Indigenous Social Movements and Institutional Reform: Mechanisms of Interest Representation in Three Colombian Municipalities

Institutions that Framed State-Indigenous Relations Before The 1991 Constitution

Before the constitutional approval of multiculturalism in Colombia, indigenous activists tried and tested the legal limits of Law 89 of 1890 and the agrarian reform laws of the 1960s to claim rights to collective lands. According to Luis Javier Caicedo, an indigenous rights lawyer and adviser to the Consejo Regional Indígena de Caldas (Caldas Regional Indigenous Council— CRIDEC), Law 89 played a central role in framing state-indigenous relations for almost 100 years and persists as the legal backbone of the governance of indigenous communities (e-mail communication, September 2019). The law was passed in 1890 by Conservatives to delimit indigenous lands as a temporary measure to shelter people as they transitioned from “a savage state to one of civilization.” It specified the functions and constitution of cabildos (indigenous councils) and stated that resguardos could not be divided, embargoed, or extinguished without court approval. It entrusted lawyers and church officials with settling disputes over land use, and they tended to favor nonindigenous landowners (Appelbaum, 2003).

Indigenous rights activists could denounce an act of corruption if they could demonstrate that landless peasants or sharecroppers living within the old boundaries of a resguardo still spoke an indigenous language or followed indigenous customs and traditions. Activists to this day utilize old resguardo titles to recover indigenous collective lands. The public deeds are kept in historical archives or public registries, contain the original resguardo boundaries, and often describe iconic indigenous leaders who fought for their people and their lands as far back as the seventeenth century. These titles serve as mnemonic devices for mapping indigenous lands and justifying self-government, helping indigenous communities maintain “a territorial agenda of land repossession” (Rappaport, 1994). Law 89 of 1890 is still valid today, though Constitutional Court ruling C-139 of 1996 revised it to remove references to indigenous people as savages or moral inferiors.

While Law 89 structured governance institutions, the 1961 Agrarian Social Reform Law that modernized rural social relations unintentionally supported indigenous mobilization. The law founded the Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform—INCORA) to redistribute land and grant private property titles to landless peasants. Landless indigenous peasants found new opportunities to mobilize in the government-organized Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (National Peasant Association—ANUC). Created to support the work of the INCORA, the ANUC established an indigenous secretariat that represented the demands of indigenous communities. Some government officials encouraged the specific demands of indigenous peasants even though they were not contemplated in the agrarian reform (Cortés, 1984). These demands centered on recovering collective land titles and liberating terrajeros (ANUC, 1974), indentured laborers allowed to live on their ancestral lands in return for working for a hacienda owner (Castrillón, 1973).

In 1968 the INCORA abolished terraje, threatening landlords with losing their properties if they failed to recognize the land rights of their sharecroppers. Many affected landowners promptly expelled terrajeros from their land instead of handing over land titles (Cortés, 1984: 56). The evicted terrajeros organized with the INCORA’s support and strengthened an independent indigenous movement. Indigenous leaders eventually severed their ties with the ANUC over disagreements about the role of private property (Gros, 1991) and organized a regional movement in Cauca. When President Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978–1982) tried to pass a law designed to weaken the cabildos and dissolve the resguardos, effectively overhauling Law 89, this threat unified a national indigenous movement.

Subsequent efforts to redress historical injustices also influenced state-indigenous relations or energized indigenous activism. The 1960s Second Vatican Council’s mandates for social justice and the Latin American Bishops’ Conference’s update of missionary work to recognize cultural differences inspired indigenous organizations (Flórez, 2007), and the controversial official celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the European conquest drew fresh attention—particularly among nonindigenous people—to the plight of indigenous groups. Finally, the government revised the agrarian reform law to recognize collective landownership in 1988, and in 1989 it signed International Labor Organization Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples and went on to ratify it in 1991.

An Unevenly Enforced Constitution

In the 1980s, prominent political analysts began to argue that Colombia’s 1886 Conservative constitution was incompatible with a reality of uneven state territorial presence (Bejarano and Segura, 1996), deeply rooted local powers (Fals Borda, 1988), and strong regional identities that resisted national integration (Fajardo, 1993). They blamed “low governability” as a leading cause of conflict in Colombia and encouraged decentralization to curb violence and regional unrest (Uprimny, 2001). A coalition of public intellectuals, ethnic rights advocates, and Liberal politicians defended indigenous claims for the constitutional recognition of cultural diversity (Fajardo, 1993). Technocrats supported the modernization of the state and social justice advocates saw an opportunity to end internal colonialism (Fals Borda, 1988).

