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[Op-Ed] VULNERABLE POPULATIONS WEAVERS OF COLOMBIAN HISTORY. "Part One"

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RESIST, PERSIST AND WEAVE ALTERTIVITIES IN COLOMBIA

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INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RESIST, PERSIST AND WEAVE ALTERTIVITIES IN COLOMBIA

Mapa de los indígenas de Colombia

Map 1. Indigenous Peoples of Colombia. Source: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2

Currently in Colombia, there are 115 indigenous peoples, 65 of whom retain their language. The 32 departments of the country are home to an indigenous population. However, in 214 municipalities and in 12 townships in 25 departments they live in collective territories (reservations).

The colonial imaginaries of the indigenous as "barbarian" and "savage" still persist today in the national imaginary, reinforcing structural racism, disrespect for their cultures, and the idea that their territories are the object of conquest and exploitation. For many years the indigenous people were relegated to live under the figures of land, debt and servitude on their lands. (Truth Commission. Colombia).

Despite suffering systematic violence of forced dispossession-displacement, disrespect for their cultures and worldviews, from also systematic processes of resistance and persistence, and based on organizational processes in which spiritual and material elements from the bowels of their worldviews as ancestral peoples converge, they have constituted themselves as a "cultural-socio-political subject", incident in the construction of territorial autonomies,  that advocate for social inclusion, environmental and agro-productive proposals that are friendly to nature and cultures.

 

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                                             Photo 1. Lucía Vásquez Celis with "Taita", spiritual guide of the Kamëntsá people in Putumayo

INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS KEY ACTORS IN ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC-SOCIO-CULTURAL AND PRESSING POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN COLOMBIA

 

Informe Alternativo Regional Sobre la Aplicación del Convenio 169 de la ...

Photo 2. ONIC Today 45 years since its formation. Source: ONIC 2020

Despite cosmogonic specificities, they have managed to base their organizational processes around four pillars: Unity, Culture, Land, Autonomy. Under these principles, they build their strength as collective and political actors, whose actions, from a high level of organicity (local, regional and national), tend to influence the construction of the alternative history of Colombia and participate in the historical present of the change desired and assumed by vulnerable sectors in the country. Their principles are expressed in forms of government, the search for their own economies in their territories and in their presence in the context of the social sectors with their own discourse, from the roots in the tradition of their life and struggles as peoples.

Indigenous peoples are actors that clearly define a situation of opposition, that have an identity that is put into play to achieve socio-cultural transformations that allow them autonomy and control of central resources in society.  Their action is situated within the framework of the existence of a conflict in which they act as a movement. (Touraine, 2000)

 

Autonomy for indigenous peoples is part of their identity, it is maintained as a central value that they inscribe as a condition and contribution to democracy in Colombia. "Autonomy is a right of the indigenous people, but not only of them, but of the bulk of the social sectors. To defend and conquer it will be to advance in a more democratic society" on the understanding that in the search for real democracy, the autonomy of social movements with respect to the forms that political forces and elites of the country try to impose becomes valuable.

The indigenous movements of Colombia make a significant contribution to the idea of direct and real democracy understood from the recognition of differences and equality based on the universal condition of diversity. From their dynamics, they articulate the defense of ethnic identity with the search for democratic participation in the political system. (Carlos Alberto Osorio Calvo. 2016)

A good part of the experience of the Colombian indigenous movement is strengthened, among others, with the agrarian struggles for the recovery of the "Mother Land" (which they strengthened from the decade of the 60s and which still endure) to organize themselves in collective territories (reservations) with their political and cosmogonic expression of "Cabildos".

In collective territories, they assume the structuring of their political organizational dynamics at different levels and are committed to caring for nature, with which from their productive, care and use proposals they establish and defend the principle of "Reciprocity", as the foundation of Human-Nature relations, and play a fundamental role in the face of Climate Change, due to their actions,  through spiritual and material practices of care for the "living spaces" of their territories with large areas of forest and fallow land (coal sinks), "water nurturing" (care of water bodies), respect and care for the hills and lagoons considered "sacred sites" and biodiverse production models for food purposes and the reinforcement of their own productive and conservation practices.

Their territories, scenarios and struggles show their defense of other models of economies for life, their willingness to lead their vision of democracy from the scenarios of power and their determination to conquer them as well, through the electoral contest but with the understanding that the center of their political struggle is in the autonomous management of their dynamics as peoples in the territories (Sánchez Botero. 2010).

Autonomy conceived as a right, along with their differential rights as peoples, is linked to their identity. It derives from tradition, from "Customary Law" and as such, it is a central value in dispute that materializes in the territory. Even though the land is the Mother and the foundation of its existence, it becomes a "vital element" when it is configured as a territory and this implies relating it to a series of cultural values linked to it, autonomy being fundamental as an exercise of authority over the land and the community (territory), without ruling out alliances with other actors.

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