If we relied entirely on censuses to understand what the people of Latin America and the Caribbean look like, the picture that would emerge would be a complete fantasy.
While the cities and villages of this part of the world abound with color and vitality thanks to the multitude of ethnic groups that live together on its soil, most of the region’s censuses do not include questions about race or ethnicity. As a result many indigenous communities and, in particular, millions of citizens of African descent, are not officially recognized as such by their governments. In many cases, questions about the respondent’s native language are also absent from census forms.
Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is of indigenous or African descent, less than one-third of the region’s countries gathers information on its population of African descent explicitly. The data collected on indigenous peoples, while somewhat more abundant, tend to be incomplete and flawed.
Since these two groups are not taken into account or are poorly covered in official figures, their particular needs are not reflected by government programs in which resources are allocated for such important areas as health, education, employment, and housing.
The consequences of this fact can be seen in regional statistics on poverty and marginalization, that consistently show indigenous groups and Afro-Latin Americans to be disproportionately disadvantaged. A 1994 World Bank study shows that in Guatemala, where the national poverty rate is 64 percent, the figure climbs to 86.6 percent for the indigenous population. In Peru, the national poverty rate is 49.7 percent, compared with 79 percent for the indigenous population. In Mexico, it is 17.9 percent for the country as a whole, and 80.6 percent among indigenous groups. In general, indigenous and Afro-Latin American communities experience higher infant mortality, illiteracy, and unemployment, and also tend to be less healthy than the white population.
Time for new numbers. Given that the self-portrait of Latin America and the Caribbean is almost exclusively white or mestizo, and that this misperception is reflected in programs and the distribution of resources, it comes as no surprise that the region’s racial minorities are clamoring for change. It also makes sense that institutions concerned with improving regional development should want to attack poverty and exclusion from all angles. In an era dominated by information technology, the availability of reliable and complete data on populations is the basis for any serious development work.
At a recent conference on censuses, Paulo Paiva, the IDB’s vice president for planning and administration, said "information plays an essential role in the consolidation of democracies and the formulation of public policy. There is no doubt as to the need to produce information on the racial, ethnic, and cultural composition of the different countries of Latin America, and on their socioeconomic conditions."
Paiva was speaking at a meeting convened last November in Cartagena, Colombia, by the IDB, the World Bank, and Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE). It was the first regional meeting convened to study the status of census data across the region, analyze available statistics, and exchange views with census officials and representatives of indigenous communities and Afro-Latin Americans anxious to correct this long-standing imbalance.
Indigenous peoples demand recognition of some of the rights for which they have been fighting for more than 30 years. "We are not legally recognized under the law. A minority continues to impose its authority on the majority", said Ricardo Sului, of the Maya rights advocacy group Defensoría Maya de Guatemala. The Guatemalan census indicates that 40 percent of the population is indigenous, while the Maya people claim the figure to be 80 percent. "For this reason, the indigenous groups are not taken into account in government policies. We demand that the Government of Guatemala recognize a multiethnic and multilingual society," he said. Ángel Gende, of the National Development Council of Ecuador, said, "the lack of participation affects the inability to define an indigenous person or one of African descent. If we all plan, the censuses are not going to leave those groups out."
Although more recent, the campaigns launched by Latin American groups of African descent to gain visibility and promote awareness are also driven by demands for social and economic justice. "If we Latin Americans of African descent are at all homogenous it is because of the deprivations we suffer. By not having data on ourselves, ours problems remain submerged. And if the problems are not recognized, they do not exist. Ignorance is the cause of discrimination," claims Donald Aden, of Proyecto Caribe, in Costa Rica. An example of this is the region of Chocó on Colombia’s Pacific coast. "In Chocó, there is no running water or electricity," according to Father Manuel García. "The schools are inadequate. The children have no access to higher education. The dispersion makes it difficult to use traditional census methods, and that is why the figures (for those of African descent) are below the true number. Racism is a direct consequence of ignorance," he concluded.
For these communities, official recognition of the distortions in past censuses is the first step in a process of redress that is complicated by past history and current politics. "Governments have never been interested in racial classification," asserted Rosa García, of Plan Pacífico in Colombia. "We are considered a minority group, even though African-Colombians comprise 30 percent of the population. To the extent that are not acknowledged, they simply do not exist. There is resistance to capturing the multiethnic reality, despite the rules," she said. And this resistance can be put into effect very simply. "It makes no sense to engender a debate on the census if governments do not have the political will to allocate the economic resources necessary to encourage cultural diversity in countries with indigenous populations," says Rosa Ciclos, of the Indigenous Council of Cauca, also in Colombia.
Colorblind forms. These comments were heard in Colombia, a relatively advanced country from the standpoint of censuses where the indigenous population has been counted, with uneven accuracy, since 1938, and where part of the black population has been counted since 1993. Only Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica include the option in their census of classifying oneself as being of African descent, a fact that is surprising to anyone who has walked the streets of Venezuela, Panama, or the Dominican Republic, to name just a few countries.
In a recent article in Folha de São Paulo, Brazilian Minister of Education Paulo Renato Souza affirmed that "for many years, it was said that there was no racism in Brazil. In fact, the blacks were not seen. For more than 60 years, this enormous population group was ‘invisible’ for purposes of Brazilian public policy." These circumstances undoubtedly had an influence on the fact that African-Brazilians today are crowded into favelas and live in conditions of poverty and misery far worse than the white population, according to the Brazilian Bureau of Statistics.
At the meeting in Cartagena, two regionwide objectives were pursued: recognition of an anomalous and unfair situation in the censuses and a way out of this complex problem. While the value of having correct population data is increasingly understood in most countries, agreeing on how to do so will surely be a long and arduous task.
First there are theoretical questions, such as how to identify the various ethnic and cultural groups: by common biological heritage (genetics, physical traits), cultural heritage (language, customs, values, traditions), ancestry (maternal and paternal ethnic groups), or awareness of ethnic belonging (self-identification).
Then there are methodological issues, such as participation of ethnic communities in the design of surveys, the language used on the census forms, who the census-takers should be, how many resources should be used to reach the most remote communities, and public education on the importance of being counted, among others.
The Cartagena meeting ended with a commitment to create a standing committee to follow up on the progress of the countries in the region toward more representative censuses. It was considered imperative that the process of designing censuses include sectors of the population comprised of ethnic and cultural groups that have been underrepresented or ignored until now. Development agencies like the IDB and the World Bank affirmed their willingness to promote programs in support of proper design and execution of censuses, in order to fight poverty and the social exclusion of groups that are marginalized today.
In a year in which the United Nations wants to draw the world’s attention to the problem of racism, it seems appropriate for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean to take a step forward and finally recognize the presence of a significant proportion of their populations that has been invisible up till now.