Women Leaders Bring Indigenous and Black Issues to Colombia Peace Table

Background

For 400 years, Afro-Colombians have lived in the most desolate, hardest to cultivate areas of the country, far from Colombia’s urbanized centre. In the beginning, Africans ran away there to escape slavery. When slavery was abolished, they settled there to eke out a difficult living. They were not allowed anywhere else, but it was mercifully out of sight and mind of the ruling mestizo class.

For the last 50 years, these regions, along with the territories belonging to the equally marginalized indigenous peoples, have been the site of most of the horrors in Colombia’s internal armed conflict. Like the US Wild West, their lands have been ungovernable and ungoverned by anyone with a legal mandate, fought over by factions who wanted to control their natural resources. The Colombian Armed Forces fight there in an existential struggle with rebel groups—including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) and the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN)—for political control of the country, even as peace talks go on in Cuba. They are flanked by paramilitary forces, which the government refers to as ‘criminal bands’. These are reorganized paramilitaries that popped up as soon as the United Self-defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) paramilitary troops officially demobilized. Then there are straight-up economic interests: almost omnipotent narco-traffickers, national and foreign companies looking to make it rich on Colombia’s breathtaking extractive industries. Afro-Colombians were–and continue to be–forced from their homes to escape the violence generated by others, once again displaced into conditions of violence, destitution and every kind of insecurity there is.

But there is a silver lining. One of Colombia’s greatest strengths as a nation is that it contains a diverse, multi-sectoral civil society—a strong fabric of churches, unions, local councils and other groups that in turn work together to build networks, coalitions and alliances up to the national level. For decades, these have fuelled some of Colombia’s most productive movements and policy proposals for social change. This is a civil society that has endured periods of extreme violence, persecution and deep stigmatization from all sides. Yet, it has managed to create proposals and implement them in very hostile environments. Despite the insecurity and with little political or financial support, Colombia’s civil society has thrived on its own determination, courage and creativity. In the case of Afro-Colombians, their strong roots in traditional autonomous community living, inherited from the practices of their African ancestors, have pulled them through unthinkably difficult times.

This is the non-violent side of Colombia. This is the other reality that the newspapers do not report on. This is the Colombia constructed on hope and dignity. It has met the needs of the most vulnerable—the displaced, women, ethnic minorities, youth and other victims—when the nation’s institutions have fallen short. Colombian civil society has consistently monitored and advocated for better public policies, transparency in governance and justice for the ignored, the underserved and the victims.

Agripina is one of its leaders.

Agripina Hurtado Caicedo and the Labour Movement

Afro-Colombian Agripina Hurtado Caicedo had an idyllic childhood in Valle del Cauca, a lush region along the coast of southwestern Colombia. She lived in a big house with her mother, father and nine siblings. Her maternal grandfather sent them produce and money from their family farm, and her father was a sugar cane cutter for a company that provided great benefits. The cane cutters’ children studied in private schools and received scholarships to high school—an extraordinary level of education in that area. Her father would have been an avid reader if he had known how to read, and he required his children to read the newspaper to him every day. This routine provided a great educational boost to the household, whose academic and political literacy skyrocketed.

By the time she was 10, Agripina was deeply immersed in union life. Her father was a union member, and though he was not interested in leading the cause (on his one day off every week, he ran a successful bar in town), he did host union meetings in their big house. Delegates gathered there, including her uncle, Manuel Felipe Hurtado, a life-long union leader and the eventual President of the Colombian Workers’ Confederation (Confederación de Trabajadores Colombianos, CTC) in the 1980s.

Agripina’s professional life grew up within the unions too. When she left school, she began working as an organizer with indigenous communities in Cauca. As she learned more about the communities around her, she came to understand that organizing was ‘her path’ and she was more needed than ever.

