Simon Bolivar’s Nightmare: Pardocracia and the Place of Afro-Colombians in the Mestizo Nation

The president Gustavo Petro and his vice president Francia Marquez were the first candidates in the national history of Colombia to make an explicit connection between the Afro-Colombian movement and other Black and anti-colonial movements worldwide. This is remarkable because Colombia is the country with the third largest Black population in the West after the United States and Brazil. But, unlike the US and Brazil, Colombia did not have any major social mobilizations around race issues or engage in conversations about anti-Black racism up until the last decade (Cárdenas, 2023). This absence of social mobilization around blackness is not a testament to the lack of racism in Colombia but to its successful invisibilization campaign against Black communities. The Colombian 1991 constitution adopted a pluralistic and democratic framework that recognizes the existence of Indigenous communities and allows them two senatorial seats. However, this allegedly pluralistic framework does not acknowledge the existence of Black communities, reinforcing with it a mestizo (Indigenous/European mixed race) national identity. In this paper I argue that there are two key elements to understand this systematic invisibilization campaign against Afro-Colombians. First, Simon Bolivar’s fear of Pardocracia, the government of the Pardos (those of African descent) and how this fear played into his conception of Nueva Granada (Colombia) as an independent nation. Second, the role of pureza de sangre (blood purity) as a guiding notion in the classification and social stratification of peoples of mixed race in the Spanish colonies. These two elements will help us to understand the exclusion Afro-Colombians from a national project since its foundation.