Donna Lee Van Cott. McNair Papers. National Defense U, 1996.
The cycle of Indian rebellion and government repression that characterized the first centuries of contact between European and Amerindian peoples can not yet be consigned to the history books. The eruption of an armed movement in southern Mexico, comprised primarily of destitute Maya Indians, as well as smaller demonstrations of resistance in Brazil, Ecuador, and elsewhere speaks eloquently to this fact. While the majority of conflicts between the estimated 40 million indigenous peoples in Latin America and the societies in which they live are now played out in the political arena, security issues continue to generate violent inter-ethnic conflict. Since the Conquest, the interests of indigenous communities usually have conflicted with national governments’ security policies. These include a dimension explicitly intended to control the autonomous tendencies of indigenous communities, suppress Indian political organizing, and erase the independent identity of Indian nations.
Relations between Latin America’s indigenous population and the state have always been militarized. The European conquistadors subdued native peoples with superior weapons and maintained control through force over the often rebellious indigenous populations of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies from administrative centers established in the viceroyalties and audiencias. After independence, the new states remained centralized, with the majority of the government apparatus located in the capital city and some important provincial commercial centers. By this time, the majority of the indigenous population had fled or been forced into the more remote areas of the country: the unexplored jungles, the highest mountain ranges, and along the blurry borders between the emerging nations. The borderlands were particularly desirable destinations, as they represented the furthest distance between the centralized power of adjacent states and thus the weakest zone of state power. Until very recently, these remote regions of indigenous population were controlled almost exclusively by two institutions: the Catholic Church, which in many countries received a mandate to care for the Indians’ bodies and souls; and the military, charged with maintaining the tranquility of the indigenous population, projecting the power of the state, and patrolling contested borders. Areas of commercial agricultural value were ruled by the large landholding classes, backed up by the military when necessary.
By the mid-20th century, little had changed in the indigenous regions of Latin America. From the highlands of Peru and Guatemala to Brazil, where the state remained a distant idea, the military represented state power to indigenous people. In the Amazon Basin. military presence increased, especially along the borders, under the national security regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, when military governments of the Amazonian countries—particularly Brazil—sent troops to defend and patrol their borders. Each encouraged the settlement of colonists in the vicinity to legitimize territorial claims.
Border Conflicts and the Struggle for Natural Resources
Prior to January 26, 1995, it would have been difficult to convince even experts on the region of the seriousness of border conflicts in Latin America. Machismo, hyper-nationalism, paranoia, and even illicit business opportunities are frequent excuses used to explain policies that mass troops along borders to defend against seemingly imaginary threats. When war broke out between Ecuador and Peru on that date, the unthinkable possibility of a shooting war between Latin American states became a reality, especially to the tens of thousands of Amerindians in villages along both sides of the border, who bore the brunt of months of military attacks. As soon as the first shots were fired, national Indian leaders from both countries appealed to the combatant governments and the international community to cease the fighting, which had resulted in the bombing of several Shuar communities and the evacuation of upwards of 8,000 Shuar from the area. Meanwhile, local leaders of that ethnic group fought each other from either side of the border. Both armies used Indian scouts to navigate the forbidding terrain of the theatre of conflict; the BBC reported that the Peruvian army used Indians as minesweepers to penetrate outposts (in Indian territory) mined by the Ecuadoreans. In mid-February, indigenous and environmental organizations called for the designation of a bi-national protected territory in the affected area and for donations of food and medicine for indigenous refugees.
The casualties suffered by indigenous border communities in Peru and Ecuador would be repeated if hostilities were to break out on other sensitive borders. Disputes remain unresolved between Guyana and Venezuela, which both claim 50,000 square miles of rainforest, and on Venezuela’s western flank, where a dispute with Colombia over the use of the Gulf of Venezuela and the Los Monjes islands flares up occasionally. Venezuelan troops also patrol the Arauca area, to prevent drugs and guerrillas from infiltrating their border with Colombia—particularly since February 26, 1995, when 120 to 150 Colombian guerrillas killed eight Venezuelan soldiers and wounded three others during a cross-border raid to steal weapons. As a result, both the Colombian mad Venezuelan militaries have increased their presence on the border. The aggressive defense along the frontier has led to violence against Indians mistaken for guerrillas and complaints by Indians of harassment during trips to visit relatives across the border. While unlikely to lead to armed action in the near future, Bolivia’s claim to a Pacific outlet in the region of Antofagasta remains hot politically, particularly in Bolivia.
