Antioquia department being the main producers of gold in Colombia according to the 2017 data from the Colombia Mining Information System (this according to Lara-Rodríguez 2018). It is predominantly an Afro-Colombian department, with Afro-Colombians making up 82.1% of the population, followed by the Indigenous population at 12.7%, and the mestizo population at 5.2 % and a few white Colombians. I lived in the Pacific Department of Chocó. I lived and served with Mennonite Central Committee in Colombia for two years. This systematic exclusion and marginalization is largely by design, formulated and implemented by years of segregation in the name territorial independence. And it is not by accident that these racialized groups live on the peripherals of Colombia. Because sometimes marginality works in pairs, in Colombia, where there is a marginalization of Afro-Colombians, there is also the marginalization of the Indigenous population. And most of the overt racism Black and Indigenous Colombians face emerges out of the mestizo population because they tend to live in close proximity with the former, although white Colombians are the architect of the systematic racism most Black, Indigenous and mestizo people face in Colombia.įor people to authentically understand the reality of racism in Colombia, they need to ask the Indigenous minority, which is only 4.3 %, and the Black/Afro-Colombian community who make up 6.8% of the population. The problem with this group of people, for the most part, like everywhere else in Latin America, tends to view itself as white. To know of its reality in Colombia, do not ask white Colombians who make up 37% of the population, or the mestizo population which is birthed out of intermarriages among Amerindian, enslaved African, and European descendants, and forms the majority of Colombia’s population at approximately 5 0%. Of course, racism is very much alive in Colombia. “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” James Baldwin

#CHOCO COLOMBIA SERIES#

This article is part of a series about racism in Colombia.

Choco colombia