Richard
Gott
Richard Gott discusses the emergence of important
new political players in Latin America, often based on new alliances between
the armed forces and indigenous movements.
Something new and interesting, and profoundly original, has been taking
place in Latin America in the early years of this century, deserving close
attention from all those left depressed or made cynical by global developments
in the years since 1989. Seismic political upheavals have occurred in countries
that once seemed permanently lulled to sleep by the siren voices of neo-liberalism,
encapsulated within the so-called Washington
This US-inspired
project, first codified in 1989, sought to reform the economic programmes
of Latin American governments through a radical reduction in public spending,
the privatisation of state enterprises, the encouragement of foreign investment,
and the liberalisation of trade and finance. Part of the neo-liberal counter-revolution,
and overseen by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, it promised
huge improvements in economic performance, and was widely welcomed as though
there were no alternative.
Yet in practice
its imposition led to vastly increased unemployment and to the further impoverishment
of huge swathes of the population. The eventual rebellions against these
programmes have seen the emergence of important new political players, some
drawn from the armed forces, others from Latin America’s indigenous movements.
An entirely fresh and radical spirit is abroad, bringing the question of
race and ethnic difference to the surface, not as a simple petition for
indigenous ‘rights’ but as a demand for a restructuring of the old colonial,
white settler state. This has the flavour of a genuine revolution.
In the countries
of the Andes in particular - Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador - the rebellious
movements created by the indigenous peoples, the majority of the population,
have begun for the first time to make a major impact, introducing a new
and transforming element into the politics of the region. Indeed the cultural
resurgence of groups reclaiming their indigenous identity can be detected
throughout the continent - from Argentina to Venezuela, from Chile to Brazil,
from Colombia to Mexico. The ruling elite in countries like Chile and Argentina,
traditionally imagining their country to be as white as Australia, have
been shocked to find themselves sharing their territorial space with people
who claim an aboriginal background.
The appearance
of these indigenous movements has appeared in the foreign media with little
explanation or analysis. Yet they represent a sea-change in the politics
of Latin America. The indigenous peoples, heirs to the age-old civilisations
of the continent, have been stirring themselves politically for the first
time since the eighteenth century. Now highly politicised, they have grown
strong enough to overthrow governments.
The continuing
displacement of native peoples from the countryside, accelerated during
the neo-liberal years, has produced immense new indigenous cities, often
invisible to the white middle class. These rural refugees have been driven
from their homes by the collapse of the tin mines, by oil prospectors, by
logging companies, and by coca eradication programmes. Lima in the coastal
plain of Peru has become a Quechua city, peopled by the inhabitants of the
high plateau; the Chilean capital, Santiago, is now surrounded by shanty
towns of Mapuches, the indigenous peoples driven out of their forest reservations
in the south; the Ecuadorean capital of Quito has doubled in size in recent
years; while El Alto, the new Aymara city on the high Bolivian plateau,
often threatens to overwhelm La Paz, the capital in the valley below.
The population
of these new urban conglomerations, thanks to modern methods of communication,
often retain their rural culture and remain in constant touch with their
rural roots. They also make fresh connections with their ethnic counterparts
in the countries next door. Their cities have become a political tinder-box,
inexorably changing the balance of power throughout the Andes.
The new movements
of indigenous peoples have been causing considerable alarm within the local
conservative (and racist) political establishments, as well as in the United
States. A recent headline in a Miami newspaper read: ‘War on Terror has
Latin America’s Indigenous People in its Sights’. Some academics argue that
the growth of the indigenous movements is merely an extension of the democratic
practice developed in the continent since the defeat of the dictatorships.
Latin America once extended the franchise to the working class, so why should
it not now incorporate the indigenous peoples? In theory that sounds plausible,
yet Latin America’s ruling elite has been notably reluctant to embrace this
new democracy. The reason lies in its racist fear, deeply etched over the
centuries, of the gigantic underclass with which it shares the continent.
Debates within
the continent’s once powerful leftist movements have also been affected
by the indigenous upsurge. Gender issues and liberation theology were taken
on board in the last decades of the twentieth century, but many on the left
have been unprepared to deal with questions associated with culture, race,
and popular religion. For in parallel with the growth of indigenous politics
has come an explosion of evangelical chapels, threatening the ancient monopoly
of the Catholic Church. These developments have been greeted with confusion
or rejection by the left. Little guidance on all this can be found in the
classical texts.
Some of the
indigenous peoples of the Andes have been making unprecedented and utopian
demands. Bolivian radicals have been calling for the revival of the Aymara
nation in the Altiplano that preceded the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
Peruvians have talked about the return of Tahuantinsuyo - the ‘four states’
of the old Inca empire of 500 years ago that stretched from Pasto in Colombia
to the River Maule in Chile, and over the Andes to Tucumán in Argentina.
