Native Americans of Middle and South America

B

3

Efforts to Control Natural Resources

Indigenous peoples also struggle with governments and rival users over the control and use of natural resources. Mineral development is a frequent issue, particularly in countries where the law reserves all rights to minerals below Earth’s surface for the state. A prolonged struggle in the early 1990s over oil rights pitted petroleum giants and the Ecuadorian government against the tiny Huaorani ethnic group and its international allies, who fought the issue to a draw. The Mexican Huave also took on their government concerning oil pollution. In 1989 Brazilian Kayapó protested against a huge dam and besieged Congress in their feather crowns. They became instant media icons. These successful actions show how small indigenous groups have sometimes become powerful actors in the struggle over natural resources.

Another frequent issue is how to balance a country’s environmental agenda—for example, managing national parks located in rain forests—with the ownership rights of people who originate there. Environmental movements have been influenced by a Brazilian rubber tapper named Chico Mendes, who defended the rain forests against development and deforestation because the tappers needed them for their livelihood. When Mendez was assassinated in 1988, the event awakened the media to the possibility that some humans might guard, not menace, biologically diverse habitats. More recent projects emphasize working with local indigenous peoples as stakeholders in enterprises that depend on biodiversity and conservation. The Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico, have mounted a notably successful system of community forestry. In Amazonian Ecuador, rain forest residents are developing self-managed ecotourism.

Knowledge is a contested resource, too. As the pharmaceutical industry combed rain forests for curative biochemicals, transnational alliances campaigned to get indigenous knowledge of these curative biochemicals recognized so they could be paid royalties for their intellectual property.

B

4

Crossfire

In many cases indigenous peoples’ deadliest problems include crossfire between national governments and nonindigenous guerrilla insurgencies that choose indigenous terrain as battlefronts. Around 1980 many Maya highlanders in Guatemala took part in the Committee of Peasant Unity, which was a nonindigenous union allied with one of the four leftist armies fighting against the government. They usually did so in defense of local, nonideological interests. But scorched-earth warfare left about 50,000 Maya among the more than 150,000 dead, and it destroyed more than 400 Maya communities. A 1996 peace pact improved Maya prospects for peaceful self-defense by making it possible for them to defend land and other rights through litigation or public campaigning without being accused of trying to subvert the government.

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In Peru a revolutionary Communist movement, called the Shining Path, at first gained support among Quechua peasants who were embittered by the government’s failure to meet their particular needs in agrarian reforms from 1969 to 1974. However, the Shining Path soon alienated them by assassinating indigenous leaders and choking off commerce. By 1990 Quechua village rondas (militias) played a major role in fighting the Shining Path. Ronda veterans emerged in the 1990s as a new type of rural leadership.

In Colombia, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a group of left-wing rebels, and its enemies, the paramilitary forces, also proved ready to shed indigenous blood. By 1986 FARC had killed more than 100 indigenous leaders in the Cauca Valley, and in 1999 they murdered a group of foreign observers backing the U’wa. Although why indigenous leaders were being killed in Peru and Colombia is not entirely clear, some observers speculate that the Shining Path, FARC, and other insurgent groups wanted to crush rival leadership.

In Nicaragua, where Sandinista revolutionaries successfully overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, many Miskito of the Atlantic coast rejected a land reform that denied their traditional tenures. They, too, were swept up in political warfare from 1981 to 1988 as their leaders joined the U.S.-sponsored opposition guerrilla force known as the contras (short for “counterrevolutionaries” in Spanish). Later, a post-Sandinista government granted the Miskito an autonomous zone.

Another crossfire threat to indigenous peoples is quasi-military intervention by government forces allied with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to stop the production of drugs. Groups on the eastern flank of the Andes Mountains have grown coca leaf as a legal traditional crop since pre-Columbian times. But the cocaine industry hugely inflated demand for coca beginning in the 1970s, and some indigenous peoples, motivated by the possibility for economic advancement, became involved in the cocaine industry as illegal suppliers or laborers. Their position is dangerous because they are cornered between government repression—arrest and defoliation and burning of the coca plants—and the carnage inflicted by gangster cartels or guerrilla armies trying to control production.

C

Employment and Economics

Poverty is pervasive among Latin America’s indigenous population, and living conditions are generally poor compared to that of the nonindigenous population. In many places, indigenous families put up with dirt floors, meager diets, contaminated water, and constant worries about expenses such as medicine, schoolbooks, or bus fare. In 1989 Mexico’s census agency reported that in municipalities with an indigenous population of 40 percent or more, 42 percent of the residents were extremely poor. It also reported that in municipalities with indigenous populations under 10 percent, less than 10 percent of the residents were extremely poor.