Once ratified, the 1991 Constitution created new opportunities for the intermediation of indigenous interests. Ethnic political parties formed, indigenous participation increased, and indigenous authorities gained more control over the affairs of their communities. The 1991 reforms, however, were unevenly enforced and disregarded the reality that most indigenous people shared parts of their territories with other cultural groups (Hale, 2005) or their communities overlapped with or were contained within municipal lands. Congress, entrusted with clarifying the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous jurisdictions, did not pass the enabling laws that would have strengthened the special indigenous jurisdictions. For example, Constitutional Article 246 lets indigenous authorities “exercise jurisdictional functions in accordance with their own rules and procedures” but instructs Congress to specify how indigenous jurisdictions and the national judicial system will coordinate their activities. Article 286 recognizes entidades territoriales indígenas (indigenous territorial entities) as subnational jurisdictions, but Article 329 hands over to Congress the approval of an organic law of territorial organization that would authorize them (Bastidas, 2007). After 13 failed attempts, Congress approved the organic law in 2011 but did not activate the indigenous territories. Following national indigenous protests in 2014, Congress passed Constitutional Decree 1953, which recognized indigenous authorities as subnational administrative entities, allowing indigenous governments to receive fiscal transfers directly and to design development plans. These entities have not yet been enabled.

In contrast, other institutions were more diligent. The Constitutional Court, created by the 1991 Constitution and seeking to affirm its independence as a separate power, played an extraordinary role in clarifying the legal boundaries of indigenous jurisdictions. It settled disputes between local authorities and/or individuals over the meaning and implementation of rights. Breakthrough cases that set precedents include a 1992 ruling validating cabildos as authorities and a 1996 decision establishing that indigenous jurisdictions must “comply only with a limited set of rules [including due process and the prohibition of the death penalty, torture, and slavery] and not with the whole gamut of national legislation” (Jaramillo, 2012: 316).

Likewise, the INCORA and the Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (Colombian Institute for Rural Development—INCODER) that replaced it bought 189,000 hectares of land to expand resguardos for US$84 million at 2001 exchange rates (192 billion in 2001 constant pesos) between 1966 and 2001, and more than half of these purchases took place in the 10 years after the new constitution was approved (Arango and Sánchez, 2004: 114). These transactions secured indigenous rights by protecting their natural and spiritual patrimony (Arango and Sánchez, 2004: 113). Similarly, in 1994, the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (National Planning Department—DNP), a relatively independent administrative entity, began to transfer to indigenous communities a small percentage of the decentralized budget to spend on education, sanitation, and operating costs (DNP, 2012). Between 1994 and 2002 it assigned them more than US$160 million, roughly US$36 per person per year or 400 billion in 2002 pesos (Arango and Sánchez, 2004: 168–177). Because these funds could not be transferred directly to communities, which were not enabled as fiscal authorities until 2014, they were deposited in municipal accounts and cabildos and mayors were required to coordinate the budgets. This delegated fiscal responsibilities to municipal authorities with whom regional ethnic movements had developed mostly adversarial relations in the past (Pardo and Álvarez, 2001).

Not all administrations were equally prepared or willing to work with indigenous authorities, so access to decentralized resources depended on the indigenous authorities’ capacity to hold local administrators accountable (Gros, 1997). According to Julia Marín, a civil servant with the Ministry of Agriculture, communities with a cabildo tradition, governance experience, or local state networks that supported indigenous institutions were able to represent indigenous claims (interview, Bogota, 2016). This scenario compelled indigenous leaders to adjust to specific local political dynamics.

Contentious Politics in Toribío, Cauca

To reclaim their lands, Cauca activists used a mix of formal and informal mechanisms that framed indigenous demands for land in terms of a moral discourse on the righteousness of indigenous ancestral rights, mobilized indigenous communities in periodic cycles of protest to negotiate indigenous rights, and repurposed laws originally designed to control indigenous people as legal instruments for preserving land boundaries and holding communities together. Once the reforms were passed they secured municipal power and revised local institutions to create local development policies. These strategies were informed by the performance of previous institutions and drew inspiration from the legacy of historical figures who resisted conquest or claimed indigenous rights.