Such developments
are not peculiar to Latin America. They have elements in common with comparable
phenomena in other parts of the world. The revival of local and indigenous
cultures across borders, and the desire to redraw the artificial frontiers
established in colonial times, is a familiar theme in contemporary Africa.
The United States itself has seen a significant revival of indigenous activity
- with the revived memory of old battles and the reclaiming of ancient land
rights. Yet the experience of Latin America, different though in some ways
similar to what has been happening elsewhere, has rarely been bracketed
together in a common analysis.
In
their early years, in the 1990s, the new indigenous movements received a
certain amount of assistance from outside - chiefly through example. The
upsurge of indigenous activism in the United States preceded that in Latin
America, and US activists were already making visits to the southern continent
in the 1980s. The movements in Latin American took off seriously after 1992,
when official festivities were held to record the 500th anniversary of the
Columbus landings. These became a celebration of the continuing survival
of the indigenous nations rather than of the achievements of the white settler
societies. A UN declaration describing the 1990s as ‘the decade of indigenous
peoples’ also gave a focus to the new movements.
An antiquarian
strand, sometimes called indigenismo, has long permeated Latin American
thinking about the pre-Colombian peoples. Whites in Cuba in the nineteenth
century wrote novels about the island’s heroic indigenous past, the phenomenon
known as siboneyismo. In Peru in the 1920s Juan Carlos Mariátegui,
an early Marxist, invoked the country’s Inca heritage and called for the
Andean peoples to be integrated into the nation. But the developments of
the 1990s are new and different in that demands are being made by the indigenous
people themselves - through increasingly vocal and well-organised political
organisations.
The indigenous
movements are not alone. Other forces are at work in the current upsurge
in radical protest. In the southern cone countries of Argentina and Uruguay,
a revival of the progressive tempo of the early 1970s has begun to surface,
an apparent generational throwback to earlier experiments cut short by the
military interventions of that sinister decade. The heirs of the radical
Young Peronists (in Argentina) and the Tupamaros guerrillas (in Uruguay)
are now in power through popular election. Social movements that had mobilised
around the concept of ‘civil society’, abandoning the prospect of securing
political power at the centre, suddenly found that this unexpected possibility
had become a reality. Not least among the intriguing developments of the
new millennium has been the surprising capacity of popular movements to
use the ballot box as a source of unity rather than division, producing
election results often undetected by opinion polls.
One remarkable
phenomenon has been the comeback of Cuba and its formidable leader Fidel
Castro, now in his eightieth year and enjoying a position of respect throughout
the continent. Banished from inter-American councils since 1961 by US diktat,
and suffering from nearly half a century of economic sanctions unilaterally
imposed by the United States, Cuba has re-established diplomatic and business
links with most of the continent, bringing increased trade and finance as
well as fresh and much-needed intellectual contacts to this too long isolated
island.
Castro himself,
largely ignored or derided in Europe as an authoritarian dictator, is now
perceived throughout Latin America as a wise and benign elder statesman,
one of the great figures of the twentieth century, in the pantheon with
Nelson Mandela. Sought after by students and journalists wherever he goes,
he is also waylaid by Presidents anxious for a photo-opportunity or simply
for a word of approval. Cuba’s success in resisting US pressure over such
a long period is displayed as a badge of honour, recognised as such in the
current climate of overt anti-imperialism - itself the result of the foreign
policy of the US administration of George W Bush, unpopular throughout the
continent among all groups.
A mood of
expectant optimism now prevails in much of Latin America, a welcome change
after three decades of political inertia. For years the adherents to the
Washington Consensus were able to rule with barely a squawk of protest from
within the political system (though with considerable popular upheaval taking
place outside). The astonishing victory of Evo Morales, a radical indigenous
leader, in the presidential elections in Bolivia of December 2006, has served
to focus attention on a widely touted ‘move to the left’ that has characterised
the early years of the new millennium. Foreign journalists and television
crews have been trying to catch up after years of ignorance and neglect.
The language
of Evo Morales, never less than direct, gives the flavour of the new era.
‘This is a confrontation between rich and poor’, he told an interviewer
in his office in the Congress building in March 2005, ‘but it’s also a racial
conflict’. ‘Look at them’, he said, pointing to photographs of former congressmen
over the past hundred years. ‘Almost all those people are white. They hate
the fact that I'm an Indian. They hate that we're here.’
He was speaking
under a poster of his smiling face with the legend: ‘While the poor have
no bread, the rich will have no peace.’ Fighting talk. ‘They have humiliated
and looted for hundreds of years’, Morales told the journalist. ‘We are
trying to put a stop to that now.’
