Apartheid y segregación en Colombia
Luis Mejía, nuestro corresponsal en New York, nos remite este texto de Steven Bunce, donde el tópico tratado es el apartheid. En Bogotá, la alcaldía de Petro llama la atención sobre la ciudad capital como un escenario segregado, e insiste en la urgencia de redensificarla, y el debate empieza a superar las lindes de la ciudad colonial, asentada, impuesta, conquistada a la Bacatá de los Muiscas habitantes del altiplano cundiboyacense. Negri y Cocco llamaron la atención sobre el racismo y la proyección del biopoder y la biopolítica como contra en América Latina. Aquí está el texto de Steven Bunce, y su contribución al presente debate. N de la R.
Cosmopolitan apartheid? The racial landscape of
Contemporary Colombia.
Steven Bunce
The disproportionate
marginality and victimization of Colombia’s ethnic minorities has its origins
in what Cristina Rojas describes as its ‘regime of representation: a space of
presences and absences [including] things that appear, that are visible, as well
as those that are suppressed, condemned to remain backstage’. The two
administrations of President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) were characteristic of
this enduring regime.
Uribe watered down the
complexities of the nation’s history, diversity and political landscape to make
it more manageable, prosperous and secure. In his Colombia, the business world,
multinationals, and a concentrated executive power base had starring roles,
with ethnic minorities and peasants appearing as extras in the background.
Regard for the environment, land reform and the local ceded in favor of mining
and energy megaprojects. In sum, rural territories were finally converted into
little more than the ‘primary sector’.
That the discovery of
‘strategic lands’ suppresses the right to ‘ancestral lands’ is an implicit
notion of Eliana Rosero’s description of the ‘three key eras’ of the official
history of Afro-descendent Colombians: Following their total marginalization
and invisibility for centuries, in the 1980s they were granted specific rights
as an ethnic group, culminating in the institutionalization of their
traditional laws and collective territories with the 1991 Constitution. From
2000, a third phase began: the discovery of resource-rich deposits in these
territories and the ensuing attacks, displacements and violation of their right
to self-determination. The ongoing reorganization of territory by armed groups
complements the imperative of certain economic and political elites to use
forced displacement to 'homogenize' the population in a given area.
Afro-descendants comprise
nearly a quarter of Colombia’s population, and are concentrated in the regions
of the Pacific Coast and the southwest of the country, although the Caribbean
archipelago of San Andres and Providencia is home to an almost exclusively Afro
descendent population. The category itself refers to citizens with varying
proportions of African heritage. As the most recent census suggests,
identification with this ethnic category is loaded and complex: In 2005, for the
first time, Colombians were asked to assign their own racial category.
Ironically, this ‘enlightened’ process of self-ascription deflated the earlier
official figure of 26% to 10.6%.
Peter Wade describes how
ethnic minorities in Colombia tend to be regarded as the ‘guardians of the
natural environment’, a category that, while vital to the institutionalization
of the rights for traditional communities, has calcified a stereotype of
‘blackness’ as antithetic to economic growth and modernization. From the late
nineteenth century, Bogota’s elites proliferated a European cultural imaginary
and political order of the capital that denigrated the attitudes, behaviors –
even dress styles – of ethnic minorities and the urban mestizo labor force.
This centralist hegemony retained formidable power even as its population
soared and the city became a patchwork of economic migrants and displaced
persons from all over the country.
A tradition of regionalism,
the location of ethnic minorities as exogenous to the major urban commercial
hubs, and the concentration of wealth and power in elite institutions, have
generated glaring disparities, particularly as the gulf widens between cities
and regions. Currently, some one million Afro-Colombians are estimated to be
living in Bogotá, a city with a population nearing nine million.
Bogota is nowadays an emblem of Colombia’s improved security and place on
the global stage as a cosmopolitan metropolis. In April 2008, African-American
sociologist Fatimah Williams Castro found herself at the sharp end of this
process when she joined with her Afrocolombian friends for a night out in
Bogota’s Zona Rosa, an upmarket zone frequented by the capital city’s young
white elite and foreign tourists.
Castro and her friends attempted to enter a number of venues, but were
consistently met with vague reasons for why they could not go inside. The event
drew the interest of local lawyers, who assisted the group to petition the
Supreme Court, which later ruled that certain parties had violated their fundamental
rights to equality, honor and dignity.