With a population of about 308,455 representing eight ethnicities and about 24.8 percent of the departmental total, indigenous people have a voice in local politics. Historically, Cauca’s landed elites enacted local laws to contain indigenous people territorially in order to facilitate the exploitation of their labor or to collect tribute. In 1623, when the Nasa people accepted their military defeat but not the loss of indigenous “rights and preferences,”chiefs Manuel del Quilo y Siclos and Don Juan Tama y Calambás resorted to Spanish laws on indigenous collective lands (e.g., pueblos indígenas or resguardos) to unify the chieftaincies of Toribío, Pitayó, Tierradentro, Togoima, and Vitoncó and maintain the cohesiveness of their beleaguered people (CRIC, 1977). In a 1700 letter to the King of Spain, Chief Quilo y Siclos wrote, “Your Majesty only has the right to assign land to white individuals without harming tribute-paying Indians because we also have rights and preferences” (Cortés, 1984: 20). These institutions formally remained in place well into independence, when Colombia’s elites privatized resguardos to demolish the “walls that prevented the expansion of ‘Civilization’” (Pineda, 2002).

Cauca governments, however, slowed the privatization of indigenous lands. For most of the nineteenth century, the region’s capital, Popayán, governed a territory known as the “Gran Cauca.” The province covered a substantial portion of Colombia’s geography, and its elites counterbalanced the weak central government (Vélez, 1996). The Gran Cauca sustained an upper class on land and mining tributes, but when a constitutional reform split it into different departments in 1904 Popayán’s income was reduced (Castrillón, 1973) and local elites deepened their exploitation of indigenous labor.

Cauca legislators approved one key measure to keep resguardos: Law 90 of 1859, which maintained indigenous landholdings and identified the administrative and judicial functions of cabildos. Luis Javier Caicedo explains that municipalities were ordered to recognize indigenous lands and that the law served as the legal precedent for Law 89 of 1890 (interview, Riosucio, 2016). By the 1910s, widespread violation of Law 89 had caused an indigenous uprising in Cauca and Tolima. Manuel Quintín Lame, a Nasa terrajero and autodidact lawyer, wrote petitions to the national government demanding compliance with the law (Lame, 1973). When this failed, he led a campaign centering on seven points including the defense of indigenous territories, autonomy, the liberation of terrajeros, and the affirmation of indigenous culture (Castrillón, 1973; CRIC, 1977; Romero, 2006). He also led a series of raids on haciendas in Cauca and Tolima, but his movement was swiftly repressed by the national military.

In 1923 Congress passed laws that favored Cauca landowners and handed over the education of indigenous people to the Catholic Church. Between 1936 and 1942 Liberal government reforms dealt a final blow to the resguardos when they declared them baldíos (vacant territories). Though there were some uprisings between 1927 and 1932, indigenous communities were for the most part defeated. It was not until the 1960s reforms that indigenous communities found renewed opportunities for mobilization.

In the 1960s, Cauca was a poor department, and indigenous peasants were among the poorest in the region. Church and local politicians controlled cabildos, using them to expand hacienda lands. In violation of Law 89, only 48 resguardos remained (Cortés, 1984: 51), leaving landless indigenous peasants few options other than to leave their homelands (Gros, 1991). The CRIC, founded in a 1971 assembly of 2,000 people, brought together a coalition of indigenous and nonindigenous activists (Cortés, 1984) including members of the Liberal party, urban social movements, unions, and even some INCORA officials.

Rallying the terrajeros to claim their lands, the CRIC developed a political platform that “showed less faith in the government” (CRIC, 1989). It organized a strategy for recovering resguardos by enforcing Law 89, revitalizing indigenous culture and history, and establishing bilingual education on indigenous lands. According to Efraín Jaramillo (an indigenous movement adviser) and Alonso Tobón (president of the Alianza Social Indígena [Indigenous Social Alliance—ASI]), the CRIC infiltrated cabildos and replaced them with CRIC sympathizers who turned Law 89 into a decision-making instrument that favored indigenous people (interview, Bogotá, 2005). By 1973 it had gained control of 17 cabildos and recovered resguardo lands that had been illegally occupied by eight haciendas.

