Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzon encouraged the Afro-Colombian community to demand the creation of a law to guarantee their rightful access to proportional employment, according to a Tuesday press release from the vice president’s office.
The vice president said that, currently, members of the Afro-Colombian population are often judged based merely off of their skin color, before prospective employers even consider their resume, knowledge base or experience. He stated that this racist behavior occurs not only in the private sector, but also in certain public, or government, entities.
“For this reason, I invite the movement of the Afro-Colombian community (…) to demand the creation of quotas of participation in the state, at a national, municipal and local level,” said Garzon.
He said that the quotas of participation must always respond to the democratic right of proportionality with relation to the number of the population.
Garzon recalled the fact that in Colombia, by constitutional mandate and judicial norms, racist practices and discrimination are prohibited, and added that Colombia must not continue to be one of the countries with the greatest amount of social inequality, in which Afro-Colombian communities end up at the bottom.
“We have girls and boys and in general people from the Afro-Colombian community that in many parts of Colombia live worse than animals and this is a public debate that must be faced. The proposal of President Juan Manuel Santos is to see how we can reduce poverty and misery because it is a social debt that the state owes to many sectors of the population, beginning with the Afro-Colombian community,” said the vice president.