[News] Indigenous Movements in the Americas Building Autonomies
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Feb 29 11:29:06 EST 2008
Indigenous Movements in the Americas: From Demand
for Recognition to Building Autonomies
http://americas.irconline.org/am/5020?utm_source=streamsend&utm_medium=email&utm_content=318212&utm_campaign=Indigenous%20Autonomies%20Built%20in%20the%20Americas%20%7C%20Francisco%20L%F3pez%20Barcenas
Francisco López Bárcenas | February 26, 2008
Translated from:
<http://ircamericas.org/esp/4948>Autonomías
Indígenas en América: de la demanda de reconocimiento a su construcción
Translated by: Maria Roof
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)
<http://americas.irc-online.org/>americas.irc-online.org
"In the struggle for a freed Latin America, in
opposition to the obedient voices of those who
usurp its official representation, there arises
now, with invincible power, the genuine voice of
the people, a voice that rises from the depths of
its tin and coal mines, from its factories and
sugar mills, from its feudal lands, where
obedient to usurpers of their official function,
now rises with invincible power, the genuine
voice of the masses of people, a voice that
emerges from the bowels of coal and tin mines,
from factories and sugarcane fields, from the
feudalistic lands where rotos, cholos, gauchos,
jíbaros, heirs of Zapata and Sandino, grip the weapons of their freedom."
Havana Declaration, 1960
Latin America is living a time of autonomy
movements, especially for indigenous autonomy.
The demand became a central concern in national
indigenous movements in the 1990s and intensified in the early 21st century.
Not that it didn't exist before. On the contrary,
demands for autonomy have permeated struggles of
resistance and emancipation by indigenous peoples
since the conquestSpanish in some cases,
Portuguese in othersand the establishment of
nation-states, since the rebellions against
colonial power by Tupac Amaru, Tupac Katari, and
Bartolina Sisa in the Andes and Jacinto Canek in
Mayan lands; by Willka Pablo Zarate in Bolivia,
and Tetabiate and Juan Banderas among the Yaquis
in Mexico during the republican period [1800s];
Emiliano Zapata in Mexico and Manuel Quintín Lame
in Colombia in the 20th century; and on into the
20th and 21st centuries with the Zapatista rebellion in Mayan areas.
These struggles have included among their most
important demands the same utopian proposals that
arise from peoples demanding full rights,
territories, natural resources, self-defined
organizational methods and political
representation before state entities, exercise of
internal justice based on their own law,
conservation and evolution of their cultures, and
elaboration and implementation of their own development plans.
This is not a small matter. From the beginning of
the 21st century, the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) warned that indigenous movements would be
one of the main challenges to national
governments over the following 15 years and that
they would "increase, facilitated by
transnational networks of indigenous rights
activists and supported by well-funded
international human rights and environmental
groups. Tensions will intensify in the area from
Mexico through the Amazon region ... ."1
More recently, United States Deputy Secretary of
State, John Dimitri Negroponte, referring to
victory by the indigenous Aymara Evo Morales Ayma
in the Bolivian presidential elections, averred
that subversive movements are misusing the
benefits of democracy, which endangers the
stability of nation-states throughout Latin America.
Indigenous movements and their struggle for
autonomy are a concern for dominant economic and
political groups because they are a part of other
social movements in Latin America that are
resisting neoliberal policies and their effects
on people. They are also an integral part of the
broad social sectors supporting alternative
proposals that would help us resolve the crisis
in which the world finds itself.
But in contrast to others, indigenous peoples
movements and organizations are more radical and
deeper in their framing of the issues, as is
apparent in their choice of the means of
strugglemostly pacific, but when that is not
possible, with the use of violenceand also
because their demands require a profound
transformation of national states and
institutions that would practically lead us to a
re-founding of nation-states in Latin America.
The reclamation by indigenous peoples of
recognition of their autonomy has another
component that gives pause to the hegemonic
classes wielding power in Latin American states
where movements occur. Movements arise precisely
at a time when states begin to undergo a serious
weakening, a product of the push by international
economic forces to move them out of the public
sphere and reduce them in practice to simple
managers of capitalistic interests.
Paradoxically, these same classes scream to high
heaven that states will fall apart if the
indigenous peoples' demands are metdemands for
reformation or re-founding of states to make them
more functional for the multiculturalism of their
populations. But the reality is quite different,
because if a new state were established with
indigenous peoples recognized as autonomous
political subjects, surely it would be
strengthened, and then free market economic
forces would lose their hegemony in the crafting of anti-popular policies.