Activists studied colonial land titles and other archival records to identify land boundaries and reconstruct a historical memory about the seventeenth-century caciques and Quintín Lame. They developed a moral imagination (Gow, 2008), a set of shared metaphors that helped map the understanding of a particular concept (Johnson, 1993) about the righteousness of indigenous claims to land (Rappaport, 1989). Early CRIC documents framed the defeat of the caciques as a partial “accommodation” to Spanish demands for tribute and labor that allowed them to retain their traditional authorities (CRIC, 1977: 11).

The CRIC and other regional organizations such as the Association of Northern Cauca Cabildos are now the main political intermediaries between indigenous communities and the government and manage departmentwide education and health programs in coordination with cabildos. Currently there are 115 cabildos, 11 cabildo associations, and 84 resguardos covering about 531,200 hectares of land that, according to Paz (2001), are not suitable for agriculture. The indigenous movement continues to demand the expansion of ancestral land and better access to fertile agricultural lands—targeting, for example, the Cauca Valley’s powerful sugar industry. It also defends land conservation in areas unsuitable for agriculture. The national government is generally opposed to the expansion of indigenous lands and has repeatedly failed to comply with agreements with the indigenous authorities. In response, indigenous communities frequently mobilize mingas (communal work parties) or contentious assemblies that pressure national and departmental governments to fulfill prior agreements or make substantial policy changes.

Toribío is a majority-Nasa municipality of 34,758 people that overlaps the resguardos of Tacueyó, Toribío, and San Francisco. It is known as the place where Father Álvaro Ulcué, an indigenous Catholic priest and CRIC ally, introduced the Nasa Project in 1980. This innovative model of participatory governance and planning was inspired by the CRIC’s platform of “land, culture, and autonomy” (Rodríguez et al., 2005) and introduced the idea of the plan de vida (life plan) as a guiding principle for the local development plans that all Colombian municipalities must design to manage decentralized fiscal resources. The holistic approach to development (Beltrán and Mejía, 1989) spread to other indigenous communities as an alternative planning model.

When the 1991 Constitution expanded opportunities for participation, including in local elections, indigenous activists began to field candidates. In 1997 Toribío was one of the first municipalities to elect an indigenous mayor, Ezequiel Vitonás (1998–2000). Once in power, indigenous leaders saw the opportunity to use the existing political structure—a partisan mayoralty, a municipal council, an ordinary justice system, and individualistic forms of interest representation—as an instrument to achieve a “communitarian governance alternative” based on a communitarian mayoralty, a community assembly of delegates, consuetudinary law, and a communitarian identity (Rodríguez et al., 2005). Toribío’s development plans are guided by the Nasa community’s life plan. However, the indigenous mayors claim that “the execution [of the plan will respect] the rights of the nonindigenous population” and harmonize their own plans with those of the national and departmental governments (Municipio de Toribío, 2012; 2016).

The town’s political transformation was well received by national and international institutions, even earning an award for best local development plan in 1998 (El Tiempo, November 6, 1997). Toribío saw improvements in the supply of basic services. In a document published by the Latin American Center for Development Administration, Mauricio Beltrán (2004) compares development policies in Toribío before 1994 and between 1994 and 2003, the period when indigenous authorities consolidated their hold over municipal politics. In those years, the administration attracted more resources for public investment (including from international cooperation), which, for example, helped them increase to 90 percent the proportion of households with access to water and to 70 percent the proportion with electricity (in 1994 only 30 percent and 20 percent, respectively) and to build or improve 3,000 homes. Toribío’s 2016–2019 development plan listed a complex mix of socioeconomic and environmental challenges, such as food insecurity, waste management, early childhood education, and unemployment, as well as the local impact of armed conflict (e.g., the challenge of reincorporating ex-combatants), as urgent areas that needed to be addressed.

The FARC guerrillas, however, considered the indigenous movement’s incursion into local politics a threat to its hold on the geostrategic region. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the FARC escalated its attacks on Toribío by engaging in combat with government forces and using unconventional weapons against civilian infrastructure. In a 2007 visit to Toribío to participate in a CRIC assembly, I heard accounts that it was trying to infiltrate indigenous social organizations, form splinter organizations to challenge the CRIC and the indigenous authorities, and recruit indigenous youths. The violence devastated indigenous communities throughout the country, and in 2001 indigenous leaders declared “neutrality in the armed conflict” as a strategy of active resistance. They demanded that all armed groups, including government forces, leave indigenous territories, and Toribío became a testing ground of the strategy. In numerous episodes, Toribío’s guardia indígena (indigenous civil guard), surrounded by community members, faced FARC attacks, protected the town, and prevented the kidnapping or execution of rank-and-file members of the national police stationed in the town. The events gained national notoriety and successfully framed the benefits of local indigenous governance for an uninformed public, earning Toribío praise for its efforts to resist the FARC and numerous awards for promoting peace (Padilla, 2011). Yet, when the indigenous civil guard detained members of the military for violating indigenous rights while carrying out operations in indigenous territories, the military claimed the right to move throughout the national territory.

