Marino Córdoba: Afro-Colombians and the Colombian Civil War

In 1991, the assembly debating the current Colombian Constitution spoke for the first time of the need for recognition of traditional identity and land rights for Colombian Afro- and Native Americans. Acknowledging the existence of a diverse, multiethnic, and multicultural population was of utmost importance in a country which has for centuries taught its children a history loaded with the origins and cultures of the European colonizers of the land but nearly nothing of the Native Americans colonized nor of the Africans enslaved and brought in steadily beginning in 1520.