Collective trauma in Indigenous and Black territories on Colombia’s Pacific coast: a framework and collaborative approach to researching violence

Counter‐powers. The daily life of transitional justice: Women, songs and resistance in Bellavista, Bojayá

“…However, indigenous and Afro‐descendant peoples have been subject to the violence of an internal armed conflict ongoing for over 5 decades. The action of armed groups (paramilitaries and guerrilla groups) and drug traffickers who, based on illegitimate armed activity, have dominated territories in an attempt to obtain economic or social resources of power (Pécaut, 2006) has created a climate of violence, forcing ethnic communities to either move or join the actions of these illegal groups (Velasco, 2023). In her ethnographic work with the Afro‐Atrato population, the author Natalia Quiceno (2015) indicates that the presence of actors other than the ethnic peoples that inhabited the Medio Atrato region before the 1990s were intermittent presences that transited these territories.…”

“…The Bellavista Massacre is an example of the continuous affronts experienced by ethnic populations in Colombia and highlights the historical, racial, spatial, class, and gender conflicts that have determined regions such as Chocó as economically poor and segregated spaces (Vergara‐Figueroa & Arboleda‐Hurtado, 2014). This has also served to perpetuate the conceptions of the colonial and slavery era that categorizes people from ethnic communities as savages and barbarians, who must be controlled and/or indoctrinated (Velasco, 2023). The massacre in Bellavista is one more example of systematized violence loaded with discrimination and exclusion of ethnic peoples, who are regularly dehumanized, ignoring cultural and community constructions loaded with customs, ways of relating to others and their territories, among other important factors based on which to build ways of life.…”