In sum, the Cauca indigenous movement repurposed laws and institutions—some dating back to the colonial period—that were originally designed to force communities to pay tribute as instruments to hold communities together or claim rights to ancestral lands. Indigenous activists framed a discourse on the virtue of indigenous claims to land and converted reactionary institutions in innovative ways by salvaging useful instruments for self-government (e.g., cabildos), information on land boundaries (e.g., resguardo deeds), or a common memory (e.g., the chronicles about the caciques) to hold indigenous lands together and maintain their traditional authorities.

Cooperation in Karmata Rúa, Antioquia

As in the Cauca case, Antioquia’s indigenous movement resorted to a mix of formal and informal strategies to reclaim its lands, ² but its cooperation with the nonindigenous authorities set its strategies apart. In the 1970s Antioquia’s indigenous activists had used cabildos as instruments of self-organization and occupied indigenous lands, but by the 1980s the movement had begun to cooperate with departmental authorities committed to ethno-education and land reform policies in efforts to reduce socioeconomic inequality and deter ethnic conflict. After the 1991 Constitution opened new opportunities for intermediation, indigenous communities and their allies elected a representative to Antioquia’s legislature who successfully framed indigenous rights for a wider audience, formed a coalition that enacted multicultural reforms in the department, and harmonized or created bridges between consuetudinary and constitutional norms at the cabildo level.

Indigenous activists saw efforts to incorporate indigenous communities and avoid ethnic conflict as an opportunity to advance their rights partly because they were in a weaker position to mobilize a more contentious social movement agenda. The indigenous population of Antioquia is about 37,628, amounting to 0.55 percent of the department’s population. According to Karmata Rúa’s cabildo authorities, using formal institutions and working with government allies not only leveraged indigenous people’s rights but protected them from violence. Indigenous activism in Antioquia occurred in the context of wider struggles over land that eventually led to violent confrontation. The Peasant and Civic Movement of the Southwest formed in the 1960s to demand agrarian reform. Indigenous activists in that movement eventually organized their own land takeovers in Karmata Rúa in 1980. When hired gunmen killed the Karmata Rúa leaders Mario González and Aníbal Tascón, the departmental government bought 200 hectares of adjacent hacienda land to expand the reserve and reduce the conflict (Salazar, 2004). The murders nevertheless galvanized indigenous organization and led to the founding in 1982 of the Organización Indígena de Antioquia (Antioquia Indigenous Organization—OIA), a departmentwide coordination instrument (Salazar, 2000).

In contrast to other departmental governments, Antioquia gradually addressed indigenous demands by first creating an ethno-education program and an indigenous peoples’ section in the Office of the Secretary of Development. This office later became a departmental committee for indigenous development that was entrusted with the management of a special fund in coordination with government and indigenous representatives (Salazar, 2000). In 1985 the committee was raised to the level of a departmental council and later to a stand-alone office known as the Indigenous Board that centralizes resources for indigenous communities. In 2004 Antioquia passed a policy on ethnic autonomy (Gerencia Indígena, 2004) and the department’s assembly approved Ordinance 32, which increased the capacity of indigenous authorities to interact with adjacent municipal governments. Eulalia Yagarí González is largely responsible for the passage of ethnic rights legislation in the department assembly. The Karmata Rúa native won five consecutive terms in Antioquia’s assembly (1991–2011) by attracting voters beyond indigenous communities. The charismatic leader successfully framed indigenous rights and gained new voters beyond the indigenous communities, brokered alliances with other legislators, and earned widespread recognition as one of Antioquia’s best deputies.

Karmata Rúa (also known as Cristianía) is an Embera Chamí village of 1,691 people. It is located in the predominantly mestizo municipalities of Jardín and Andes in southwestern Antioquia. The Embera Chamí are part of the Embera cultural group that spans western Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador and in Colombia numbers around 182,335 people. The Embera fled to remote areas during the conquest and were eventually forced to settle in chieftaincies (Pineda and Gutiérrez, 1999: 224). By the 1970s they were impoverished, politically isolated, and socially fragmented.

