The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is One More Threat against Afro-Colombian Communities

“We have to stand for human rights, and that should be part of the trade equation.”
President Obama.

These words expressed by President Obama during his electoral campaign have become a
rhetoric that could cost Colombia’s Afrodescendants the legal achievements they have
won in their struggle for self-determination and recognition of their rights. It could also
cost them the ancestral territories they have defended for centuries. That is, if President
Obama insists on Congressional approval of the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.

The struggle of Afro-descendant communities for their ancestral lands and economic,
environmental and cultural rights has led to deaths of more than 47 leaders, massacres of
dozens of innocent Afro-descendants, internal displacement of more than 1.5 million
people, the loss of their control over their collective territories, and acceleration of these
communities’ impoverishment.

The port of Buenaventura and Northern Cauca zone where development-driven economic
policies were imposed against these communities’ will has created serious social and
environmental problems. Such policies have generated food and humanitarian crises
throughout the territory-region of the Pacific Coast and parts of the Caribbean. They
have also led to the illegal, and often violent, expropriation of territories for the large-
scale cultivation of oil palm and other large-scale economic projects in the collective
territories of Alto Mira and Frontera (Nariño) and Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó (Chocó).

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is just one more mechanism that will
endanger the rights of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities in Colombia. As we
have previously stated, the approval of the US-Colombia FTA will bring about conditions
that will violate the economic, environmental, territorial, and intellectual property rights
of these communities. It will exacerbate the racial, economic and environmental
injustices that have affected these populations for centuries.

We remind President Obama and the legislators who favor the FTA in the United States
that the Afro-descendant communities continue to face violence due to the presence of
illegal armed groups and actors that form part of the internal armed conflict in Afro-
Colombian territories. For the past two years, paramilitary groups known as the Black

Eagles, Rastrojos, and New Generation have systematically threatened Afro-Colombian
leaders and their organizations. Internationally recognized Afro-descendant organizations
including AFRODES and the Black Communities’ Process (PCN) are currently military
objectives for these groups. In the port of Buenaventura alone, the Human Rights
Ombudsman’s office documented 357 forced disappearances in the last three years (an
official statistic that does not reflect the actual number of forced disappearances in the
city), and an average 500 violent deaths a year for the last five years. This discriminatory
violence does not simply respond to a lack of economic opportunities, instead it responds
to the interests of different economic and political sectors in the territories and resources
of the region.

In the territory-region of the Pacific, the violence and implementation of Plan Colombia
are responsible for the impoverishment of the Afro-Colombian population in the last ten
years. 72% of Afro-descendants have lost their means of self-sustenance (one of which is
the land that is their primary source of work). 78% of internal displacement between
2002 and 2009 came from the collective territories of Afro-descendants and has left
96.5% of the forcibly displaced persons in conditions of extreme poverty, 78.4% of
which live in conditions of indigent poverty. Forced displacement, as indicated by the
Colombian Constitutional Court in Order T-025 of 2004 and Orders 004, 005, and 092 of
2009, is caused by discriminate violence against the communities, armed confrontation,
and military actions of counter-insurgency, fumigations with glyphosate on subsistence
crops of the communities, racial discrimination and the exclusion of black people from
spaces and critical actions in decision making. We remind President Obama and the
legislators that the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement was formulated and will be
applied in an environment of discriminate violence, violation of rights and without the
previous consultation with the communities whose territories, resources, and rights will
be directly affected by it.

President Obama has argued that in order to achieve peace, economic stability is
required. He has used this argument in favor of the Free Trade Agreements with South
Korea, Panama, and Colombia. In the reality of Colombia and the Afro-descendant
communities, peace would require the government of Colombia to recognize the
existence of paramilitary groups and the impact of their actions on democracy and the
possibility for peace. The government of Colombia would also have to decisively
guarantee justice and reparation for the victims of their actions. It would also require that
the Colombian government guarantee forcibly displaced, expropriated and impoverished
communities conditions for restitution, reparation and return to their territories in a way
that would reestablish their lives under dignified conditions. It also requires the creation
of differential attention policies for internally displaced Afro-descendents so that they can
recuperate their possessions and sources of work and employment (which include
recuperation of their lands), and that they are reintegrated into their productive
livelihoods with conditions of competition and equality that correlates with the rest of
society. This requires respect for their right to free and informed previous consultation as
obliged by Convention 169 of the ILO, the Colombian Constitution, and Law 170 of
1993.

We, the communities and organizations that struggle for our territorial, economic and
political self-determination, find that the Colombian government does not have any
political will to respect to the rule of law or the rights that are due to us. The Colombian
government has been characterized by its inability to implement regulations such as
Order 005 of 2009, which obliges the government to define appropriate prevention and
attention plans for Afro-descendant communities that are vulnerable to forced
displacement. The Colombian government violates the rights to free and informed
previous consultation and consent. Our last experience with this issue has been during
the formulation of the National Development Plan (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo), where
the Colombian government deliberately has limited the obligations of a transparent
previous consultation process to bureaucratic meetings where the direct voice of the
communities that will be affected by those decisions has not been represented. Likewise
the FTA was formulated behind the back of these communities making it a new
mechanism of expropriation and violation of rights.

The grassroots Afro-Colombian communities defend a Life Project (Proyecto de Vida),
based on principles of equality, sustainability, self-determination and self-affirmation,
that the US-Colombia FTA threatens, as there are not democratic conditions in Colombia
for the economic, political and social participation of our people. We make it clear that
despite President Juan Manuel Santos’ rhetoric, his decisions and actions against the
rights of our communities as Minister of Defense during President Uribe’s
administration, do not give us any hope that conditions will get better during his
administration. His policy in regards to mining, the Land Law and the poorly named
consultation process on the National Development Plan are concrete examples.

Therefore, the organizations and communities that struggle for the protection of our
ancestral territories, the resources within the territories and our rights to them,
reiterate our opposition to the current U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, as it is
not a choice that favors sustainable development in the future and favorable
advancement for our communities, in full exercise of our constitutional and human
rights.

We ask that the United Status Congress condition any future discussion of the FTA with
Colombia in compliance with the recommendations that all sectors of the national and
international social movements have presented in addition to the observations presented
last year to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

We make a similar appeal to civil society in the United States to demand their
representatives to publicly oppose the FTA with Colombia until the Colombian
government can demonstrate concrete results in transforming the human rights situation
in Afro-descendant communities.

With our traditional affirmation of life and joy, hope and freedom,


Black Communities’ Process (PCN)∗
National Coordination
International Working Group