Conditions in the predominantly Afro-Colombian sugar cane industry deteriorated by the 1990s when the companies instituted new procedures that pushed their workforce into danger and destitution. As employers took steps to do away with direct contracts that allowed for the unions to advocate for proper working conditions, safety and health practices crumbled. The work week swelled to 100 hours. People were forced to work in the fields as adjacent lots burned and filled the air with fiery smoke. In some places, one out of five workers became physically disabled. Pay crumbled as well. Their base salary was replaced by piecework contracts, with so many deductions taken by their employers for tools and supplies that there was barely any pay left at the end of the month to make it into the workers’ hands. Most workers operated in an environment of debt bondage. It became a modern-day slavery.

Fighting the status quo, and especially the status quo with such entrenched economic interests, is brutal. Until Guatemala surpassed it recently, Colombia held the title of the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. Over the last 20 years, some 4,000 unionists have been assassinated there, with almost none of the murders prosecuted. Even as she was immersed in this world, Agripina did not think it could happen to her and it did not, at least not exactly.

They killed her seven-month-pregnant daughter.

It shattered her life.

She fled.

Exiled to Brazil in 2010, Agripina found herself asking in indignation why she should be the one forced out, when she had done nothing wrong. Her compromise between home and safety was to move to Cali, the nearest big city to where she had grown up. But it is still not quite a life. She does not go out after 7:00 in the evening any more. She turns off her phone around 8:00 so that she is not upset by the death threats overnight. She has seen her face on posters that the anti-union thugs have hung on the walls outside: ‘Agripina Hurtado. Wanted Dead or Alive’. She lives in fear.

In 2014, Agripina was finally provided some protective services, in the form of bodyguards and other security measures, by the Colombian government’s National Protection Unit (Unidad Nacional de Protección, UPN). This agency was created in 2011 at the behest of national and international activists and the United States government. Its short history is a troubled one, because creating a new agency on paper does not mean it will do its job effectively. So far, it needs a lot of work and a lot more political will to offer adequate protection to human rights defenders. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, Senior Associate for the Andes at WOLA, who has advocated for the protection of human rights advocates in Colombia for years, came to Agripina’s aid as well, bringing her case to the attention of the US government and pushing the UPN to take it seriously.

In spite of the danger, Agripina proclaims defiantly that she will do what she wants to do. Unions are in her blood, and that is just the way it is. In 2012, Agripina was working for Public Services International (PSI), the global trade union federation representing 669 unions and more than 20 million workers around the world, when she was called upon to help her own. A new organization had arisen out of a 2008 cane workers’ strike, with the help of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center in Cali and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU). The Afro-Colombian Labour Council (Consejo Laboral Afrocolombiano, CLAF) invited her to be its president. She looked at the organization, told them it needed some women, and accepted.

The CLAF represents workers from the sugar cane, oil palm, mining, port, domestic work and public service sectors—all heavily dominated by Afrodescendent workers. Operating at the national level with 10 local chapters across the country, it is the first organization in Colombia to advocate specifically for improvements in the inhumane conditions in which most Afro-Colombians are forced to work. It has been an active force in national and international advocacy that has truly improved conditions for Afro-Colombian workers and there at its helm is Agripina.

In 2014, the CLAF joined forces with all the major Afro-Colombian ethnic-territorial groupings to form the Afro-Colombian Peace Council (Consejo Nacional de Paz Afrocolombiano, CONPA). In more than three years that Colombia’s peace talks have continued, they have never included dialogue with the Afro-Colombian territorial authorities—the authorities who are supposed to control the lands where the conflict and the post-conflict transition are centred. The CONPA advocates for inclusion of Afrodescendent individual and collective rights at the negotiating table. Agripina forms part of the sub-commission on gender, working to guarantee that peace becomes a reality for Afro-Colombian women and that it is sustained in the long term by strengthening workers’ rights.

Francia Elena Márquez Mina and the Land Rights Movement

Another extraordinary leader is Francia Elena Márquez Mina, a young Afro-Colombian woman, beautifully balancing the weight of the world on her shoulders. Francia, the grand-daughter of a community leader, grew up in the mountains of La Toma, Cauca—the department next-door to Agripina’s in Valle del Cauca. People in La Toma have traditionally supported themselves and their families through artisanal mining. They have sifted gold dust from the river and pulled gold-flaked rocks from the ground with their fingers and so has Francia.

