Bolivia: Indigenous Peoples Make Themselves Heard

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October 19, 2003

Across the Americas, Indigenous Peoples Make Themselves Heard

By Hector Tobar , Times Staff Writer

EL ALTO, Bolivia - Above the rocky bowl of La Paz, this
vast township of brick and adobe homes stretches across
a dry plain. This is where the Aymara Indians of western
Bolivia come to live and work when their farms can no
longer feed them.

For the past week, the hardscrabble order of El Alto
gave way to a fervor of rebellion. Armed with the
traditional weapons of the Aymara people - sticks,
slingshots and muscle - its residents fought the army,
built barricades and derailed a train, cutting off and
shutting down the capital below them.

"We are not going to allow ourselves to be pushed around
anymore," said Bernaldo Castillo Mollo, a 37-year-old
Aymara bricklayer and jack-of-all-trades who was shot in
the foot during the protests. "So that our children have
a better life than us, we are willing to die."

The Indian-led movement that brought down Bolivian
President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada last week was only
the most recent and startling expression of a growing
militancy and political assertiveness among the native
peoples of the Americas.

In Ecuador and in Guatemala, indigenous leaders arguably
wield more influence in local and national affairs than
in any time since the Spanish conquest. And in Chile and
Mexico, resistance to the changes brought by the global
economy are helping to feed a renaissance of indigenous
organizations.

"Everyone thought that globalization would wipe out
local identities and cultures," said Alejandro Herrera,
a professor at the University of the Frontier in Temuco,
in south-central Chile.

"Instead, the opposite has happened. People are
embracing their indigenous identities against these
outside threats."

In recent years, the Mapuche villages around Temuco have
been the site of a smoldering, low-tech war against
corporate tree farming that has landed a handful of
Mapuche Indian leaders in prison on charges of burning
logging trucks.

Similarly, Bolivia’s plan to export the country’s
natural gas reserves through a pipeline to be built by a
multinational consortium helped coalesce Indian
resentment against a government dominated by politicians
of European descent.

Castillo Mollo, the wounded bricklayer, has only a
fifth-grade education. Until he moved to El Alto in
1986, he worked the land, growing potatoes and other
crops. But like many other residents of El Alto, he is
well-steeped in the anti-globalization rhetoric that has
swept through Latin America.

"It’s not just the gas that we’re angry about," Castillo
Mollo said from a La Paz hospital ward he shared with a
dozen other El Alto residents injured in the uprising.
"Look at all the privatization [of government
enterprises] and how many people they threw out of work.

"People are going hungry," he said. "In the cities you
see people working on the streets in exchange for food."

What Soweto was to the anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa, El Alto has been to the indigenous movement in
modern Bolivia: an overpopulated slum of internal
migrants that has been transformed into a caldron of
activism.

In El Alto, ideas first expressed by left-leaning
economists a decade ago - that U.S.-inspired economic
policies would benefit only a small minority of Latin
Americans - have found fertile ground among the poor.

Brought into the national debate by a handful of Indian
and union leaders, they have percolated down to the
community’s neighborhood assemblies. According to
activists and residents, there are more than 150 such
assemblies in El Alto, a city of 750,000.

The assemblies are the urban equivalent of traditional
Aymara and Quechua communes. All decisions are made by
voice vote. The opinions of elders carry additional
weight. And all members of the community must carry out
responsibilities, such as participating in safety
patrols.

"What we’re seeing in Bolivia is really a clash between
civilizations," between Western individualism and Indian
communalism, said Jacqueline Michaux, an anthropologist
who has worked in the community.

"In the countryside, all the members of the village work
together in the harvest," Michaux said. Similarly,
during the conflict in El Alto, "everyone worked
together to build the barricades and to feed the
marchers who were arriving from out of town. They had
to. It was their obligation to the community."

In Mexico, too, indigenous consciousness appears to be
gaining momentum, nearly a decade after the Zapatista
uprising that first brought worldwide attention to the
plight of Mexico’s native peoples.

