Essential Afro-Latino/ Caribbean Current Events

[Yehuda]

MST keeps solidarity initiatives in Africa and Latin America during the pandemic

Learn more about the work done by Brazilians in Haiti, Venezuela, and Zambia

Daniel Giovanaz
Translated by: Thiago Moyano
Brasil de Fato | New Delhi (Índia) | 04 June, 2020 | 20:24

MST donates hand sanitizers and masks to be distributed in the outskirts of Zambia — Samora Machel Internacionalist Brigade

During the pandemic, the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST by its Brazilian Portuguese acronym) made the news for donating 1.2 tons of foods produced in their camps and settlements to the vulnerable populations in Brazil. The solidarity initiatives, which help to avoid shortages during the health crisis, also took place abroad, and started way before the covid-19 pandemic.

The movement's internationalist brigades work in other two Latin American countries, Haiti and Venezuela, and are also present in Zambia, in South Central Africa.

Haiti

Brazil's Via Campesina Internationalist Brigade in Haiti was named after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the revolutionary heroes who fought for the country's independence in 1804.

Their work started in January 2009 and was intensified in the following year, after an earthquake killed 316 thousand people and left 1.2 million people without shelter in the capital Port-au-Prince and other neighboring towns.

Food sovereignty is one of Haiti's most urgent needs / Dessalines Internationalist Brigade

The MST has contributed by sending emergency food packages produced in Brazil, helping to implement water collection systems, and building a national center of agroecology — including a hen house with a full capacity for 7 thousand hens. The Dessalines brigade also started to run a bank of rice, corn, and bean seeds.

"Coronavirus comes into a context of historical and structural crises, intensifying a public health crisis that has been severe since the times of cholera," explains Paulo Henrique, MST activist and member of the brigade. The country has already reported 2,507 Covid-19 cases and 48 deaths.

According to the activist, the election of Jovenel Moïse in 2016 has worsened the political instability and economic crisis, affecting the population's quality of life, causing popular demonstrations across the country.

"It's a government that implemented a neoliberal agenda, with an economy depending even more on the US imperialism, which during this pandemic is not doing anything to protect the population. In other words, the State is absolutely absent from the lives of Haitians," he criticizes.

Today, the Dessalines brigade works on four fronts. The first axis is the production of food in partnership with Tet Kole ti Peyizan Ayisyen, a peasant movement that fights for food sovereignty in Haiti. Besides that, the brigade also helps in the distribution of seedlings, stimulating reforesting, as well as masks to the population.

The fourth front works on political mobilization with organized popular movements against Moïse's regime.

Activists expose social movements' flags that carry out solidarity actions in Haiti / Dessalines Internationalist Brigade

Venezuela

The MST work in Venezuela started 15 years ago. Their first task was to help the Bolivarian Revolution with political education, as well as to grow healthy food. The brigade is named after Apolônio de Carvalho, a Brazilian intellectual and activist who died in 2005.

Amid the economic war promoted by the US, which has been aggravated in the pandemic, MST members work to guarantee food sovereignty and avoid shortages in the country.

The production of native and agro-ecological seeds in the country is conducted in partnership with the Venezuelan state, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The new coronavirus has infected 1,819 venezuelans and caused 18 deaths in the country up until now. Since the number of cases is under control, at least in comparison to neighboring states, the food health of the country remains a priority.

MST activists have been in Haiti since 2009 / Dessalines Internationalist Brigade

The agricultural technician Rafael Quiroga, MST activist, works in the state of Merida, in the municipalities of Andres Bello and Campos Elías. "Our work here aims at sharing knowledge and experience in agroecology for the production of seeds, greens, and grains. We assist the families in the production of seeds, extraction, cleaning, drying and stocking," he reports.

"We have a dream to help them create a co-op similar to Bionatur, with a Venezuelan identity. We have learned a lot from the stories of struggle, resistance, and organization of the Venezuelan people," adds Quiroga.

The agronomist Patricia Balbinotti works in the El Maizál commune, in the state of Lara, and believes that the stimulus to the production of healthy food is central to the Venezuelan scenario. "We are trying to implement a process of agroecological transition, recovering the soil with organic compost," says the activist, who also works with the peasant families who live in the community.

Zambia

The Internationalist Brigade in Zambia is named after Samora Machel, a revolutionary that led Mozambique's independence in 1975.

Zambia has 1,089 official covid-19 cases and 7 deaths. The situation is apparently under control, but undercounting must be factored in.

Members of the brigade also call attention to the growth in the number of people dying from HIV/Aids and the flu, for instance. It is possible that HIV-positive people's lower immunity has aggravated the number of deaths by coronavirus — by stating the cause of death as the flu, the government could be underestimating the problem.

During a heavily militarized quarantine, MST activists work mostly on the distribution of seeds and healthcare equipment, which has been neglected by the local government, as well as on political mobilizations to protect peasants' rights. Last week, the brigade donated 400 liters of hand sanitizer and 400 masks to the Socialist Party of Zambia — the most important progressive force in the country's opposition. The donations will be distributed in the outskirts of the country.

Out of the 17 million inhabitants, more than 10% live in the capital of Lusaka. The country has very few urban areas, which concentrate 44% of the population. The cities have precarious sewage systems and access to water. The families rely on an informal economy and are used to living in clusters, which increases risk of contamination.

MST and the Socialist Party of Zambia / Samora Machel Internationalist Brigade

Going against the World Health Organization (WHO) protocols and ignoring the rise in the number of covid-19 cases, the government eased social isolation measures a few days ago, authorizing the opening of restaurants, bars, parks, beauty salons, and gyms. The brigade coordinator and MST activist, Fabio Pimentel, adds that there is also the possibility of reopening universities, as well as a partial return of public school activities.

In the rural areas, the brigade defends that the State guarantees public policies to buy products from the peasants, given that necessary measures have been taken to protect workers' lives.

Almost 55% of Zambians live in extreme poverty and only 46% of the population has access to clean water. Life expectancy is 59 and 12,% of the people between 15 and 49 are HIV-positive.


Edited by: Rodrigo Chagas

MST keeps solidarity initiatives in Africa and Latin America during the pandemic

 

[Yehuda]

 

[Yehuda]

The tragic assassination of Colombia’s sports hero Patrón, lover of football and his Afro-Colombian community

Patrocinio Bonilla was assassinated by paramilitaries in Chocó on August 11, amid a context of intensified violence against the communities in the region

August 19, 2020 by Vijay Prashad, Zoe PC

Patrocinio Bonilla cuts sugar cane, Colombia, 2015. Photo: Pablo Fierro.

Not much, apart from football, unites the Colombian people. If a 2014 Interior Ministry survey called “The Power of Football” is to be believed, then 94 percent of the Colombian population say that football is either important or very important. Patrocinio Bonilla—called Patrón—was on the side of those who believed that football was very important, indeed essential. Patrón was murdered on August 11, 2020.

Patrón lived in Chocó in northwestern Colombia, where 96 percent of the people identify as Afro-Colombian or as part of the Emberá Indigenous community. Chocó is treated as a backwater of the country, with no real infrastructure in the province’s expanse and little social policy to enhance the lives of its population.

“From a very young age,” a friend of Patrón’s told us, “he wanted to be a professional football player.” He went to Medellín, where he tried his luck with Atlético Nacional, even though he was a fan of América de Cali (a team loved by Afro-Colombians). His poverty prevented him from being able to stay in Medellín to train, so he returned home to Pie de Pató in Chocó.

Patrón organized a football tournament in the area. He told his friend Germán Bedoya—a founder of the national agrarian movement (Coordinador Nacional Agrario, or CNA)—that if he could keep the young people occupied with football, then they would not be so easily recruited into the narco-trafficking and paramilitary organizations that preyed on these communities. The narco-traffickers needed the land to grow cocaine, and they needed the young people as their disposable employees. This is what Patrón tried to prevent through football.

Assassination

On August 11, Patrón went into the hills to chop wood with about two dozen other people from his community. In that region, one of his friends told us, “there is a custom to cut wood at certain times of the year; the wood is cut and sawed and then brought down the Baudó River to Puerto Meluk or Puerto Pizarro.” On that day, Patrón and the others were confronted by armed members of the paramilitary groups that terrorized the area. The armed men interrogated Patrón and his friends, and then released them all except Patrón. “Minutes later,” Patrón’s friend told us, the group Patrón had been with “heard shots, and they knew that they [the men] had assassinated Patrón. They waited for the assassins to leave, went back, and found him dead with his face in the earth.”

Patrón’s body was brought back to his community in Alto Baudó, where it was washed and dressed in white sheets; rituals of burial rooted in Afro-Colombian traditions were then performed. When his mother, sisters, cousins, and son tried to come for the ceremony, they were prevented by the same paramilitary groups (who did this within sight of the army and the police). Eventually, only his mother, his son, and one sister were able to get through to attend the ceremony.

Displacement of the People

In early August, in addition to Patrón, nine young people were assassinated in Samaniego, five children were tortured and killed in Cali, two children were killed in the border area of Cauca and Nariño, and two Indigenous people—one of them a journalist—were assassinated in Cauca by the army. This is part of a spate of murders going on in recent years. Between November 2016 and August 19, 2020, 974 social leaders and human rights defenders were assassinated in Colombia (185 in 2020 alone), according to live updates from the Institute of Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz) following their release of a July 15 report they prepared with two other Colombian activist organizations. In Patrón’s region of Alto Baudó, between December 2019 and March 2020, about 17 people were assassinated.

These killings are not random. They are part of an assault on the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in northwestern Colombia, particularly against anyone who resists the power of the narco-traffickers and their paramilitaries; they are also an attack on the Colombian left, since people like Patrón are affiliated with groups such as CNA and the Congreso de Los Pueblos. Since the 1990s, these groups have evicted large numbers of subsistence farmers and killed many political leaders. In the last two decades, paramilitary groups have displaced thousands of people who lived in Chocó, particularly the Alto Baudó community. Many of them have not been able to return home. These displacements continue, despite the pandemic.

Building a Fence

In 2009, the CNA arrived in Alto Baudó and other parts of Chocó to strengthen the communities that had been hit hard by the narco-traffickers and their paramilitaries. As part of its work, the CNA introduced agro-ecological production techniques, often built on older Afro-Colombian agricultural traditions, and helped both the Afro-Colombian and the Indigenous communities defend their rights to the land.

During their work with CNA, the local communities built an organization called Kinchas; the word means a barrier or a fence, a protection built to prevent animals from running riot through the crops. Kinchas was formed first to protest against the aerial spraying of glyphosate, a dangerous chemical, on crops. In 2015, the government of Colombia stopped using glyphosate after studies showed it was dangerous to people. But in March 2020, Colombian President Iván Duque told US President Donald Trump he would resume the use of glyphosate as an herbicide on crops of coca as a weapon against cocaine production. The resumption of glyphosate use, not only on coca crops but other kinds too, would threaten to, once again, make the area uninhabitable for the Afro-Colombians and the Indigenous communities.

