Noah Rosen and Ana I. Rodríguez Iglesias

On August 24, 2016, the ethnic peoples of Colombia achieved a great achievement: in the last days, before the Colombian government and the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) signed their historic peace agreement, the leaders of the Afro-Colombian and indigenous movement sat down and wrote their own chapter to safeguard the ethnic rights of their peoples. This text, barely four pages long, would be known as the Ethnic Chapter, the first set of specific principles and safeguards for ethnic groups within a global peace agreement.

The success of these villages is an exceptional example of the use of a nonviolent action strategy that included tactical sequencing and inter-ethnic consensus building. While Afro-Colombian leaders generated the initial impetus for the Ethnic Chapter and developed links with crucial sources of international support, the indigenous movement was instrumental in mobilizing actions in the country that brought the Colombian government to the negotiating table with these ethnic-territorial groups.

The history of the Ethnic Chapter begins in 2012, when the first news broke that there were serious peace negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. As Marino Córdoba, international representative of the National Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians (Afrodes), told us, some black organizations felt that, at a critical moment in Colombian history, their voices were being excluded. The peace talks were designed as a closed process between government negotiators and the FARC secretariat in Havana, Cuba. Although mechanisms for civil society participation were established, all these forms of participation were limited to non-binding consultations, through civil forums, with invited experts and victims, and an online platform for citizen proposals.

The Afro-Colombian movement felt that this type of non-binding participation was profoundly insufficient given that Colombia’s ethnic minorities have suffered disproportionately from the consequences of the armed conflict. With this motivation, black groups sought specific representation in the peace agreement as collective political subjects with specific ethnic rights. Marino Córdoba and Richard Moreno, then leader of the Foro Interétnico De Solidaridad-Chocó (FISCH), organized a meeting in Chocó in 2013 with representatives of the main black organizations in the country. Córdoba tells us like this:

The analysis we did of the draft Peace Accords was that blacks were not reflected in the agreement. They forgot that the country has an ethnic, cultural and gender diversity. The bet was to win the support of the United States. But Aphrodes alone couldn’t be a strong voice, we needed more voices to be more successful.

Nine black organizations agreed to launch the Afro-Colombian Peace Council (Conpa) in 2013, an Afro-descendant platform for peace-related issues. Over the next three years (2013-2016), Conpa led a concerted effort to access peace negotiations, beginning with an international campaign in partnership with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). In 2015, Conpa toured the US, in which he held a series of meetings with high-level political actors. The meetings resulted in high-level representatives from the White House and the US Congress putting pressure on the Colombian government to open negotiations on ethnic participation. With the support of political allies in Washington, Conpa secured a series of bilateral meetings with Colombian officials, including chief negotiator Humberto de la Calle. De la Calle himself explained to us in an interview that it was at that meeting in November 2015 that he began to understand the importance of including ethnic peoples in the process.

These international links paved the way to articulate alliances with indigenous organizations. In particular, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Todd Howland, told us that he realized that both ethnic groups were making similar demands on the national government and invited representatives of both groups to a meeting to harmonize their efforts.  Following the meeting, the indigenous organizations Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC) and Gobierno Mayor joined Conpa to launch the Ethnic Commission for Peace and Territorial Rights on March 8, 2016.

In Colombia, the Ethnic Commission established a direct line of communication with the FARC despite a history of bitter relations between the Ethnic Commission organizations and the armed group. Luis Fernando Arias, of the ONIC, led the negotiations with the FARC, which generated two agreements: the FARC would support the Ethnic Chapter proposal that the Ethnic Commission elaborated and the guerrillas would not sign the peace agreement until the Ethnic Chapter was included.

However, despite international pressure, the agreement with the FARC, and multiple previous promises by government officials to meet with the Ethnic Commission, the hearing only took place after indigenous, peasant, and black organizations had mobilized in the streets, in the Minga Agraria Campesina, Etnica y Popular between May 31 and June 12, 2016. The decisive action came when two indigenous organizations, the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and the ONIC, blocked the Pan-American highway , forcing the government to negotiate a set of compromises that included a meeting between state peace negotiators and the Ethnic Commission.

On June 26 and 27, 2016, the government met with the Ethnic Commission and agreed that the Peace Agreement required specific commitments to ethnic rights. The ethnic groups were in charge of designing a proposal for the Agreement. Its draft was sent to the government in early July 2016, however, at the end of August, information was leaked to the Ethnic Commission “that the parties planned to announce the final agreement in Havana the next day” with no response on the Chapter. Ethnic redacted. With the support of the international community and especially the United States peace envoy, the Ethnic Commission took direct action so as not to be left out of the negotiation meeting and the next day, August 24, representatives of the Ethnic Commission flew to Cuba.

On the island, the Ethnic Commission met with peace negotiators. According to the people present at the meeting, they were told they had just two hours to agree on a text that should not be more than one page long. The time and length restrictions deeply dismayed the Ethnic Commission, which had written a 20-page proposal for the Ethnic Chapter. After an hour and a half discussing the length of the text, they managed to push the boundaries a bit and, in the next hour, called on the expertise of three women—a member of the government technical team, an indigenous ONIC adviser, and a female leader. Afro-descendant—to write the final text. The product was a brief but complete document, with principles and guarantees to protect ethnic rights in the Peace Agreement. The Ethnic Commission’s ability to put together what was essentially a completely reformulated proposal, yet reflected the central goals of Afro and indigenous leaders, is perhaps the clearest example of the strength of the ties that emerged between the two movements over the years that advocated for its inclusion in the peace process.

Almost six years after the signing of the Peace Agreement, the Colombian government has systematically failed to implement the Ethnic Chapter. Ethnic communities continue to suffer state and non-state violence in their collective territories. However, this does not undermine the important inter-ethnic victory represented by the Ethnic Chapter which required a coordinated sequence of tactics that they pushed with the different strengths of each movement: Afro leaders developed international alliances, indigenous leaders led a decisive protest on the ground and they negotiated an agreement with the FARC and there was a commitment united by shared objectives in a moment of extreme coercion, in which the Ethnic Commission reconstructed its proposals in a matter of hours.

The Ethnic Commission continues to exist and is the main platform to demand the full implementation of the Colombian Peace Agreement, as the only way to advance comprehensive peace.

Anna Isabella Rodriguez

She is a professor at the International University of Catalonia and a member of the GLOBALCODES (globalization, conflicts, security and development) research group at the Ramón Llull University. She has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Coimbra and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University.

Noah Rosen

He is a doctor in political science from American University. His research focuses on the implementation of peace and the ethnic-territorial organization of the Afro movement in the Colombian Pacific. He has published in the journals Latin American Research Review and Colombia Internacional.

Translated by Damian Vasquez