This argument has been used by those in power to
design counterinsurgency policies against social
movements and their allies, under the guise of
defense of national sovereignty, as has happened
in different ways. In some cases, for example,
Bolivia and Mexico, the state directly confronted
the indigenous movements, even mobilizing its
military without respecting the constitution. In
other places like Panama and Nicaragua, and to a
certain extent in Ecuador, especially in the
Andean region, the use of an "encircling
strategy" has been adopted in order to recover lost spaces.
In these cases there is no violent confrontation,
because political parties are used as a means of
control, offering channels to power that become
forms of control and disarticulation. Another
strategy is isolation, used in Brazil and part of
Ecuador, where an open field has been left for
transnational companies exploiting natural
resources to directly confront indigenous
discontent, while the state acts as if nothing were happening.2
Let's be clear: indigenous peoples in Latin
America struggle for autonomy because in the 21st
century, they are still colonies. The
19th-century wars for independence ended foreign
colonizationSpanish and Portuguese, but those
who rose to power continued to view indigenous
peoples as colonies. The hegemonic classes hid
these colonies behind the mask of individual
rights and juridical equality, proclaimed by that
century's liberalism, and now, given proof of the
falsity of that argument, they hide behind the
discourse of conservative multiculturalism,
apparent in legal reforms that recognize cultural
differences in the population, although the state
continues to act as if they did not exist.
Meanwhile, Latin American indigenous peoples
suffered and continue to suffer from the power of
internal colonialism. That is why indigenous
movements, in contrast to other types of social
movements, are struggles of resistance and
emancipation. That is why their demands coalesce
in the struggle for autonomy; that is why the
concern among imperialist forces increases as the
movements grow; that is why achievement of their
demands implies the re-founding of national states.
500 Years of Resistance
In 1992, indigenous movements substantively
revised their forms of political actions and
their demands in the context of the continental
campaign of 500 years of indigenous, black, and
popular resistance, in which different indigenous
movements on the American continent protested
against government-supported celebrations of five
centuries since the European invasion, or so-called "discovery."
First, indigenous movements ceased to be
appendices to rural farmer movements, which had
always put them last in their participation as
well as their reclamations, and became political
subjects themselves. Then, they denounced the
internal colonialism exercised against them in
the nation-states where they lived, revealed
"indigenism" as a policy to mask their colonial
situation, and demanded their right to
self-determination as the peoples that they are.
Nicaragua is an exceptional case because, after
the counterrevolution adopted ethnic discourse,
it established regional autonomies in 1987 in
order to deactivate the armed opposition, and
this, over time, also effectively deactivated the
indigenous movement. Except for this case, since
1992 indigenous movements are movements of
resistance and emancipation: resistance in order
to not cease to be peoples; emancipation in order
to not continue being colonies. Ethnic
reclamations were conjoined with class reclamations.
The axis of the indigenous movements' demands
became the right to free determination expressed in autonomy.
Since 1966, the UN Pacts on Civil and Political
Rights and on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights recognized peoples' right to free
determination and, as a result, to freely
establish their political condition, as well as
make decisions about their economic, social, and
cultural development. The recognized right
included the free administration of natural
resources for their own benefit, without ignoring
the necessity of international cooperation based on mutual benefit.
Indigenous movements demand not only rights for
individuals but also for collectives, for the
peoples they are part of. Their demand is not
limited to making state institutions fulfill
their functions but also change. They demand not
lands but territories. They ask not that they be
allowed to exploit the natural resources in their
territories, but that they be granted ownership
of them. They demand that justice be administered
not only according to state law, but also in
recognition of their right to administer justice
themselves and in accordance with their own laws.
They seek not development plans designed for
them, but recognition of their right to direct
their own development. They want their own
cultures recognized and respected instead of only
the dominant culture. Indigenous peoples do not
want to continue as colonies, but rather, as peoples with full rights.
These reclamations by indigenous movements opened
a new period in the history of indigenous rights,
which first became visible when Latin American
nation-states that had not already revised their
political constitutions and internal legislation
to incorporate recognition of indigenous peoples
and guarantee their collective rights, did so. A
legislative fever was unleashed, but legislation
was passed so that the political class would not
lose legitimacy, more than to recognize rights.
In this way, except for a few places like Chile,
almost all states revised their political
constitutions to incorporate indigenous peoples and their rights.
Autonomous Tendencies
When indigenous peoples realized that their
struggle for constitutional recognition of their
rights had not produced the desired results, they
focused their efforts on building de facto
autonomies. Some movements that already had
shifted in this direction grew more powerful, as
others began the long path of making the shift.