Patrón was a founder of Kinchas. A comrade of his told us that “Kinchas was the barrier against the glyphosate. We demarcated the food-growing zones with huge tall yellow and green banners so that the pilots of the small planes would know not to spray there.” Kinchas was a barrier against the glyphosate and other toxins; people like Patrón built it to protect the growing of subsistence crops using agro-ecological techniques. The work of Kinchas, we were told, “is a political struggle to raise awareness and to fight for the rights of the people to their land.”

The Alliances of Death

“In Colombia we continue to confront the deepening of state terrorism,” Ernesto Roa, the president of the CNA, told us. “Far from looking for solutions to the structural problems in the country, the state continues to turn over the land to transnational companies,” he said. There is an “alliance of death,” Roa said, a close link between the army, the police, and the paramilitaries of the narco-traffickers. It is concern about this “alliance of death” that motivated the Supreme Court to sentence Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe to house arrest on August 4; protests on behalf of Uribe and favorable statements by the current President Iván Duque—and close US ally—suggest that even the highest court has little power to seek justice for the acts committed by the “alliance of death.”

The province of Chocó is one of the flashpoints for this “alliance of death.” Patrón, who loved to dance and drink viche (distilled aguardiente), had received several death threats prior to August 11; his work in building peace had rattled the paramilitaries. Germán Bedoya told us that this scared Patrón, and so Patrón “decided to lower his profile, to continue to encourage football but to lower his political profile.” Nonetheless, he continued to be active in the community council and in the local government in Alto Baudó. Patrón was a natural leader of his community, someone who could not retreat from the demands made by his people. It is this work that likely painted a target on Patrón’s back for the paramilitary groups and led to his death.

Tenderness and His Smile

When Germán Bedoya last spoke to Patrón, the conversation drifted into football. Patrón told Bedoya that he wanted to create a talent school for children just like himself who harbored ambitions for a professional football career. Bedoya remembers his friend and comrade for his love of his land and his roots, for his love of the Baudó River and for Chocó, for his love of hunting and being connected to Afro-Colombian culture. Patrón leaves behind, Bedoya told us, “the lesson of tenderness, the lesson of his smile, and the lesson of his consistency in the struggle.”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Zoe PC is a journalist with Peoples Dispatch and reports on people’s movements in Latin America.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The tragic assassination of Colombia’s sports hero Patrón, lover of football and his Afro-Colombian community

 

[Yehuda]

Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations: the struggle continues

By Jesús “Chucho” García | August 10, 2020

Last June, the Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations celebrated two decades (2000/2020), under the impulse of two organizations: the Afro-American Foundation and the Union of Black Women. These two organizations created at the beginning of the 1990s came together to expand their radius of action in the absence of an agenda by the State / Government of Venezuela to fight against racism, exclusion and public policies of inclusion for about 51 percent of the Venezuelan population that is considered black, brown, bachaco, trigueño, or any other characteristic that denotes an Afro-descendant, according to what we defined in the Pre-Conference of the Americas Against Racism held in Santiago, Chile in December 2000.

During our first attempt to include Afro-descendant in the nascent Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in 1999, our proposals were rejected, thus violating our right as an Afro-American people to have contributed to the formation of the Venezuelan nation, since the rebellion of King Miguel in Buría (1553), Andresote (1732), Guillermo Ribas / Manucha Algarín and Miguel Gerónimo Guacamaya with Josefina Sánchez in 1791, and José Leonardo Chirino in Sierra de Falcón (1795), in addition to the participation of Afro-Venezuelan men and women in the Oil Strike in the second decade of the 20th century, as well as the participation in the guerrilla war in the sixties and seventies of the last century.

The Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations is the genesis of the Afro-Venezuelan movement in its diversity

Obviously, the deputies and deputies drafting the new Constitution expressed their ignorance of the subject and of the Venezuelan history itself. However, from there we created an agenda with five strategic points: continue fighting for (1) inclusion in the Constitution, (2) inclusion in the organic laws that would be derived from the new Constitution, (3) inclusion in the Census as to know how many of us there are, where do we live and how are we living, (4) the inclusion of the historical, moral and political contributions as well as the knowledge of Afro-descendants in the curriculum of the Venezuelan educational system and (5) finally, promote the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

Internally, the Network had and continues to have three fundamental aspects for its internal functioning. First, the ideological political aspect supported by the contributions of Africa to humanity, recognizing ourselves as an Autonomous Social Movement with an agenda of self-determination, anti-imperialism, anti-neo-colonialism and anti-racism. Second, the organizational aspect with a movement structure that is not the same as that of political parties and operates on the basis of consensus and dissent. And third, economic development in order to enjoy greater autonomy in our actions that are not mediated by the State or by political parties.

Under these six strategies and three principles, we marked our path of permanent struggle, speaking our own language and trying to re-educate President Chávez who understood the issue as he recorded it during his show Aló Presidente and the last letter he sent to the Africa-South America Summit in February 2013, a few days before his death: “The empires of the past, guilty of the kidnapping and murder of millions of daughters and sons of Mother Africa, in order to feed a system of pro-slavery exploitation in their colonies, sowed warlike and combative African blood in Our America, which burned for the fire that produces the desire for freedom”.

The sustainable development proposal that Chávez proposed for Barlovento and Yaracuy included our aspirations for economic sustainability, but unfortunately the bureaucracy that came after him placed bureaucrats in those projects and ended up assassinating Chávez's plans. Today we say that the Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations is the genesis of the Afro-Venezuelan movement in its diversity. In the next part we will address the agenda that we have proposed for this next decade, but that agenda must be fought, they have never given us anything for free and an Afro-revolutionary does not know how to lower his head before power or a pat on the shoulder. We are maroons and will always be.

Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations: the struggle continues

 

[Yehuda]

The internationalization of Afro-descendant struggles

By Jesús “Chucho” García | August 17, 2020

In the previous article we talked about the role that the Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations has played as the genesis of the Afro-Venezuelan movement in these two decades of struggle (2000/2020), as well as the strategies to re-educate the Bolivarian Government with our own agenda. Within this, it was necessary to articulate our struggles with other Afro-descendant brothers and sisters from the north and south of Our America to establish a common struggle against the traumas left by the slave trade, the denigrating system of slavery, racism, poverty that nearly 200 million Afro-descendants on the continent were and continue to be subjected to.

That common struggle was reflected when various Afro-American organizations on the continent created the Afro-Latin American Strategic Alliance (2000) to participate in the Pre-Conference of the Americas, in Santiago de Chile in December 2000. We prepared an agenda and elaborated a concept, which was Afro-descendants, emerged from our self-determination, not even from academia, neither from the political parties, nor the States; it was a political conception elaborated by and consensual among the social movements.

Thus we were united to participate in the III World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, September 2001. The Cohesive Afro-Venezuelan Network was the only Afro-Venezuelan organization that participated in that conference where the UN recognized us as Afro-descendants in its Plan of Action. Additionally, the creation of an Afro-descendant working group was proposed to provide permanent monitoring to the States so that they comply with this plan of action.

Several members of the Afro-Venezuelan Network had to travel to Geneva, Switzerland to strengthen the issue in that multilateral organization. This articulation depended on the understanding of President Chávez and the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, which had not yet signed optional protocol 14 of the Convention Against Racism so that our country would be periodically evaluated in terms of progress in public policies against Racism.

The Network held a meeting with then-Foreign Minister Roy Chaderton, for Venezuela to sign the protocol. Chaderton understood it and, at the request of the Movement, deposited the legal signature for said multilateral evaluation (2003). President Chávez was becoming more literate on the subject, some of his ministers were resisting as well as many high-level PSUV cadres, but the internal struggle had to be fought as said in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: we are decision-making legal subjects.

The Network, aside from developing its national agenda, promoted several international events in Caracas to establish international Afro-descendant links. In 2004 we held an exchange with progressive militants from the United States, led by Danny Glover and James Early. And in 2005 we held the first International meeting with the presence of President Hugo Chávez: Afro-descendants and Revolutionary Transformations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2006 and 2007 two more international meetings were held where the Afro-descendant anti-imperialist approach began to walk in the ideological definition, in the face of an approach that the international right led in the United States began to build as the Afro-Right. In 2011, we held the fourth international meeting of Afro-descendants and Revolutionary Transformations, with the indisputable support of the Bolivarian Government, held within the context of the International Year for People of African Descent, decreed by the United Nations. There the Regional Council of Africans in the Americas (RCAA) would emerge, as a part of the progressive transformations that Latin America was experiencing at the time.

The internationalization of Afro-descendant struggles

 

[Yehuda]

Day of the Disappeared: Garifunas Demand Return of Comrades

Social media campaign demands return of all five young men alive. | Photo: Twitter / @All4GlobalJust

Published 30 August 2020

Five abducted members of the Triunfo de la Cruz coastal town remain missing after being abducted by armed men on July 18.

On International Day of the Disappeared, the Garifunas of Honduras are demanding the safe return of five abducted members of the community of Triunfo de la Cruz, including Garifuna leader Snider Centeno, the president of the elected community council.

RELATED: Honduras: Protests Demand Return of Disappeared Garifuna Youth

Saturday marked six weeks since the young men were taken on Saturday, July 18th, by a group of men wearing Honduran Police (DPI) bullet proof vests, according to witnesses.

The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (Ofraneh) led a twitter storm at 11:00am while the communities of San Juan Tela, Trujillo and Puerto Cortes came together in traditional song, dance and other forms of protest, to sound alarms about abducted men whose whereabouts continue to be unknown 43 days on.

The demand for their return is being accompanied by calls to end the violence against Afro-Indigenous communities and the attempts to displace Garifuna communities from their ancestral lands in order to turn their territories into mono-culture agriculture, tourist resorts and extractive projects for the benefit of developers linked to the Honduran regime of Juan Orlando Hernandez.



Given the human rights situation in Honduras and the failure of the state to protect threatened communities, the community is afraid they’ll never see the four men alive again. “They were taken alive, we want them back alive” is the slogan.

Ofraneh is also demanding an impartial investigation which does not include the DPI, into the disappearance of the men and compliance with orders of the Inter-American Human Rights Court (IACHR) for justice for Triunfo de la Cruz and Punta Piedra.



The IACHR ordered the Honduran State to make reparations for the harm they committed against Garifuna communities, to return the stolen land and to end impunity for the crimes committed but the government has ignored the court’s orders and allowed violence to intensify.

The Alliance for Global Justice reports that the government has tried to frame activists as being part of organized crime in order to cover up and divert from the disappearances and murders taking place with total impunity.



Day of the Disappeared: Garifunas Demand Return of Comrades

 

[Yehuda]

The Afro-Peruvian Women Leading the Black Movement in South America

Get to know five women who have become the leading voices of the Afro-Peruvian movement.

