Americas Indigenous Peoples

[Other News - Roberto Savio / IPS <soros@topica.email-publisher.com>]

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Across the Americas, Indigenous Peoples Make
Themselves Heard
By Hector Tobar , Times Staff Writer

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-indigenous19oct19195921,1,1308553.story?coll=la-home-headlines

October 19, 2003

EL ALTO, Bolivia -- Above the rocky bowl of La Paz,
this vast township of brick and adobe homes stretches
across a dry plain. This is where the Aymara Indians
of western Bolivia come to live and work when their
farms can no longer feed them.

For the past week, the hardscrabble order of El Alto
gave way to a fervor of rebellion. Armed with the
traditional weapons of the Aymara people — sticks,
slingshots and muscle — its residents fought the army,
built barricades and derailed a train, cutting off and
shutting down the capital below them.

"We are not going to allow ourselves to be pushed
around anymore," said Bernaldo Castillo Mollo, a
37-year-old Aymara bricklayer and jack-of-all-trades
who was shot in the foot during the protests. "So that
our children have a better life than us, we are
willing to die."

The Indian-led movement that brought down Bolivian
President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada last week was only
the most recent and startling expression of a growing
militancy and political assertiveness among the native
peoples of the Americas.

In Ecuador and in Guatemala, indigenous leaders
arguably wield more influence in local and national
affairs than in any time since the Spanish conquest.
And in Chile and Mexico, resistance to the changes
brought by the global economy are helping to feed a
renaissance of indigenous organizations.

"Everyone thought that globalization would wipe out
local identities and cultures," said Alejandro
Herrera, a professor at the University of the Frontier
in Temuco, in south-central Chile.

"Instead, the opposite has happened. People are
embracing their indigenous identities against these
outside threats."

In recent years, the Mapuche villages around Temuco
have been the site of a smoldering, low-tech war
against corporate tree farming that has landed a
handful of Mapuche Indian leaders in prison on charges
of burning logging trucks.

Similarly, Bolivia's plan to export the country's
natural gas reserves through a pipeline to be built by
a multinational consortium helped coalesce Indian
resentment against a government dominated by
politicians of European descent.

Castillo Mollo, the wounded bricklayer, has only a
fifth-grade education. Until he moved to El Alto in
1986, he worked the land, growing potatoes and other
crops. But like many other residents of El Alto, he is
well-steeped in the anti-globalization rhetoric that
has swept through Latin America.

"It's not just the gas that we're angry about,"
Castillo Mollo said from a La Paz hospital ward he
shared with a dozen other El Alto residents injured in
the uprising. "Look at all the privatization [of
government enterprises] and how many people they threw
out of work.

"People are going hungry," he said. "In the cities you
see people working on the streets in exchange for
food."

What Soweto was to the anti-apartheid movement in
South Africa, El Alto has been to the indigenous
movement in modern Bolivia: an overpopulated slum of
internal migrants that has been transformed into a
caldron of activism.

In El Alto, ideas first expressed by left-leaning
economists a decade ago — that U.S.-inspired economic
policies would benefit only a small minority of Latin
Americans — have found fertile ground among the poor.

Brought into the national debate by a handful of
Indian and union leaders, they have percolated down to
the community's neighborhood assemblies. According to
activists and residents, there are more than 150 such
assemblies in El Alto, a city of 750,000.

The assemblies are the urban equivalent of traditional
Aymara and Quechua communes. All decisions are made by
voice vote. The opinions of elders carry additional
weight. And all members of the community must carry
out responsibilities, such as participating in safety
patrols.

"What we're seeing in Bolivia is really a clash
between civilizations," between Western individualism
and Indian communalism, said Jacqueline Michaux, an
anthropologist who has worked in the community.

"In the countryside, all the members of the village
work together in the harvest," Michaux said.
Similarly, during the conflict in El Alto, "everyone
worked together to build the barricades and to feed
the marchers who were arriving from out of town. They
had to. It was their obligation to the community."

In Mexico, too, indigenous consciousness appears to be
gaining momentum, nearly a decade after the Zapatista
uprising that first brought worldwide attention to the
plight of Mexico's native peoples.

