The social construction of Afro-descendant rights in Colombia

Afro-descendant people make up around 30 per cent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, some 150 million people (IACHR 2011). In a context of mestizaje and the myth of racial democracy, Afro-descendant rights were not institutionalised in many Latin American states until the end of the 20th century. This reflected an invisibility at the international level where a specific normative framework on Afro-descendant rights did not begin to emerge until the beginning of the 21st century. Through multicultural citizenship reforms in the 1980s and 1990s several Latin American states recognised rights for their Afro-descendant populations; however, these tended to be subsumed into the existing indigenous rights framework, thus neglecting the specific situations of Afro-descendants.