By DASH HARRIS
Jul. 24, 2020 12:55PM EST

Photo by Leyla Galvez.
Afro-Peruvian women mark International Women's Day March earlier this year.

The image of a smiling Black woman, complete with red kerchief, sits above the word "Negrita," emblazoned on the bright red packaging of various sweets. The brand name stands out, as if taken from the refrain of Victoria Santa Cruz' emblematic poem, Me Gritaron Negra (They Yelled 'Black Woman' at Me).

Negrita is a familiar mammy trope, similar to the United States' Aunt Jemima. Both are set to become relics of their stereotypical past—the Peruvian version declared gone in late June, when AliCorp, the largest Peruvian consumer goods producer, announced the change of the name and image of its brand Negrita after 60 years of existence. Calling the image "inappropriate," the company said it will continue "inspiring respect, inclusion and equity…to build together the society we want."

Black Peruvian actress Anaí Padilla Vásquez, who was integral in the company's decision to remove the image, said, in a post on Facebook: "growing up and living under a stereotype like this generates a lot of damage, pain and even rejection of your own identity." She called racism one of the "largest pandemics in the world" and said the move by AliCorp is an "important and historic action in the fight against racism" in Peru.

Many Afro-Peruvians identify with the global fight against anti-Black imagery that ultimately informs and fosters anti-Black discrimination and violence. According to the Peruvian government, as of 2017, there were close to one million people of African descent in the country. Half of Afro-Peruvians have been insulted at least once on the street and four of every 10 have felt discriminated against in their workplace, in shops or other public spaces.

The current and ongoing anti-racist movement has received further global attention since the death of U.S. man George Floy on May 25—a poignant time in Peru, which honors Afro-Peruvian history every June since the month's designation in 2006. June 4 is the national day of the Afro-Peruvian—in honor of the birthday of renowned AfroPeruvian writer, poet and musician Nicomedes Santa Cruz—and, just last month, Peru declared July 25 as the day of the Afro-Peruvian woman. It's the same day that Latin America celebrates International Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women's Day, which was established in 1992, forged by La Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora.

Afro-Peruvian activist and researcher Sharún Gonzales has drawn parallels between police abuse of Black people in the U.S. and the over-policing and high incarceration rates of Black Peruvians. Gonzales says that the "differential treatment" in the criminalization of Afro-Peruvians "is a minimized and invisible trend in Peru, along with other inequalities that go unnoticed by those who insist on an abstract equality among all Peruvians."

Gonzales and Padilla are among a group of women who have become the leading voices of the Afro-Peruvian movement. Here are five others to get know.

Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado

Courtesy of Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado.

Ana Lucía Mosquera, activist and professor at University of Saint Martin de Porres—named after the first Afro-descendant saint in the Americas—is happy to hear calls for change, as she remembers being taunted as "la negrita mazamorrera," (in reference to the AliCorp brand), as well as "Doña Pepa," the name of a Peruvian chocolate bar, in grade school, where she was the only Afro-Peruvian student.

For her, the Afro-Peruvian celebrations in June were essential because they "recognize Afro-Peruvian contributions to larger society, as they are often put outside the narrative of being Peruvian." Mosquera however believes a month of recognition is not enough because anti-racist actions are not articulated sufficiently within the country, and "these actions must guarantee rights." Access to education, proper health care, especially amid the pandemic, systematic marginalization and invisibility are the most pressing issues in Mosquera's view.

Peru's 2017 census quantified Afro-Peruvians for the first time since 1940, showing that they make up 3.7 percent of the country's population. The number pleasantly surprised Mosquera, as she said there was very little done to inform and promote the "Afro-descendant" variable to the public. Previously, independent Afro-Peruvian organizations estimated Afro-descendants as 10 percent of the population.

Mosquera has been an activist for over 10 years after observing she was among the very few Afro-Peruvians in her university, alerting her to a certain type of privilege that "isolated her in every space" she was in. Mosquera is a member of Afro-Peruvian organization Makungu para el desarollo, and formerly worked with the Ministry of Culture.

Rocio Muñoz

Photo courtesy of Rocio Muñoz.

Consultant and activist Rocio Muñoz—who has also worked with the Ministry of Culture to prioritize visibility of the Afro-Peruvian community—shared the positive sentiment in eliminating racist imagery, saying the denial of racism and the act of "delegitimizing the sustained demand of many people of African descent, regarding racist representations and the normalization of racism, is very violent." Especially, she said, when it comes from a system sustained by privilege and from people who "have not lived the painful experience of racial discrimination that also impacts Afro-descendant boys and girls."

In an interview in 2013, Muñoz expressed this pain in hearing the anti-Black bullying of her nephew, after classmates called him "El Negro Mama." The taunting was inspired by actor Jorge Benavide's blackface caricatures "El Negro Mama" and "La Paisana Jacinta," both of which reduce Afro-descendant and Indigenous Peruvians to racist tropes. The depictions were pulled from TV after pressure from Afro-Peruvian organizer Monica Carrillo and her organization LUNDU, but subsequently were returned by popular demand.

Since then, Muñoz says the institutional framework that provides more attention to the Afro-Peruvian population has advanced, yet its scope is still limited. The Ministry of Culture is the only public ministry that has the "most specific data and is in charge of designing public policy and the monitoring of it. There are no other executive institutions that are specifically geared to Afro-Peruvians and that is a huge limitation in the guarantee and implementation of fundamental human rights," she said.

Muñoz is part of Presencia Y Palabra: Mujeres Afroperuanas, a collective founded by Eliza Pflucker Herrera, Sofía Arizaga, Adriana Mandros, Carmen Espinoza, Eshe Lewis, and Gonzales, whose videos during the marches on International Women's Day on March 8, and the National Day against Violence against Women on November 25 went viral. With their bold purple and yellow t-shirts, they invoked legendary activist and writer Angela Davis in their calls for "feminism to be anti-racist or not at all." The Black women's collective highlights systemic marginalization, inequality, racism, and violence against AfroPeruvians and Black women in particular who face multiple dimensions of oppression through poverty, limited access to education, employment, and media imagery that devalues and hyper-sexualizes them.

In the public health sector, Afro-Peruvian women in Latin America are "made to wait longer for medical attention and when they do access a medical professional, they are often cursorily examined and dispatched quickly," cites researcher and professor of law, Tanya Kateri Hernandez. The group lifts up voices of diverse forms of resisting while fostering an environment of mutual care, respect and community-building.

Muñoz said the struggle against systemic racism, patriarchy and oppression requires a "united effort of Black women because our diasporic experiences mark common elements, when one talks to a woman in Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico or any other country, discrimination, our history, pain, narratives of resisting and struggle and of freedom and justice" are the same.

Giovanna Sofía Carrillo Zegarra

Photo courtesy of Giovanna Sofía Carrillo Zegarra.

Journalist Giovanna Sofía Carrillo Zegarra says she did not set out to be an activist but found there was no other way she could live, as her activism has proven a "tool and a way to resist racism, machismo, and sexism…in defending human rights in a patriarchal misogynist heteronormative society…so that no Afro-Peruvian child ever has to go through" what she has gone through, she said.

Carillo has been subject to violence on and off social media, while doing her job, and at times from other journalists—like a racist and sexist exchange that was recently dug up, showing Peruvian journalist Alan Diez, when speaking to Carillo, comparing Afro-descendants to gorillas, among other anti-Black and sexist remarks. The video came to light after it was Tweeted out by a well-followed soccer-themed account, without context or condemnation of Diez's behavior—indicative of a trend in Peru to mask the country's white pathology and anti-Blackness through "jokes."

Carillo experienced more of this pervasive coded and racialized "humor" while going through Peru's airport customs in 2019. An agent made a "joke," alluding to a Black person's incapacity to think after 12 pm. Carillo denounced the remarks in a follow-up meeting with the employee and the employee's superiors.

Carillo also has a history of activism on gender equality. In 2011, alongside her sister Monica, who is the founder of Afro-Peruvian organization LUNDU, she co-wrote a 200-page report with quantitative and qualitative data on the absence of effective gender policies that guarantee the exercise of AfroPeruvian women's rights. The report made clear that the use of "negra" is of political and cultural identity that resists eurocentricity.

We still need normative change, Carrillo said, "through public policies against discrimination and racism, which incorporate actions aimed at prevention with education and is explicit that discrimination and racism are crimes."

 

[Yehuda]

Nani Medrano

Photo courtesy of Nani Medrano.

Nani Medrano describes herself as an artivist, combining her music and dance with her activism. She said for her it is generational, naming her mother and grandmothers as feminist activists as well. "So it was impossible for me not to be. I could not triumph and leave my community to the sidelines. My community is my family. To not support the struggle, to not support the fight is like saying I relinquish my rights to my family," she said.

That family extends to her musical family, where Medrano uses the Afro-Peruvian cajon, which she says connects her to her motherland and her ancestry. Sharing the histories, her family lineage and her personal stories through these mediums is not a trend, it is a lifestyle, she said. Medrano wants to take up space as a self-described Black woman, who is also tall and fat in a country where most of the women "are not like me."

Medrano says, visibility is an urgent issue in the country, as it relates to recognizing, valuing, and teaching the country's African history especially in schools where Afro-Peruvian children are often psychologically affected by racist bullying, just as Mosquera and Muñoz pointed out.

Her musical group, Las Respondonas, centers visibility through artistic resistance of "introspection of our bodies as historical and political." She uses her own body to affirm her own negritude and that of other Black women to "shine bright in their own way, because we are all beautiful and our advancement is connected."

Belen Zapata Silva

Photo by Giovanna Sofía Carrillo Zegarra.

Connection is key in representation in anti-racist movements, said Belen Zapata, coordinator at Casa Trans Zuleymi. "There has to be an intersectional focus in the struggle, you can't defend the rights of some and not others."

Casa Trans Zuleymi is Peru's first trans house, founded in 2016 and named after Zuleymi Aylen Sánchez Cárdenas, a 14-year-old trans girl murdered in May 2016. The house chose the name of Zuleymi to remind the state that it is not "fulfilling its responsibility to protect Peru's trans population."

Zapata has worked in various Afro-descendant organizations, Red de Jóvenes Afroperuanos Ashantí and La Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora. Zapata was also among the yellow and purple shirts on the streets marching this past year with Presencia y Palabra. The group said "they couldn't say the march was for women, if all women were not represented. We had lesbians, cis, trans, and bi folks." Zapata said the machismo that lives within the Afro-Peruvian movement "must be eradicated," continuing: "Peru is only beginning to take the first steps in including the LGBTQ community."

Zapata highlighted that there is still much work to do on the topic of exclusion. "We cannot talk about the LGBTQ movement without all LGBTQ people, we cannot demand human rights for Afro-Peruvian people if we don't include all Afro-Peruvian people. Much of the strides of the LGBTQ movement, ends up benefitting white gay men only. Trans people are excluded from both movements and that calls for us to raise and lead our own."

