Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the Wayuu community, the quack doctors or shamans are those who have the ability to communicate with the beyond (the afterlife), cure diseases, interpret dreams, predict the future, read or interpret nature and establish relationships or bounds with the deads, who in the form of yoluja (the shadow of the Spirits), return and cohabit with the Wayuu. The previuos is a sign of the different cultures that García Márquez (Gabo) lived with. Since Gabo was a child or in his childhood, he experienced a bicultural (colombian and Wayuu) vision where the supernatural, the mythological and the ordinary life were part of his existence. Among these, the Wayuu culture stands out, an indigenous influence that deeply marks the writer's work, because, just as García Márquez feels close to the language of the “Guajiros”, some of his characters seek to communicate only in the Wayuu's mother tongue: Wayuunaiki. In this sense, this article establishes five categories to analyze the symbolic role of bones, life in death, the prediction of the future, the clairvoyance of the dream world and the role of some characters as shamans in that specific social group. These elements of the Wayuu’s culture, which are found explicitly and implicitly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, constituting a great dialogic fabric or unit, in which two cultures of the Colombian Caribbean intersect ways of living and thinking; and the characters do not fully fit into neither the common indigenous canon nor the Western ones.

This paper seeks to approach the relationship between the indigenous guard of Cauca and the peace-building process in this region of Colombia. For this purpose, a qualitative methodology based on documentary analysis and a conceptual tool based on the notions of peacebuilding and governance from critical approaches are used. The main result of the analysis is that, in the framework of governance and governability of a State governed by a belligerent political faction, the indigenous guard contributes to the construction of peace through the territorial control of the spaces left by the demobilized guerrilla, an unfulfilled objective of a belligerent but weak State that has needed civilian structures of territorial protection antagonistic to its political project (such as the indigenous guard), to advance in the construction of territorial peace.

Este dossier especial se lanzó en parte como conmemoración de los 30 años de la Constitución Política de Colombia, por ello invitamos al antropólogo Salvador Schavelzon de la Universidad Federal de São Paulo, quien hizo una labor estupenda de convocatoria y curaduría y sugirió ampliar el alcance temático del dossier al constitucionalismo latinoamericano, un campo de investigación y acción muy dinámico en dicha región y que permite una discusión más amplia sobre las heterogeneidades y similitudes regionales, donde, por un lado se presentan diferencias nacionales importantes, y por otro se hace evidente un conjunto de intervenciones a escala transnacional que configuran la aparición de constituciones políticas y las respuestas socio-políticas a estas, como se ha visto en Chile en los últimos años. 

VOLUMEN 20 N° 1, 2 y 3 DE 2021 / e-ISSN 2389-7872

A fundamental role of the different agricultural extension models is the generation of entrepreneurial processes through associative and organizational proposals among medium and small producers. Knowing how these organizations have developed allows establishing opportunities for improvement that will benefit their structure and function, strengthening their social and commercial capital. The objective of the research was to characterize rural agribusinesses through the analysis of secondary information and the collection of field data provided by managers and members of the organization to learn about their current situation and their needs for strengthening. For this purpose, a mixed approach research was used, with a predominantly qualitative and concurrent type of research. The agroenterprises were characterized through the analysis of secondary information, semi-structured interviews and focus groups, which allowed the identification of the key aspects that affect the business initiatives, seen from five categories of analysis -technical, economic, social, commercial and organizational-, which facilitated the approach to the multiple factors that revolve around these business models and their influence in the rural sector. The intervention made it possible to identify fundamental aspects in the process of consolidation of an organization, finding similarities with what is reported in the literature; it also favored the diagnosis of the territory and the social and business impact of the agroenterprise on the community, identifying the aspects that they consider relevant for the development of their self-management and sustainability capacities, and thus building a participatory tool for the identification of the real needs that involve the real actor of the agricultural extension interventions. In conclusion, the participatory proposal for the characterization of agribusinesses generated a high degree of ownership on the part of the key actors of the territory, reflecting on factors that influence their operation and making a journey from their capacities to the identification of weaknesses and opportunities. This form of intervention encourages the community not only to identify its needs, but also to become involved in the creation of proposals that mobilize its resources and strategies towards consolidation and sustainability.

Social metabolism studies the exchange relations between social and natural systems. This allows us to analyze the sustainability of natural resources, such as water, linked to the relationship between society and nature. For which, population groups have a significant weight in the increase of resource consumption and energy transformation. For this reason, alternative water collection and storage systems are important, as they allow for self-management. This research sought to characterize the rainwater catchment and storage systems present in the city of Quibdó, in areas not connected to the aqueduct system, in relation to social metabolism. For this purpose, a mixed approach methodology was used, with qualitative techniques and data collection. Visits were made to 150 homes in which storage systems and structures for water storage were evidenced; of these, 41.8% were elevated tanks and 40.2% were low tanks. The average consumption of rainwater in a household was 500 L/day, used for potable uses (food preparation, hydration, and care for babies and children) and non-potable uses focused mainly on cleaning (personal, housing, laundry). Depending on the water storage capacity of the house, it can last between one and five days without rainfall; however, in rainy seasons there is a constant recharge of the storage systems that prevents water shortages.

The notion of inalienability applied to indigenous lands in the Ecuadoran and Colombian Constitutions is an intercultural contact zone that allows the method of translation proposed by Santos, as well a cultural mistake to be explored according to Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism.  It affords communication between Indigenous land tenure systems and the liberal private property regime.  Despite being created to eliminate the Indigenous land and traditional tenure, inalienability rules worked as a tool for protecting it, for which their constitucionalization was claimed by the indigenous movements in Ecuador and Colombia.  The Constituent Assemblies were the proper place to start intercultural dialogues in the field of what we call Law, however they preserved power asymmetries as they maintain the liberal legal frame.  Departing from an intercultural translation exercise in the field of Law, this article defends the Indigenous right to veto and proposes imagining an intercultural negotiation frame where Law can be seeing as a wide system of communication.

This article moves some issues concerning indigenous political participation according to the theoretical foundations of “Latin American democratic constitutionalism”. The central objective is to understand part of the challenges of the Brazilian constitutional experience in view of the disputes over the territory of the indigenous village Maracanã located in the city of Rio de Janeiro/RJ. It seeks to identify how these social and legal tensions materialize and the difficulties imposed by the authoritarian uses of the elements of popular origin. To this end, the literature review and the document analysis uses to identify the answers that the theoretical framework and Brazilian institutional and social practices offer. The conclusion is that the practices analyzed make it difficult to understand and deal adequately with the indigenous territorial issue.