The movement’s charismatic leader, Subcommander Marcos,
is moving the Zapatistas toward Indian self-rule in the
southern state of Chiapas. Zapatista leaders have sworn
in five "good government boards" to oversee a scattering
of rebel-controlled indigenous communities there.

They set their watches on "Zapatista time," an hour
ahead of what they call "Fox time" (after Mexico’s
president). The Zapatista army seizes drugs, alcohol and
illegally cut timber trafficked through its territories.

The years since the Chiapas uprising have been hard on
the peasantry throughout Mexico. The free trade
agreement with the United States has flooded the country
with cheap corn, the staple crop of the indigenous
people.

Now the movement for indigenous autonomy is spreading
northward, to Oaxaca and other states. Many villages
practice de facto autonomy, for example, by electing
mayors in village assemblies rather than by secret
ballot, by farming the land communally and by settling
disputes by centuries-old methods rather than using
Mexico’s legal system.

Even on the outskirts of Mexico City, about 100,000
Nahuatl Indians, descended from the Aztecs, have set up
12 indigenous communities and are demanding that the
government recognize their autonomy. City officials have
barely acknowledged their demands.

In years past, Indian discontent in the Americas was
often channeled into traditional political parties
dominated by Western ideas and non-Indian leaders. But
in Bolivia, as in other countries of the region, new
Indian leaders have emerged. And there is a growing, if
still small, indigenous intelligentsia.

"We have lots of educated people now. We don’t have to
rely on the ’experts’ to make decisions for us anymore,"
said German Jimenez, a teacher and Quechua from the
Bolivian city of Potosi who joined a group of miners
marching to La Paz last week.

In Potosi, Jimenez has witnessed a flowering of
indigenous culture and thought. "There are even people
now who are beginning to question Christianity, who are
saying we should return to our original religions," he
said.

Perhaps the most well-known and radical voice of
indigenismo in Bolivia is Felipe Quispe, a former
professor and the president of the nation’s largest
peasants union. In the Aymara villages around Lake
Titicaca, he is known as "El Malku," the Condor.

Quispe’s Pachakuti Indigenous Movement won only a small
fraction of the vote in last year’s presidential
election, but he wields much influence as the leading
proponent of Aymara nationalism.

"If the concerns of the original inhabitants of this
land are not addressed, then the so-called Bolivia will
cease to exist," he said recently. "The indigenous
people will march into La Paz and an Indian will sit in
the presidential chair."

Another Aymara, Evo Morales, finished second in last
year’s presidential election here. He is the leader of
the Movement to Socialism, whose strongest base of
support is among the nation’s Quechua.

Once a coca farmer trying to eke out a living in the
Chapare region, Morales is now a major figure in
Bolivian politics, but also a proponent of radical
tactics, including confrontations between striking
peasants and the authorities.

In Ecuador, the indigenous movement is one of the best
organized and most powerful in Latin America.

The country’s primary indigenous group, the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador,
was behind a brief 1999 coup that toppled the
government. And the indigenous Pachakutik political
movement formed a key part of the support that
catapulted Lucio Gutierrez to the presidency.

Until a recent falling-out, indigenous leaders held
several key position in the Gutierrez Cabinet, including
South America’s first indigenous foreign minister, Nina
Pacari, a Quichua.

In Guatemala, indigenous political power has flourished
since the signing of a peace treaty ending the country’s
civil war in 1996. Maya children can now be educated in
their native languages, a right that was long denied
them under the country’s repressive military regimes.
There is also a Maya member of the Cabinet.

On Saturday, less than 24 hours after Sanchez de
Lozada’s resignation, Bolivia’s new president, Carlos
Mesa, visited El Alto, where he made a speech to
thousands of Aymara and other community residents. He
later participated in an Indian religious ceremony.

In one of his first official statements, he said he
would name indigenous leaders to his Cabinet.

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City and
T. Christian Miller in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to
this report.