Feature article of a 2011
issue of Hello! Magazine, Colombia. The text reads: 'The most powerful women
of the Valle de Cauca region in their stunning Hollywood-style mansion'. At
the rear of the photo are two Afro-Colombian women dressed in traditional maid
outfits. The image generated scathing criticisms of racism and moral
bankruptcy amongst the country's upper classes
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In my interviews with
residents on social class in Bogota, one Afro-descendent respondent emphasized
that it is ‘not easy being black’ in Colombia, one should not assume that a
solidarity exists amongst Afrocolombians based on a shared narrative of
discrimination. ‘I am a relatively successful, economically comfortable,
well-educated Baptist woman. My outlook is completely different to that of a
displaced Colombian living in hard conditions. The fact that we might both
happen to be black doesn’t mean anything really’. No single demographic
category expressed a consensus toward the primacy of race as a discriminating
factor. The closest I came to a consensus reflected what human rights lawyer
Mauricio García describes a prominent ‘class-based racism’ in Colombia, by
which racial differences have ceased to be clear-cut and yet the ‘upper class
tends to be whiter and the lower class darker’.
One Colombian anthropologist
asked: ‘Have you ever seen a black person driving a car in Bogota?’ I relayed
this question to an Afro-Colombian researcher writing her postdoctoral
dissertation at Colombia’s most elite university. ‘Well, my Dad has a car’, she
said with a smirk, ‘but I can tell you that there are very few Afros in
Bogota’s upper strata. I could count them on my hand’. A local historian was
emphatic: ‘You can see hundreds of black people driving cars in Cali, which is
a more Afro-populous city’. A politics student expressed a similar
territorialization of ethnic groups: ‘There are black elites, but in the black
regions’.
Select cultural and aesthetic
hallmarks are mobilized as part of Bogota’s performance of cosmopolitanism and
the projection of a tourist and business-friendly global city. Condemned to
remain backstage are the stark division of black and white social spaces and
the tacit exclusion of ethnic minorities. The subtle forces of spatial
distancing and socioeconomic exclusion of ethnic minorities do not fit neatly
with any claims of an institutionalized racial segregation. When Castro
discussed her experience with Afro-Colombian residents of Bogota, most were
simply mystified as to why she even wanted to spend time there.
Black residents have trickled
into the domains of Bogota’s upper classes in recent years – but more so in
professional environments, rather than social circles. Ana recounted her
‘rebellious adolescence’ in which she dated a black guy and was forbidden to
bring him into the house. Now she is engaged to a currency trader with German
heritage, and they both dine with her parents on a weekly basis. Another
resident described how, in recent years, a handful of black Colombians have
become members of the country club he and his family frequent: ‘This is a
racist society, but it is not apartheid’. For many, black residents are not
shunned, but they are anomalies in the city landscape.
As head administrator of the
science faculty at one of Bogota’s top universities, many appear in Claudia’s
doorway in search of signatures. ‘When they see a black woman sitting behind
the desk’, she tells me, the following exchange tends to occur:
“I’m looking for the head program authority”
--- “Yes, that’s me”
“I mean the head of administration. The person who can approve my
admission”
--- “Also me”
Her father, born in the
predominantly Afro department of Chocó, was determined to not end up working as
a laborer his whole life. By the time he completed secondary school, he knew he
had to move to the nearest city, Medellín, and find his way into a private
university. After graduating in veterinary science, he established his own
clinic in Barranquilla, and began to save money for her education from the
moment of her conception. ‘Not birth – conception’, she reiterated.
In spite of decades of
positive economic growth and democratization, the recurrent application of
economic and political paradigms originating in the Global North have
negatively impacted the country’s rural-dwelling populations and ethnic
minorities, while facilitating the illegal expropriation of land and public
resources. This monopolization of wealth is greatly aided by illegal groups,
who engage in clandestine alliances with powerful officials and economic elites
determined to uphold rigid traditions and inhibit change in economic, political
and social structures (Acemoglu et al, 2009; Lopéz et al 2010). The extreme
right-wing ideology and willingness of paramilitaries to swiftly circumvent
state functions complements a range of neoliberal principles, namely its
preference for a monocultural logic and the accelerated internationalization of
the economy (Springer 2012).
In the meantime, as Maria
Clemencia Ramirez captures in her ethnography of community leaders in Putumayo,
those from remote regions make every effort to attain formal education in
cities so as to ‘gain access to the level of social and cultural capital
necessary to make connections between local and national struggles’. The
painstaking process of attaining this symbolic capital contrasts violently with
the whirlwind speed with which privileged and violent actors pilfer, hoard and
commodify the country’s natural resources – a quite literal case-in-point of
what Teresa Brennan describes as capitalism’s ‘inherent need to occupy more
space’.
‘It is jarring for them to see
me sitting behind the desk’, Claudia chuckles, while imitating a serious of
incredulous expressions, ‘They think I’m here because I must be cleaning it’.
References
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies
of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Posted
by Ryan
Anderson
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