A native of the predominantly Afro-descendant northern coastal department of Piura, where 26 percent of Afro-Peruvian children are not enrolled in school, Zapata has spent the last 17 years in Lima continuing her work in bringing visibility to the varied experiences of trans people, noting the stark differences in the social trajectories of a white, middle class, generationally moneyed gay person versus a gay person who lives in poverty, or a trans white person versus a trans Black person.

"The majority of trans people have been living in extreme poverty and these realities have been uncovered and viewed more clearly with the pandemic. We are even excluded within social programs and initiatives. Access to livelihood and jobs is extremely limited. How will we eat, live, pay rent? And many of us are immigrants," Zapata said during a forum on June 25.

Zapata, like her fellow Black Peruvian macheteras, embodies the principles echoed in Presencia y Palabra's mission: breaking the pacts that oppress and divide us while "blackening the streets of Lima to vindicate our joy at knowing ourselves together, and in existence. "

And, as Muñoz declared: "We are not alone and all the Black voices, hands and bodies are necessary in continuing the fight."

The Afro-Peruvian Women Leading the Black Movement in South America

 

[Yehuda]

Activists Across Latin America Are Marching in Solidarity With 'Black Lives Matter' Protests in the US

From Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and El Salvador to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico, here's how Afro-Latino activists are uniting in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and in memory of George Floyd.

By DASH HARRIS
Jun. 15, 2020 10:27AM EST

Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images
A protester shouts during a protest in the streets of Sao Goncalo, Brazil, June 5, 2020. About 300 people walked and shouted slogans against the government of Jair Bolsonaro and protested against the death of the American George Floyd and Joao Pedro (murdered by police in the Salgueiro community).

It was a powerful sight — the words "Black Lives Matter," inscribed above a large Black power fist, were projected against the side of Costa Rica's legislative assembly building Tuesday night.

It was one of many acts across Latin America over the past two weeks, not only in solidarity with Black lives in the U.S. but also with Black communities in their home countries, where Black people are also targets of state-sanctioned violence.

Hashtags in support—including #NoPodemosRespirar! #LasVidasNegrasImportan! #NoAlRacismo #SoyGeorgeFloyd (We Can't Breathe, Black Lives Matter, No to Racism, and I am George Floyd)—have been spreading through social media as Black Latin Americans have joined in marches and protests, virtual and in-person.

"The bullet that kills there is the same one that kills here," Brazilian group ColectivoJuntos posted on Instagram June 5, in a call for a global fight against racism.



From Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and El Salvador to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico, among others, Black and Afrodescendant people are denouncing the white supremacist systemic racism that continues to discard and kill Black people globally, and specifically in the Americas.

"I would like to express my solidarity with George Floyd's family," Costa Rica's first Black vice-president, Epsy Campbell, said. "The African American community has come together in a deep outcry beneath the motto, Black Lives Matter, because their lives have definitely not been treated with the same value."



From Costa Rica, more than 1,000 people joined a virtual protest on June 2 hosted by Costa Rica Afro. Campbell voiced her admiration of the people "marching and highlighting the ideals of justice, equality and love," insisting that by keeping silent one becomes "accomplices of injustice, brutality and pain."

In Panama, La Red de Jovenes AfroPanameños, an association of AfroPanamanian youth, said in a statement that it is past time to denounce and deconstruct the oppressive system that has denied human rights and emphasized the importance of youth to "stand up and fight against racial violence and anti-Black prejudice." This violence, the group said, "is not an exclusive feature of the United States... Afro-descendants... in the Latin American region have been persecuted for many years, and have been threatened to death for calling out social injustices."

Spotlight on police violence in Brazil

Protest Against Racism and Bolsonaro in Support of Democracy and the Black Lives Matter Movement in Niteroi Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic
Photo by Luis Alvarenga/Getty Images

Brazilian activist Marry Ferreira, who works as the communications coordinator for AfroResistance, an organization focused on racial justice in the Americas, said the feeling is similar back in her home country as well. "There is no way to talk about democracy in Brazil and not mention the institutionalized racism and violence that kills Black people. The movement to end police brutality and other types of violence against our communities are global."

The statistics around police brutality in Brazil alone are staggering. The 2018 Brazil Violence Map, a study conducted by two think tanks in the country, estimates that a Black person is murdered in Brazil every 23 minutes. Between 2006 and 2016, police in Rio killed more than 8,000 people, 75 percent of them were Black men. State police killed 1,810 people in 2019, nearly five a day, in the name of Rio Governor Wilson Witzel's "war on drugs," which primarily targets Black favelados.

A month after 26-year-old medical technician Breonna Taylor was killed in her home by police in the U.S. in March., a 14-year-old boy in Brazil, João Pedro, was also killed in his own home—shot in his back by police, with the support of the country's openly white supremacist president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has said "a police officer who does not kill, is not a police officer."

"In Brazil, our communities are fighting to end state violence that is represented by police brutality and also by the negligence of the state to decide who lives and who dies amid a global pandemic," said Ferreira. "In the state of Sao Paulo, Black people have 62 percent more chance of dying from Coronavirus than white people." (A separate study in Brazil found that 55 percent of Black or mixed-race COVID patients died from the virus—compared to 38 percent of white patients.)

Ferreira mentioned the recent case of Miguel Otavio, the five-year-old son of Mirtes Renata de Souza, who was forced to bring her son to work with her as daycares are currently closed due to COVID-19. The mother left her son in the care of her employer, as she went out momentarily to walk her employer's dogs. Security camera video captured the employer placing the boy into the elevator and sending him off on his own. He died soon after, by falling from the ninth floor.

Brazilians have also invoked the names of Pedro Gonzaga, who died in 2019 after being choked by a supermarket security guard; Claudia Ferreira, dragged by a police car after being shot in 2014; and Marielle Franco, the only Black woman on Rio's city council, and Anderson Franco, who were both killed in 2018, in a rain of bullets aimed at their vehicle — their murderers still not been brought to justice.

Afro-Colombian voices silenced

People take part in a demonstration in Bogota, Colombia, on June 3, 2020 in front of US Embassy to protest against the murder of George Floyd in the United States and for the murder by police of Anderson Arboleda in Cauca, Colombia.
(Photo by Sebastian Barros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Violence in Colombia is also claiming the lives of Black social leaders. In particular, Afro-Colombian and Indigenous activists have been assassinated for defending their ancestral lands on the Pacific Coast. Although a peace treaty was signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC, to end an armed conflict that had been ongoing since 1964, social leaders have continued to be targeted, mostly by criminal gangs.

Currently, with "stay-at-home" orders for COVID-19, leaders have been especially vulnerable to attacks. This is just part of the ongoing "genocide," said human-rights and environmental activist Francia Marquez, who survived an armed attack in May 2019. With Black women at the helm, Black Colombian organizations have been marching and striking for years, demanding collective human rights, basic services, ancestral land rights, and resistance to land and port privatization that forces Black residents into extreme poverty. They also demand an end to violence and corruption, and for health system reform.

One march in particular spanned over three weeks in 2019, while 2017 saw a nearly month-long strike and protest in port city Buenaventura, and, in 2014, Black women marched to Bogota, the country's capital, from the predominantly Afro-Colombian department of Cauca.

Cauca has once again made headlines after Anderson Arboleda, a 24-year-old Black man, was killed there in May, three days after being beaten by police on the doorstep of his home.

Solidarity with 'Black Lives Matter' in Central America

Many in Central America are also rallying this month, with a history of violence against Black communities there as well.

Protestors in Costa Rica have been declaring they are the voice of Antown Serrano Daviery, a 17-year-old killed in 2018 during protests against the Plan Fiscal, the government plan to privatize the docks in Puerto Limon.

"It is important not only because we are part of the same diasporic family but due to the fact that we are part of the same society and racist system, by fighting their fight we are strengthening our own," Pamela Cunningham-Chacón. co-founder and director of Costa Rica Afro, said in an interview. "Their liberation is ours in a similar way that the Haitian revolution changed our lives."

Most residents in Puerto Limon are Afro-Caribbean descendants, notably Jamaicans, who came to build in Costa Rica's infrastructure projects. Limon locals were not recognized as Costa Rican citizens and were restricted from even traveling outside of the province until 1948. The city is significant for regional movements—it served as the Central American headquarters of Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which promoted Black nationalism. (Liberty Hall, the building of Garvey's shipping company Black Star Line, was destroyed in a fire in 2016, taking with it a relic of one of the largest organized mass movement in Black History.)

In Puerto Rico, protesters have recently invoked Adolfina Villanueva, a Black woman killed in 1980 in Loiza by policemen—a "memory that is very much alive," Gloriann Sacha Antonetty Lebron, founder and editor of Revista Etnica, said in an interview. Alongside Colectivo Iwe and Colectivo El Ancón, Antonetty organized a gathering on June 1 which drew hundreds in Loiza.

"It was crucial for us in Puerto Rico to unite in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement," she said, using "Black [music and culture] such as bomba puertorriqueña and plena to raise our vices and heal all the pain, racism and violence that we have received for centuries." The group gathered where the historically Black town built a ferry in the 1700s to cross the Rio Grande in the northeast end of the island — a symbol of ingenuity and of a commitment to survive in the face of the marginalization Black communities face globally.

It's that ongoing marginalization and violence that Black Honduran Garifuna activist Miriam Miranda said is barbaric.

Miranda is the leader of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, advocating for the human, environmental, and land rights of the Garífuna people, a group descended from African and Indigenous people who resisted and fought enslavement and developed their own culture in St. Vincent and Central America.

Commenting on the murders of Black people in the U.S., Miranda criticized the way the country has been held as a desirable example. "In order to fight against racism and discrimination…there is also an urgent need to change this model and system of life that makes us consume everything for white people. Of what value is it to rant against whites, when in the end we buy everything. Let's build autonomy," she said.

Activists Across Latin America Are Marching in Solidarity With 'Black Lives Matter' Protests in the US

 

[Yehuda]

Photos: An Afro-Colombian Photojournalist Documents the Coronavirus Crisis in Chocó

Photographer Jeison Riascos is capturing not just dramatic stories from the pandemic but also the solidarity shown by residents of his hometown, Quibdó.

By ANA LUISA GONZÁLEZ PINZÓN
Jun. 10, 2020 03:34PM EST

Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos
Woman on the Quibdó Market Place, on the Atrato River, where people sell the local products.

A woman sits in front of her kiosk piled high with fresh fish in a market along the Atrato River. Even in a mask, her face reveals her despair and expectation—common feelings right now for those battling the COVID-19 pandemic in Quibdó, the capital of Chocó, a region home to many of Colombia's Black and indigenous people.

