Lazo Gitchos
A small town in Colombia fights for recognition, and a better future, through community governance.
On a sweltering July day, Rosiris Montes cools herself with a yellow plastic hand fan outside her home in Sincerín, a small inland village an hour’s drive from Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Montes is a member of the local community council, and looking across the street toward the baseball diamond at the heart of the town, she runs through a list of pressing concerns for the residents of the town. “We have to prioritize our needs here,” she says, “drinking water, garbage collection, sewage treatment, our streets filled with water, healthcare access, and education.”
Montes holds one of 10 elected positions on the town’s community council, or Consejo Comunitario. In Colombia’s constitution, the Consejo Comunitario exists as a method of self-government for Black and Indigenous communities who, the constitution recognizes, had been underserved by Colombia’s federal and regional governments of the past. Even now, in Sincerín, members of the Consejo say that constitutional protections have all but broken down and that they cannot rely on the government to improve economic conditions or quality of life for the community.
The fishing village is home to about 5,000 people, and without the altitude and mountain air of Colombia’s southern plateaus or the moderating ocean heat sink of the Caribbean beaches, it sees temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. Most afternoons the heat is buffered by warm bursts of rain that thunder on the village’s tin roofs and flood the clay-dirt streets, leaving behind puddles where Dengue Fever-carrying mosquitoes breed. Muddy runoff fills Sincerín’s blond roads, carrying topsoil, garbage, insect larvae, and disease into large puddles.
Hot days and equatorial sun mean early mornings in town; fishermen walk several miles to the ciénagas to cast round nets from narrow carved canoes, catching Crappie and Catfish; women wake before the sun to refill water basins for bucket-showers and prepare food; young men well-off enough to own motorbikes drive to Cartagena and work at the port or in tourism, the coastal city’s main industries.
Children in white shirts and blue slacks and skirts travel in small groups to the school, a concrete compound of white open-air buildings. The outer wall of the school is adorned with the painted logos of NGOs and the blue-and-yellow flag of the European Union, one-time sponsor of the town’s only public school. Red rafters of the local Gallera, or cockfighting ring, rise above a bare cinder-block wall across the street.
Dr. Robins Strusberg Ramos remembers stories of a very different Sincerín. Born in Bolívar, not far from Sincerín, Ramos has practiced medicine in the region for 23 years, including in Arjona, Sincerín’s municipal capital. When his mother was a child, he told me, his grandfather would travel to Sincerín for the best selection of produce and agricultural goods in the region. The town’s markets were buoyed by the industrial success of the town’s largest employer, the Sincerín sugarcane factory. “The Sincerín,” as it was known, could produce more than 10 million pounds of sugar per year — enough to sustain the region’s economy. The factory, located a few kilometers outside of town and once connected to the coast by a railroad track, was owned by a wealthy Cuban family and operated in part by Cuban laborers. It was these Cubans, the local legend goes, who first brought baseball to Colombia.
Today, only the cement-and-stone foundations remain of the factory, rubble scattered through a cow pasture. The old railroad track is now a conspicuously straight dirt road. Since the factory closed in 1948, the town’s prosperity has dried up. Markets closed, residents sought jobs in the city or nearby agricultural centers further from the coast, and subsistence fishermen returned to the marshes in their wooden canoes. In the time of the factory, the company provided medical services to its employees and their families.
Now, Sincerín’s local medical infrastructure consists solely of a small clinic in town. The clinic is staffed from 8am to 2pm by one employee, usually a nurse, and for emergencies or care outside this time residents must travel the 30 minutes by car to Arjona’s hospital. This is an impossible proposition for most, who don’t own personal vehicles. Dr. Ramos says this level of care is inadequate, and that Colombia’s ministry of health would agree. The ministry, he says, stipulates that in order to ensure rural Colombians’ constitutional right to healthcare access, communities should have one full time doctor for every 2500-3000 people. Sincerín’s 5,000 residents have well below half of that. In a town facing health issues related to contaminated water, pollution, and transmissible diseases, and without adequate transport to reach more robust medical care, this only adds to Sincerineros’ sense of abandonment.
For many residents, the state of infrastructure, access, and opportunity is just the way it is. Some older Sincerineros remember the days of industrial prosperity, but these days are long gone; Along the town’s main street, between bare brick buildings, there is little air of change.
Resignation, however, is not common among the community’s leaders. Facing decades of entrenched disregard, the town of Sincerín is doggedly pursuing the autonomy of autogobierno y autoreconocimiento - a legal designation of self governance and self recognition, enshrined in the country’s constitution.
In 2020, with support from the Cartagena-based nonprofit Foundation for Multidimensional Education (FEM), Sincerin published two 100-page pamphlets on community governance and self-recognition, each one in part declaration and in part instruction manual. The first, Sincerin en la Jugada; Plan de Etnodesarrollo (“Sincerin on the Playing Field; a Plan for Ethno-Development”), outlines the community’s past and present roles in the regional and national context, and acts as a public census record affirming that the community meets the standards for self-recognition as a Black community. The second, Reglamento Interno para el ejercicio del autogobierno de la Comunidad Negra de Sincerin (Internal Regulations for the exercise of self-governance of the Black Community of Sincerin), acts as a census record and constitution for community governance.
