CIAO DATE: 05/02

Defiant Again: Indigenous Poeples and Latin American Security

Donna Lee Van Cott

Institute for National Strategic Studies
National Defense University

October 1996

Overview

Since the Conquest, indigenous communities throughout Latin America have endured with astonishing restraint a multitude of impositions and indignities. ¹ Occasionally that restraint has been punctuated by cycles of rebellion and repression. Violent confrontations between Indian organizations and the state in the last two years indicate a growing frustration by indigenous peoples with political attempts to advance their demands. Major altercations have occurred in Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia, with smaller scale confrontations becoming a regular occurrence as hldian communities grow increasingly defiant of state authority in the wake of repeated violations of indigenous territorial and human rights. While in some countries such groups have been able to achieve recognition and protection through constitutional and legal reforms, Indians in general continue to be disproportionately the poorest of the poor and regular victims of human rights abuses. They are chronically under represented in political office in all countries of the Americas.

This paper explores the complex nexus of security issues that the governments of Latin America and the indigenous communities of the region face at the end of the 20th century. A better understanding of security issues from the perspective of indigenous communities should enable policymakers in the United States to estimate more accurately how U.S. policy plays a role in the aggravation or resolution of interethnic conflict in Latin America. Although the national contexts of indigenous-state relations differ markedly throughout the hemisphere, relevant issues of national security are strikingly similar — maintenance of international borders, eradication and interdiction of drugs, suppression of armed insurgencies, and containment of rural unrest. National governments, state armed forces, and indigenous peoples, however, all have different conceptions of the meaning of "national security."

Governments tend to view security in terms of sovereignty: protecting the integrity of international boundaries, containing social conflict manifested in rural violence or urban riots, monopolizing the means of legitimate force, protecting natural resources, and encouraging economic development. The Latin American military tends to view security as a mission to defend the nation from either external attack or internal subversion. Thus the relationship between the military and indigenous peoples varies, depending on the definition of the military's security mission, which may include wiping out internal subversion, maintaining public safety, or promoting economic development.

Indigenous peoples, however, consider themselves to be nations, and their conception of national security is intimately connected to their survival as nations. Thus, in addition to physical security — protection from violence and coercion — indigenous peoples struggle to protect their cultural security, their medium for preserving the Indian nation as a political, territorial, and societal entity. The most important security issue is not only retaining lands they have controlled for generations, but also the right to control that land communally. Land is not merely an economic resource to indigenous peoples (although for the majority of Indians who eke out a living through subsistence farming, it is vital to survival), land is also the material guarantee of indigenous self-government and autonomy. It provides the basis for the re-creation of the indigenous community as a social organization — the medium dlrough which native peoples pass their culture and their identity to their descendants.

Direct threats to land tenure or incursions by outsiders have always been met by a show of force, and many times have led to violent confrontations during which Indians usually suffer the highest casualties. On the rare occasions when Indians have formed armed organizations, they have almost always done so to defendthemselves against violent attempts to expel them from ancestral lands, or to protest government attempts to dissolve Indian land rights protected by law.

To understand the land issue, therefore, it is necessary to look at it from the perspective of indigenous peoples, who increasingly project themselves on the international stage as nations or nationalities, claiming for their peoples the right to self-determination and autonomy under international law. Past notions of indigenous communities as tools of elite manipulation, objects of state policy, or barriers to national integration and economic development are challenged today by the evident autonomy and sophistication of Indian movements. An understanding of Indian aspirations, values, and traditions is necessary to understanding how ethnicity and political change could interact in the next decade and the extent to which interethnic conflict might be manifested in violent confrontation.

It is also important to distinguish among the various political tendencies within Indian movements. For example, the peasant-based tradition of the diverse Indian communities and organizations of Mexico (rooted in that country's transformative social revolution), is different from the pan-Mayanism of Guatemala's Indian intelligentsia, which derives its energy from the revitalization of Mayan languages. It is equally important to understand how differences in ideology have divided Indian communities in most countries of the hemisphere. Another factor affecting the issue is the exact definition of "indigenous movements." Such movements continually change their form as their membership fluctuates (class-centered or edmo-cenlric), their political goals change (symbolic "awareness" or specific legislation), or their tactics vary (union-based activities or broad social alliances).

hidigenous peoples remain exceedingly diverse. The protection of Indian territory, language, culture, and autonomy is a "security issue" common to all indigenous peoples in the Americas, derived from centuries of extreme marginalization. Additional problems, however, have developed in the last decades as a result of security policies that do not fully address the complex relations at the local level between indigenous peoples, tile military, guerrillas, drug traffickers, and economic elites. The essays that follow address three major issues:

• The contradictions between contemporary Latin American national security goals and policies and the consequences of these policies for civil-military relations.
• The emergence of indigenous movements in Brazil and Colombia, where Indian activists and their supporters have been able to achieve impressive constitutional reforms despite their minuscule demographic representation.
• An indigenous-state conflict that has received wide attention but remains little understood — the armed uprising in Mexico in January 1994 by a group calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

Three significant conclusions can be drawn from these essays:

• First, with regard to the traditional "security issues" (protection of borders, control and dismantlement of guerrilla forces, and the fight against drug trafficking), governments whose police and military forces work with indigenous organizations and communities to solve these problems are less likely to be responsible for human rights violations against indigenous peoples. They are also more likely to resolve the problems at hand. For instance, the Peruvian military did not begin to make headway against the Shining Path until it realized that Peruvian campesinos were just as eager to root out the guerrillas. Once they joined forces, they made progress.
• Second, as the studies of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil demonstrate, the rise in Indian political mobilization in the 1970s can be traced to increasing pressure on Indian lands during that period. In Colombia and Brazil, this rise can be traced to efforts to eliminate legal regimes protecting communal land and other special etlmic rights. Indians are also likely to mobilize around issues that complement activity on the national or international agenda — constitutional reform, protecting the environment — and to seek support from international organizations that share their concerns.
• Third, the most important local point for change is the resolution of indigenous land tenure rights. Most, if not all outbreaks of hostility have resulted from incursions on Indian lands, the basis of their economic and cultural stability and survival. Working to resolve this problem will encourage economic stability for indigenous groups, resulting in political stability and national security.

What will the future hold for indigenous politics? In the 1980s and early 1990s, environmental issues were the focus of international attention. Indians in Latin America made their most convincing public appeals as protectors of the environment. As we move into the 21st century, Indians are likely to increase their already strong presence in the international effort to codify and protect the rights of national and ethnic minorities through international law and innovative national experiments in power sharing and regional autonomy. International instruments protecting the rights of indigenous peoples are under consideration by both the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

The power of the indigenous movements to force government concessions and command the attention of political actors and the media may have crested, as the quincentennary and the Rio environmental summit fade from public attention. The weight of demographics, however, should keep Indian movements on the political and security agenda in Latin America, as the relative growth of the population identifying itself as indigena steadily outpaces that of the remainder of the population. The influence and presence of sophisticated and experienced Indian leaders and their advocates in international organizations should continue to play an important role in the shaping of international development, trade, and envirotmaental policy. The solution for each indigenous group will be different, as the best strategy for each depends on the history of interethnic relations in each country (and within regions of each country), as well as the feasibility of a cooperative versus confrontational approach.

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Notes

Note 1. The terms "Indian," "Amerindian," and "indigenous people(s)" are used interchangeably when referring to those people and communities defined by the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities definition as follows:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having ahistorical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.

Study of tile Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, United Nations Document E/Cn.4/Sub.2/1986/7Add.4, para.379 (1968). Back