Photojournalist Jeison Riascos captured this image while documenting the outbreak in his hometown in the west of the country. A freelancer for El Espectador, one of Colombia's main newspapers, his work has appeared in The New York Times, AFP and many local media outlets. He is also the co-creator of Talento Chocoano, a webpage that tells outstanding stories from the Chocó region.

Riascos is known as "Murcy", short for murciélago, or "bat" in Spanish. While he has not come into contact with bats recently, he has definitely been very close to COVID-19. With more than a million infections at this point, Latin America is emerging as the new global epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak and in Colombia more than 1350 people have died and more than 42,000 were infected according to the National Institute of Health, INS.

So far, in Chocó numbers are relatively low with 488 reported infections and 11 deaths, according to data released on June 9th. But though the numbers are not high here, the pandemic arrived at a very critical moment, says Yoseth Ariza, an epidemiologist from the Afro-Diasporic Studies Center, CEAF.

"There is a huge disadvantage in Chocó, compared to the country's main urban centers," says Ariza. "And because there is a lack of health services, there is an increase in vulnerability and as in other Latin American countries, it will end up generating more inequality."

Murcy´s work as a photojournalist has been crucial in a region with some of the worst medical infrastructure in the country. According to the Minister of Health there are only 20 Intensive Care Units (ICU), while Martín Emilio Sánchez, Quibdó´s mayor, said there are 27 hospital beds for its more than 500,000 inhabitants. In addition, there is no guaranteed food security, and the drinking water supply is very scarce and precarious.

Beyond that, in 2019, the average unemployment rate in Colombia was 10.3 percent, and in Quibdó it was more than 20 percent. In other words in the Chocó capital, the unemployment rate was double the national average, even before the pandemic, according to official data.

"In the Quibdó market, on the boardwalk by the river bank, I had to report a very painful image," Murcy remembers. "There was a big crowd of vendors without security measures, they had to be there because that's where the fish arrive, but they didn't have any safety equipment."

Street vendors on Quibdó selling their fruit. Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos

"It is difficult sometimes to photograph people in the middle of this pandemic," says Murcy. "I have taken photos of people who have to go out to work, they live from day to day and cannot afford to stay at home."

This reality is not only happening in Chocó but around the country. "It is very complex to socially distance when people make their living from informal jobs, when there is no basic income and if you don't go out to work you do not have something to eat," says Ariza, the epidemiologist. "This is the situation of big inequality in the department of Chocó, but also in the entire Pacific Coast region."

Work conditions for health workers are also very precarious. "When the first case of COVID-19 arrived in Colombia," says Ariza, "the government owed health personnel 4 to 6 months of last year's salaries. And they have to be on the front line and comply with protocols."

To date, there are 12 confirmed COVID-19 cases of medical personnel in Chocó, and Murcy has been the one to tell this story. He recalls the moment when he documented a healthcare worker who needed to enter the COVID-19 area in the hospital.

Health worker in San Francisco Hospital in Quibdó entering into the "COVID-19" area. Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos

Murcy thought at that moment that "to get there you need a lot of morale, not just anyone could enter knowing that we are in this emergency. It was very cool to see the nurse and I feel that these guys are the ones who need to be empowered, those who are giving it all to work in this situation."

Murcy is not the kind of photographer who takes a picture and then walks away. He really likes to talk to the people he is photographing, gain their trust, take honest images of them when he is telling stories about them.

But during the pandemic, things have changed. "I have been taking photos in areas where there are big crowds and I always try to not touch anything and to be with myself. Also, I used to greet people a lot, and now we cannot have contact, so it has been a difficult transition."

A health worker in San Francisco Hospital in Quibdó putting their PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) to enter into the "COVID-19" area. Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos

The stories reported from Chocó tend to be negative, so there is rarely something on the good side of things, and Murcy allows a handful of positive narratives to thrive. This makes his work on what he is doing to tell the story of Covid-19 even more important.

Murcy knows that it is very hard for Afro-Colombians to achieve an accurate representation of their communities in the media. While most of the time he is covering a lot of breaking news within the COVID-19 emergency, he is also highlighting good deeds from people who bring solidarity and hope in this pandemic.

Quibdó´s Fireman cleaning to prevent the spread of the virus. Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos

That's why his lengths "always try to find those moments which could build," like the firefighter team volunteering to clean-up days in Quibdó to support the community and advice on cleaning habits and measures in town.

That's why he developed Talento Chocoano, a website that spotlights positive stories from Chocó. For him, there is no point in documenting only those who have nothing to give. He doesn't shy away from the bad, but his photographs always aim to empower.

"I have portrayed the strikes in Chocó from a regional perspective, but also from one perspective: making the community visible, and appropriating it, the community that is in the fight."

Over the last years he has gained a reputation as an anchor for peers and aspiring photographers. He also started to teach photo workshops so young people could acquire the tools to tell their stories of their region through photography.

Now, Murcy defines himself as a "reference point, who keeps the idea of telling stories and creating memories. That strengthens my story when I talk about photography with the young people who want to be photojournalists." He has become a leader who is using his camera to tell other stories beyond poverty and inequality in Chocó.

As Murcy's photos show us, it is a good time to reflect — what are the good things that make our world more human and with more solidarity.

Quibdó´s Fireman cleaning to prevent the spread of the virus. Photo by "El Murcy" — Jeison Riascos

Photos: An Afro-Colombian Photojournalist Documents the Coronavirus Crisis in Chocó

 

[T'krm]

El racismo en el reggaetón y el blanqueamiento del género | ElCalce

El racismo en el reggaetón y el blanqueamiento del género
Nos sentamos con una académica estudiosa del tema, mujer negra y especialista en el tema de música y raza, y con un profesor de comunicaciones, negro y rapero, para una plática al respecto.

Por Hermes Ayala

jueves 11 de junio de 2020, a las 20:47

Ya con más de cuatro décadas de vida en las costillas, se pudiese decir que no hay mucho más que a Welmo Romero Joseph – negro, 'MC' de hip hop y puertorriqueño – le falte por ver con respecto al racismo.

De madre haitiana, de padre dominicano, nacido y criado entre la negritud y lo caribeño de Barrio Obrero y, para colmo, rapero. Eso debería ser suficiente para llenar esta gaceta con experiencias pero, bueno, ahora mismo, en la coyuntura que vive el mundo tras los reclamos de igualdad racial que ha acentuado el caso del asesinato de George Floyd a manos de la policía de Minneapolis, son muchas más las deconstrucciones de estas tendencias nefastas que pueden hacerse.

“Digo, de alguna manera a todos y todas el racismo nos impacta”, comienza a narrarle a Metro y El Calce este poeta de vocación y profesor de la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (USC) de oficio.

“Y en el caso de la música, el mercado responde a la misma estética con la que responde el resto de las instituciones que nos forman en una sociedad racializada: lo negro se ve con sospecha y para “darle belleza” hay que aclararlo. En el caso de Puerto Rico se complica ya que nuestra identidad surge en el nacimiento de una colonia y un mestizaje que busca borrar lo negro del mapa o relegarlo a unos espacios particulares. Al igual que en Estados Unidos, se vive un racismo sistemático que afecta las instituciones, sea la escuela, el gobierno, la iglesia e, incluso, las manifestaciones culturales que se desarrollan en la sociedad como tal”, indicó, con música reggae de fondo, antes de detener su discernimiento.

El racismo sistemático que se ve en Estados Unidos se reproduce en Puerto Rico en distintas esferas, explicó el profesor Welmo Romero Joseph. (suministrada)



Romero Joseph toma un respiro – lo que no pudo hacer George Floyd – y se traslada hasta los inicios del hip hop para comenzar a desmenuzar el asunto de la raza y la música urbana. Recuerda cómo, desde la necesidad de gritar la inconformidad social y la pobreza que vivían los negros y latinos en las urbes estadounidense, nació esta cultura, durante la década de los setenta, una cultura que tras años de desenvolvimiento logró aunar cuatro elementos principales: el grafiti como expresión de arte física; los B-Boys y B-Girls, como expresión de baile; el o la DJ, como facilitadores de la música, aunque en inicio el 'DJ' también fungía de 'MC'; y los 'MCs', los que rapean, como las voces a la vanguardia del movimiento.

En Estados Unidos y otras partes del mundo, se ha notado como, a pesar de la masificación de mercado a la que ha sido sujeto, el rap que nace de la cultura hip hop mantiene algo de su aura combativa, en especial cuando surgen momentos como los que se viven ahora. Incluso, el rap de crítica social ha servido para propulsar al estrellato a artistas como Nas, Queen Latifah, Common Sense, Lauryn Hill, Wiclef Jean, el icónico KRS-One y Kendrick Lamar, quienes a pesar del éxito se mantienen siempre al día con la crítica social. Los casos de NWA y Public Enemy denunciando el abuso policiaco durante el giro de década hacia los noventa es incluso ya un referente de libro de texto.



Mientras, en Puerto Rico, el fenómeno del reggaetón, que particular y parcialmente surge de los movimientos subterráneos de hip hop que se solidificaron en Borinquen durante la década del '80 y que se entremezcla con otras vertientes del reggae y el dancehall jamaiquino con influencia panameña, pasó por situaciones similares. En los '90, sus componentes le hicieron frente a las autoridades, especialmente con la campaña en su contra que estableció el gobierno bipartita del Partido Popular Democrático y el Partido Nuevo Progresista, con Velda González, popular, llevando la voz cantante en el Senado en contra de la lírica, y el gobernador Pedro Rosselló, penepé, atacando desde Fortaleza su entorno pobre de barrios y caseríos con su política de “mano dura”.

Tras enfrentar a las autoridades durante la década del noventa, alcanza el mainstream y el éxito económico, quienes han estudiado a fondo el tema de raza en el reggaetón consideran que el género cayó víctima, al igual que muchas otras disciplinas musicales, de ese embeleco sobre la mezcla de razas y el mestizaje en Puerto Rico bautizado como “democracia racial”, un espejismo que de repente vemos a diestra y siniestra, una excusa que se usa mucho para despachar la problematización del racismo. Es decir, de repente, un género que venía de la pobreza, que cargaba con su negritud, enfrentó el blanqueamiento estético del que es sujeto toda arte o manifestación con características culturales distintas a la caucásica, que sale desde lo subterráneo, pues los poderes que lideran el mercado entienden que las cosas deben ser así, sí o sí.



“Yo empecé oyendo hip hop, no reggaetón, porque las letras no me llamaban más allá que no fuese en tal o cuál ánimo particular. Hoy sigo pensando igual, pero fluimos. Lo que quiero decir es que cuando empecé a escuchar el género, lo nítido que encontraba es que estaba mas cercano al Caribe que al mismo hip hop afro-americano, que era en español, que me está rimando de forma alegre, que me pone a bailar. Pero de repente, los que veo que empiezan con el movimiento ya son sustituidos. Uno recuerda, por mencionar algunos de tantos en aquel entonces, en los noventa, a un OG Black, un Lito MC Cassidy, o sea, sobraban los exponentes negros. Luego Tego da el golpe grande, sale también Don Omar. Pero entonces, como que cambia la cosa hacia el fenotipo de lo que se piensa que es el puertorriqueño, que es de estilo brunette, blanco-latino”, articuló, resaltando los cambios de imagen incluso en artistas como Wisin y Yandel.

