The unprecedented indigenous prison that will be built in the heart of Cauca

Luciano Camayo was a prisoner who, in 2004, paid the sentence imposed on him by his indigenous community in the Silvia prison, in the heart of Cauca. The Honduran council, in the neighboring municipality of Morales, sentenced him for homicide and forced him to receive nine blows before his community and pay four years in prison in a mestizos prison. Camayo participated in a pilot program of resocialization through field activities, a project that, over time, lost strength. However, starting in 2024, he returns through a megaproject that promises to be the first prison with a completely indigenous focus in national and Latin American history.

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This year the construction of the Silvia Agricultural Colony begins, a municipality located a few kilometers from Popayán, within the Caucasian mountains where the FARC dissidents hide. A project of the Penitentiary and Prison Services Unit (Uspec) that will cost $58,000 million and will take three years to execute. For the construction, the Silvia BO2 consortium was hired by the State, which must adapt a piece of land in a mountainous area to create the first prison designed from scratch for the indigenous population. It will have 500 places and there will be taken community members and indigenous authorities who are condemned by their own rules in Cauca, Nariño and Valle del Cauca.

The Silvia Agricultural Colony will be built in the El Tablazo village, just over a kilometer from the town center. It will be a different prison complex than the one already located in another area of ​​the municipality, which has capacity for 100 inmates and is 80 years old. According to Pablo Andrés López, who directs the existing prison, “the Constitution says that in Colombia there is ordinary and indigenous jurisdiction, but all penitentiary centers are built and focused on the ordinary. We have forgotten that indigenous governors are constitutional judges in their communities and that they have had to go door to door seeking to be received by community members who committed crimes.”

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As of June 2024, there are 1,628 inmates of indigenous origin in the more than 100 prisons in Colombia, according to the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (Inpec). The calculation assumes that the Agricultural Colony would have capacity for 30% of that population. According to Juan José Casafranco, deputy director of Infrastructure Monitoring at the Uspec, when an indigenous community finds a community member responsible for a crime, they have two options: they can send him to a harmonization center within the same reservation; or, if the person has to serve a very high sentence or represents a serious danger, the authority uses the figure of “borrowed yard” and requests from Inpec a place within the ordinary justice prisons.

In 2021, in addition, the Constitutional Court determined four essential causes for which an indigenous person could end up in an Inpec prison, among them, determining whether the acts were committed in the ancestral territory and verifying whether the indigenous authorities have the mechanisms to advance in complex criminal investigations. In this case, the Silvia Agricultural Colony will be the conjunction between a prison of ancestral harmonization and a prison with the characteristics of Inpec. The arrival of inmates is expected mainly from Nazca and Misak indigenous people, in addition to the Pitayo, Guambia, Ambaló, Usenda, Quichaya, Quizgo, Usenda and Valle Nuevo reservations, which constitute the municipality of Silvia.

“At the top of the colony, a tulpa (space for dialogue that represents a community bonfire) will be built with all the ancestral cosmogony of the indigenous peoples there. It will be fundamental for the harmonization processes, which, in our understanding, is resocialization,” Casafranco explained. Director López adds that, according to local traditions, the same indigenous authorities will be the ones who deliver and pick up the prisoners in the sentencing process. The colony will have, as its name suggests, a productive crop project to support the inmates and its own spaces for workshops and educational classrooms related to the communities’ own customs.

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Although the start date of work was planned for May 9, those in charge of the work respond that it is in the final review phase of studies and designs. Once the planning with the indigenous authorities has been completed, the construction of public service infrastructure, such as sewage and electricity, will begin. Likewise, a waste dump in the jurisdiction of Popayán and another in Puerto Tejada have already been managed as a waste disposal center. The municipality promises to generate hundreds of construction jobs and hopes to receive revenues for lodging, food and transportation.

However, the project is not to everyone’s taste. Part of the mestizo population has put constant obstacles in socialization meetings because, in general, they do not understand why the State invests in prisons, having so much to do in other aspects, such as education, health, infrastructure, transportation or security, for example. . Other voices question the fact that Silvia could become a kind of crime mecca in the region, by holding such a large number of indigenous prisoners. However, the Silvia Agricultural Colony is about to become a reality and become the State’s great commitment to “harmonize” the indigenous population.

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Jhoan Sebastian Cote Lozano

@SebasCote95

[email protected]

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