[News] Indigenous Movements in the Americas Building Autonomies

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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.




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