After centuries of submission, South American indigenous groups demand recognition, inclusion.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
From the Southern Cone to the Caribbean coastline, indigenous groups are making a clear push to overcome the state of cultural, social, and economic submission into which they were forced beginning more than five centuries ago with the bloody conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns.
Since 1492, when the conquistador Christopher Columbus set off for what was then called the East Indies and ended up, by accident, on the island of Guanahani (in the Bahamas), communities throughout the Americas have fought for their independence. In no case however, did those struggles benefit the original owners of the land.
In is only now, in the 21st century, that the emergence of progressive South American leaders such as Presidents Evo Morales (Bolivia) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador) has finally opened a door to sectors of the population that had previously been the targets of systematic extermination policies. External factors, however, have limited how quickly the two presidents can act. As a result, native groups have at moments turned on both Morales, himself an indigenous man, and Correa, whom Ecuador's indigenous people hailed early on as one of their own.
In recent weeks, events throughout South America have pushed indigenous issues back to the regional forefront. In Colombia, representatives from 18 different indigenous peoples gathered for three days of policy talks in the historic coastal city of Cartagena de Indias. In Brazil, indigenous groups demonstrated in defense of the country's 1988 Constitution--which guarantees many of their rights--as a way to challenge large multinational companies that promote the use of genetically modified seeds. They have also taken the opportunity to denounce the extermination policy and slave system imposed on them during the period when Brazil was still under Portuguese control.
In Chile, ethnic Mapuches, the country's largest indigenous group, are again challenging the conservative government of President Sebastian Pinera, demanding that the country's antiterrorism law--used to subject indigenous people to discriminatory legal procedures (NotiSur, Sept. 10, 2010)--be scrapped. The Mapuche made the same demands on Pinera's post-dictatorship predecessors (NotiSur, Nov. 13, 2009).
In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups have begun challenging the "friendly" governments of Presidents Morales and Correa. And in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, member states of the Southern Cone Common Market...
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