Indigenous poverty is not the poverty of unemployment. In fact, in countries with large indigenous populations, indigenous unemployment is lower than the national averages. Rather, indigenous poverty reflects the fact that native populations are concentrated in badly paid sectors of work, like rural wage labor or farming on eroded land. Indigenous workers are more likely than others to have a second job, and they work disproportionately more hours.

In rural areas, farming, herding, and working on plantations are the most common jobs. Much rural poverty is due to the fragmentation of land into parcels so tiny that they cannot support a family. Governments place a high priority on improving agricultural productivity, but many have taken approaches that favored large, modern farms over small parcels or community development. These facts have tended to drive indigenous workers off the land.

The result is that millions of indigenous migrants have poured into the huge shantytowns of major cities such as Mexico City or Lima, Peru. Migrants often have to settle for informal work like street vending or off-the-books jobs such as sewing in sweatshops. Even legitimate employment often means fleeting work with firms in search of low-cost temporary labor. Because no job can be counted on, workers in assembly plants, hotels, and so forth often maintain economic ties to ancestral communities. Each household pieces together a living combining meager urban wages with food from the field. Back in the villages, the elders, and sometimes women and children, work the family’s inherited fields.

Families like these usually do not merge into the urban working class. Their “safety nets” are associations of fellow villagers. Old village connections give them financial credit and emotional support. Such families strive to maintain these connections in cities by tending to live in the same areas. At the same time they try to build their urban connections by trying to lose the low-prestige indigenous accent and dress of country people. (Urbanites usually reject the public identity of indigenousness because it carries a stigma.) But they do not renounce their rural homes. Indeed, today, it is mostly their donations that make possible traditional Andean or Mesoamerican dances and rituals.

Indigenous migrants also head for richer countries as legal or illegal immigrants to seek a better living. Many highland villages today have diaspora colonies in North America or Europe. The most obvious front-runners of migration from the Andean area are the Ecuadorian indigenous textile traders and musicians who play in cities from Washington, D.C., to Rome, Italy, to Sydney, Australia. But these visible Ecuadorians are just the edge of a much bigger population working inconspicuously in hotels, homes, factories, and shops. In industrial areas in the Northeast and Midwest of the United States, indigenous immigrants are proving adept at helping to reclaim decayed industrial towns.

Indigenous peoples also use tourism, the crafts industry, and ecotourism as ways to escape poverty. In Otavalo, Ecuador, indigenous peasants have parlayed their weaving arts and their famous market square into a major export center of woolen goods. Quechua-speaking entrepreneurs form an upper middle class that piques the envy of local mestizos.

With ecotourism, one key to success is indigenous control of tour packaging. A standout example is Peru’s Taquile Island where the local indigenous people formed a cooperative that controls tourist lodging and sells crafts and textiles. More commonly, however, indigenous communities find it hard to capture income from the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visit fleetingly in search of quick cultural enrichment.

D

Social and Cultural Issues

D

1

Gender Roles

As the economic activities of indigenous communities have changed, gender roles have changed as well. Particularly among migrants and refugees, traditional male-dominated institutions within the indigenous community proved unable to guarantee order and welfare, while state support failed to make up the difference. Women took it upon themselves to try to help with the burden of soup kitchens and communal organizations. In doing so they also won public leadership positions. María Elena Moyano, the Afro-Peruvian deputy mayor of a largely indigenous-migrant borough of Lima, set a widely admired standard of female leadership. She was assassinated by the Shining Path in 1992. Along with changing gender roles, indigenous women also began to use birth control in larger numbers to gain more control over their lives. Family planning quietly increases female self-assertion and challenges traditional male privileges. Challenging these privileges in association with heavy ritual drinking can often lead to domestic violence.

D

2

Languages

Latin America has about 400 living indigenous languages. In some countries, more than 200 different languages are spoken. The giant among Native American languages is Quechua, the former official language of the Inca Empire. If considered as a single speech community, Quechua-speakers number near 10 million. But some linguists think it more realistic to speak of a Quechua family of languages because some Quechua dialects are barely mutually intelligible. Quechua is spoken in large parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as smaller parts of Colombia and Argentina.

The Maya family of languages has even greater diversity, with more than 30 tongues in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. About 4.5 million Paraguayans (most of whom do not consider themselves indigenous) know the indigenous language Guaraní, one of the country’s official languages. Aymara, with speakers estimated from 1 million to 2.5 million, spreads from the Bolivian high plains into southern Peru. The rest of the Latin American languages consist of far smaller speech communities, sometimes tiny ones consisting of a single village. These are the ones most vulnerable to extinction. Most of the small ones are endangered with many close to disappearing.

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