Buenaventura: A community in resistance culturally

Abstract

Buenaventura, through its port activity, exports almost all of the products that represent the highest economic activity to the country. 60 % of Colombia’s foreign trade is conducted through the city’s port, in which, 100% of sugar and 80 % of the coffee exports are made. Social investment is mostly intended to speed up and optimize production levels of the port area, which the government casually assumes to generate higher levels of social welfare in the rest of the city that suffers from huge unmet basic needs. The phenomenon of unemployment that sheltered the country about 10 years ago, reached rates in major cities that ranged between 18% and 21%. Buenaventura, on the other hand, has an alarming 80 % and is the city where the scourge feels harder, fed by the dynamics of forced displacement, which have intensified in its area of influence. But the Colombian Pacific and particularly Buenaventura, despite the dynamics of structural violence, is also a region noted for the great peace-building efforts by organized communities in the form of resistance. The resistors are axes of a cultural project of peace building by civil society that is necessary to identify the dynamics of communities in the context of war and defeat violence. In this sense, this paper discusses some aspects of resistance and peace building during the twentieth and twenty-first century, that black communities have developed in the Port of Buenaventura.