The Ecuadorean military’s occupation of the disputed region following the 1942 settlement of the border conflict with Peru led in the early 1970s to the discovery of oil by the military in the Amazon. Control of this resource—a key source of foreign exchange for the heavily indebted country—fell into the hands of the armed forces. Today, retired Ecuadorian officers own large landholdings in the Amazon and have benefitted from the oil production and colonization boom promoted by the government in the 1980s. Thus, in Ecuador the exploitation of natural resources for national development—and for the enrichment of the military as an institution—has been an important reason for the militarization of areas populated by indigenous peoples, now considered rich in natural (particularly mineral) resources.
Brazil has long maintained a strong military presence in the Amazon to protect its borders and control the exploitation of mineral and timber resources. The first Brazilian government agency in charge of indigenous affairs was created in 1906 under the direction of the military, and it retained charge of indigenous policy until the creation of the National Foundation of the Indian (FUNAI) by the military dictatorship in 1967. Since the end of military rule in 1985, the government has promoted colonization and development of the Amazon in order to relieve economic and social pressures in the south and depressed northeast, to exploit the region’s vast resources, and to patrol its northern frontiers. The military has been on the defensive regarding control of the Amazon and its resources. The international community—particularly environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—began a campaign in the late 1980s to protect the Amazon rainforest from uncontrolled logging and burning of large tracts of land for environmentally unsustainable cattle ranching and commercial agriculture. The NGOs also mobilized to protect indigenous peoples and their territories from the illegal predations of garimpeiros (goldminers) and other fortune hunters who have invaded indigenous lands virtually with impunity.
The military is also concerned about the Indians because riley inhabit the border regions. Indian reserves cover 10 percent of Brazilian territory, although only half have been officially demarcated. Two of the largest groups, the Yanomami and the Macuxi, are along the borders of Venezuela and Guyana, respectively. The military is increasingly concerned that Indians will join with their ethnically related neighbors to pressure for an independent Indian state and has begun to lobby the central government regarding the entire Indian land situation. In February 1994, President Franco gave the National Defense Council authority to approve any further demarcations of Indian lands. In December of that year, the Brazilian Senate passed a bill requiring the National Defense Council to review all demarcations of Indian land in the frontier zone, as well as prior consultation with state governments prior to forwarding future demarcations to the federal congress for approval. According to the Indianist Missionary Council, such a procedure would make further demarcation of Indians lands unfeasible anywhere in Brazil.
The massacre of 16 Yanomami in August of 1993 by Brazilian garimpeiros on the Venezuelan side of the border drew the attention of the international community to the consequences of the Brazilian government’s failure to regulate economic activities in the Amazon or to prevent incursions by garimpeiros into Yanomami reserves. None of the miners accused in the 1993 massacre is in custody. According to the U.S. State Department’s 1994 human rights report for Brazil, about 2,500 garimpeiros reentered the Yanomami reserve in Roraima in 1994, setting off an epidemic of malaria and other diseases that killed at least 26 Yanomami.
In January 1995, the Pro-Indian Commission of Sao Paulo (CPI-SP) and the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) reported that 400 Macuxi Indians were expelled by the Roraima state military police and army from their own territory, where they were protesting the unlawful construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Cotingo River. In the process, the armed forces destroyed the Macuxis’ livestock holding area and three houses; seven Macuxi were beaten and two were seriously injured. According to NGOs in the area, violence against the Macuxi in the Raposa/Serra do Sol Indian area where they live has become commonplace; the U.S. State Department reports that four Macuxi were murdered in 1994. The state of Roraima has proceeded with construction of the dam despite the lack of congressional approval and the consent of the indigenous communities, as mandated by the 1988 Constitution. The Rainforest Action Network reports,
Military police and members of the Army continue to occupy the area. The Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) has asked FUNAI to remove the police from the area, and to request clarification from the Army about its participation in this illegal operation, and for the Federal Ministry to take all necessary measures.
