Afro-descendants of Latin America: Selected Resources (CRS Report for Congress)
| Release Date |
Revised Aug. 8, 2024 |
| Report Number |
IN11790 |
| Report Type |
Insight |
| Authors |
Carla Y. Davis-Castro |
| Source Agency |
Congressional Research Service |
| Older Revisions |
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Summary:
The United Nations (U.N.) estimates that approximately “200 million people identifying themselves as
being of African descent live in the Americas.” Congress has long demonstrated interest in the status of
Afro-descendants abroad as seen in legislation and hearings. Since 1993, the Department of State submits
an annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices that includes a section on “National/Racial/Ethnic
Minorities.” This CRS Insight focuses on global resources that relate to the human rights of Afrodescendants of Latin America, including connections to socioeconomics, international organizations, and
international declarations and conventions. The resource titles link to English-language resources while
links to other languages are listed in the column “resource type.”
This CRS Insight uses the umbrella term “Afro-descendant” rather than country-specific terms such as
“Afro-Cuban” or “Afro-Colombian,” or foreign language terms such as moreno or pardo. The World
Bank’s 2018 report Afro-descendants in Latin America: Toward a Framework of Inclusion details that the
term “Afro-descendant” was “first adopted by regional Afro-descendant organizations in the early 2000s,
and describes people united by a common ancestry but living in very dissimilar conditions.”
For Afro-descendants of Latin America, human rights challenges are intertwined with socioeconomics.
The 2002 U.N. Durban Declaration emphasized “poverty, underdevelopment, marginalization, social
exclusion and economic disparities are closely associated with racism, racial discrimination ... and
contribute to the persistence of racist attitudes and practices which in turn generate more poverty.” For
example, the World Bank’s LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) Equity Lab published 2021 data
illustrating that in the case studies of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, a higher percentage
of Afro-descendants are poor (living on less than $5.50 per day in 2011 purchasing power parity terms) as
compared to the national average. In reverse chronological order and then alphabetically, Table 1 lists
resources related to the socioeconomic status of Afro-descendants in Latin America.