To accomplish this, they appealed to what they
had: their cultures, histories of resistance,
organic structures, relations with other social
movements, and concrete realities in their countries.
On different levels during the 1990s, Latin
American states noticed transformations in the
indigenous movements that had struggled since the
prior decade to reclaim their rights. Some
movements transcended local struggles and broke
national barriers, achieving more notoriety than
others. Indigenous movements for autonomy were a
social phenomenon seen in all of Latin America.
Just when worker and rural farmer movements were
weakening from Mesoamerica to Patagonia,
indigenous movements were reactivating, much to the concern of neoliberals.
Community-based autonomies arose as a concrete
expression of indigenous peoples' resistance to
colonialism and their struggle for emancipation.
Since the majority of indigenous peoples were
politically de-structured, and communities were
the concrete expression of their existence, when
indigenous movements propelled the struggle for
their self-determination as peoples, it was the
communities that defended the right. To do this,
they used their centuries-old experience in
resistance, but also their self-generative
experiences within the farm workers movement.
Entrenched in community structures, indigenous
movements forcefully made themselves heard, and
in many cases, states had no alternative other
than yielding to their demands. The strongest
proof of this is that most Latin American
legislation on indigenous rights recognizes the
juridical personhood of indigenous communities
and enunciates some of the competencies states
recognize in them, all the while requiring, as
stated in the recognitions, their conformity to the framework of state law.
Another tendency among indigenous autonomies is
the regional autonomy proposal. It arose in
response to the need to surpass the community
space of indigenous peoples and seek spaces not
only larger than the community, but also beyond
local state governments. Its first expression was
in the autonomous regions in Nicaragua,
introduced as a form of government in the 1987
Political Constitution of the State. Since this
event, unprecedented in Latin America, it spread
to other countries through intellectuals close to
indigenous reclamations, to the extent that in
some countries, such as Mexico and Chile,3
proposals were put forth for constitutional
reforms and statutes of autonomy. In others, it
remained one more tendency in the struggle for
indigenous autonomy but without any concrete expression.
As on many other occasions, indigenous movements
themselves resolved the "contradiction" between
community proponents and regionalists. When the
occasion presented itself, first they showed that
the proposals were not contradictory, but rather,
complementary. This has been very clear in Mexico
with the Zapatista Caracoles communities, but
also in the community police in the state of
Guerrero. The same is happening in the Cauca
region of Colombia and in the Cochabamba
Department in Bolivia. In all these cases it has
been demonstrated that communities function as a
foundation for building regional structure, which
is the roof for autonomy, and they can combine
effectively, because regional autonomy is not
imposed from above, but occurs as a process that
consolidates the communal autonomies that then decide the scope of the region.
Together with the community and regional
tendencies there are other indigenous movements
that do not demand autonomies but the re-founding
of nation-states based on indigenous cultures.
This is the tendency most apparent in the various
movements in the Andean region of the continent,
especially among the Aymara in Bolivia.
Participants in these movements say they do not
understand why, since their population is larger
than the mestizos, they should adapt to the political will of minorities.
Many Latin American governments have coopted the
indigenous movement's discourse, emptied it of
meaning, and begun to speak of a "new
relationship between the indigenous peoples and
the government," and to elaborate "transversal
policies" with the participation of all
interested parties, when in reality they continue
to posit the same old indigenist programs that indigenous peoples reject.
In order to legitimize their discourse and
actions, they have incorporated into public
administration a few indigenous leaders who had
long worked for autonomy and now serve as a
screen to depict as change what actually is
continuity. Some countries have gone further by
denaturing the autonomy demand and presenting it
as a mechanism by which certain privileged
sectors maintain their privileges. This is the
case among the bourgeoisies in the departments of
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Guayaquil,
Ecuador, and the state of Zilia in Venezuela.
If one assumes that autonomy is a concrete
expression of the right to free determination,
and that this is a right held by peoples, it
cannot be forgotten that the titular subjects of
indigenous rights are the indigenous peoples, not
their communities, much less the organizations
that they build to propel their struggle. This is
why along with building autonomies, indigenous
movements assume a commitment to their own
reconstitution. At this particular juncture,
given the fragmentation among the majority of
indigenous peoples, communities are important to
articulate their resistance struggles and
building of autonomies, but movements do not
renounce the utopia of reconstituting the
indigenous peoples of which they are a part, so
that the peoples can assume the holdership of
rights. For this reason the defense of community
rights is made at the same time as they establish
relations with other communities and peoples in
their countries and elsewhere, to support each
other in their particular demands, but also hoist common demands.