On February 9, 1995, Brazilian Minister of Justice Nelson Jobim announced an army deployment to support the demarcation of Indian lands on the border with Guyana and Venezuela. Conflicts between the local Krikati Indians and nonindigenous peoples in the state of Maranhao had led to the assassination of Krikati leader Manuel Mendes on January 17, 1995. However, because of strong pressure from the military, the Justice Minister also announced his intentions to submit the land claim of the Macuxi in Roraima state to the National Defense Council. That decision was prompted by the Brazilian Senate in December of 1994, when it passed a bill to review all indigenous land demarcations in the frontier zone of the Amazon. The bill was sponsored by a senator from Roraima, and promoted by the armed forces. According to the Indianist Missionary Council (CIMI),
standing to gain from the bill are the economic groups who have a vested interest in exploiting the natural resources to be found in the Indian areas, and certain sectors of the military dissatisfied with the way in which the demarcation is currently carried out, and who maintain, erroneously, that Indian lands in the frontier zone present a threat to national sovereignty. There is an article in this Bill which would require approval of the National Defense Council for any future initiatives for the demarcation of Indian lands in the frontier zone. This Council is made up of the four military ministers (the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and is intended to be a consultative agency for the President of the Republic on issues relating to national sovereignty.
Meanwhile, on Brazil’s Bolivian border, CIMI reports that the Brazilian Army, which had occupied and registered ownership of I’nsua Island, is resisting the federally ordered demarcation of the island as an Indian Area. The local commander has refused to allow the Guato Indians, who were expelled from the island by cattle ranchers in 1925, to resettle their land. According to the Indians’ supporters, the army’s claim of national security is a cover for the main reason land demarcation of Indian areas has been stalled: pressure from powerful political and economic interests in border states who covet the natural resources on those lands.
Counterinsurgency Policy
The relationship between indigenous peoples and armed insurgents, drug traffickers, and security forces is a complex one. As noted above, indigenous peoples inhabit the more remote regions, especially those straddling international borders. Guerrilla groups and drug traffickers inhabit these regions for the same reasons: they are excellent places to evade the short reach of the state, to base offensive operations, and from which to retreat across international borders. As a result, where guerrilla movements, drug traffickers, and indigenous peoples share territory—most notably in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru—Indians must struggle to establish a working relationship between themselves and the various armed groups in the region. In order to address the challenge of subversive armed movements, governments—particularly military governments—in the hemisphere have targeted groups in society considered inherently subversive or susceptible to the influence of communist groups. Indian community and political organizations are among those targeted.
Since the 1960s, Indians in Colombia have fought for independence from the FARC, M-19, ELN, and other guerrillas based in rural areas, fending off attempts by the insurgents to infiltrate their political organizations and coerce their support. At the same time, they suffer from attacks by their Colombian security forces, who assume the Indians support the guerrillas:
The contradictions increased during the 1980s, a period of “total war” against the various guerrilla organizations. These organizations, in turn, aware of the government repression of the Indians, made repeated entreaties to involve them in their armed struggle, while the Indians searched harder for ways to protect themselves from both fronts without abandoning their own struggle for revindication. There were various nonaggression accords between cabildos (indigenous towns) and guerrilla organizations but, as the “total war” came to be a “dirty war,” the Indians remained between both fronts—as usually happens—suffering deaths and repression, as much from the FARC mad M-19 as from the army. police, and the “pajaros” or assassins in the pay of the landowners.