Francia’s community became embroiled in a land dispute in the early 2000s when the Colombian government illegally granted an outsider with dubious ties to criminal groups a licence to build an industrial mine in La Toma. Although the law states that mining can only be carried out with the prior informed consultation of the property’s Afro-Colombian residents, the government had stated on the man’s permit that there were no Afro-Colombian residents there, so he refused to conduct the consultation. With no one living there, he reasoned, whom would he consult? He did, however, file a request for their eviction. Francia and her community organized peaceful but tense protests to block the eviction, and by 2010 they succeeded in having both the eviction proceedings and improper mining permit terminated in the courts.

When Gimena met her in 2009, Francia was in her early twenties and already the vice president of her community council, one of the local Afro-Colombian governments that comprise the Black Communities Process network (Proceso Comunidades Negras, PCN). Her first trip to Washington was with a delegation of civil society leaders coming to advocate on behalf of displaced Afro-Colombians to the US government. Gimena set up meetings and accompanied the delegates on their rounds through the marble-floored offices of Capitol Hill. It was the first time Francia had been out of Colombia and Gimena’s guidance over time helped the woman with the dangly red earrings and dazzling smile make the transition from local leader to international force.

Francia’s leadership and reach kept expanding. In 2014, she helped organize more than 70 women in a march from Cauca to Bogota to fight the environmental degradation that comes from the illegal mining operations. The group called themselves the Black Women’s Movement for the Protection of Life and Ancestral Lands (Movilización de las Mujeres Negras por el Cuidado de la Vida y de los Territorios Ancestrales). The next year, she travelled to Havana, Cuba to take part in Colombia’s peace talks. She was representing the Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities who have been displaced by mining companies, and was one of a group of advocates providing input into the victims and justice accord.

But union leaders are not the only people at risk in Colombia. In 2015 alone, 69 human rights defenders were killed, often over land disputes. Francia’s role in the 2014 protest earned her the designation of ‘military objective’ and the multiple armed groups operating in Cauca began targeting her with intimidation and threats of violence. Anonymous death threats have forced her, too, to move to the city of Cali for her own protection. WOLA works to keep her and her two young sons safe by advocating on her behalf with the National Protection Unit and keeping the US government apprised of her case and that of the other leaders in this community.

Raising her public profile is another way to give Francia a modicum of extra protection and a great deal more power in her own advocacy. When Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) approached Gimena to help them make a documentary about Afro-Colombian women for their ‘Women, War, and Peace’ series, Gimena led them to Francia. In 2011, they released ‘The War We are Living’, a documentary video highlighting Francia and another leader. Last year, the Swedish development organization Diakonia, bolstered Francia’s profile and credibility again, naming her 2015 Defender of the Year for work with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities against the mining companies who were pouring into the region.

Francia is now a global leader fuelling the work of PCN—and the CONPA as well, of which PCN is a member. Representing their cause, she travelled to Havana to talk to the negotiating parties at the peace talks about the suffering her community has endured at the hands of the mining companies and the solutions they could implement to stop the ongoing harm.

Francia will soon complete her legal studies in Cali, adding another skill to her portfolio for protecting her community and its ancestral lands. She has become more polished; her presentation and arguments are even more sophisticated and effective with broad audiences than they were just a few years ago. She is an actor now on the world stage and people are listening.

Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the Lifeline

Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli’s family fled Argentina’s dirty war when she was a little girl and escaped into the exile of a life all over the world. After college, she became an expert on internally displaced populations, and although she has worked on these issues in many countries, she likes to say that Colombia chose her. After more than 15 years, she has become the go-to person for Colombians from trade unions, displaced Afro-Colombian communities and human rights networks when they have needed to get their story out.

