The struggle of Colombian farmers to be recognized and counted

José Darío Puentes Ramos*

The final photo of those who drafted the 1991 Constitution, one of the milestones in Colombian politics, was incomplete. While there was participation from various communities and different social movements in the National Constituent Assembly, a historic population that has been fighting for decades, even since the colonial era, for its rights was missing: the peasantry. They are convinced of this in Inzá, a town nestled in the mountains of eastern Cauca.

“That new agreement, the ’91 Constitution, makes the peasantry invisible and excludes them from that political pact, and lags them behind the other rural communities, whether indigenous or Afro-Colombian. This left the peasantry orphaned. That’s when we say: we exist and we are here,” says Eliécer Morales, a peasant from Inzá who has dedicated a good part of his life to the vindication of the rights of the Colombian peasantry.

Inzá is part of the Tierradentro region —Eliécer says as if he were giving a history class— a territory that since the time of the Conquest began to be populated by indigenous people, mestizos, white people, and Black communities. “The migration occurred because the region was an obligatory passage between Bogotá and Quito; and because people from other lands settled here fleeing the violence we have experienced in the countryside, in the flat areas.” Additionally, Eliécer adds, the quinua, coffee, and timber booms that occurred in the region also attracted new settlers. “That makes us a region with cultural, ethnic, and identity diversity.”

But that diversity has also caused tensions between the peasantry and the other populations that inhabit Inzá and Tierradentro, specifically due to the diversity in territorial governance and land ownership. The peasants feel that the ’91 Constitution excluded them again, ignoring the struggles that began in the 1930s, and at the same time, it provided political tools to the indigenous and Afro-Colombian population, but unfortunately, the same did not happen with the peasantry.

An important moment in the struggle for peasant recognition was when a handful of young people from Tierradentro decided to go to Bogotá in the 90s to study and train with the purpose of returning to the territory and contributing their knowledge to the peasant struggle that their parents had led for decades. Among those young people is Eliécer, who first entered SENA and then studied law at the University of the Andes.

Eliécer Morales, a peasant from Inzá (Cauca) and one of the leaders of the Peasant Association of Inzá-Tierradentro, ACIT. Photo: José Puentes

Eliécer says that the education he and the other young people from his town received opened their minds. It made them understand that the peasant struggle had to go beyond local demands or vindications, such as demanding the construction of a road or access to a public service. And while these are needs, the problems of the countryside are more due to structural and historical causes, such as the lack of participation of the peasantry in decision-making. “When we returned, there was an oxygenation because we applied what we learned. We created training spaces and traveled through many rural areas to expand the struggle.”

That is how the Peasant Association of Inzá-Tierradentro (ACIT) was born in 1997 with 200 families from the region who organized to promote the socioeconomic development of the peasantry, community participation in different political scenarios, self-management, access to land, and the creation of a Peasant Reserve Zone that guarantees their subsistence and autonomy. To date, according to Eliécer, there are at least 4,000 families from the region linked to or represented by ACI

A census that did not count them

August 19, 2013, is an important date for the peasant struggle in Colombia. That day, a historic Agrarian Strike began, which is remembered because thousands of peasants from all over the country protested to demand better living conditions and because of a phrase from the then-president Juan Manuel Santos: “That such Strike does not exist!” Those who led the Strike presented the National Government with a list of demands with points such as greater access to land and the recognition of the peasantry as a political subject, which means participating in the construction of public policies and guaranteeing the right to dignity.

The petitions were negotiated with the Santos Government and the Strike ended in September of that year. However, commitments such as the recognition of the peasantry were not fulfilled, and this was evidenced in the preparation and convening of the third National Agricultural Census, which the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) conducted in 2014 with the intention of identifying the state of the Colombian countryside.

March of peasant organizations in Popayán, Cauca, in 2013. There, ACIT participated to demand the rights of peasants.

For ACIT and other organizations that protested in 2013, the Government did not listen to the demands of the peasant movement because the Census did not include the category ‘Peasant’ nor did it ask questions to identify how this population lives. “That is, for the State, we are only a farm worker, not a subject who has an identity, a culture, rights, and a voice,” explains Eliécer.