Similarly, Peruvian Indians are caught between the brutal Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas and the scorched-earth tactics of the Peruvian military. In the period 1983-1986, thousands of Peruvian campesinos (peasant farmers) were killed by Peruvian troops gunning for Shining Path members and sympathizers. Campesinos in the highland areas controlled by the Shining Path were slaughtered by both sides in the guerrilla war, each side assuming that the largely neutral campesinos supported the other. By the late 1980s, the Peruvian military had changed its strategy to one of working with campesino communities—often organized into self-defense rondas—to fight the Shining Path. This strategy ultimately succeeded, with far less violent consequences for the indigenous population.
On the run from the beefed-up intelligence and targeted counterinsurgency tactics of the Peruvian military in the highlands, the Shining Path remains a potent force in the Amazon. Thousands of Ashaninka, who number in the tens of thousands, have been forced to join the guerrillas or pressed into service to provide an economic base for the Shining Path, often through production of coca leaf. While the Ashaninka have resisted the guerrillas, they have less access to resources such as weapons with which to defend themselves than do highland Indians. As a result, the U.S. Department of State estimates that:
between 20-40 Ashaninka communities have disappeared as a result of Sendero violence, and that more than 10,000 have been displaced. As many as 3,000 Ashaninkas may be trapped in zones under Sendero oppression. In late August [1994], unconfirmed reports indicated that common graves with the bodies of Ashaninka natives were discovered; the authorities said riley believed the graves may contain the remains of victims of Sendero violence.
The Shining Path also took advantage of land conflicts between indigenous colonists from the highlands and local Indian communities to lure Indians into their ranks: some 60 Ashaninka Indians were killed by a Shining Path unit containing Indian conscripts on August 18, 1993. According to Eusebio Castro, all Ashaninka and vice president of AIDESEP, one of Peru’s two Amazon Indian confederations, the presence and violence of the Shining Path have diminished somewhat in the more settled areas of the jungle, where the Peruvian military and police now maintain a foothold. In rural areas, particularly where there are no good roads, Indian communities must defend themselves. While the Ashaninka successfully expelled from their territory the now nearly defunct Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in the early 1990s, ejecting the Shining Path is proving more difficult.
In 1987 the balance began to shift from the majority of violence against Indians being perpetrated by the military toward a greater role for the Shining Path, which currently accounts for the majority of abuses against Indians. According to Peruvian sociologist Maria Isabel Remy, domination and intimidation were part of the Shining Path’s strategy. Indigenous communities increasingly allied themselves with the army in order to defend themselves. In the beginning, however, the Peruvian Government mistook the Shining Path for a social movement with broad appeal among the marginalized indigenous population:
The action of a Maoist party organized with strict discipline and solid dogma was not analyzed; rather, the phenomenon was perceived as a sort of popular uprising against poverty, marginalization, and injustice. Moreover, in the early 1980s it was seen as an indigenous movement, a sort of “caste war.” Depending on the anthropological current, it was identified as “millenarian” or “indigenous”; it was the “revenge of the centuries,” “the Andean utopia,” the pachakut’i. This ultimately mistaken view of the violence—urban, distant, and culturalist—also had a military interpretation that drove a strategy of brutal repression of the population by the army. An indio (and if from Ayacucho, “all the worse) was identified as a real or potential member of the Shining Path. In this context the army attacked and occupied peasant population centers. Fear and distrust of the “other” led any soldier seeing a puna Indian wearing a poncho to suspect that weapons might be hidden under the poncho, and would fire first and find out later. The army was an army of occupation.
Indeed, the Shining Path had some initial support in rural areas where conditions of government neglect favored the introduction of some authoritative power. The Shining Path had little to offer but violence, however, and community support plummeted.
The Guatemalan military has always considered the country’s majority Mayan population to be a base of support for the country’s decades-old guerrilla forces, organized under the umbrella of the National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity (URNG). Since 1962, the military-controlled government’s attitude toward the country’s majority Mayan population has increasingly reflected national security concerns that this population harbored a potential and actual threat of communism. That preoccupation with communism emanating from the rural population dates back to concerns about Bolshevism in the 1920s, as well as fears of a contagion from the 1932 rural rebellion in El Salvador, which contained a large Indian component. Anthropologist Richard Adams identifies a crucial shift in relations of the Guatemalan military with the Maya population following the expansion of the insurgency in the 1970s, when the military actively began attacking Indian targets, “eradicating at least 410 Mayan communities, killing an estimated 50,000 people and propelling at least two to five hundred thousand refugees into Mexico and the United States.”