“Y entonces, uno ve como que sucede un blanqueamiento en la música del reggaetón, que no es algo fuera de lo común, pues se ha visto en otros géneros como el reggae o el R&B, y en el caso de ritmos como la bomba, sucede cuando algún artista del mainstream intenta incorporarlos en su propuesta para el mercado, excepto casos particulares”, agregó el profesor de 'Introducción a medios masivos de comunicación y teoría de medios masivos de comunicación' en la USC.



La académica Bárbara Abadía, que publicó hace unos años el libro Musicalizando la raza. La racialización en Puerto Rico a través de la música (2012, Ediciones Puerto), su tesis de maestría, resaltó además cómo el hecho de encajonar la música bajo el mote de “música urbana” segrega la misma a algo meramente de los pobres y negros en la urbe. Igualmente, recordó como la supuesta “democracia racial” con la que los sistemas de educación y las estructuras de la sociedad han acondicionado al puertorriqueño a aceptar las determinaciones de la estética blanca como normativas. De hecho, citó varios ejemplos, entre ellos, el del autodenominado 'Negrito de ojos claros', el mega-exitoso Ozuna.

“Por ejemplo, tengo dos hermanos negros, de tez más clara que yo, y con ojos verdes. Desde pequeña me preguntan porque no tengo los ojos verdes, era algo constante. Recuerdo que una tía de mi mamá que finalmente un día dijo: 'los ojos verdes son los de los negros', como para darle punto final al tema. Y entonces, pues vemos ahora a Ozuna, que se hace llamar el 'Negrito de ojos claros'. Es como decir: 'Mira, es negrito, pero tiene ojos claros'. Eso no lo veo muy distante a lo que salió diciendo Cosculluela, de que aquí hay negros pero que 'no son de África\'”, acotó Abadía.

La estudiosa Bárbara Abadía explicó que el concepto de “democracia racial” domina en la música urbana. (UPR-RP)



“Lamentablemente, como se construye esa supuesta 'democracia racial', pues a mí me vuela la cabeza porque sí, hay muchos negros en Puerto Rico que dicen: 'yo soy negro, pero no de África'. Coscu lo expresa desde su espacio de blanquitud y lo tildan de racista, pero ese mismo racismo anti-negritud es uno que se ha internalizado y sigue presente. Para colmo, se pierde la perspectiva de que Coscu está ahí por haber brillado encima de un ritmo negro del que él y otros se apropiaron”, detalló en otro de sus ejemplos, agregando también a esto las distintas fases que ha sufrido la imagen de Daddy Yankee.

En una reseña de hace unos años del libro de la boricua Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (2015), Abadía resalta que la pieza “argumenta sobre cómo el reggaetón, en tanto producto cultural transnacional, propone nuevas formas de explicar las identidades puertorriqueñas conectadas con otras diásporas africanas. Rivera-Rideau sobrepasa las nociones de la democracia racial y la folclorización de la negritud en Puerto Rico e incorpora, como plataforma teórica, la negritud urbana (urban blackness) para postular que el reggaetón es un instrumento que permite medir la perpetuación de estereotipos socialmente construidos, relacionados con la violencia e hipersexualidad, principalmente, que se asocian con lo no-blanco en la isla y sus diásporas. Las lecturas que provoca el reggaetón son reflejo de una sociedad desigual en la que se privilegia la noción de la blancura eurocéntrica heredada desde los procesos de colonización. A través del análisis de la autora, se revalida la existencia de la criminalización y marginalización hacia el reggaetón por su vínculo con la negritud”.



Así las cosas, ambos académicos coinciden que, “se debería también abrir espacio para que los artistas negros suban”, aunque exista respaldo de los artistas en el género, “como sucede con Bad Bunny, que se solidariza con causas sociales, pero que sigue siendo uno más dentro de la estética blanca y safe del género, aún con su acertada manifestación o, quizás product placement sería otro término, de lo queer”, según Romero. Apuntaron al reciente video de Rafa Pabón, Sin Aire, como uno que galopa en contra del viento en el mercado mainstream, batallando el racismo y la desigualdad en un género que se rige por la payola y los poderosos.

“Me pareció muy buena la denuncia de Rafa. Apela a otra generación que es la que veo en las manifestaciones, la generación que me rodeaba el martes en la Calle de la Resistencia en la manifestación en apoyo al #BlackLivesMatter y, por supuesto, a lxs jóvenes negrxs que el racismo antinegro les hacen creer que las violencias y hostigamientos raciales de los que son víctimas y que sobreviven cotidianamente son normales”, señaló Abadía.

El profesor Romero citó de ejemplo la estética negra en el video de La Zista del tema 'Awipipío', como un ejemplo de constancia de la negritud en el género, contra viento y marea….

De igual manera, recordaron que nunca dejará de existir el movimiento del rap subterráneo alejado del mainstream, donde siguen floreciendo artistas que trabajan estos temas, como los loiceños Siloé Andino, Sharif Rafael, Hanzen & Ralex, el santurcino-carolinese Mala Cara, La Cotto, Lady Step, Manosalva & El Santo, el combo de la Ultra Comanda, EBRS de la Estación Central, o Kenny Wright, que enarbolan la ascendencia dominicana, o veteranos como R-Two, los Mandrillest o Gunzmoke o Nébula o Coo-Kie, entre muchos otros, que ya llevan tiempo trabajando temas anecdotarios de corte social y en contra del racismo y la xenofobia, igual que otros referentes, como Luis Díaz, SieteNueve, Velcro MC y el propio Welmo, por mencionar algunos.



“Aquí tú demuestras que es algo sistémico, pues ves una nueva cepa como Sharif Rafael o Hanzen & Ralex, que quizás chocan con lo que otros 'MCs' y cantantes que llevamos años chocando, por la exclusión sistémica de la misma industria musical. O dime tú… ¿de qué color tú ves ahora mismo al trap o al reggaetón? “, puntualizó el profesor rapero.

Mira también:

El racismo: un mal impregnado en el deporte de forma estructural y sistemática
Luis Díaz deja claro que “el reguetón no es rap”

 

[Yehuda]

21st Century and COVID-19 Offer More Opportunities for Better South-South Caribbean Cooperation

By VP Digital
September 12, 2020

Saturday, September 12, is being observed worldwide as United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation.

It’s usually a multinational, multilateral and multilingual intergovernmental mechanism seeking to reduce dependence and improve interdependence between developing nations, with varying results in different world regions.

But where is South-South Cooperation in the Caribbean in 2020 and what are the related prospects?

What it is…

It’s not a topic you see, read or hear about in the news every day, but South-South Cooperation is about developing nations cooperating to reduce the levels of dependence of the proverbial poor South on the rich North.

That type of cooperation is becoming even more important between countries today, as the wealth gap continues to widen – and more so as the world starts to try recovering from the devastating health, social and economic impacts of COVID 19.

South-South Cooperation can see, for example, developing countries – which have the most natural resources in the world – doing more to help each other, instead of all depending on the developed countries forever for economic and development support.

This is also what Sustainable Development is about — countries of the South with oil, for example, not only putting it all in the hands of companies from and in developed countries, but also taking steps to assist poor non-oil producing countries currently paying the costly fuel prices being charged by the multinational oil corporations of the developed countries.

We have what it takes…

Functional cooperation does exist in the Caribbean at certain levels (like in education, health, law, economics, etc.) but the level of South-South cooperation in our part of the world just still isn’t good enough to shout about.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has always had what it will take to actualize the levels and types of 21st Century South-South Cooperation needed among and between member-states at this time, in 2020:

Guyana has enough oil to make sure no other CARICOM country has to pay current excessively high and over-charged prices for fuel; and Trinidad & Tobago might still have enough natural gas to supply the entire region.

Jamaica has enough Blue Mountain coffee, Grenada has enough and nutmeg and cocoa – and the Windward Islands have enough bananas to supply the Leeward Islands and Barbados.

Same with gold and diamonds, sugar, rice and timber in Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and Surinam, water in Dominica, arrowroot in St. Vincent and the Grenadines…

The ‘Three Guianas’ (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) have all the food and minerals, plus the space needed to turn the Caribbean into one of the world’s food baskets.

Between those three massive continental CARICOM states and the islands – including the hundreds in The Bahamas — we have all the fish, birds and animals, marine space and resources we need, as well as the land space, with all the natural foods most of the rest of the world can only dream of.

We produce everything we need to eat and live, we can meet all our own energy and food security needs, and we can develop a plan to ensure each country that does not have something another produces, will get it.

And this level of cooperation can go beyond CARICOM to include the non-English-speaking Caribbean nations able and willing to be part of any new South-South Cooperation Plan that will together address the common problems that existed pre-COVID 19 — and the new ones created by the 21st Century pandemic.

Where are we now?

But even so, what’s the situation?

We still import most of what we eat, our food import bill is still in the billions of US dollars, our oil and natural gas isn’t really ours and almost everything we produce for export is not to another CARICOM country, but to the wider outside world.

We consume from outside and we export to outside – hardly anything is produced inside for inside.

The levels of South-South Cooperation the Caribbean needs right now will require the CARICOM leaders to come together and agree to do what needs to be done for the Caribbean to grow more of what we eat and eat more of what we grow, instead of letting farmers’ healthy produce go to waste alongside cheaper imported foods.

But the nature of trade and business between borders in our part of the world is still so one-sided that not all governments – meaning, not all leaders — are prepared to take that stand to take that first step to see about Caribbean people first.

The ACS

That said, however, there is a Caribbean entity responsible for coordination of such cooperation within the wider Caribbean region: the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), based in Trinidad & Tobago and uniting dozens of Spanish, French, Dutch and English-speaking countries washed by the Caribbean Sea.

The ACS, led by Saint Lucia-born Ambassador Dr June Soomer — the first woman to hold that lofty position — is quietly but purposefully promoting South-South Cooperation among members, but only at the pace allowed by such multilateral, multi-lingual entities.

Not that South-South Cooperation can’t happen quickly, but it always depends on the level of preparedness of political leaders to go that extra mile – and that is as true of the African Union (AU) as it is of the Organization of American States (OAS) as it is of CARICOM and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).

How it can be done…

Venezuela and Cuba, under Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, together showed how it could (and still can) happen across the wider Caribbean (and indeed South and Central America) through the PetroCaribe and ALBA-TCP agreements that sought to make the entire Caribbean a Free Trade Zone for member-states, with guaranteed low energy prices with loans at very-long-term interest rates and Venezuelan subsidies for rice, arrowroot, coffee, fishing and farming in individual nations across the region.

