Almost immediately after the end of World War II, the United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at its General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Seventy-five years have passed since this Declaration, which has served to safeguard that most sacred of all human rights: the right to be treated as a dignified human being without any discrimination and to a guaranteed right to life, regardless of skin color, nationality, social and economic status, sex, religion, political opinion, or any other condition.
Today the world in general is shaken by wars. Painful ones like the Israeli massacre of Palestinian people, and silent (or ignored) wars like those in the Sudan, Ukraine, or Russia.
In these 75 years, more people have been killed in local, national, and international conflicts than in WWI and WWII. This situation can only be compared to the shameful trade and enslavement of African people which the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) declared a crime against humanity during its 2001 meeting in Durban, South Africa.
Current status of Afrodescendants in Latin America
International economic analysis organizations such as the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, and United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), all concur that in Latin America there are more than 100 million Afrodescendants. “The progressive inclusion of ethno-racial self-identification questions in population and housing censuses now provides answers to the most elementary questions: how many people are of African descent and where are they?” ECLAC noted in its “Afrodescendants
and the matrix of social inequality in Latin America” report, published in 2021. “These data are crucial, not just as basic inputs for public policy and planning but also because they serve to confirm the existence of the Afrodescendent population and make it visible to States and societies that deny its existence. Based on available census figures, Latin America’s estimated Afrodescendent population is currently 134 million people, accounting for 21% of the region’s total population.”
Afrodescendent organizations have regularly challenged the census counts of their populations in several countries. They have claimed that their community populations are underreported. ECLAC acknowledges that census statistics have been shown to change when Latin American Black communities are properly educated about their heritage and critically evaluated. “In seven countries in the region, it is possible to compare the census figures for the 2000s with the census figures for the 2010s,” ECLAC’s report notes. “In six of these countries, the Afrodescendent population has increased, in both absolute and relative terms, at a higher growth rate than that of the national population (Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Honduras, the exception being Colombia). Although fertility and mortality are the main components of a country’s population growth, they fail to explain the high growth of the Afrodescendent population between one census and the next because, although the fertility rate among Afrodescendants tends to be higher than among the rest of the population, it is still relatively low. Thus, a significant part of this growth has to be the result of increased Afrodescendent self-identification, which itself reflects the mobilization and growing political role of the Afrodescendent population whose demands are emerging from the democratic recovery.”
The term “Afrodescendants” was created by Latin American social movements during a WCAR preparatory conference in Santiago de Chile in December 2000. The countries with the largest Afrodescendant populations in Latin America are Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Generally, though, all Latin American countries have Afrodescendant populations.
This year, the U.N. tried to have nations implement three principles concerning Afrodescendants: dignity, freedom, and justice. But these principles were not entirely fulfilled.
A decade without concrete results
The U.N. Decade for People of African Descent, decreed in 2014, is coming to an end in 2024 and it has gone almost unnoticed because its implementation has been disastrous. Here are a few observations: During the previous Brazilian government headed by then-President Jair Bolsonaro, Afro Brazilians suffered persecution, assassinations, and prohibitions of their ancestral religious practices. In Colombia during the Iván Duque and Álvaro Uribe administrations, the vast majority of the almost 200 massacres were carried out in Afro Colombian territories, provoking massive displacement because of confrontations between the guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the army. In Honduras during the previous government of Juan Orlando Hernández, the Garifuna people were dispossessed of their land and, alongside the eco-militant leader Berta Cáceres, have fought to keep it from being transformed into a space for the drug trafficking trade. Today Juan Orlando Hernandez is in prison for drug trafficking in the U.S.
Afrodescendants in Latin America live mostly below the poverty line. This situation will worsen in 2024, because they generally have no access to education and, if they have it, it is of low quality as shown by institutional indicators. Those most affected are Black children and Black women who are mostly heads of households. We must reconsider the issue of human rights for Afrodescendants in Latin America in these troubled times of war, climate crisis, migration, and xenophobia.