Rise Of The Latin Africans.(World Affairs)

Byline: Joseph Contreras; With Steven Ambrus in Bogota, Maria Amparo Lasso in Mexico City and Phil Gunson in Caracas

A new black-power movement in Central and South America.

Hugo Chavez is known as a revolutionary in many contexts, especially his defiance of the United States. In recent years, however, he's also broken ground on a far less well-exposed subject: the question of race in Latin America. The saga began two years ago, when, during a tour of Gambia, Chavez surprised observers by declaring that "I've always said that if Spain is our mother, Africa, mother Africa, is much more so." Since then, the Venezuelan leader has often revisited the theme at home, even drawing attention to his own African roots. It may not sound shocking. But such language would have been inconceivable from a major Latin American leader just a short time ago.

That's now changing, due to a black-consciousness movement stirring in Central and South America. Emboldened by the success of their indigenous countrymen in pressing for resolution of long-ignored grievances, Afro-descendientes (people of African descent), as they are known, are now lobbying for recognition of their own communities' land rights and for increased spending to improve living conditions in urban slums and rural villages. Local activists have begun urging Latin blacks to take pride in their culture, and with the help of the Internet, leaders are reaching across

borders to share tactics and compare notes with their brethren in the Caribbean, the United States and Africa. This "black-power movement has gone way beyond anything that has happened in the past," says Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "People are making critiques of racism in their own societies, and there's been a real shift in black consciousness and involvement."

Black power isn't entirely new to the region; for some time now the descendants of African slaves have wielded political clout in a few corners of the hemisphere. That's especially the case in the English-speaking Caribbean, where black heads of state are the rule. And in Brazil, where nearly half the country's 192 million people have African ancestry, Joaquim Barbosa, arguably the most influential member of the Supreme Court, is black; so is recording artist Gilberto Gil, who served as Culture minister under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for five years. Moreover, Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, once announced that he himself had "one foot in the kitchen"--a colorful way of admitting intermarriage among his ancestors (albeit one that earned him criticism at the time).

In the rest of Latin America, blacks remain a small (they're thought to number about 20 million, though activists claim the figure is much higher) and marginalized minority. Demographics highlight their second-class status. For example, Ecuador's blacks, who make up 5 percent of the population, suffer a 14.5 percent unemployment rate, higher than that of the country's nonblack majority and twice that of indigenous groups. In neighboring Colombia, which is home to 10.5 million Afro-descendientes--giving it the third largest black population in the hemisphere, after Brazil and the United States--only one in five blacks has access to electricity and running water (compared with 60 percent of the rest of the population), and the black infant mortality rate is more than three times the white level.