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Resumen Este artículo examina el fenómeno de la objeción de conciencia (OC) a los servicios de aborto legal en Argentina, Uruguay y Colombia. Basado en relatos obtenidos a través de entrevistas, el análisis toma distancia de aquellos enfocados en diferenciar entre OC y barreras al servicio, o en identificar si las razones de objeción son verdaderas o válidas. Partiendo del hecho de que en muy pocos casos las/los objetoras/es están al tanto de las definiciones legales de la OC, se busca entender los significados que las/los entrevistadas/os le atribuyeron, y desde los cuales organizan su práctica médica, y justifican su negación a prestar servicios de aborto. En los tres países las/los entrevistadas/os se oponían principalmente a que fueran las mujeres quienes tomaran la decisión de qué embarazos interrumpir, y cómo y cuándo hacerlo. Los discursos contingentes a través de los cuales las/os médicas/os construyen las racionalidades de su OC están hechos, sobre todo, de un incuestionado apego al control de los cuerpos con capacidad de gestar; y de entendidos médico-sociales de las mujeres como inexorablemente madres, máquinas de reproducción o soportes vitales de fetos.

In 1993 Afro-Colombians were granted multicultural rights as members of a distinct ethnic group and as collective subjects of ‘black communities’. In recent years, this discourse has intersected with national and international apparatuses that seek to identify victims of Colombia’s war in order to grant them rights and reparations. This has resulted in the emergence of a new political subject that is both racialized and defined as a victim: the afro-desplazado, or black Internally Displaced Person (IDP). Using ethnographic description from an urban IDP arrival site in Bogota, I illustrate how these two discourses have become interwoven in practice and explore their consequences for afro-desplazados. I explore the political limits and possibilities of this new category by showing how Afro-Colombians both adopt it and push at its limits.

I write these words from what feels like a crumbling world. As I walk through the streets of Havana to find an internet spot from which to read the terrible news coming from the three places I cons...

This article examines the role that vernacular notions of racialized-regional difference play in the constitution and stabilization of DNA populations in Colombian forensic science, in what we frame as a process of public science. In public science, the imaginations of the scientific world and common-sense public knowledge are integral to the production and circulation of science itself. We explore the origins and circulation of a scientific object--'La Tabla', published in Paredes et al. and used in genetic forensic identification procedures--among genetic research institutes, forensic genetics laboratories and courtrooms in Bogotá. We unveil the double life of this central object of forensic genetics. On the one hand, La Tabla enjoys an indisputable public place in the processing of forensic genetic evidence in Colombia (paternity cases, identification of bodies, etc.). On the other hand, the relations it establishes between 'race', geography and genetics are questioned among population geneticists in Colombia. Although forensic technicians are aware of the disputes among population geneticists, they use and endorse the relations established between genetics, 'race' and geography because these fit with common-sense notions of visible bodily difference and the regionalization of race in the Colombian nation.

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’. My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens...

In May of 2011, I received an invitation to the UN’s inaugural celebration of the International Year of Afrodescendants in Colombia. The event, a photographic exhibition in Bogota’s most prestigious public library, was scheduled to open on May twentieth, the eve of Colombia’s anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The invitation, which was jointly circulated by the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the National Association for Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), included two pictures taken by the featured photographers.1 The first shows a middle-aged woman, barefoot and sitting on a plastic chair in the middle of a desolate and derelict room. Three young girls, also barefoot, are standing around her. The four of them look straight into the camera lens without the slightest hint of a smile. Although it is impossible to identify the nature of the room, the viewer is tempted to surmise that this was the women’s home but is left wondering whether the marks on the wall behind them are the “normal” result of the passage of time and the scarcity of money, or the product of a relentless barrage of bullets. In the second photo we see an older man with his face opposite to the camera, hands behind his back, head tilted down, contemplating the room before him in a gesture of resignation. Strewn across the floor in front of him are the contents of a battered file cabinet and bookcase.