Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America

Abstract

In recent years, Apro-descendant social movements have won important collective rights from the state in many Latin American countries. They have forced Latin American states to begin to acknowledge the persistence of racism in their respective societies. Taking advantage of recent democratization processes that opened up the political system in many countries in the region, Afro-descendants have waged increasingly visible and successful struggles for various kinds of collective rights to overcome the racial discrimination and social and political exclusion to which they have historically been subjected. In the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American states—including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela—implemented new multicultural citizenship regimes. The features of these multicultural citizenship regimes vary from country to country, but they generally include some combination of the following collective rights: formal recognition of the existence of ethnic-racial subgroups, recognition of indigenous customary law as official public law, collective property rights (especially to land), guarantees of bilingual education, territorial autonomy or self-government, and rights to redress racial discrimination (such as affirmative action in education and employment).1 As a result, Afro-descendants have been able to gain certain collective rights to land and culture although generally to a lesser extent than indigenous peoples. In addition, in a few countries in the region, notably Brazil and Colombia, Afro-descendants have also won certain antiracial discrimination rights.