Moderação: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso (CES)

Resumo

After almost five years of negotiations in Havana, in November last year, the Colombian Congress approved a revised peace agreement between the government and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main guerrilla group, after that an earlier version was rejected in a referendum. This new peace accord is a historical landmark in Colombia’s complex peace process of a five decades long armed conflict that killed 220 000 people and generated 7 million internally displaced people. However, the road of the implementation of the Comprehensive Rural Development and the Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence contained in the new peace accord is full of challenges.

This debate will focus on the multilayered complexities that these peace agreements will face when implemented in rural conflict-torn indigenous territories. Even though indigenous peoples make up a disproportionate number of victims of the violence and displacement, they were initially excluded from the peace negotiation table. Only at the very last moment, after years of advocacy efforts supported by the international community, their voices were considered in the Ethic Chapter of the peace agreements. It remains however unclear how the several commitments of the peace agreements will be implemented respecting the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination and political and judicial autonomy as enshrined in international human rights law.

During this discussion we will also look at Guatemala where important lessons can be drawn about the mismatch between national post-conflict and transitional justice mechanisms and local indigenous realities. Twenty years ago, in December 1996, the Guatemalan Government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) signed a comprehensive peace agreement which made an end to 36 years of internal armed conflict. This war led to the death or disappearance of an estimated 200 000 people. It included at least 600 massacres, the destruction of over 400 indigenous villages, the internal displacement of one million people and a refugee stream of 150 000 to Mexico. According to the UN sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH), most of the victims were indigenous civilians (83%) and acts of genocide against Mayans were carried out in at least four areas of the country. Further, the Guatemalan State was founded responsible for 93 percent of the conflict’s human rights violations. In line with the international tendency, Guatemala has carried out several initiatives of the transitional justice agenda to respond to the legacy of the armed conflict, such as two truth commissions, a National Reparation Programme, the prosecution of military officers, memory initiatives and exhumations. However, despite the fact that the majority of Guatemala’s victims are indigenous, transitional justice policy makers never toke this cultural reality into account nor the highly localized dimension and mass civilian participation in the large-scale human rights abuse which provoked many frictions and short circuits at the local level of indigenous war-torn communities.

In this debate we intend to develop a critical analysis of complex issues such as indigenous epistemologies regarding justice, reparation, truth recovery, the challenges of the construction of intercultural interpretation of human rights, and the role of local ownership of Colombian peace and transitional justice processes among others.

Notas Biográficas

Lieselotte Viaene is a Belgian anthropologist, with PhD in Law (2011), specialized in the fields of human rights, transitional justice, indigenous peoples' rights and legal pluralism. Since 2002, after having carried out fieldwork on transitional justice and restorative justice within the framework of her master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, she maintains a close relationship with several conflict-torn Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in Guatemala. During her PhD research on transitional justice and indigenous peoples (2006-2010), she conducted long term multi-sited ethnographic research among Maya Q’eqchi’ victims and perpetrators, tracing survivor views, priorities and practices as well as indigenous justice systems in post-conflict settings. After her PhD, she joined the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights in Ecuador (2010-2013) where she was responsible for the area of collective rights of indigenous peoples and afro-descendants and the area of transitional justice. Since September 2016, Lieselotte is a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at CES with the project "Challenges of Grounding Universal Human Rights. Indigenous epistemologies of human rights and intercultural dialogue in consultation processes on natural resource exploitation” () with Guatemala and Colombia as case studies.

Begoña Dorronsoro, is a feminist of basque origin and PhD Candidate in “Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship” at CES with over 10 years of experience in working and militating at several basque ngos with indigenous organizations counterparts mainly from Colombia, Bolivia and Guatemala. Begoña is developing her PhD thesis with indigenous organizations in the Cauca region of Colombia.

Activity within DECIDe and GROUNDHR