The Atrato River: an Afro-Colombian Cultural Heritage of Resistance

“If our territory is polluted it’s a threat to us. A connection we have. Everything in areas that are contaminated dies. When that happens part of our life dies.”[1]

For the Afro-Colombian communities, the territory is everything. It is the history we have lived; is the culture of our people; is the inexhaustible resistance of our “mayores” and “mayoras”; it is the memory of the fear and terror of the war, but is also the love for the river, the marshes, the forests and, in general, all the natural resources since it is there where we develop our life and where we want the lives of our children to be developed.

That is why the Atrato River holds such profound significance for Afro-Colombian communities. The river is not only the place where we make our homes and grow our crops, but it is also the place where our strength and courage make sense; it is “a place of coexistence, domestic work, and recreation, and is the communication channel that maintains the ties of extended kinship and strengthens exchanges between communities”.[2] In the river our ancestral practices, traditions, and customs are still alive.

In the municipality of Carmen del Darien, in Chocó, adults take children from early childhood to interact with the river. There they learn to swim and walk along the river bank.[3] Thus, the connection between land and water is always present; an amphibious understanding of life, culture, and nurture. Children play on the river with the fallen leaves of the trees, they see their mothers washing clothes with the river water, and, ultimately, they learn that the river is their home and their refuge. For them, the Atrato River is joy and fun, and they have a relationship of trust with it that is built at an early age. They are afraid of many things, but never of water, which is love and the space where they develop their ancestral culture.

As the Constitutional Court of Colombia recognized, declaring the Atrato River as an autonomous entity subject to rights started from a basic premise: “the earth does not belong to man but, on the contrary, man and all other species belong to the earth… The Atrato River constitutes an important factor of cultural identity in the Chocó Province”.[4] Therefore, caring for the river is also caring for our cultural heritage and the identity that defines us as Afro-Colombians.

[1] Personal Communication (with Rebecca Bratspies) at the Joint Workshop of PCN and CUNY’s Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic, February, 2019. See https://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/files/2020/05/12-Bratspies_Final.pdf

[2] Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la Asociación Campesina Integral Atrato (COCOMACIA). Identity and territory of the Black communities of Atrato. Revista Semillas. May 05, 2003.

[3] Henry Beltrán Pérez. The Atrato is life: Environmental and cultural implications of the Atrato River in the care and upbringing of early childhood children in the municipality of Carmen del Darién, Chocó. Bogotá, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2018. Pág 92.

[4] Constitutional Court of Colombia. Decision T-622/2016. See https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/english/Decision.php?IdPublicacion=9336