A Category That Barely Existed in International Law
Before the early 2000s, "Afro-descendant" was not a meaningful, widely used legal or political category in international human rights frameworks. Indigenous peoples had, by the late twentieth century, secured real international recognition and legal tools, including the International Labour Organization's Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989), which several Latin American governments had already ratified. People of African descent living across the same countries, often descended from populations who had lived there just as long, had no equivalent international framework at all. Activists and scholars across the hemisphere increasingly saw this gap as a central problem, one reason why organizations like Fundacion Oro Negro, whose founder Marta Salgado has directly described this history, and the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diaspora (RMAAD), founded in the Dominican Republic in 1992, had already begun organizing years before the events this lesson focuses on.
Building Coalitions Before the Conference Itself
In 1997, the United Nations General Assembly announced it would convene a third World Conference against Racism, to be held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. What happened in the four years between that announcement and the conference itself mattered as much as the conference proper. Afro-Latino organizers recognized that a single global conference, dominated by delegations far more focused on issues like reparations for the transatlantic slave trade from an African-continental perspective, might overlook the specific, distinct situation of Afro-descendant communities living within Latin American nations. In November 1999, activists founded the Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiative (GALCI) specifically to build the organizational infrastructure needed to ensure Afro-Latino concerns would not be lost within the broader conference agenda.
Regional preparatory meetings held ahead of Durban proved especially consequential for this curriculum's story. At the Latin American regional preparatory conference, held in Santiago, Chile, in 2000, the same conference Marta Salgado has cited as the founding moment for Fundacion Oro Negro, delegates explicitly addressed racism against Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, migrants, and mestizo populations as a combined regional agenda, a framing that gave Latin American Afro-descendant organizing a genuine seat at the table heading into Durban itself. Afro-Latino delegates at both the Santiago meeting and the subsequent Geneva preparatory session ultimately concluded that their most effective path forward at Durban would be building alliances with both the African and African Descendants Caucus and the Latin American and Caribbean Caucus simultaneously, a strategic decision that shaped how Afro-descendant recognition ultimately entered the conference's final language.
Durban Itself: A Contested but Landmark Conference
The World Conference against Racism convened in Durban from August 31 to September 8, 2001, drawing delegates from more than 160 governments. The conference was, by any account, contentious, with sharp disputes over language addressing colonialism, reparations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nearly derailing the proceedings entirely. But for the specific purposes of this curriculum, Durban's significance lies in a narrower, less headline-grabbing outcome: the conference's final Durban Declaration and Programme of Action formally acknowledged, for the first time at this level of international consensus, the existence and specific situation of people of African descent living in Latin America and the Caribbean, explicitly naming them among groups, alongside refugees, migrants, and Roma communities, that had received insufficient attention at prior international human rights conferences.
Why 'Recognition in a Declaration' Actually Mattered
It is reasonable to ask why a non-binding UN declaration should matter much to communities facing concrete, daily discrimination. The answer lies in what recognition at this level enables afterward: an international legal and political vocabulary, "Afro-descendant" as a defined category, that domestic activists could then invoke in pushing their own national governments, courts, and legislatures. Chapters that follow in this unit will show exactly that pattern playing out concretely, first in Colombia, whose recognition legislation actually preceded Durban and helped inform it, and then in Chile, whose recognition law came nearly two decades after Durban and drew directly on the international framework and vocabulary Durban had helped establish.