The URNG is a class-based leftist movement founded by ladinos. It is not an “Indian” movement, and its political agenda is not based on the cultural and ethnic demands made by the country’s many Mayan political and social associations. Still, the unprovoked repression by the military of the indigenous population led thousands of Maya to join the URNG to defend their communities, to avoid forced recruitment into the Army’s Civil Self-Defense Patrols or to topple a government that had long-repressed and despised the Maya. The distinction between the URNG and the Mayan political movement, however, remains clear: Mayan organizations insist on representing their own interests in the on-again, off-again peace negotiations between the government and the insurgents. Mayan groups such as the Council of Maya Organizations of Guatemala (COMG) were particularly angered to learn that one of the topics of discussions between the URNG and the government—from which the Mayan organizations had been excluded—was to be “identity and rights of the indigenous peoples.” As a Maya-Caqchiquel writer recently put it, the “dialogue for peace” is seen as a “monologue” between two [ladino] minorities who basically maintain the colonial discourse.”
Indigenous rights and identity issues have delayed resolution of the 34-year-old insurgency. In February of 1995, following four rounds of talks between the URNG and the Guatemalan government on the indigenous issues, key obstacles remained, including measures that would lead to the ratification of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, which would require reform of the Guatemalan Constitution. Convention 169 recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples to regional linguistic autonomy and self-government. Also in the balance were demands for recognition of the existence of Mayan communities in Guatemala and their systems of justice, ideas that are anathema to the country’s elites. The country remains one of the few in the hemisphere whose constitution fails to define its indigenous population or to grant it any special protections.
The guerrillas in Guatemala may be using the indigenous issue to maintain the support of the militant Maya groups. They can thus demand the type of profound social reform that the government would not accept, perpetuating the armed struggle until the “correlation of forces improves,” while maintaining a posture of willingness to negotiate. According to the Central American Report, indigenous rights issues are of strategic importance to the URNG in terms of its immediate political future and credibility among civil society groups. The guerrillas had been criticized sharply by Maya organizations when they signed a human rights agreement with the government that failed to include investigation and punishment for past human rights violations. The Coordinator of Mayan People of Guatemala (COPMAGUA), a group composed of four federations representing about 300 Maya organizations, has made it clear that it will not endorse a peace agreement that does not make radical reforms in the law and politics of what they call the “racist, ethnocentrist, exclusive, homogenising, centralist, classist and militarist” nature of the Guatemalan state. The COPMAGUA has called for reforms similar to those recently made in Colombia and Bolivia, recognizing the pluricultural and multilingual nature of the Guatemalan state.
In Mexico City, on March 31, 1995, the government of Guatemala and the URNG signed the Accord on the Identity and Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, an historic agreement that will require the Guatemalan Congress to ratify the controversial provisions discussed above, among others. While the government finally capitulated to demands for constitutional reform in order to lay to rest this phase of the peace process, the largest party in congress, the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front (RFG), led by former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, threatened to block passage of any agreement that requires constitutional changes and has thus far blocked ratification of ILO 169. As do their counterparts in Ecuador, Guatemala’s military and political Right consider indigenous autonomy commensurate to the creation of “states within a state” and, as such, a direct threat to the existence of the “nation-state.” It now appears that the Guatemalan Government and the guerillas have finally completed the peace accords, and a new congress appears likely to approve them.