An external problem to becoming political
subjects encountered by indigenous peoples is
that in the majority of cases, they are
politically de-structured, affected by the
politics of colonialism wielded through
government entities in order to subject them to
the interests of the class in power. A concrete
example of such politics is that numerically
larger indigenous peoples find themselves divided
between various states or departments, and the
smaller ones between different towns,
municipalities, or mayoralties, depending on how
states organize local governments.
Indigenous peoples know that in this situation
the construction of autonomies can rarely be done
from those spaces, because even if they were in
control of local governments, their structure and
functioning would follow state logic, limiting
their faculties to those that are functional to
state control; but in the worst of the cases it
could turn out that, in the name of indigenous
rights, power is handed over to the mestizo
groups led by local cacique bosses, that would
use it against indigenous peoples.
On the other hand, they know that indigenous
communities composed of one people find
themselves divided and in conflict for diverse
reasons that run from land ownership, use of
natural resources, and religious beliefs, to
political preferences, among others. In other
cases fictitious or invented problems are created
by actors outside the communities.
To confront these problems interested indigenous
peoples make efforts to identify the causes for
division and conflict, locate those that
originate in the communities' own problems, and
seek solutions. At the same time, they try to
determine problems created from the outside and seek ways to repulse them.
The struggle for the installation of autonomous
indigenous governments represents an effort by
indigenous peoples themselves to construct
political regimes different from the current
ones, where they and the communities that form
them can organize their own governments, with
specific faculties and competencies regarding their internal life.
With the decision to build autonomies, indigenous
peoples seek to disperse power in order to
achieve its direct exercise by the indigenous
communities that demand it. It is a sort of
decentralization that has nothing to do with that
pushed by the government with the support of
international institutions, which actually
endeavors to enhance government control over
society. The decentralization we are talking
about, the one that indigenous peoples and
communities advancing toward autonomy are showing
us, includes the creation of paralegal forms to
exercise power that are different from government
entities, where communities can strengthen
themselves and make their own decisions.
When indigenous peoples decide to build
autonomies, they have made a decision that goes
against state policies and forces those who
choose that path to begin political processes to
build networks of power capable of withstanding
state attack, counter-powers that will allow them
to establish themselves as a force with which
governance must be negotiated, and alternative
powers that will oblige the state to take them
into account. This is why building autonomies
cannot be a volunteerist act by "enlightened"
leaders or an organization, no matter how indigenous it claims to be.
In any case, it requires the direct participation
of indigenous communities in the processes toward
autonomy. In other words, indigenous communities
must become political subjects with capacity and
desire to fight for their collective rights, must
understand the social, economic, political, and
cultural reality in which they are immersed, as
well as the various factors that contribute to
their subordination and those that can be used to
transcend that situation in such a way that they
can take a position on their actions.
With the struggle for autonomy indigenous peoples
and communities transcend the folkloric,
culturalist, and developmentalist visions that
the state propagates, and many people still
passively accept. Experience has taught them that
it is not enough for some law to recognize their
existence and a few rights not in conflict with
neoliberal policies, or cultural contributions by
indigenous peoples to the multicultural make-up
of the country. Nor is it sufficient for
governments to mark specific funds for
development projects in indigenous regions,
amounts that are always too small and are applied
in activities and forms decided by the
government, which rob the communities of any type
of decision-making power and deny their autonomy.
Is it not by chance that the Zapatista rebellion
in Mexico began in January 1994, when the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between
that country, the United States, and Canada went
into effect, or that most of the national demands
by indigenous movements include the rescue of
natural resources from control by transnational
corporations, or that the struggles in Ecuador,
Peru, and Chile include opposition to free trade agreements.
They also know that the struggle for autonomy
cannot be a struggle by indigenous peoples alone.
For this reason, they build relations of
solidarity with other social sectors, supporting
each other in their particular struggles, while
at the same time pushing common demands.
Indigenous peoples, by appealing to their culture
and identifying practices in order to mobilize in
defense of their rights, are questioning vertical
political forms even as they offer horizontal
forms that work for them, because they have
tested them over centuries of resistance to
colonialism. These are practices that come into
play precisely at a moment when traditional
organizations of political parties, syndicates,
or others that are class-based and
representative, are entering into a crisis, and
society no longer sees itself reflected in them.
These political practices are apparent in many
ways, from the postmodern guerrilla, as the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation has been
labeled, that rose up in armed rebellion in 1994
in Mayan lands, brandishing arms more as a symbol
of resistance than to make war, to the long
marches by authorities among indigenous peoples
in Colombia, the "uprisings" of Ecuadoran
peoples, or the Aymara blockade of La Paz,
Bolivia, and the Mapuche direct confrontation
against forestry companies trying to steal their natural resources.