Aquileo Yagarí, Karmata Rúa’s cabildo gobernador, explained that Karmata Rúa activists had led mobilizations to recover their resguardo in 1967, but the government had denied their claims until 1975 (interview, Karmata Rúa, 2009). Karmata Rúa was the first community in Antioquia to adopt a cabildo as an instrument of autonomous organization and a life plan modeled on the Cauca experience. Karmata Rúa also stands out for approving in 1998 a local constitution known as the Dachi Código Embera to address internal conflict (Cabildo de Karmata Rúa, n.d.). This came after two years of consultation involving all groups in the community to design a “normative body” to “regulate the life of the community” and handle relations “with society in general” (Valencia and Caicedo, 1998: 3). The Código translated multicultural reforms into an understandable format and addressed increasing worries about community and family violence. Once it was approved, Karmata Rúa’s Justice and Conciliation Council took over the administration of justice. In an official ceremony presided over by cabildo authorities and municipal judges, the council received the legal records over which Karmata Rúa had jurisdiction. It investigates and sanctions misdemeanors and handles serious offenses in collaboration with the municipal justice system. In instances in which indigenous individuals have exercised their right as Colombian citizens to challenge their communities’ legal processes, the courts have normally agreed with the indigenous authorities.

As Colombian citizens, indigenous individuals can resort to the regular courts if they find fault with their rights to due process within indigenous communities. In a landmark ruling from 2012, the Constitutional Court sided with Karmata Rúa in a conflict over sanctions to stop an illicit liquor business, arguing that the cabildo had followed due process under consuetudinary norms. Jardín’s municipal council has also chosen to cooperate with indigenous authorities in adopting Accord 12 of 2010, which acknowledges indigenous territorial boundaries and indigenous juridical, administrative, and political autonomy. Jardín’s 2008–2011 development plan included Karmata Rúa in various social projects and treated the Embera as a vital community in the region’s character, history, and identity. The mayor’s office equipped the cabildo with an office in the city hall, and the municipal authorities have established an indigenous citizen committee to oversee municipal proceedings and the implementation of public policy.

In sum, indigenous leaders in Antioquia worked with local government allies and helped develop policy instruments that supported the constitutional rights of indigenous people in their department, compelling the nonindigenous authorities to follow these laws. Indigenous authorities in Karmata Rúa also harmonized consuetudinary and constitutional norms to develop local government capacities.

Competition in Riosucio, Caldas

As in Cauca and Antioquia, Caldas’s indigenous activists reclaimed cabildos as instruments of self-organization and used formal and informal strategies of interest intermediation. Here competition focused on reviving a sense of indigenous identity and securing a larger constituency. Indigenous activists framed indigenous demands in ways that included other rural groups to persuade them that indigenous rights would effectively address their own socioeconomic claims, participated in local elections to gain local power in order to enhance the decision-making rights of resguardo authorities, and, once in power, demonstrated that indigenous authorities could govern well and that harmonizing indigenous and nonindigenous jurisdictions produced positive feedback effects that benefited the town as whole.

About 55,801 people in Caldas, 5.6 percent of the department total, identify themselves as Embera Chamí. Most resguardos in Caldas were dismantled after a wave of migrants from Antioquia, using fraudulent or violent means to privatize resguardos, expanded the agricultural frontier in the 1880s. During the period of bipartisan conflict known as La Violencia (ca. 1948–1954), Conservative Party strongmen violently expropriated small peasant landholdings and dissolved most of the region’s remaining resguardos. While indigenous traditions had practically vanished by the 1970s, cabildos remained in place as institutions that settled conflicts over land boundaries, property rights, and inheritances (Lopera-Mesa, 2010: 69). Judges, indigenous leaders, lawyers, and other intermediaries for landowners, miners, or settlers continued to resort to Law 89 to privatize resguardos or to restore them by demonstrating the presence there of indigenous people (Lopera-Mesa, 2010: 69).

