Abstract
For decades incipient violence has raged across the Colombian state. Despite divergent political ideologies, regionalized territorial strife, and the development of the drug economy that fuels this violence, Colombian democratic institutions have shown resilience. In 1991 Colombia reaffirmed and strengthened its democratic principles with the passage of a new, revolutionary constitution. Unlike anything seen in the region at the time, the 1991 Colombian Constitution expanded both collective rights and individual protections for all the country’s most vulnerable populations, but specifically for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians. Subsequent reforms expanded and safe-guarded the political and social rights enshrined in the Colombian Constitution. In the years following ratification, often referred to as the “Rights Revolution,” Colombians experienced an onslaught of legal protections. Work remains to be done, however, as many of the changes have yet to be felt by Afro-Colombians living in the agrarian Pacific Coastal Region, which has borne the brunt of the decades-long paramilitary violence that had ravaged the country until recently. Displacement has threatened to undo the work of the 1991 Constitution before it has even been fully actualized. As Afro- Colombians have scrambled to save their homelands, they have sought new ways to advocate for themselves within the Colombian political apparatus. And still, displaced Afro-Colombians struggle to have all their rights recognized as legitimate, sown into the fabric of the new pluri-cultural, multinational state. The ensuing rights enforcement mechanisms, whether used to supplement or complement Afro-Colombian collective rights, have yielded mixed results. Three theories pose explanations to this paradox, each finding that the discourse of rights, and eventually opportunities, for Afro-Colombians expanded as well as limited by the articulation of Afro-Colombian rights with that of displacement. This paper explores the discursive strategies Afro-Colombians have deployed to ensure their collective rights within the 1991 Constitution and their place within the new Colombian nation-state while simultaneously addressing the issue of mass displacement. In particular, it expands on the reasons that language, discourse, and the politics of three articulation are restrained and expanded by new legal protections and external actors. It also identifies the way that language is being formulated and deployed by Afro-Colombian advocates to contextualize the Afro-Colombian experience apart from any temporal or institutional restraints. Controlling the language used within the institution, who uses the language, and how the language is used, Afro- Colombians have an opportunity to remedy the main inconsistencies found within the state-sanctioned modes of individual and collective rights protections. Finally, this paper argues that Afro-Colombians and other marginalized peoples engage in a discursive offensive with the Colombian nation-state, the Colombian people, and international stakeholders. Mass displacement has overshadowed an already tenuous situation, making it nearly impossible for Afro-Colombians to operate under their newly recognized collective identity. Thus, a discursive offensive often means shedding the nascent ethnoterritorial identities the 1991 Colombian Constitution affords them, instead cloaking Afro-Colombian issues beneath the terms and language of displacement and war.