While the majority of guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America are class-based, nonindigenous movements, there are several instances of Indian-led guerrilla movements and others where the leadership and ethnic orientation of the movement are murky. The most clear-cut case of an Indian armed movement is the Quintin Lame, formed in 1981 by Indians in the Cauca region of southwestern Colombia to defend indigenous communities from attacks by guerrillas, drug traffickers, local landowners, and state security forces. During the years of its existence it had only 100 to 300 members. While the Colombian government considered the group to be no different than the country’s other insurgencies, the Quintin Lame was a local self-defense movement with no national political or military aspirations. On May 31, 1991, one month alter a Quintin Lame representative, Alfonso Pena Chepe took his oath as a member of the National Constitutional Assembly, the group put down its weapons and became a legal political organization. Attacks against Colombian Indian leaders continue, however. Seven community leaders of the Zenu tribe were murdered in 1994. as was Indian rights activist Laureano Inampue. Attacks from the Colombian guerrillas continue to be a problem. A spate of attacks against indigenous communities in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region occurred in September of 1994, in which FARC guerrillas executed four Indians suspected of collaborating with the army.
In Bolivia, several tiny armed movements have emerged from the more militant factions of the Katarista movement, a self-consciously ethnic strain of the Indian political movement of the late 1980s. These include the Red Offensive of the Katarist Ayllus, the FAL-Willka, and the larger Tupaj Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK). Two groups—Zarate Wilka and the Nestor Paz Zamora National Liberation Army—were all but dismantled by the Bolivian army following their assassinations of U.S. missionaries mad a prominent businessman. Heightened anxiety in Bolivia about armed insurgencies cropping up in that country, in light of the possible inspiration and rumored infiltration of the neighboring Shining Path, led the Bolivian security forces to root out and dismantle these weak groups. According to anthropologist Xavier Albo, these Marxist-Leninist, mostly urban-based movements use Indian names and slogans and the indigenous banner to attract support from the countryside.
In Ecuador, the guerrilla group known by the Quichua name Puka Inti (Red Sun, or Sol Roja, in Spanish), rumored to be influenced or supported by the Shining Path, has been vigorously suppressed by the military. While the military has claimed that Puka Inti is tied to the indigenous movement, its base is in the student movement in Guayaquil. Some former indigenous members of the now-defunct Ecuadorian subversive group Alfaro Vive, Carajo (Alfaro Lives, Damnit), are currently working peaceably within the nonviolent Indian political organizations.
Finally, the degree to which the Mexican Zapatistas (the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN) can be considered an Indian guerrilla movement merits discussion. The particular blend of circumstances that led to the foundation and later transformation of this movement, the unusual composition of its participants and their supporters, and the mix of ethnic, cultural, and traditionally leftist demands that comprise its stated political agenda, make the Zapatista movement an anomaly among both guerrilla organizations and indigenous movements in Latin America. The EZLN was created from the merging of two primary forces. The first was composed of a small group of nonindigenous, non-Chiapan intellectuals, formerly members of Mexico’s seminal leftist guerrilla organizations, which were mostly dismantled by the Mexican army in the 1960s and 1970s. These revolutionaries moved their base of operations to eastern Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala in the early 1980s. The second force was composed of a small group of militant Indian activists who in 1977 decided to take up arms against the government. They split from the burgeoning nonviolent indigenous political movement in Chiapas and migrated to the Lacandon jungle.
The EZLN was founded in 1983 by the combined Indian and non-Indian revolutionary forces in the Lacandon. The group failed to gain much attention or support until the early 1990s, when the collapse of international coffee prices, which bankrupted many campesino cooperatives, coincided with the abrupt suspension of agricultural subsidies and fueled increasing dissatisfaction among the state’s indigenous population. The product of the marriage of these two militant forces was an organization with the structure, strategy, military nomenclature, and much of the rhetoric of a Marxist armed movement, but with distinctively Indian features as well: a consensual, community-based method of decisionmaking; a political agenda that contains many of the substantive demands of the nonviolent indigenous movement of Chiapas, as well as its characteristic call for dignity, self-determination and respect for indigenous culture and identity; and a primarily Mayan membership, a significant number of whom speak only indigenous languages.
