As with Afro-descendants in the United States, Afro-descendant communities in Colombia have been losing their lands at an unprecedented rate over the last decade and a half. In the United States, the number of African-American farmers has declined by 98 percent since 1920. By 2001, African-Americans were losing 1000 acres of land per day, with only 29,000 black farmers left in the United States currently, compared with close to a million in the 1920s. In both historical cases, racist governmental policies, private sector criminality and the failure to protect the fundamental human rights of Black people and communities resulted in massive alienation of people from their land. Unfortunately, in Colombia, this process of land alienation will be exacerbated with the passage of the US-Colombia “Free Trade Agreement.” [2]

In Colombia, Afro-Colombian farmers face unlawful and violent dispossession, internal displacement, targeted violence and pauperization - all the effects of mercenary policies and interests over their ancestral territories and natural resources, now viewed as some of the most valuable in the country. According to census data collected in 2005 (the first official data collected that is specified by race), 69 percent of Afro-descendants had lost their wealth, represented mostly by land. Today, 79 percent of Afro-Colombian internal displacement comes from Afro-Colombian collectively-owned territories. One-third of the 5.2 million internally displaced persons (IDP) are Afro-Colombians and 79 percent of those internally displaced live below the poverty line.

Violence and bloodshed has been at the center of Black land loss in both the US and Colombia, but in Colombia violence has proved to be the preferred practice by many forces to remove Black communities from their land. This includes situations such as the widely-known case of the Chiquita Banana company, which allegedly paid $1.7 million to fund paramilitary groups that massacred community leaders, trade unionists, children, and women; the case of palm oil companies in Curvarado and Jiguamiando (Choco), and Tumaco (Nariño), whose actions have cost the lives and caused the internal displacement of hundreds of Afro-descendant men, women and children; the illegal mining concessions granted by the Colombian government to multinationals such as Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Cosigo Resort, Kedhada and Drumond, resulting in death threats to Afro-Colombian leaders, organizations and whole communities in Choco and the Northern Cauca Region; illegal mining in Zaragosa (Valle) that resulted in more than 2,000 death in two years; the horrendous case of the Port of Buenaventura, where women are savagely raped and dismembered by armed groups and state police, and where five neighborhoods are facing displacement to give way to a large-scale expansion of the Port and large-scale tourist projects.

The US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was formulated and passed in Colombia in an environment of deliberate and targeted violence against small farmers, most of them Afro-descendants. The implementation of such a perverse plan of dispossession will be consolidated with the US passage of the US-Colombia FTA, pushed by the Executive Branch of the Obama administration. While this agreement is being debated in the halls of congress and assurances given to trade unionists and Afro-Colombian farmers that their rights will be protected, Afro-Colombian leaders and trade unionists are still losing their lives - Afro-Colombian leaders like Ana Fabricia Cordoba, was murdered by right-wing paramilitary forces on June 7, 2011. [3]

Any benefit US or Colombian investors gain from this agreement will be at the cost of the blood and suffering of black, indigenous and campesino peoples. We must not let this agreement go forward behind the backs of the American people. Opposing this agreement should be the goal of all people who believe in human rights and fair trade policies that put the rights of people at the center.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Charo Mina Rojas, is the National Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator of the Black Communities’ Process (PCN, by its acronym in Spanish), International Working Group, and member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network (ACSN). Click here to contact Charo.

Also visit: www.afrocolombians.com