Targeted by Washington

But this model genuine and successful Caribbean economic experiment in South-South Cooperation started by Chavez and Castro and continued by their successors Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz Canel was targeted early after its tenth anniversary by Washington through a series of actions by two successive US administrations.

First, the Obama Administration invited CARICOM Leaders to Washington in 2015 to meet with then Vice President Joe Biden, who invited them to pull-out of PetroCaribe and ALBA and to switch their energy dependence from Venezuela to the USA.

Then, the Donald Trump administration tightened the US squeeze with over 150 sanctions against Venezuela in three years, to cripple the country in pursuit of US companies controlling the world’s largest crude oil reserves just next door, which certified amounts dwarf Saudi Arabia’s.

That’s the type of price some countries will pay to see others pay dearly for pursuing South-South cooperation that gets in their way.

Opportunities and Challenges

But opportunities for South-South cooperation don’t ever die – and the challenge now is to rise to the challenges posed by the new opportunities.

Guyana having more oil today than gold or diamonds, rice or sugar and Venezuela having more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia has sand, just imagine what it could mean for the entire Caribbean, if Georgetown and Caracas were to be left alone, today and tomorrow, to own and control and jointly market and do what they like with their incomes from their oil, diamonds, gold and mineral wealth?

The average Caribbean islander won’t imagine the amount of different types of rare and expensive minerals and un-tapped ‘rare earth’ resources that these neighbouring oil-producing Caribbean countries alone have between them — or the potential possibility of putting all that together with that of Surinam and what’s already being tapped by France in French Guiana.

The immense and endless oil reserves must be used to first rebuild the countries from whence they cometh — and at the same time, ways and means can be examined and implemented to help CARICOM and wider Caribbean and South and Central American nations to emerge from the COVID 19 economic meltdown and take the entire region and all its people to another higher and better level.

Good for the Caribbean, but…

These possibilities are all very real.

But the US will not simply sit down or stand by and allow that type of South-South Cooperation to happen and succeed in the Caribbean, which it still considers ‘America’s backyard’ under the Monroe Doctrine.

With ExxonMobil, Hess Oil and other North American oil companies already in majority charge of Guyana’s oil, all the American oil giants lining-up to benefit from President Trump’s plan to return Venezuela’s oil to their control, like in the days of ‘The Seven Sisters’ – the American and British companies that ruled the oil world and Venezuela’s oil without challenge or question, before Chavez led the Bolivarian revolution that brought Venezuela’s oil revenues back home.

South-South and neighborly cooperation between Guyana and Venezuela today and tomorrow would be the best for the Caribbean, but not for the US, which constantly reminds the world that it has no friends — just interests, which it will always protect by any means necessary.

Counting the costs

The US will therefore do all it can, even possibly under Biden as President, to prevent those two Caribbean countries from kissing and making-up, by fanning the flames of division over their century-old territorial dispute, just to keep them as far apart as possible, in the US national interest.

That’s why, for example, the US still wants to use Guyana’s territory for Voice of America to broadcast hostile propaganda, in Spanish, across the border into Venezuela.

So, while this most ideal model of South-South cooperation is very possible, it will not be that easy, even for the two main players, because a bigger neighboring player will just not simply let it start reducing the economic dependence of smaller Caribbean on the USA and the other rich developed nations of the North always worried about counting the cost of the benefits of South-South Cooperation to poor developing nations.

Adjusting to new norms…

Breaking out of this revolving cycle of traditional dependence might have seemed impossible a decade or a year ago, but the common problems posed by COVID-19 have created several common bases for better and more appropriate, meaningful and urgent South-South cooperation models designed by and for Caribbean nations and people, which and who have always proven resilient in the face of adversity.

Change is the new normal and Caribbean leaders need to adapt to this eternal fact of life on Planet Earth and themselves adapt to the new norms that continue to change everything around us!

21st Century and COVID-19 Offer More Opportunities for Better South-South Caribbean Cooperation

 

[Yehuda]

In the puzzle of domination

By Bernardo Marín | 26/08/2020

The puzzle

The history of Colombia has been marked in recent times by events that at first glance may seem disconnected from each other, but are actually the pieces of the puzzle of a country that has been the spearhead of the continental counterrevolution for several decades, the aircraft carrier of US imperialism, or the “Israel of America”, as others call it.

While this analysis is being written, on August 17 of this year, the signing of a new agreement between Colombia and the United States was announced. That agreement is called “Colombia Crece” (“Colombia Grows”). But in reality it is the New Plan Colombia: a package of economic and military aid, with the assumption of helping in “the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism”. Present at the event were: Craig Faller, chief of the US Southern Command; Robert O'Brien, representative of the National Security Council — NSC, for its English acronym — and Philip Goldberg, US Ambassador in Bogotá.

The pieces of the puzzle

The first piece was the signing of a Peace Agreement in 2016 between the Government of Colombia and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — the FARC —, at that time the largest insurgent force in the country, which led to their disarmament and demobilization. This peace agreement meant a reduction in the levels of violence in the country, particularly political violence.

The second piece has been precisely the dramatic increase in political violence, marked by the murder of peasant, indigenous and Afro-descendant leaders and human rights defenders. Since the signing of this agreement, more than 1,000 leaders and social activists have been assassinated. More than 200 ex-FARC combatants — who had received amnesties — have also been killed. Massacres — a practice that became common in the 1990s and early 2000s but had disappeared — have returned. Only in the week that elapsed between August 8 and 14, three massacres were carried out in the country. All against young people and perpetrated by paramilitary organizations. The most recent occurred in the municipality of Samaniego, Nariño, in southern Colombia. So far this year, 33 massacres have been documented.

The so-called “peace” did not pave the way for profound social transformations, nor did it eliminate violence as a way of doing politics by the dominant ones against the popular sectors, but it was a setback in the correlation of forces that benefited the usual suspects.

The third piece is a social movement that at the end of 2019 was experiencing a moment of rise and accumulation of forces. For a month, between November 21 and December 21, the National Strike occurred. This exacerbated the crisis of governance and legitimacy of the ultra-right government of Iván Duque. The accumulated forces from that strike were projected towards an indefinite national strike by 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic postponed those plans and the confinement forced the withdrawal of the social and popular movement. But the right wing, the Armed Forces and big capital did not retreat. The dominant bloc took advantage of the situation to increase violence and killings against leaders and communities, also imposed new neoliberal measures and invited more Yankee military personnel to deploy within the country.

For Colombia, the pandemic has not been this beautiful “new world” that a certain left dreams of without having to go out to fight for it.

The fourth piece is the role that Colombia has played, as a rearguard of North American imperialism, to destabilize and sabotage the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela in order to impose a regime favorable to its interests. A series of facts demonstrate this:

1. The arrival in Colombia, in January 2020, of an elite unit of the United States Army to conduct exercises with elite Colombian troops. It was the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, along with 40 members of the US Army Southern Command with C17, C130J and B52 aircraft. It is worth noting that the Brazilian military were present as observers.
2. Operation Gideon, in May 2020, launched from northern Colombia — La Guajira —; a mercenary operation by the US and Colombia against Venezuela. The mercenaries were trained by SilverCorp USA, an American mercenary company.
3. The arrival, in early July 2020, of 800 US servicemen from an elite force — called the Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) — from special operations in Afghanistan. Its mission in Colombia is to help train the Armed Forces of Colombia and “collaborate in the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism”.

The geopolitical context

To understand how the pieces fit together and their relationship between them, it is necessary to place Colombia in the geopolitical context and in a historical moment marked by an imperialist offensive, together with the Latin American right, against the governments of the left — of which very few remain — and of any present or future change or transformation options.

Latin America is, as it has been in its history, the vital space for the recomposition of hegemony of a North American empire in decline. It is not the Middle East, nor is it the South China Sea. It has been that way since its birth. Alexander Hamilton, one of the “founding fathers”, suggested that a system capable of controlling the Atlantic would have to emerge from the union of the 13 colonies, in order to dominate the power relations between the old and the new world. In 1823, President James Monroe's Monroe Doctrine enshrined this idea with the infamous phrase: “America for the Americans”. Since then, control of the “backyard” has represented the cardinal geopolitical key to the plans for expansion and imperialist domination of the US. In other words, the strategists of Yankee imperialism know that they cannot contemplate world domination unless they manage to control their own home. In March 2019, John Bolton — then National Security Advisor to the Trump Administration — said the following in reference to Venezuela: “In this administration we are not afraid to use the phrase ʽMonroe Doctrineʼ [...] this is our own hemisphere”.

During 18 years, from the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela — 1998 — to the Parliamentary Coup against Dilma Roussef in Brazil — 2016 —, Latin America and the Caribbean lived a historical period where most of the countries had progressive or leftist governments. During this period, new regional and continental architectures were created such as ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America — 2004 —, PetroCaribe — 2005 —, UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations — 2008 — and CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States — 2010 —; spaces of political, economic and social protagonism without the presence of the United States or Canada. The “Ministry of Colonies” — the Organization of American States — seemed to lose strength and relevance. The continent moved toward greater independence and sovereignty, and the balance of forces became markedly unfavorable for Yankee imperialism.

Bogged down in endless and “unwinnable” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since the early 2000s, having started a new warmongering adventure in Syria — 2011 —, losing world hegemony to the economic-military rise of China and Russia; the need to regain control and dominance of the “backyard” became a major strategic task for the United States.

It was in this context that imperialism determined it was time for a counteroffensive, and it inaugurated it in 1999 with Plan Colombia.

Plan Colombia: a continental counterinsurgency plan

We already mentioned that a few days ago the Government of Colombia and the United States signed an agreement for a “New Plan Colombia”. Due to the bad reputation that the original Plan Colombia received, they changed its name to “Colombia Crece”. It is worth remembering that the original Plan Colombia, signed between then-presidents Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana in 1999, was presented as “a plan to combat drug trafficking and promote development alternatives in the country”, but that it was actually an aid package military counterinsurgency for a total of 10 billion dollars, which lasted 15 years.

Plan Colombia ran in parallel with a paramilitary offensive throughout the country. By that time, the paramilitaries had been centralized in a counterinsurgent political-military project under a single command, adopting the name Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Plan Colombia, in concert with the paramilitary offensive, unleashed horror and death with an intensity rarely known in the history of Colombia. Those were times of scorched earth, massacres, selective assassinations and indiscriminate violence. There was a massive displacement of more than seven million peasants and the concentration of 10 million hectares of land in the hands of the landholding oligarchy.

That Plan Colombia emerged the same year Hugo Chávez took office is no accident. Republican Senator Paul Coverdale, one of the main intellectual authors behind Plan Colombia, said the following in 2000: “To protect US interests in Venezuela, it is necessary to intervene militarily in Colombia”. The strategic purpose was clear: to establish Colombia as an immense base, a gigantic aircraft carrier, from which the continental counterinsurgency strategy could be deployed.