In Sincerín’s contemporary struggle for recognition and recovery, the malaise of a collapsed industrial economy hangs thick in the muggy air. While federal inaction and neglect have prevented the establishment of self-government, centuries of colonization, slavery, and resource extraction cuffed the community to the conditions that prevent progress to this day.
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Amid a recent wave of left-leaning political movements in Latin America, some in Sincerín are hopeful that Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro and vice president Francia Marquez, the first avowed leftist administration in the country, will bring real change to rural communities, including recognizing Sincerín’s bid for sovereignty in addressing material concerns. Referring to vice president Marquez, the town’s Consejo Comunitario president Misael Perez told me “now that there is a Black woman in office, we have hope.”
Perez’s hope is a long time coming, and Colombians’ fight for recognition is too. But the hope, and the fight, rest on decades of promises left unfulfilled by Colombia’s federal government. In August 1989, with sentiments and demands familiar to leaders like Perez and Montes, thousands of university students filled the streets of Bógota, Colombia’s capital, in a silent march. They carried signs pushing political reform and peace in the wake of the murder of favored liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán a week prior. Before the end of the election cycle, Pablo Escobar would orchestrate the murders of two more prominent candidates. Between the 1950s and 2010s, thousands of Colombians were killed by paramilitary groups, drug cartels, and guerilla groups. The violence galvanized Colombians and catalyzed a constitutional and social reform movement with broad implications for towns like Sincerín.
In 1991, under liberal president César Gaviria, Colombia convened a constitutional convention for the first time since 1886. The new constitution, sometimes referred to as the Constitution of Human Rights, sought to address the root causes of Colombia’s violence, including inequality, government illegitimacy and corruption, and the drug trade. As drafted, the document affirmed positive rights, guaranteeing access to healthcare, clean water, and education. The mechanisms to ensure these rights, however, have been plagued by an unstable and ineffective bureaucracy.
Two years later, as part of the suite of constitutional reforms, president Gaviria would sign Law 70 of 1993, which extended to the country’s Black communities the right to designate as ethnocultural groups, the first time this right was granted to non-indigenous ethnic groups in South America. The law also granted Black communities the right to education, agricultural practices, land management in accordance with their “ethnocultural aspirations and necessities.” In effect, it granted Black communities the right to limited sovereignty, a right that the 1991 constitution had already granted to indigenous communities. By extension, the law gave already-recognized Black communities the access to land rights under the newly-ratified constitution, meaning communities could receive collective rights to the land upon which their community was built.
Law 70 is a statutory law, meaning it can only be made enforceable and effective by further presidential Executive Orders. Parts of the law, such as the means through which Black communities may apply for collective land titling, have been effectively ‘operationalized,’ as the process is known, but other parts of the process have gone uncodified. While the law enjoys widespread popularity and support, the failure to effectively implement the guaranteed rights has trapped communities like Sincerín in limbo.
In 2017, recognizing the failures of the federal government to actualize the constitution’s guarantees, FEM identified Sincerin as a candidate for its Land Forever initiative. The campaign facilitates the complex legal processes communities must navigate to seek land titles and self-recognition. Dilia Florez Rosario, FEM’s Executive Director, describes the organization’s role in Sincerin as logistical support. “We helped connect them with lawyers and legal resources,” Florez Rosario told me as we walked down Sincerín’s main street, stepping around deep brown puddles. The community needed these resources, she emphasized, to first attain recognition as a Black community from Arjona, Sincerín’s municipal capital, and then to obtain the collective land rights from Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior in Bógota. FEM had already assisted with six of these processes in other communities in Colombia, providing legal counsel, coordinating funds from international organizations and private entities, and working with the regional and federal governments. They have helped several communities win collective titles throughout Sincerín’s governing department – akin to a state or province – of Bolívar. But five years after applying for their collective title, Sincerín’s community council has heard nothing from the Ministry of the Interior.
In Sincerín en la Jugada, the Consejo likens the process of self government to playing a game of baseball. The pamphlet outlines the players, the field, and the historical home runs – the factory and agricultural successes of the early- to mid-twentieth century. The publication also articulates the Grand Slam: achieving the final goal of sovereignty. In a section titled El Juego – The Game – the end goal includes three components; Sociocultural Sovereignty, Environmental Protection, and Land Management. According to the pamphlet, these would all be best administered by an autonomous and democratic consejo comunitario.
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Council president Misael Perez’s family’s farm marks the outer edge of Sincerín – the town’s main road reaches the farm’s front gate and no further. Past the 100-odd head of cattle and assorted free-range chickens and goats, a canal cuts through marshy grassland, carrying muddy water to the coast from the ciénagas.
Upstream in these marshes, fishermen cast wide round nets from their canoes. The nets are made of nylon, and the boats hand-built from planks of local hardwood, an asynchronous set of tools that mirrors Sincerineros’ subsistence lifestyles in the modern age.