In these battles indigenous peoples, instead of
turning to sophisticated political theories to
prepare their discourses, recover historical
memory to ground their demands and political
practices, and this gives the new movements a
distinctive and even symbolic touch. Indigenous
peoples in Mexico recuperate the memory of
Emiliano Zapata, the incorruptible general of the
Army of the South during the revolution of
1910-17, whose principal demand was the
restitution of native lands usurped by the large
landowners. Colombians recuperate the program and
deeds of Manuel Quintín Lame. Andeans in Peru,
Ecuador, and Bolivia make immediate the
rebellions by Tupac Amaru, Tupac Katari, and
Bartolina Sisa during colonization, and by Willka
Pablo Zarate during the republican period. Local
and national heroes are present again in the
struggle to guide their armies, as if they had
been resting, waiting for the best time to return to the fight.
Along with their historical memory, peoples turn
their eye to what they already have so as to
become stronger, and, tired of so much
disillusionment with traditional political
organizations, to recover their own, their own
systems of responsibilities. This is why those
who are unaware of their particular forms of
organization affirm that they act anarchically,
that it's not the right way, that they contribute
to dispersion, and that it's a bad example for
the unity of the oppressed, the exploited, and the excluded.
Final Reflections
Everything said here about indigenous autonomies
and the shift from demanding constitutional
reform to becoming a process of construction, has
as background the search for the root cause of
the problem that is the condition of internal
colonialism in which indigenous peoples live in the states they are part of.
It is a situation that neither juridical equality
of citizens prescribed by 19th-century
liberalism, nor indigenist policies imposed by
different Latin American states throughout the
20th century, were able to resolve, because they
did not go to the heart of the problem which, as
can be seen now, involves the recognition of
indigenous peoples as collective subjects with
rights, but also the re-founding of states to
correct the historical anomalies of viewing
themselves as monocultural in multicultural societies.
Where will the processes to build indigenous
autonomies in Latin America lead us? That is a
question that no one can answer, because even the
social movements do not know. The actors in this
drama draw their utopian horizon, but whether
they can achieve it does not depend entirely on
them but on different factors, most of which are
outside their control. What we can be sure of is
that the problem will not be solved in the
situation in which states currently find
themselves, and for that reason, struggles by
indigenous peoples for their autonomy cannot retreat.
Neither the Zapatista guerrilla in Mexico, nor
the indigenous self-governments in Colombia, nor
the struggles by Andean and Mapuche peoples will
find a full solution if the state is not
re-founded. But it is also true that states
cannot be re-founded without taking seriously
their indigenous peoples. The challenge is dual,
then: nation-states must be re-founded taking
into account their indigenous peoples, and these
must include in their utopias the type of state
they need and fight for it. This is what
indigenous autonomies and struggles to build them are about.
Therefore, we must celebrate that many indigenous
peoples and communities have decided not to wait
passively for changes to come from the outside
and have enlisted in the construction of
autonomous governments, unleashing processes
where they test new forms of understanding
rights, imagine other ways to exercise power, and
create other types of citizenships.
No one knows how the processes will turn out, but
it is certain that there is no going back to the past.
End Notes
* Jim Cason and David Brooks, "Movimientos
indígenas, principales retos para AL en el
futuro: CIA," La Jornada (Mexico), Dec. 19, 2000,
<http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2000/12/19/024n1mun.html>http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2000/12/19/024n1mun.html.
The complete English version of the report is
posted at:
<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html#link2>http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html#link2.
* Leo Gabriel and Gilberto López y Rivas,
ed., Autonomías indígenas en América Latina.
Nuevas formas de convivencia política, Plaza y
Valdez editores-Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana-Unidad Iztapalapa-Ludwig Boltzmann
Institut, México, 2005, p. 19.
* Javier Lavanchy, Conflicto y propuesta de
autonomía mapuche, Santiago de Chile, Junio de
1999, Proyecto de documentación Ñuke Mapu,
<http://www.soc.uu.se/mapuche>http://www.soc.uu.se/mapuche.
Translated for the Americas Program by Maria Roof.
Francisco López Bárcenas is a Mixtec lawyer,
specialist in indigenous rights, and analyst for
the Americas Program
(<http://www.americaspolicy.org/>www.americaspolicy.org).
He is author of Muerte sin fin: crónicas de
represión en la Región Mixteca oaxaqueña [Endless
Death: Chronicles of Repression in the Oaxacan Mixtec Region] and other books.
Freedom Archives
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