Colombia is systematically killing off its black citizens Opinion

BY FRANCE FRANCOIS
JANUARY 25, 2020 03:00 PM



Maria Ruidis holds a photo of her missing son Everth Ibarguen, during an event in Bogota in 2016 to mark the International Day of the Disappeared. FERNANDO VERGARA AP

“This is where the bodies lay,” the Afro Colombian activists casually pointed to a spot outside the window as the tiny car that we were crammed in darted expertly in and out of 11 p.m. traffic in Cali, Colombia.

Cali is where many displaced Afro Colombians have sought refuge from the Colombian civil war, often only to find that they’ve fled one kind of terror only to encounter another. Rather than your typical tourist sites, they pointed out the places where black people have been killed, black communities displaced and the endless civil war has rendered black life inconsequential and disposable.

Originally from a rural black community outside of Tumaco, Colombia near the border with Ecuador, Quiñones, the activists had survived threats and persecution from the largest guerrilla group in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), only to be detained, tortured and imprisoned for over a year by Colombian security forces for their activism against illicit activities destroying their community.

When we met, they’d only been released three months earlier and couldn’t return to Tumaco, now the biggest producer of coca in Colombia. Consequently, the region now has a murder rate four times the national average, the highest rate of sexual violence in the nation and least 2,700 people displaced by violence in 2019 alone. Thus, as we drive through the city, my guide talked about the urban facades that masked unimaginable cruelty and violence with the heartbreaking detachment of a survivor of war, forever changed by what she’d seen.

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