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Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Inés Acosta writes about the struggle to regain stolen housing among Uruguay's
Black community: " 'One of the biggest
challenges we face is the difficulty of providing our families with decent housing,'
[Alicia García of Mundo Afro, an Afro-Uruguayan organisation founded in 1988] told IPS. "To
tackle this problem, a group of women joined together to promote the creation of housing cooperatives, with the support of
Mundo Afro, in the southern Montevideo neighbourhoods where the Afro-descendent population was historically concentrated:
Barrio Sur, Palermo and Cordón. "These neighbourhoods were originally
settled by immigrant labourers and freed slaves who rented lodgings in 'conventillos' or tenement housing, in which entire
families shared a single room. "The conventillos were the birthplace of
Afro-Uruguayan culture and
particularly candombe, a percussion-based musical genre with African roots
that has
become quintessentially Uruguayan. "In the 1970s, however, the rising property
values in this central area of the city spurred the forced eviction of many Black families to make room for growing urban
development - a gentrification process that was further stepped up during the 1973-1985 military dictatorship.
" 'As far as we are concerned, what happened during those years was an act of genocide
and outright racism. Many of the houses in the neighbourhoods where we lived had been built many years before. The de facto
government at the time issued an announcement that repairs would be made to run-down houses if the occupants reported the
poor conditions of the places where they were living,' recalled García, who was 12 years old at the time.
" 'People went to file reports so that their houses would be repaired,
but it
was all a trick: the military government gathered up all these
reports and used them to condemn the houses as uninhabitable,
and then
started evicting the occupants based on these grounds. It was all a
terrible deception,' she added."
12:30 am est
Monday, December 7, 2009
Perú apologizes for racism, discrimination
By Karen Juanita Carrillo
In Perú, the administration of President Alan García Pérez
has published an apology and a request for Afro Perúvians to accept a “historical pardon” from the government,
for years of discrimination and second class citizenship.
Published in the Saturday, November 28, 2009 edition
of the official government newspaper, El Perúano, the legal notice states that the government wanted to express a “pardon
to the Afro Perúvian community for the history of abuses, exclusions and acts of discrimination that have been committed
against them.”
The statement also noted that the “offenses” – or acts of discrimination
– against Afro Perúvians may have begun in the 16th century but have remained unrelenting “to the present
time”, continuing to present “a barrier to the social, economic, labor and educational development” of Perú’s
Blacks. read more
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