Counterdrug Politics
Because of steep drops in world agricultural commodity prices and neoliberal reforms that removed state supports for peasant agriculture during the 1980s—which fueled unrest in Chiapas—hundreds of thousands of campesinos throughout Latin America now make their living growing marijuana, heroin poppies, or coca leaf. For many it is the only crop from which they can make a living, as drug traffickers pay cash up front and pick up the crop at its source, eliminating the need for long and costly trips to market centers. As growers, they are at the mercy of the region’s mostly non-Indian drug traffickers, sometimes in collusion with the local military or police. In Peru and Colombia, links between the guerrillas and drug traffickers complicate the already volatile mix of interests in rural areas.
This violence against Indians is not due to discrimination but to the fact that the people who grow marijuana, heroin poppies, and coca in the Andean countries are Indians. Even when not involved as growers, they are the targets of paramilitary and drug cartels violence because they are involved in disputes over the land the drug cartels occupy, legally or illegally. As noted elsewhere in this study, disputes over land are the main focus of violent altercations between Indians and non-Indians. Ethnicity is not a motivator of this drug-related violence, but it is an important factor in devising a solution to the problem: the authorities must be sensitive to the cultural issues involved in the violence against indigenous peoples because of their ties to the drug business.
In December of 1991, at a Colombian hacienda called El Nilo, 20 Paez Indians, including women and children, were gunned down by over 60 hooded gunmen. Human rights groups, Colombian indigenous organizations, and Colombian government officials have linked the killers to drug traffickers and members of the Colombian army in their employ, and attribute the massacre to a land dispute between the Indians and neighboring drug traffickers. While the Colombian government and indigenous organizations have signed numerous agreements to halt the cultivation of poppies for heroin production, according to Jesus Avirama, a leader of the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca, production continues today due to the government’s repeated failure to fulfill promises of development assistance.
Coca production is the only source of income for the majority of the 300,000 campesinos of Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley, which is ideally suited for coca growing. The crop nets the growers from 4 to 34 times as much as cacao and corn, the leading alternative crops, and buyers come directly to the growers, eliminating the problem of hauling agricultural products to market down a deteriorating single access highway. The Shining Path has targeted the valley for its economic value and has come to control the region’s lucrative drug trade, protecting growers from antidrug operations of the Peruvian government and extracting huge fees per flight from drug traffickers entering the area for pick ups.
President Fujimori has stressed, at least rhetorically, alternative crop production in Peru’s effort to fight the drug war, a policy that conflicts with U.S. preference for eradication. The Bolivian government has taken a similar approach, given the dependence of a large part of Bolivia’s indigenous population on coca production and the paucity of development alternatives. Nevertheless, according to Healy, the wealthy and strong drug-trafficking groups, not the coca growers, are the main obstacle to eradication. Moreover, the weight of the coca trade in the Bolivian economy—worth 75 percent of the country’s legal exports—is far greater in Bolivia than in the more diversified Colombian and Peruvian economies.
Healy estimates that some 500,000 indigenous farmers are involved in the coca trade. In Bolivia, where growing the traditional coca leaf for medicinal or traditional purposes is legal, the coca growers are represented by a well-organized and militant union, the National Association of Coca Producers (ANAPCOCA). Through it they have engaged in numerous public protests, hunger strikes, rallies, and road blockades to impede government efforts to control production and distribution of coca leaf. Some protests have ended in violence, such as a 1987 Cochabamba blockade that left six campesinos dead. The coca growers responded by occupying the Chapare offices of UMOPAR, the antidrug police. The UMOPAR killed 10 more peasants before the conflict ended, further fueling the militancy of the union. According to Healy a “police-state environment” prevails in the Chapare and growers are continually harassed by UMOPAR and agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
On April 18, 1995, the Bolivian government ordered a 90-day state of siege to break up increasingly militant and disruptive strikes by teachers and other union activists, leading to almost daily clashes with police in La Paz. The government took advantage of the state of siege to arrest Evo Morales, leader of ANAPCOCA, and over 300 other labor leaders, jailing them in remote areas of the country. Five days later, over I00 coca growers protesting the incarceration of Morales were jailed in the Chapare, where they clashed with police and the army. While most of the jailed labor leaders were released 10 days later following a Church-mediated agreement, Morales remained in jail until the end of May.
