8 - Safeguarding the Witoto: How Indigenous Law May Challenge the Universality of Human Rights

Summary

In 2009, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued Order 004 to compel the national government to lead Ethnic Safeguarding Plans (ESPs) aimed to prevent the cultural and physical extinction of thirty-four groups of indigenous peoples threatened by forced displacement (Colombia, “Auto 004” 43). Given the urgent need for the state to grant sufficient attention to these groups, the court established a deadline of six months for the state to create and implement these plans. However, this has taken longer than expected. In view of the number of groups threatened by displacement, in 2012, the Colombian Ministry of Internal Affairs extended the ESP initiative to more than seventy-three indigenous communities (Colombia, “Informe De Avance Presentado a La Honorable Corte Constitucional” 8). As of December 2015, four plans were completed, fifteen were in their implementation phase, and thirty-eight assessment documents related to ESPs were available on the ministry's website (Colombia, “Informe De Avance Presentado a La Honorable Corte Constitucional”; Ministerio del Interior). For the Witoto of Leticia, Amazonas, the assessment phase of their ESP has entailed an intercultural negotiation between their indigenous knowledge of law and international and state procedures, institutions, and concepts related to human rights.

This chapter explores some complexities in the negotiations between local and global views of rights through the case study of the Leticia Witoto Ethnic Safeguarding Plan. From the interdisciplinary field of communication studies, I see this plan as a relational process that localizes the universal discourse of human rights in the cultural practices and understanding of the Witoto and ten additional indigenous groups located in the Leticia area. Like other global processes, the international discourse of human rights needs localization to be effective. In Santos's view, a critical analysis of human rights illustrates that there is no entity without local roots, nor globalization without localization (“Por uma concepcao multicultural dos direitos humanos” 14–15). Similarly, Hall recalls that, instead of a homogenizing process that undermines diversity, globalization is possible through negotiation with local cultures: “What we usually call the global … negotiates particular spaces, particular ethnicities, works through mobilizing particular identities and so on.