Tania Lizarazo, College of Maryland, Baltimore County
It’s been virtually 9 years since Colombia celebrated a landmark peace settlement between one guerrilla group and the federal government, and three years since President Gustavo Petro vowed “whole peace.” However in actuality, the nation’s decades-long inner battle continues – making it one of many oldest on the earth.
Violence surged in early 2025, essentially the most intense uptick in years. Preventing between two armed guerrilla teams within the northeastern Catatumbo area killed dozens of individuals and displaced tens of hundreds extra. For the reason that largest armed group – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, referred to as FARC – signed the 2016 peace accord, greater than 400 signatories have been killed. In the meantime, greater than 1,200 social leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated.
We regularly outline peace because the absence of battle. The issue with interested by peace and battle as an all-or-nothing binary, nevertheless, is that it obscures the violence that takes place in “peaceable instances.” For Colombians, that paradox is nothing new. In lots of communities most affected by the violence, interested by a “post-conflict period” feels utopian.
As a Colombian researcher who has collaborated with Afro-Colombian leaders for over a decade, I’ve seen that emphasizing peace talks and accords erases the historic violence that’s nonetheless current, particularly for racial minorities. Colombia has the most important Black inhabitants in Spanish-speaking Latin America. In Chocó – a area on the Pacific coast the place I performed my analysis – Afro-Colombians type a majority.
Communities there are contending not solely with the up to date battle, but in addition ongoing challenges from the legacies of slavery, colonialism and extractive industries. Many residents, notably girls, work collectively each day to attempt to convey peace and justice inside attain.
Rights vs. actuality
Colombia has been mired in battle for over six many years, as authorized and unlawful armed teams throughout the political spectrum battle for territories and assets. The battle is estimated to have killed round 450,000 individuals and displaced round 7 million.
Black and Indigenous communities have disproportionately suffered the brunt of the battle – particularly in rural areas, the place their lives and territories have been threatened by armed teams and firms alike. In Chocó Division, the location of my analysis, the area’s remoteness and biodiversity have attracted unlawful teams and practices like drug trafficking, in addition to mining and different kinds of useful resource extraction that threaten conventional livelihoods. Mercury from industrial mining poses an extra hazard to individuals’s well being and the surroundings.
Black rural communities within the Pacific lowlands, the place most of Chocó is situated, have a authorized proper to collective possession of their territories and to be consulted about growth plans. In actuality, land grabs and focused killings over unlawful crops, mining and different extractive practices have grow to be the norm right here, as is true all through rural Colombia.
The battle has intensified racism and gender hierarchies, with Black girls, notably activists, particularly weak. Vice President Francia Márquez Mina, for instance – who has gained awards for her activism towards unlawful mining – survived an assault close to her dwelling within the close by division of Cauca in 2019. She and her household have acquired different threats on their lives since then.
Constructing solidarity
Even in “postconflict” instances, peace is a difficult process. It requires social change that doesn’t occur in a single day. Moderately, it’s the accumulation of tiny sparks in individuals’s each day commitments.
In my e book “Postconflict Utopias: On a regular basis Survival in Chocó, Colombia,” I write about how Black girls’s organizations care for his or her territories and communities. The “comisionadas,” for instance, belong to one of many largest associations of neighborhood councils in rural Colombia, known as COCOMACIA. These girls journey the Atrato River and its tributaries to guide workshops concerning the group, in addition to territorial rights and girls’s rights.
Everybody locally is welcome to take part in dialogues about points equivalent to girls’s political participation, land possession and associated laws. Comisionada María del Socorro Mosquera Pérez, for instance, wrote a track to share the significance of Regulation 1257, a landmark 2008 regulation towards violence and discrimination towards girls.
In her story for the analysis venture that I focus on in my e book, “Mujeres Pacíficas,” comisionada Rubiela Cuesta Córdoba says it greatest: “The very best legacy that one leaves to household and mates is resistance.”
One focus of those girls’s teams’ work is the Atrato River itself. Since 2016, the identical yr of the peace accords, Colombian courts have acknowledged the river as a authorized individual, with rights to safety, conservation, upkeep and restoration.
The river is a supply of meals and transportation between many basin communities the place potable water, electrical energy and different facilities are scarce. However it is usually intertwined with politics and spirituality. Pilgrimages like “Atratiando,” a visit alongside the river and its tributaries that has taken place a number of instances since 1999, spotlight that there is no such thing as a life with out the river. Individuals journey by way of areas the place paramilitaries and guerrillas are energetic, exhibiting solidarity with weak communities.
COCOMACIA’s comisionadas are a part of many different organizations – highlighting how survival will not be solely intertwined with lands and rivers, however different areas and international locations. The wrestle for ladies’s rights has led the comisionadas to collaborate with different organizations, creating wider networks of care. These embrace La Crimson Departamental de Mujeres Chocoanas, a feminist coalition of girls’s organizations in Chocó; La Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, a feminist motion of 300 organizations from throughout Colombia; and Ladies in Black, an anti-militarism community with members in over 150 international locations.
Their solidarity is a reminder that peace and justice are a collaborative, on a regular basis effort. As Justa Germania Mena Córdoba, chief of the comisionadas on the time, instructed me in 2012: “One can not change the world by herself.”
This text has been up to date to appropriate the outline of COCOMACIA.
Tania Lizarazo, Affiliate Professor of Latin American Research and World Research, College of Maryland, Baltimore County
This text is republished from The Dialog below a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article.
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