E/CN.4/1997/71/Add.1 page 4 personeros (municipal councillors), representatives of the Office of the Attorney-General and the Public Prosecutor's Office, members of Congress such as Mrs. Zulia Maria Mena Garcia, Senator Lorenzo Muela, the head of the Office of Indigenous Affairs and the head of the Office of Afro-Colombian Affairs (Ministry of the Interior), and representatives of indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in the different regions of the country, in Bogotá, Buenaventura, Cali, Cartagena, Quibdo and Tumaco. He would also like to express his gratitude to the municipalities that received him, in particular those of Cali, Buenaventura and Quibdo, and to the different communities that he met, particularly those of African origin, with whom he shared cultural evenings: African history, anthropology and dances. They expressed their attachment to their ancestral roots and their keen desire to establish intercultural relations with Mother Africa. The Special Rapporteur promised to speak on their behalf to UNESCO, which has produced important learned publications on African culture and their relations with the African diaspora, and on indigenous and Caribbean cultures. Those meetings were most interesting and rewarding. C. General 7. The Special Rapporteur finds that, since colonization, Colombia has been experiencing persistent structurally and economically entrenched racial discrimination in the form of domination by Whites over Amerindians and Afro-Colombians. This system has been perpetrated through education, the media, the economy and interpersonal relationships, although great hopes were raised by the historic institutional turning-point for the country represented by the adoption of the 1991 Constitution and transitional article 55, which became Act. No. 70 of 27 August 1993. The Special Rapporteur has noted that: (a) the indigenous and Black populations have been and are marginalized, they are the poorest and most vulnerable groups, and they live in unfavourable economic and social conditions, in appalling shanty towns such as Aguablanca in Cali and the intolerably unhygienic Quibdo market; (b) racial discrimination seems almost natural, unconscious, as illustrated by a weekly television programme Sábados Felices , which ridicules Blacks; even the most militant human rights activists only realize the discriminatory nature of this popular programme and its incitement to racial hatred when their attention is drawn to it; (c) questions on the number or percentage of indigenous people and Afro-Colombians in the army or navy, the diplomatic corps or the Catholic hierarchy are met with awkward replies or an embarrassed silence, as if the questions were unusual. 8. The 1991 Constitution and Act No. 70 of 1993 recognize and guarantee the rights and fundamental freedoms of the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, especially their right to collective ownership of the land and the right to preserve their natural identity, which led the Colombian Government to write the following in a report to the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery: “Because of the major institutional change which the adoption of the 1991 Constitution represented for the country, not only is the Government's current policy and goal to promote recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity, but there is now legislation in existence to support the development of the country's black communities, thereby putting an 4 end to racial discrimination”. Colombia has gone beyond the stage of debating whether to recognize the different ethnic groups and their rights and