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Ethnic Citizenship in Colombia: The Experience of the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca in Southwestern Colombia from 1970 to 1990

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Brett Troyan
Brett Troyan*
Affiliation:
Cortland College, State University of New York
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Abstract

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This article argues that the national political context of Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s led the Colombian indigenous movement to elaborate an ethnic citizenship. The failures of the left and the decline in effectiveness of partisan citizenship played a large role in the representation and political practices of the premier indigenous grassroots organization Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca; CRIC). This article focuses on the formative moments of the 1970s and early 1980s when CRIC began to represent its movement as a primarily indigenous, ethnic one, minimizing the importance of nonindigenous actors. The nation-state, at each stage of the movement's development, fostered the “ethnicization” of the indigenous movement of Colombia in hopes of weakening the southwestern insurgency and legitimizing its institutions:

Resumo

Resumo

Este ensayo argumenta que el contexto político nacional de Colombia en los años setenta y ochenta llevó al movimiento indígena del país a consolidar una ciudadanía étnica. Los fracasos de la izquierda y el declive en la efectividad de la ciudadanía partidista jugaron un papel significativo en la representación y prácticas políticas de la organización indígena de base más importante, el Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC). Este artículo se centra en las etapas de formación del CRIC, durante los años setenta y principios de los años ochenta, período en el que comenzó a representarse como un movimiento principalmente indígena, minimizando la importancia de los actores no indígenas. El estado-nación, a lo largo del desarrollo del movimiento indígena, reforzó su carácter étnico, con la esperanza de debilitar a la insurgencia en el suroeste del país y legitimar sus instituciones.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , 2008 , pp. 166 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Marcos Avirama, Jesús Avirama, Graciela Bolaños, Victor Daniel Bonilla, Jhon Jairo, and Pablo Tattay for their incredible generosity and honesty. I would also like to thank the anonymous LARR reviewers for their helpful comments. The writing of this article was funded in part by the Latin America Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Junior Scholars.

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