Protesters descended by the thousands on Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, this week, horrified by a brutal wave of violence sweeping the country, one so intense that mass killings have taken place every other day on average. Most traveled hundreds of miles, from the rural Indigenous communities that have been particularly ravaged by the violence, which they trace to government failures to protect them under the country’s halting peace process. They call their movement the “minga Indígena.”Minga is an Indigenous word, one used long before the Spanish arrived in South America, to refer to an act of communal work, an agreement between neighbors to build something together: a bridge, a road, a government. But minga has also come to mean a collective act of protest, a call to recover what a community believes it has lost: territory, peace, lives.

Source: New York Times October 24, 2020 13:40 UTC