Landlessness and marginalization and a collective belief that the resguardos had been dissolved unfairly and that elders were being castigated for maintaining their customs justified the organization of a regional indigenous movement in the 1970s (CRIDEC, 2011). In 1971 indigenous peasants mobilized in Caldas under the guidance of the ANUC (González, 2013: 140) and coordinated land takeovers in the resguardo of Cañamomo y Lomaprieta in Riosucio. The movement recovered the cabildos and used them to advance indigenous and peasant land claims (Luis Javier Caicedo, interview, Riosucio, July 2016). In 1981 it recovered part of its lands, and in 1982, with the help of activists from Karmata Rúa and Cauca, it formed the Consejo Regional Indígena de Caldas (Caldas Regional Indigenous Council—CRIDEC). As it reclaimed indigenous lands, the CRIDEC focused on revival of a local indigenous identity (González, 2013: 141). Activists pointed to the 30 Indian pueblos that had existed on the left bank of the Cauca River in 1559 (CRIDEC, 2011) and gave a positive spin to a pseudo-scientific biometrical study from the 1940s claiming that more than 60 percent of the people of western Caldas were indigenous (Duque, 1943). Confirmation by other Emberas who see the people of Riosucio as their own continues to be the most fundamental source of support (González, 2013: 139).

Riosucio has four resguardos. The resguardos of San Lorenzo, Cañamomo y Lomaprieta, and Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria de la Montaña were demarcated in 1627, while the resguardo of Escopetera y Pirza was founded in 1800 (CRIDEC, 2011: 83). In 1943 San Lorenzo and Escopetera y Pirza were dissolved by fiat, and by then Cañamomo y Lomaprieta had lost two-thirds of its land. Despite this loss, Riosucio’s cabildos continued to exist and comply with Law 90 of 1859, which required them to conduct a census. Lacking a clear definition of an indigenous person, cabildos normally counted someone as indigenous if his or her family line could be traced back to the original inhabitants (González, 2013: 83). These legal proceedings signaled the presence of an indigenous identity even though most people identified themselves as peasants.

The CRIDEC inched its way into Riosucio politics by organizing cabildos and slowly replacing the juntas de acción comunal (community action boards), clientelistic organizations unable to make effective land claims. Though it was challenging to persuade people to identify themselves as indigenous (CRIDEC, 2011: 48), the organization increased its legitimacy once it had revived a sense of community and reduced emigration by helping create jobs, education opportunities, health services, and training in politics (González, 2013). Official census data offer some evidence to support these claims: In 1993, 41 percent of Riosucio’s 43,511 people identified themselves as indigenous, and by 2005 75 percent of the population of 54,537 considered themselves Embera (Lopera-Mesa, 2010: 71).

There are now 4 main cabildos that represent 133 minor ones (CRIDEC, 2011). Abel Jaramillo, former mayor of Riosucio, clarified that the main cabildos are now part of the governance structure of the municipality and indigenous leaders are seen as a political alternative and counterbalance to the traditional parties that controlled Riosucio (interview, Riosucio, 2016). The initial efforts by indigenous leaders to enter local politics were, however, met with violence. Between 1998 and 2003 paramilitary groups—usually associated with rogue elements of the state’s armed forces, large landowners, or drug traffickers—assassinated three indigenous candidates for mayor. Between 2001 and 2012 illegally armed groups killed another 194 indigenous people as a result of violent confrontation between armed groups trying to control the region (El Tiempo, October 23, 2003). Violence did not deter activists from pursuing the control of the local government for a simple reason: accessing local power can gain people some leverage and help counteract efforts by violent actors to control local politics.

Indigenous mayors were elected in 2004–2007 and 2012–2015, and, according to local sources, most politicians running for office campaign with promises to represent indigenous and nonindigenous constituencies. Indigenous mayors have apparently used the opportunity to build a reputation for good governance that helps secure indigenous institutions. In 2008 a nonindigenous mayor tried to expand the community action councils in indigenous resguardos, but the Constitutional Court ordered him to desist, arguing that the state had to support the community’s right to reconstruct its cultural identity (CRIDEC, 2011: 49). At the time of my visit, the nonindigenous administration included indigenous advisers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that as indigenous leaders demonstrated that ethno-political rights were effective instruments for redressing socioeconomic exclusion, some indigenous households that still had private deeds relinquished their titles to join the resguardos.

In this case, indigenous activists successfully framed indigenous rights and demonstrated the advantages of coordinating indigenous and nonindigenous laws and authorities. The movement revived a dormant indigenous identity and expanded its political base. This created a positive feedback effect for indigenous institutions and helped the local government address the grievances of rural communities long ignored by the traditional parties.