The movement's charismatic leader, Subcommander
Marcos, is moving the Zapatistas toward Indian
self-rule in the southern state of Chiapas. Zapatista
leaders have sworn in five "good government boards" to
oversee a scattering of rebel-controlled indigenous
communities there.

They set their watches on "Zapatista time," an hour
ahead of what they call "Fox time" (after Mexico's
president). The Zapatista army seizes drugs, alcohol
and illegally cut timber trafficked through its
territories.

The years since the Chiapas uprising have been hard on
the peasantry throughout Mexico. The free trade
agreement with the United States has flooded the
country with cheap corn, the staple crop of the
indigenous people.

Now the movement for indigenous autonomy is spreading
northward, to Oaxaca and other states. Many villages
practice de facto autonomy, for example, by electing
mayors in village assemblies rather than by secret
ballot, by farming the land communally and by settling
disputes by centuries-old methods rather than using
Mexico's legal system.

Even on the outskirts of Mexico City, about 100,000
Nahuatl Indians, descended from the Aztecs, have set
up 12 indigenous communities and are demanding that
the government recognize their autonomy. City
officials have barely acknowledged their demands.

In years past, Indian discontent in the Americas was
often channeled into traditional political parties
dominated by Western ideas and non-Indian leaders. But
in Bolivia, as in other countries of the region, new
Indian leaders have emerged. And there is a growing,
if still small, indigenous intelligentsia.

"We have lots of educated people now. We don't have to
rely on the 'experts' to make decisions for us
anymore," said German Jimenez, a teacher and Quechua
from the Bolivian city of Potosi who joined a group of
miners marching to La Paz last week.

In Potosi, Jimenez has witnessed a flowering of
indigenous culture and thought. "There are even people
now who are beginning to question Christianity, who
are saying we should return to our original
religions," he said.

Perhaps the most well-known and radical voice of
indigenismo in Bolivia is Felipe Quispe, a former
professor and the president of the nation's largest
peasants union. In the Aymara villages around Lake
Titicaca, he is known as "El Malku," the Condor.

Quispe's Pachakuti Indigenous Movement won only a
small fraction of the vote in last year's presidential
election, but he wields much influence as the leading
proponent of Aymara nationalism.

"If the concerns of the original inhabitants of this
land are not addressed, then the so-called Bolivia
will cease to exist," he said recently. "The
indigenous people will march into La Paz and an Indian
will sit in the presidential chair."

Another Aymara, Evo Morales, finished second in last
year's presidential election here. He is the leader of
the Movement to Socialism, whose strongest base of
support is among the nation's Quechua.

Once a coca farmer trying to eke out a living in the
Chapare region, Morales is now a major figure in
Bolivian politics, but also a proponent of radical
tactics, including confrontations between striking
peasants and the authorities.

In Ecuador, the indigenous movement is one of the best
organized and most powerful in Latin America.

The country's primary indigenous group, the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador,
was behind a brief 1999 coup that toppled the
government. And the indigenous Pachakutik political
movement formed a key part of the support that
catapulted Lucio Gutierrez to the presidency.

Until a recent falling-out, indigenous leaders held
several key position in the Gutierrez Cabinet,
including South America's first indigenous foreign
minister, Nina Pacari, a Quichua.

In Guatemala, indigenous political power has
flourished since the signing of a peace treaty ending
the country's civil war in 1996. Maya children can now
be educated in their native languages, a right that
was long denied them under the country's repressive
military regimes. There is also a Maya member of the
Cabinet.

On Saturday, less than 24 hours after Sanchez de
Lozada's resignation, Bolivia's new president, Carlos
Mesa, visited El Alto, where he made a speech to
thousands of Aymara and other community residents. He
later participated in an Indian religious ceremony.

In one of his first official statements, he said he
would name indigenous leaders to his Cabinet.

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City
and T. Christian Miller in Bogota, Colombia,
contributed to this report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Other News" is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that
should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It
welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on
global issues, north-sutrh relations, gobernability of globalization. The
"Other News" motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s
old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003:”What walls utter, media keeps
silent”. Roberto Savio

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