In Spanish, Agripina calls Gimena their ‘oxygen tank’, but in English, we might use the phrase ‘lifeline’. Afro-Colombians themselves are the ones who must fight their own fights and come up with their own solutions, but they have to be alive to do it. The work that Gimena does every day—channelling updates on death threats and the security particulars of individual activists to the US Congress and State Department and advocating for their plight—literally saves lives. Afro-Colombians have been invisible to the Colombian government for centuries, but when the US government steps in on their side, their own government cannot ignore them. This is especially true in the spotlight of the international press, which WOLA’s communications team engages strategically to increase pressure and accountability. In the immediate term, Gimena also helps individual activist’s access to emergency funds to pay for travel expenses or a new safe apartment when they have to get out quick.

Meanwhile, US involvement is not just a lifesaver for the individuals; it is the most powerful tool they have for policy advocacy as well. Colombia’s desire to maintain its good reputation and relationship with the United States has been effective leverage in many key political moments.

In 2010, both countries signed the US–Colombia Action Plan on Racial and Ethnic Equality (CAPREE). Its purpose was to recognize and elevate the contributions made by African descendants and indigenous people in the United States and Colombia, and to break down the social barriers that they faced in education, employment, economic opportunities and cultural preservation. Agripina and her civil society and government counterparts revisited this agreement in the spring of 2016 to strengthen bilateral cooperation and exchange best practices. Advocacy by WOLA and its partners ensured that CLAF would be invited and that the meeting would include a meaningful discussion of labour rights.

Gimena was also instrumental in the US decision to create the 2011 Labour Action Plan, a political precursor to the US–Colombia free trade agreement, which promised a reduction in unionist killings and justice for these murders. It was to do away with sub-contracting and it also aimed to re-establish the Labour Ministry to guarantee labour rights including unions’ right to organize. Among its terms was the promise that labour activists would be provided protection services if they were threatened because of their attempts to organize. The US Congressional Monitoring Group that oversees the plan relies on Gimena’s information—gathered regularly from colleagues like Agripina—to evaluate the next phase of the endeavour: actually enforcing it.

Until civil war broke out in Syria, Colombia held the world record for the highest number of internally displaced persons. Most were Afro-Colombians—roughly one million—and their displacement came about due to violence, land grabs and environmental degradation from extractive industries. To help rectify the injustices and snowballing community problems caused by displacement, Gimena works regularly with PCN and the Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians (Asociación de Afro-Colombianos Desplazados, AFRODES). One practical initiative has been to bring their proposals to the attention of donor governments. The US Agency for International Development regularly consults with Gimena and her Colombian partners to design its rural development and civil society strengthening programmes in a way that will address these problems and truly help promote the peace.

Still, agreements are often just paper. Harassment, inequality and racial discrimination are the overwhelming reality. The magic bullet, the golden ticket, the one thing that could reconcile words and reality, is the rule of law. The first step in achieving the rule of law is an inclusive, well-thought-out transition out of this protracted internal armed conflict.

Peace talks finally began in 2012 between the Colombian government and the FARC. Although there had been earlier efforts at negotiations, the ones that are going on now are more widely expected to result in an actual agreement. When these talks opened, Gimena had the contacts and expertise to play an important role in the discussions. She brought champions like Agripina and Francia and the causes they represent to the international community, most notably the US Congress. All three have highlighted exquisitely the issues that are so often ignored. With many other allies, these women have made significant progress in ensuring that the voices and proposals of marginalized groups make it to the negotiating table.

The peace talks with the FARC may soon enter their final phase, and upcoming negotiations with the ELN have now been announced. But Afro-Colombians and their allies still have an uphill battle confronting the institutionalized racism and systems, official and unspoken, that have displaced and devalued them over the centuries.

García Márquez said in a 1981 Paris Review article (Stone, 1981) that ‘Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination’. The same could be said not just of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, but its Pacific coast and landlocked regions as well. Who would have thought that heavily populated Afro-Colombian lands could be designated as empty and that no one would challenge it? Who would have thought that real people would expect workers to walk into blazing sugar cane fields as readily as into a pool of sunshine?

But then again, who could have anticipated the likes of Agripina, Francia and Gimena? With the world behind them, they can go a long way towards making the wildest ideas ever—peace, justice and the rule of law in Colombia—a reality.