Plan Colombia achieved a reengineering of the Colombian Armed Forces, who had suffered major setbacks at the hands of the insurgency in the 1990s. New counter-guerrilla combat units, task forces, rapid deployment forces, high mountain battalions were created. Helicopters and warplanes were purchased, such as the Russian Huey-30, Blackhawk, MIG-17 and Brazilian Super Tucanos bombers. But the most significant leap was the growth in the foot of the Colombian Army, which went from 300,000 in 2001 to more than 480,000 men in 2018. That is, Colombia, a country with 50 million inhabitants and an area of 1,140,000 kilometers square, has an army of almost half a million soldiers. To put this figure in its proper dimensions, Brazil, with a population of 210 million inhabitants and an area of 8,500,000 square kilometers, has an army of 334,000 soldiers. In other words, Colombia, which fits a little more than seven times within Brazil and has a quarter of its population, has a larger Army.

The inevitable question is: What is the purpose of an army of half a million soldiers? Is it just for fighting the guerrillas, when one of them, four years ago, surrendered its weapons and demobilized?

An army of half a million soldiers does not have the exclusive purpose of fighting the armed insurgency, since at the best of times the combined guerrilla armies of the ELN and the FARC numbered no more than 30,000 men and women. It is clear that the purpose of that huge army goes beyond the borders of Colombia.

“Our most important strategic partner in the region”

Ten years after the beginning of Plan Colombia, an agreement was signed between Colombia and the United States — Álvaro Uribe and Barack Obama as presidents — that allowed the establishment of seven North American military bases in Colombian territory: Palanquero, Apiay, Bahía Málaga, Tolemaida, Malambo, Larandia and Cartagena. But the agreement also stipulated that the US military could use any transportation and logistics infrastructure in the country — such as civilian airports — to carry out its operations. The Palanquero base — located in the center of the country — houses an adapted landing strip for military cargo planes that allows these planes to be projected beyond the borders of Colombia. The very strategic position of this base allows the Boeing C-17 military aircraft to reach the middle of the continent without having to stop to refuel, which reveals the real objective of the treaty. In other words, the entire country could be used as a base, like “a huge aircraft carrier”.

In 2018, Admiral Kurt W. Tidd, then commander of the Southern Command, visited Colombia. On that occasion, he stated that Colombia was “our most important strategic partner in the region”.

Beachhead: a privileged geostrategic position

For North American imperialism, Colombia has geostrategic advantages — to serve as the control platform over Central and South America — that no other country on the continent possesses: 1) it has access to both oceans, 2) it is a gateway to the Greater Caribbean and is close to the Panama Canal, 3) it has a shared border with Venezuela, 4) it is a gateway to the greater Amazon, and 5) it is the hinge country between Central and South America. The above are factors that have been determining factors in establishing Colombia as the ideal space from which continental counterinsurgency can be launched.

 

[Yehuda]

Inward violence, outward aggression

What connects the increase in internal political violence with military aggression abroad is the North American strategy of continental domination. The possibility of Colombia serving as a continental counterinsurgency base depends, to a large extent, on the ability of the dominant Colombian bloc to contain and neutralize — read exterminate — internal resistance and political opposition. Who does not have his own house under control, cannot aspire to control other people's houses.

This explains the persistent war against community resistance, against indigenous and Afro-Colombian people who oppose extractive megaprojects or the imposition of coca and poppy plantations by the mafias and paramilitaries.

It also explains, in part, the regime's interest in negotiating first with the FARC and now with the ELN. The dominant bloc aspires to achieve through the negotiating table what it has not been able to do with bullets: disarmament and demobilization of the oldest and most durable insurgencies in Our America.

For the dominant regime, the negotiation of peace is an extension of war.

Imperialism knew well that, in the face of any military aggression against the Bolivarian Revolution, guerrilla units of the FARC and the ELN, due to their internationalist and Bolivarian vocation, would cross the border and enter Venezuela to fight imperialism together with their people.

It must be understood that the war in Colombia precedes the existence of the guerrillas. For the ruling class, war has been for more than 100 years the preferred way to achieve three objectives: 1) territorial and population control, 2) the accumulation of power, and 3) the accumulation and concentration of wealth. In other words, war is a structural part of the dominant bloc's project of domination.

Through blood and fire Colombia became the country with the most internally displaced people in the world and became the most unequal country in Latin America in terms of land distribution. Today, 1 percent of the country's farms own 81 percent of the land. Héctor Mondragón, a Colombian economist and analyst on peasant and land issues explained it this way: “In Colombia there are no displaced people because there is war, there is war so that there are displaced people”.

War is the dominant bloc's method of domination and accumulation of wealth.

The negotiation with the FARC

The two historic guerrillas, the ELN and the FARC, were both born in 1964. For more than 50 years, there was in Colombia what could be called a “strategic balance”. The oligarchic power bloc opposed what could be dominated by the “popular-insurgent bloc”. Neither of them was winning the war against the other, but the presence of the insurgency — which came to control more than 45 percent of the national territory — kept the country, from a logic of class struggle, in a situation of strategic balance. Extractivist multinationals did not enter the territory controlled by the armed insurgency, the presence of paramilitaries was blocked and the Yankee military did not enter either.

The disarmament and demobilization of the FARC radically modified this situation. The correlation of forces between the oligarchic bloc and the insurgent-popular bloc leaned sharply in favor of the former. The ruling class, having neutralized one of its main enemies and without the counterweight from before, feels that it has a free hand to do whatever it wants. The FARC surrendered their weapons and carried out what they agreed to. But the State has not fulfilled even 15 percent of what was stipulated. Later, the murders of the leaders of the resistance and community and social rebellion increased, as did the murders of former FARC combatants. The historic territories occupied by the FARC have now been occupied by the Army, by paramilitaries and, most importantly, by multinational mining and agribusiness companies. The FARC decided to end its war against the State, but the State decided to continue its war against the FARC. And against all who opposed it.

Of the elements of the Peace Agreement between the Government and the FARC, perhaps the most important was the Restitution of Lands. Those 10 million hectares that were taken from the peasantry through blood and fire. The Government did not recognize the 10 million hectares and in the end an agrarian reform was agreed to restore three million and the formalization of property titles for another seven million. Needless to say, none of this has been accomplished.

It turns out that, in Colombia, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the military doctrine of “National Security” to fight the “internal enemy” is still maintained. During the negotiations, both the FARC and the ELN insisted that the military doctrine should be transformed. The Colombian government responded that the doctrine was untouchable and would be maintained in the same way. For the Colombian state and the ruling class, the war continues, with or without guerrillas.

The pandemic, the class struggle and the correlation of forces

The Covid-19 pandemic and social confinement have served State Terrorism — using its paramilitary tools such as the Black Eagles, the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, Rastrojos, Clan del Golfo, etc. — to intensify its campaign of extermination of social leaders and community members and ex-combatants of the FARC.

The Colombian government has taken advantage of confinement and social immobility to govern by decree. The most visible results are: the increase in the militarization of social life, the increase in political violence and repression, the imposition of neoliberal packages, the intensification of extractivism and exploitation of natural resources, and a greater precariousness of work and erosion of all labor rights.

For the working class of Colombia the fear of dying of hunger is more prevalent than the fear of dying of the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“To resist is not to endure”


The Afro-Colombian movement of Cauca — southwest of Colombia — coined that slogan a few years ago. In fact, it was an Afro-Colombian woman, Francia Márquez — national leader of Proceso de Comunidades Negras, or Process of Black Communities, PCN, one of the strongest black organizations of Our Americas — who said it. The phrase crystallizes the sentiment of the entire popular movement, the peasants, indigenous people and workers.

Resisting is one thing, enduring ignominy is another.

While society obeyed the guidelines of confinement, the Army, the paramilitaries, and big capital did the opposite. The killings of Afro-Colombians, indigenous peoples, peasants, and community leaders increased to unbearable levels. The ignominy overcame the pressure of confinement and, in the month of June 2020, the social, ethnic and popular movement said ENOUGH! and made the decision to mobilize and march towards the capital. First, the indigenous and Afro-Colombians called for a march from the south of Colombia — the city of Popayán — to Bogotá, a journey of more than 600 kilometers, crossing two mountain ranges. Later, the social movement Congress of the Peoples and the new party Common Alternative Revolutionary Force — established as the political successor of the FARC — were added. Two other marches were added to the March for Dignity: one, which started from the city of Barrancabermeja in the north-central part of the country and was baptized Commoner March. The other, which started from Gibraltar, in the north of Santander, near the border with Venezuela, called the Liberator March. The three marches coincided in Bogotá.

The marches were not large mass mobilizations, as was the 2019 National Strike or what was expected for the 2020 Indefinite National Strike. But they had an impact on the subjectivity of society. They were acts of great courage in unfavorable conditions and cleared the way for the processes of struggle to come.

The times to come

In Colombia, as in the rest of Our America, times await us in which the accumulation of sufficient forces is necessary to modify the current correlation and confront the oligarchy bloc — with its Army of half a million, its paramilitaries and its Yankee soldiers.

The current situation can only be reversed by the organized action of the people, with a project and a strategic horizon of confluence between all sectors: urban and rural, Afro-descendant and indigenous. Achieving this is not an easy task because for this it will be necessary to overcome sectarianism, prejudice and hegemony. To face the challenge, we refer to the wise words of the Colombian father and revolutionary Camilo Torres: “We must insist on everything that unites us, and do away with everything that divides us”.

But we will also have to find creative ways to overcome the immobility imposed by the confinement of the pandemic.

The sanitary confinement cannot become a political confinement, because — as has already been said — the forces of reaction and imperialism have not obeyed the confinement.

It is necessary to overcome the defensive situation of withdrawal in which the social and popular movement of Our America finds itself and to regain the political initiative. For this, the work ahead must necessarily be international in nature. No one in the region is going to solve the great problems we face alone.

No movement, organization or party will be able to overcome the defensive and reactive situation in which we find ourselves without joining with others.

The coordinated work of the continent will have to gain efficiency, overcome the habit of only having meetings, making pronouncements and denunciations. There will have to be unity in action, within a strategic vision that allows us to know when, how and where we should concentrate our forces against a common enemy. We will have to learn to look beyond our borders — just as imperialism does — and assume that the victory of any of us that weakens the oligarchies and imperialism is a victory for all.

When Che Guevara was in Algeria in 1965, he exposed the essence of our internationalist philosophy: “and every time a country breaks away from the imperialist tree, it is winning not only a partial battle against the fundamental enemy, but also contributing to its real weakening and taking a step towards definitive victory”.

In the words of father Camilo Torres: “the fight is long, let us start now”.

In the puzzle of domination

 

[loyola llothta]