GAP Findings Reinforced by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

During a recent trip to Brazil, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay noted that Afro-Brazilians and indigenous groups face serious discrimination and are “mired in poverty.”

The High Commissioner’s comments echo those made by GAP in a recently released report about discrimination against Afro-Latinos and indigenous peoples in Latin America and the failure of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) – the most important multilateral lender to Latin America – to address it. GAP’s report found that:

In Brazil, differences in income by race are dramatic: nearly 70 percent of the extremely poor in Brazil are Afro-Latino, and Afro-Latinos earn 44 percent less than their white counterparts. The same pattern prevails in neighboring Colombia, where 80 percent of Afro-Colombians live in conditions of extreme poverty. (p. 10)

Commissioner Pillay noted the continued marginalization of indigenous and Afro-Latino groups in Brazil. She said that most of Brazil’s indigenous people, “are not benefiting from the country’s impressive economic progress, and are being held back by discrimination and indifference, chased out of their lands and into forced labour.”

Similarly, GAP’s report found that Afro-Latinos and indigenous peoples – which together make up more than 40 percent of the population of Latin America and a majority of the region’s poor – are significantly underrepresented in IDB operations and projects designed to address poverty. Data released by the IDB show that the institution allocated a paltry 0.13 percent ($58.3 million) of its total lending and grants (approximately $45 billion) between 2001 and 2005 to projects that incorporated components benefiting Afro-Latino and indigenous communities directly.