It’s been nearly 9 years since Colombia celebrated a landmark peace settlement between one guerrilla staff and the federal government, and 3 years since President Gustavo Petro vowed “total peace.” However actually, the rustic’s decades-long inner struggle continues – making it probably the most oldest on the earth.
Violence surged in early 2025, essentially the most intense uptick in years. Combating between two armed guerrilla teams within the northeastern Catatumbo area killed dozens of folks and displaced tens of hundreds extra. For the reason that biggest armed staff – the Progressive Armed Forces of Colombia, referred to as FARC – signed the 2016 peace accord, greater than 400 signatories had been killed. In the meantime, greater than 1,200 social leaders and human rights defenders had been assassinated.
We steadily outline peace because the absence of struggle. The issue with excited about peace and struggle as an all-or-nothing binary, on the other hand, is that it obscures the violence that takes position in “peaceful times.” For Colombians, that paradox is not anything new. In lots of communities maximum suffering from the violence, excited about a “post-conflict era” feels utopian.
As a Colombian researcher who has collaborated with Afro-Colombian leaders for over a decade, I’ve spotted that emphasizing peace talks and accords erases the ancient violence this is nonetheless provide, particularly for racial minorities. Colombia has the biggest Black inhabitants in Spanish-speaking Latin The united states. In Chocó – a area at the Pacific coast the place I carried out my analysis – Afro-Colombians shape a majority.
Communities there are contending now not simplest with the fresh struggle, but additionally ongoing demanding situations from the legacies of slavery, colonialism and extractive industries. Many citizens, specifically girls, paintings in combination on a daily basis to take a look at to deliver peace and justice inside achieve.
Indicators within the place of job of COCOMACIA, a Black girls’s group, say ‘option for life’ and ‘peace, we all build it.’
Tania Lizarazo
Rights vs. truth
Colombia has been mired in struggle for over six a long time, as felony and unlawful armed teams around the political spectrum combat for territories and sources. The struggle is estimated to have killed round 450,000 folks and displaced round 7 million.
Black and Indigenous communities have disproportionately suffered the brunt of the struggle – particularly in rural spaces, the place their lives and territories had been threatened by means of armed teams and corporations alike. In Chocó Division, the website online 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 commercial mining poses an extra threat to folks’s well being and the surroundings.
Andres Magallan carries an urn with the stays of Ivan Mejia, who was once murdered by means of right-wing paramilitary guerrillas years earlier than, in Santa Maria, Chocó, Colombia, in 2010.
Raul Arboleda/AFP by means of Getty Pictures
Black rural communities within the Pacific lowlands, the place maximum of Chocó is positioned, have a felony appropriate to collective possession in their territories and to be consulted about building plans. Actually, land grabs and centered killings over unlawful plants, mining and different extractive practices have grow to be the norm right here, as is right all the way through rural Colombia.
The struggle has intensified racism and gender hierarchies, with Black girls, specifically activists, particularly prone. Vice President Francia Márquez Mina, for instance – who has gained awards for her activism in opposition to unlawful mining – survived an assault close to her house within the within reach division of Cauca in 2019. She and her circle of relatives have gained different threats on their lives since then.
Development cohesion
Even in “postconflict” instances, peace is a difficult activity. It calls for social alternate that doesn’t occur in a single day. Slightly, it’s the accumulation of tiny sparks in folks’s day by day commitments.
In my e-book “Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia,” I write about how Black girls’s organizations take care of their territories and communities. The “comisionadas,” for instance, belong to probably the most biggest such teams in Colombia, known as COCOMACIA. Those girls go back and forth the Atrato River and its tributaries to guide workshops concerning the group, in addition to territorial rights and ladies’s rights.
Comisionadas subsequent to a poster with details about a landmark legislation in opposition to home violence, on July 7, 2012. María del Socorro Mosquera Pérez sits at the left.
Tania Lizarazo
Everybody locally is welcome to take part in dialogues about problems similar to girls’s political participation, land possession and comparable law. Comisionada María del Socorro Mosquera Pérez, for instance, wrote a music to percentage the significance of Regulation 1257, a landmark 2008 legislation in opposition to violence and discrimination in opposition to girls.
In her tale for the analysis challenge that I talk about in my e-book, “Mujeres Pacíficas,” comisionada Rubiela Cuesta Córdoba says it absolute best: “The best legacy that one leaves to family and friends is resistance.”
One center of attention of those girls’s teams’ paintings is the Atrato River itself. Since 2016, the similar yr of the peace accords, Colombian courts have identified the river as a felony individual, with rights to coverage, conservation, upkeep and recovery.
Scholars paint a mural in Quibdó, Chocó, Colombia, which says ‘Somos Atrato’: We’re the Atrato River.
Jan Sochor/Getty Pictures
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 travel alongside the river and its tributaries that has taken position more than one instances since 1999, spotlight that there is not any existence with out the river. Contributors go back and forth thru spaces the place paramilitaries and guerrillas are energetic, appearing cohesion with prone communities.
COCOMACIA’s comisionadas are a part of many different organizations – highlighting how survival is not just intertwined with lands and rivers, however different areas and international locations. The combat for ladies’s rights has led the comisionadas to collaborate with different organizations, developing wider networks of care. Those come with Los angeles Pink Departamental de Mujeres Chocoanas, a feminist coalition of ladies’s organizations in Chocó; Los angeles Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, a feminist motion of 300 organizations from throughout Colombia; and Ladies in Black, an anti-militarism community with contributors in over 150 international locations.
Their cohesion 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, informed me in 2012: “One cannot change the world by herself.”
