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REPORTS: LATIN AMERICA |
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Indians
Shake Up the Political Scene
Diego
Cevallos*
MEXICO CITY, (Tierramérica) -
In less than a decade, Latin America's
indigenous movements have toppled two
presidents, carved out new pathways in
political processes and left their
mark on parliaments, ministries,
municipal governments and even a
vice-presidency.
Through protests, electoral
participation and ever-stronger
organisation, in the past decade the
region's Indians have put more than
one political and economic system up
against the wall.
”In building democracy it is no
longer possible to ignore Indians,
that is what the mobilisations tell
us,” Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, an
Aymara Indian who served as Bolivia's
vice-president from 1993 to 1997, said
in a Tierramérica interview.
There are nearly 50 million indigenous
people in a Latin American population
of 400 million. Eighty percent live in
poverty, but are slowly rising out of
misery to vindicate their culture,
their rights and their own political
space.
In Bolivia, an uprising of Indians,
led by Aymara leader Evo Morales and
others, prompted the resignation of
president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada
on Oct. 17.
Morales, a legislative deputy of the
Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), in
June 2002 came in second place in the
presidential elections, within just
1.5 percentage points of Sánchez de
Lozada.
In Ecuador, massive indigenous
protests led to the demise of the
Jamil Mahuad government in 2000.
Those two countries, alongside
Guatemala, Peru and Mexico, have the
largest indigenous presence in the
region, and together are home to more
than 30 million Indians.
”We have learned from our breakout
into politics that with unity we can
advance in our objectives and
proposals. It is a unity based on the
individual and collective self-esteem
of the excluded original peoples,”
Nina Pacari, Ecuador's foreign
minister during the first seven months
of this year, told Tierramérica.
”Our enormous challenge now is to
contribute towards building new
democracies,” said the indigenous
leader.
Thanks to support from the country's
indigenous movement, with which he had
signed an electoral agreement, former
military officer Lucio Gutiérrez won
the Ecuadorian presidency in 2002.
Today, four of the 100 deputies in the
national Congress are Indians, and
dozens more hold local government
posts.
Pacari and several of her native
colleagues held ministerial posts in
the first seven months of the Gutiérrez
government, but later broke away from
the coalition, saying that the
president had not kept his electoral
promises.
”We went from nothing to having
ministers, deputies, mayors,
prefects... and that is tending to
grow. Now not only do the different
political sectors take us into
account, but so do the communications
media,” Ecuadorian deputy Ricardo
Ulcuango, who heads the Indigenous
Parliament of the Americas, told
Tierramérica.
In Mexico, with 10 million Indians,
the insurgent Zapatista National
Liberation Army, made up mostly of
indigenous people in the southern
state of Chiapas, took up arms in 1994
to demand democracy and justice.
Their presence and other factors
combined to shake up a political
system dominated since 1929 by the
Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), and in 2000 Mexico for the
first time swore in a non-PRI
government and consolidated a more
transparent electoral system.
In Guatemala and Peru, Indians have
not achieved the power their
counterparts in Bolivia and Ecuador
have, but they are headed in that
direction, say experts.
”The indigenous peoples have
organised politically, and that is a
new phenomenon in Latin America to be
reckoned with,” Rodolfo Stavenhagen,
United Nations special rapporteur on
indigenous rights, said in a Tierramérica
interview.
He said that political institutions
have not taken cultural plurality into
account, but it can no longer be
ignored under the ”fiction that we
are all equals,” which was never
true in practice, he said.
In Guatemala, where in the 1970s and
1980s Indians bore the brunt of
political repression during a bloody
civil war that cost hundreds of
thousands of lives, 17 of the 113
legislative deputies in office today
are Indians, an indigenous woman
serves as minister of state, and five
are deputy ministers.
Furthermore, 106 of the 331 Guatemalan
municipalities are headed by Indians,
which would have been unthinkable just
a decade ago in this Central American
nation.
According to Pablo Ceto, legislative
deputy of the formerly insurgent
Guatemalan National Revolutionary
Unity (URNG), indigenous organisations
in his country still need to mature,
but a process is building ”which in
two or three years will produce a
qualitative leap.”
Ceto, vice-presidential candidate in
the Nov. 9 elections, told Tierramérica,
”In Guatemala, due to the repression
of the 1970s and 1980s, when fighting
for indigenous rights was seen as
subversion, the organisational process
did not recover, so today there are
not enough leaders.”
But that will change, he predicts.
In Peru, the political exclusion of
the country's 12 million Indians --
the largest indigenous population in
the region -- is increasingly brought
to light.
Of the 120 members of Congress, deputy
Paulina Arpasi, an Aymara, is the only
Indian. She says she represents the
members of her culture.
Some 20 Peruvian lawmakers speak
indigenous languages, though they do
not identify themselves as Indians,
but rather as mestizos (mixed race).
”The Peruvian indigenous
organisations lack clarity and unity.
But the experiences of our brothers in
Ecuador and Bolivia give us a chance
to approach a new political space,”
Miguel Palacín, president of the
Permanent Association of Indigenous
Peoples of Peru, told Tierramérica.
According to Roger Rumrrill, who heads
the Centre for Indigenous Cultures of
Peru, the fact that Indians lag behind
politically is due to the political
and military efforts of the Maoist
group Shining Path in native
communities in the 1980s.
Shining Path, which is blamed for the
deaths of 4,000 Indians and the
enslavement of 15,000 more, tried to
destroy the communal structures of
indigenous authority ”because they
were considered counterrevolutionary,
primitive and pre-ideological,”
Rumrrill explains.
Bolivia's Cárdenas, the only Indian
to reach the vice-presidency in Latin
America, maintains that indigenous
leadership in the region ”has to be
fully democratic, leaving behind
certain authoritarian temptations, and
rise to the historic challenge.”
But he also warned that ”the
political elite must comprehend once
and for all, before worse cases of
clashes and bloodshed erupt than those
seen recently in Bolivia, that
democracy cannot continue to exclude
indigenous peoples.”
(* Diego Cevallos is an IPS
correspondent. Kintto Lucas (Ecuador),
Jorge A. Grochembake (Guatemala) and
Abraham Lama (Peru) contributed to
this report. Originally published Nov.
1 by Latin American newspapers that
are part of the Tierramérica network.
Tierramérica is a specialised news
service produced by IPS with the
backing of the United Nations
Development Programme and the United
Nations Environment Programme.)
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