Strategies for Developing Indigenous Rights in Local Politics

I have outlined contentious, cooperative, and competitive indigenous movement strategies that redistributed assets, recognized indigenous-rights, and produced broad coalitions committed to ethnic governance. The strategies adapted to the ways multiculturalism and decentralization changed the structure of political opportunities and thus prompted “jurisdictional debates about sovereignty, authority, and responsibility in shared policymaking arenas” (Herrera, 2012: 154). These debates were especially intense in municipalities with an indigenous presence, where activists found concrete opportunities to build up the power of their authorities as well as their own models of governance in a context where the state was restructured by decentralization reforms. Activists territorialized the multicultural reforms by adjusting their strategies to local political dynamics usually characterized by asymmetrical relations between the established local powers (e.g., landowners or traditional political parties) and the indigenous authorities.

The reforms were unevenly enforced and undermined by indigenous rights violations (Chirif and García, 2007). Without legislation that clarified the relationship between indigenous and ordinary jurisdictions, indigenous self-governance became a matter of local capacities to advance the new rights. Skilled activists targeted municipal governments not only to enforce indigenous rights but to reshape local politics. They utilized various interest intermediation mechanisms, including framing, mobilization, repurposing of existing institutions, and positive feedback.

In many respects, Cauca represents the most complex case. Activists in the region used illiberal laws to help keep communities together. They framed a social justice discourse inspired by their history of resistance to conquest. They responded to agrarian reform laws of the 1960s that had opened new opportunities for interest intermediation and unintentionally mobilized indigenous communities that were claiming collective titles to ancestral lands. Indigenous leaders identified useful elements in the new laws, such as expropriating haciendas located on ancestral lands and liberating terrajeros, to hold indigenous communities together and claim their socioeconomic and cultural rights. The government was eventually compelled to recognize collective lands as a necessary component of agrarian reform in Colombia and later to accept the territorial rights of indigenous communities.

Cauca’s movement also developed a model of political intermediation that repurposed existing institutions to defend indigenous territories. This had a “spillover effect” (see Meyer and Whittier, 1994) that motivated indigenous mobilization in other regions. Leaders in Karmata Rúa and Riosucio learned about effective strategies and adapted them to their local contexts. In Antioquia, government elites also learned from the events unfolding in Cauca and chose to avert ethnic conflict by developing institutions to incorporate indigenous communities. These local reforms, in turn, reshaped political opportunities in Antioquia and channeled indigenous activism in the department toward more collaborative strategies.

The constitutional reform of 1991 opened opportunities to test more conciliatory mechanisms and offered alternatives to the more contentious strategies of the 1970s and 1980s (Villa, 2011). A period of innovation ensued as authorities and activists established multicultural rights. Some of these strategies included cooperative and competitive mechanisms such as harmonizing different jurisdictions or competing in elections. Cauca penetrated municipal institutions to operationalize indigenous or communitarian forms of decision making. Antioquia’s political elites enabled multicultural rights and supported Karmata Rúa’s efforts to harmonize indigenous and nonindigenous jurisprudence and forms of authority. In Riosucio, indigenous politicians competed in elections and gained access to local administration and once in power demonstrated that indigenous institutions could improve local livelihoods. This helped increase the size of their electorate.

Multiculturalism and decentralization offered new political opportunities for the intermediation of indigenous people’s interests in Colombia. The constitution recognized indigenous governments as public authorities and formally accepted indigenous consuetudinary law as a guide for local governance on indigenous lands. The reforms supplied more liberal laws that helped revive many indigenous communities by recognizing their agency. Uneven enforcement of these rights, however, threatened to undermine an innovative political framework for the intermediation of indigenous rights. The Constitutional Court partly addressed the problem with rulings that delimited the boundaries of indigenous jurisdictions, helping to produce a legal road map for indigenous self-government. These rulings supported indigenous authorities as they built local intermediation capacities and managed public resources.

Although these cases do not represent the universe of experiences of indigenous governments in Colombia, they do reflect their potential to fill the political and legal vacuum of power produced by incomplete reform and strong opposition to indigenous governments. Despite the difficulties and their own failures, indigenous governments present the possibility of improving local governments in regions that overlap indigenous lands and may reflect the aspirations of indigenous people to represent their political interests before the Colombian state.