Rights for Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Communities are Crucial for Colombia’s Peace

Oct 7, 2016 | Omaira Bolaños
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The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santosfor his efforts in ending a more than 50-year-long civil war, serves as a reminder that Colombia is taking a worthwhile journey toward peace. But how does a country find peace when more than three-quarters of its population has known nothing but war? The vote in Colombia on Sunday, which rejected the peace agreement Santos negotiated by less than half a percentage point, shows that this is not an easy path to follow.

One of the most devastating aspects of the war was to see indigenous, peasant, and Afro-Colombian communities who spent their entire lives investing in and caring for their territories suddenly left with nothing. Displacement has a particularly destructive impact, leading to the loss of livelihoods, languages and cultures, and to the tearing apart of social fabrics — in addition to the lives lost to violence. For a lasting peace to take root, the legal recognition of collective property rights for indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities would be an important step in addressing the war’s damages and in continuing a process of comprehensive land reform.