In Perez’s backyard, tall stainless steel pots heat on iron racks over open wood fires. Perez is not dressed in a dairy farmer’s work clothes on the day of our visit, so he is careful to avoid spilling any of the hot whey on his clean yellow button down as he carries a pot from one of the fires to the plywood-and-tarpaulin shed. There, he hoists it onto the high workbench to cool.
Whey pours onto a stainless steel section of the bench, and he brushes it with his hand into a plastic 55-gallon drum under the bench. To stir the 55-gallon fermentation drum, he shows us, one must insert an arm nearly to the shoulder before swirling the thickening product. This startles the flies out of the drum, and he squints against the swarm as they rise from the surface and fill the shed.
People in Sincerín have made cheese in this way for generations; the town has no agricultural production facilities, and for a long time didn’t need them. But the traditional modes of food production don’t always mesh with modern problems of sanitation, contamination, and pollution.
I ask Misael Perez what kind of cheese he is making, and he squints again. I wonder briefly if I mixed up a word in Spanish in my question. He pauses for a second, then responds as if the question is redundant: “queso normal, queso campesino”––normal cheese, countryside cheese. A low concrete building stands across the yard from the cheese shed, with a distinctive smell, home to a handful of Sows and dozens of piglets. Its wooden roof is fashioned from the same thin trees used for fence posts in the cow pasture beyond.
At night when the air cools, in the concrete strip along the south edge of the baseball diamond, past right field, children and adults dance together. They dance to pop music and Champeta and Bachata, and the older kids teach the younger ones. The Consejo Comunitario helps organize the evening classes and after-school activities for kids. Rosiris Montes says that much of her work on the council is aimed at keeping kids out of trouble. If the community were granted autoreconocimiento, according to Montes, the council could fund education programs on substance use, a common issue in the town, and sexual health in schools. Without knowing the community personally, the federal and regional governments, she says, cannot address local issues in the same way that a local government could.
But without the ability to realize the rights to collective land ownership and prior consultation – wherein Colombia’s government and private enterprises must be approved by the community council before operating in Sincerín – the town’s leaders are stuck.
To promote the protection of constitutional rights, the constitution of 1991 provides a mechanism known as Tutela, which roughly translates to ‘Guardianship.’ The right to Tutela enables Colombians to assert the “immediate protection of his/her fundamental constitutional rights when the individual fears the latter may be jeopardized or threatened by the action or omission of any public authority.” Tutelas are considered the most important mechanism for the protection of constitutional rights in Colombia. In 2019, Colombians filed more than 620,000, more than 200,000 of which were related to healthcare access; Sincerín’s guardianship is overburdened and unresponsive. Like in the case of recognition from the ministry of the interior, red tape stands between Sincerín and the realization of rights.
The people of Sincerín could file a Tutela against their municipal capital of Arjona, Dr. Ramos told me, but “the mayor of Arjona might not be willing to execute it.” Providing medical care is expensive, and Sincerineros technically have access to Arjona’s hospital. But, Dr. Ramos said, accessibility is about more than existence. If transportation is an issue, as it is in Sincerín, that limits access to healthcare. Neither the mayor nor the department of health of Arjona responded to requests for comment.
Without the collective title, Rosiris says it’s hard to make the people of the town believe in self-governance. Sincerín’s Consejo Comunitario first held elections in 2016, shortly after realizing their census eligibility; since then, public trust in the council has waned as they remain in legal limbo.
In the council’s second election in 2020, turnout fell below 100 households out of the town’s roughly 1000. The would-be voters, a council-member told me, seemed reticent ahead of the land grant; the people wanted their land before buying into the Consejo structure.
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Down the street from Consejo member Elizabeth Valdez’s house, the paint peels from the cinder-block walls of Sincerín’s vacant police station. More cops isn’t what the community wants, Valdez says, but without traditional law enforcement, and before the Consejo receives legal power, it has been hard to access the legal and judicial systems in the country. From the empty police station and water towers to the lack of healthcare service and infrastructure, the community feels abandoned by the government, Elizabeth told me.
Young people with family in nearby cities, and the resources to reach them, often do so; these days, to access better education, healthcare, and opportunity, one must leave the hot, muddy streets of Sincerin.
If Sincerín is granted self-recognition, Dr. Ramos says, “more attention will be paid to these details.” As the stewards of the land, the community council would have a stronger footing for redress in the municipal government. But Arjona faces many of the same problems Sincerín does, and while it is politically and fiscally expedient to cut healthcare and other corners, the municipal government might simply lack the capacity as well as the political will to improve the healthcare network in its rural constituencies. Dr. Ramos says the path toward better medical care and infrastructure in Sincerín is community involvement; “They have to make it untouchable,” he says, referring to structures which are not based on external politics but on community resilience. Structures like a recognized community council with the right to prior consultation and land management, and the ability to create community business ventures to fund projects in the community.
Land rights and legal recognition as a self-governing community would not solve all of Sincerín’s problems. But their aim of self governance is not immediate fixes. Community council president Misael Perez takes a longer view; “our goal is total self-recognition,” he says; the right of the community to govern where other institutions have failed. For Sincerín, community sovereignty is the first step toward reconciling their past with the possibility of a better future.