For that reason, ACIT filed a tutela (a legal action for the protection of constitutional rights) with the Superior Court of Popayán to have the question of peasant self-recognition included in said census, a resource that was denied and confirmed in the appeal by the Supreme Court of Justice.

“For the peasantry to matter, it first has to be counted”

Alix Morales is a peasant and pedagogue from Inzá who is part of the ACIT Women’s Committee. In 2017, she says, the members of the association came together with the purpose of filing a tutela so that the 2018 National Population Census would include questions that would allow for the identification of the peasant population. 

Alix Morales, a peasant from Inzá and a member of the Association of Women for Inzá, one of the committees that ACIT has. Photo: José Puentes

They not only filed the tutela on behalf of ACIT but also on behalf of peasants from different areas of Cauca, Boyacá, Tolima, and Cundinamarca. To do this, it was necessary to collect the signatures or powers of attorney from the people. “That’s where the work of the women of the association was important because we supported the visits to the rural areas to explain the importance of being counted in the Census,” recalls Alix. And it is that without information on who the Colombian peasantry is and how they live, it is almost impossible for there to be adequate public policies to improve the quality of life of this population and, in turn, close the gaps between the countryside and the city.

“We even had to give money at times so that the peasants could go to the notary who helped us with the authentication of the signatures.” The peasant leader and Eliécer remember the lines of people who gathered in the rural areas of Inzá to join the tutela and the struggle.

In total, 1,758 powers of attorney or signatures of peasants were collected, of which at least 1,400 were from residents of Inzá.

With the help of Dejusticia, they filed the tutela on November 23, 2017. And in recognition of the persistence of the peasant movement, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled in their favor: on February 13, 2018, this high court ordered the DANE, the ministries of the Interior and Agriculture, and other state entities to prepare studies that identify the Colombian peasantry. That is, an x-ray to define what it is to be a peasant in Colombia and how one lives in the countryside.

Peasants promoting the tutela campaign: “For the peasantry to matter, it has to be counted.”

Alix considers it a great first step in the vindication of the rights of the peasantry in Colombia because “as the motto of the campaign we did says: for the peasantry to matter, it first has to be counted.”

Following the ruling, the DANE complied with the sentence and began to generate statistical tools with a peasant focus, such as the 2021 National Survey of Quality of Life for the peasant population or a series of statistical notes on rural property in the country with a gender distinction. In addition, the definition of the ‘Peasant’ category made by the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) was included.

Thanks to these studies we know, for example, that 31.8 percent of the rural population identifies as peasant and that only 32 percent of those who say they feel part of the Colombian peasantry believe that their rights are respected in the country. Furthermore, the Quality of Life Survey made it possible to identify shortcomings or gaps, such as the fact that the majority of adults in this population who are between 41 and 65 years old only completed elementary school.

Peasants promoting the tutela campaign: for the peasantry to matter, it has to be counted.

As the studies show, the needs of the Colombian peasantry are many, but organizations like ACIT have managed to cope with self-management and community work to improve the quality of life in their territories. For example, in Inzá, there is a loan system among peasants for them to start productive projects, inspired by the Grameen Bank (also known as ‘the Bank of the Poor’) of the Bengali economist Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2006.

Furthermore, a student association was created in the municipality to help young people who want to study outside the region, the community radio station Radio Campesina 88.9 FM, and the public library ‘La casa del Pueblo de Guanacas’, recognized as the best project at the 2004 Colombian Architecture Biennial and with the 2017 Daniel Samper Ortega National Public Libraries Award in the category of Best Public Library.

Regarding the progress of what was ordered by the ruling, Eliécer and Alix believe that those statistics still need to be incorporated into public policies to improve access to land and the quality of life of the peasantry. That is, now that they have been counted, the country should recognize and take them into account as political subjects with rights. Some steps have already been taken: in 2019, after more than 30 days of mobilization, the peasant organizations of Cauca managed to include article 253 in the 2018-2022 National Development Plan, which orders the construction of a peasant public policy. However, the Iván Duque Government did not comply.

(*) Independent human rights journalist and collaborator of Dejusticia

This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.