While alternative agricultural development appears to be the only option to wean the coca growers from dependence on the drug trade, the Chapare jungle, where the majority of coca leaf is cultivated and where campesinos from throughout the country have migrated in search of agricultural land, is a tropical rainforest unsuited for commercial agriculture. Given the lack of opportunities in other parts of the country for the 800,000-plus families living in the Chapare, the current situation is not likely to change in the near future.
Conclusion
Many countries in the Western Hemisphere are trying to address the challenges posed by the marginalization of indigenous peoples and the consequences of years of severe poverty, discrimination, and violence. Particularly urgent is the creation of a process for addressing the particular economic challenges indigenous peoples now encounter in the face of expanding regional and international trading regimes. In 1994, two violent altercations occurred between indigenous organizations and the military as responses to the adoption by governments of neoliberal economic policies that threatened the existence of Indian communities: the January 1994 Chiapas insurgency and the June 1994 demonstrations by Ecuadorean Indians protesting the government’s unconstitutional promulgation of an agricultural modernization law that privatized water rights, removed protections for communal lands, and otherwise threatened smallholder agricultural interests. Five Indians died during the latter, which lasted several weeks and cut off food supplies to several major cities.
The economic policies that helped provoke these incidents are being implemented in other hemispheric countries, in preparation for subregional and hemispherewide economic integration. Peru’s 1993 Constitution weakened legal protections for indigenous land tenure, and the process of privatizing water rights has already begun. The Council of All the Lands (Consejo de Todas Las Tierras), representing the Mapuche Indians, sponsored a meeting of 70 indigenous leaders from Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru during December 1994, in Temuco, Chile, to discuss the implications for Indians of NAFTA and pending free-trade arrangements. They are especially concerned about changes in access to land and natural resources, intellectual property protection of indigenous knowledge, economic development, and the weakening of their identity as indigenous peoples. At that meeting, Mapuche leader Aucan Huilcaman warned that the extension of NAFTA to Chile would cause, as in Mexico, the removal of protections for indigenous land fights. He called on the NAFTA parties to enact special protections of indigenous rights once Chile joins the pact.
The spirit of cooperation established by the December 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas provides the region’s governments the opportunity to further the process of economic integration throughout the hemisphere. However, while economic integration is a good thing, it is currently being done in ways that are destructive to indigenous communities and which provoke intense opposition on the part of Indians. Thus, regional governments should be more sensitive to these problems and take advantage of the climate of increased regional cooperation to promote a dialogue on the impact of economic policy on Indians. The result will be decreased interethnic hostility and violence between indigenous communities and the state, increased social peace (security), and democratic stability. In addition, security policies that endeavor to work with, rather than against, indigenous interests to dislodge guerrillas and drug traffickers and manage international borders would ease conflict and may lead to the demilitarization of indigenous territory.
The indigenous groups all work toward the same goal—reaching a modus vivendi between governments and Indians. There is no blanket solution for all, because there are so many complex issues involving so many different countries and cultural contexts. For example, deciding which agency of the military or police should enforce certain antidrug operations will depend on whether the state, national, or local police is the primary agent; whether drugs are a problem of specific regions; whether the police are more competent than the military; and what role the constitution provides for the police and military. These factors vary widely from country to country. Similarly, the posture of Indian groups toward state authority varies dramatically from the confrontational stance of Chile’s Mapuche (who were severely repressed during the Pinochet regime) and the cooperative stance of the Colombian national and regional indigenous organizations, who mostly speak Spanish and have waged effective battles in the country’s courts. The best strategy for each depends on the history of inter-ethic relations in each country (and within regions of each country) and the feasibility of a cooperative versus confrontational approach.
The most important focal point for change, nonetheless, is resolving indigenous land tenure rights. Most, if not all outbreaks of hostility have resulted from incursions on Indian lands, the basis of their economic and cultural stability and survival. Working to resolve this problem will encourage economic stability for Indian groups, contributing to political stability and national security.