Indigenous Peoples On Move
By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2003

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.