Category: Economic and Redistributive Justice

By the last decade of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century, many of the countries in the region, including Colombia, incorporated into their constitutions a multicultural approach aimed at recognizing the rights of Ethnic Peoples. Most countries adopted the 169 ILO Convention, which, along with other international declarations and treaties, urged governments to consult all administrative and legislative measures that could affect Indigenous peoples. The incorporation of these instruments in constitutions and legislation also implied the recognition that ethnic peoples could, and should, define their own development priorities, with autonomy and self-determination.

Although the declaration and incorporation of this nucleus of specific rights of ethnic peoples was an essential advance in the regulations of these countries, what was enacted at the legislative level is far from its effective realization, and its effects on the concrete living conditions of the Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other recognized ethnic groups remain to be seen.

Ethnic peoples’ struggles for the effective realization of their individual and collective rights collide head-on with the extraction and financialized development model that has become hegemonic in the region. The deep inequalities exhibited by Latin American countries and particularly Colombia, become abysmal in relation to ethnic peoples; Both the exclusive political model and the dynamics of capital accumulation based on the usurpation of the territory and the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources have made indigenous and Afro-descendants the main victims of development.

In AKUBADAURA we believe that the declarative and legislative advances regarding the recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity must go hand by hand with economic and social redistribution policies, incorporating a differential approach to all actions by the Government.

The Economic and Redistributive Justice line carries out actions to facilitate access to information, produce knowledge, and build capacity-building spaces, with a view to deepening this differential approach in economic and social policies. Likewise, for AKUBADAURA it is of the utmost relevance to propose actions aimed at accompanying productive initiatives of indigenous peoples to strengthen their food sovereignty and
survival of ancestral forms of production, seeking to improve access to land, public offers of support for production, and financing of all processes associated with production chains, distribution and own marketing.

With this, we seek to influence the achievement of material conditions for greater autonomy, and the allocation of adequate, sufficient and timely public resources, which allows ethnic peoples, in their territories, and according to their uses and customs, choose their own collective course.