This is the
uncompromising voice of Latin America’s indigenous peoples now making itself
heard. Morales is the latest example of the radical mood in the continent,
but the new political era began some years ago with the election of Hugo
Chávez as President in Venezuela in December 1998. A charismatic former
army officer with an overtly revolutionary programme (which included an
entire chapter of a new constitution devoted to indigenous peoples), Chávez
has begun talking recently about the need to formulate a ‘socialism for
the twenty-first century’. His victory was followed by that of Lula de Silva
in Brazil in 2002, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina in 2003, Tabaré Vásquez
in Uruguay in 2005, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Michelle Bachelet in Chile
in 2006.
Following
down the pipeline this year has come Ollanta Humala in Peru, a left-wing
former officer who, though he did not in the end win, drew on massive indigenous
support in the presidential elections in June. In Mexico Andrés Manuel López
Obregón, a former radical mayor of Mexico City, is a strong presidential
candidate; in September there are good prospects for the elections in Ecuador
(where a possible candidate is Rafael Correa, a radical economist); and
Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista leader, will probably win the elections
in Nicaragua in November. All come from ideological strands in the Latin
American spectrum that are recognisably to the left.
Clearly this
is not a homogenous left; their programmes and political processes are specific
to each country. Some have an outspoken rhetoric hostile to neo-liberalism,
others are happy with the way things are. Yet they do have several things
in common. All share a strong sense of nationalism, the revival of a historic
Latin American characteristic
That has
been strikingly dormant in the neo-liberal years. All are critical of the
excessive US cultural influence in the continent, as well as its more familiar
political presence; and all (with the exception of Chile) have indicated
their hostility to the US project of creating a Latin American Free Trade
Area, and share a vision of an integrated Latin America free from its northern
overlord.
These are
small acorns, yet the outlines of a common agenda can be mistily discerned.
While the word ‘socialism’ is used sparingly, many of these new leftist
governments are also beginning to foresee a new role for the state. There
is no intention to return to the large-scale nationalisations that characterised,
say, the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the 1970s. Yet many now
see the need for the state to control, or more closely to oversee, their
countries’ extractive industries. The recovery of governmental control over
the nationalised oil industry of Venezuela by Hugo Chávez, securing increased
revenues from royalties and taxes, is widely seen as a model. What has worked
in Venezuela is being copied in Bolivia, and Evo Morales announced on May
Day 2006 that foreign companies would have six months to renegotiate their
contracts. They would be expected to cede to the state their existing ownership
rights to energy resources, and to pay higher royalties and taxes. The companies
have made appropriate noises of discomfort, yet with the continuing high
price of oil they will have little cause for complaint. If radical governments
emerge in Peru and Ecuador, the same recipe will be tried.
Also significant
in many of countries with left-leaning governments is the presence of mobilised
social movements operating in the background. These have been working for
the most part as independent actors, yet they have proved capable of dramatic
political intervention, and include the Movimento Sem Terra (MST)
in Brazil (the Movement of Landless Workers), and the piqueteros,
or ‘strikers’, in Argentina. This movement developed from the actions of
unemployed workers in northern Argentina, thrown out of work by the privatisations
of the 1980s and 1990s. Spreading widely throughout
the country,
the piqueteros brought Buenos Aires to a standstill in December 2001,
provoking a prolonged political crisis of which Nestor Kirchner was the
eventual beneficiary. Together with the indigenous movements in Bolivia
and CONAIE in Ecuador {the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas),
these have all become permanent features of the political scene, unimaginable
in the years of military dictatorship.
The move
to the left is largely the outcome of the economic and political failure
of the Washington Consensus. This formidable, counter-revolutionary neo-liberal
project, first imposed in Chile in the mid-1970s, spread throughout the
continent in the two subsequent decades. The Chilean programmes were originally
elaborated by General Pinochet’s ‘Chicago Boys’, eager monetarists schooled
at the University of Chicago, who began their work in 1975. The privatisation
of state industries took off after 1978, and the Chilean model was finally
established in the 1980s, combining free markets with a repressive political
system. It was much admired by the new conservative governments of Eastern
Europe (and China) after 1989.
Bolivia was
next in line to imbibe the neo-liberal medicine. In 1986 it fell into the
hands of Jeffrey Sachs, a then youthful Harvard economic guru who went on
later to help dismantle the statist economies of Eastern Europe. (He subsequently
repented somewhat to become the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University.) One result of Sachs’s recommendations to the Bolivian government
was an end to the scourge of hyper-inflation that had affected the economy
in the 1980s. Less welcome was the advice to halt the government subsidy
to the country’s historic tin mines, a decision that led inevitably to their
economic collapse and closure, throwing thousands of miners out of work.
After Bolivia
came Venezuela, where an arrogant attempt in 1989 to drive through an emergency
neo-liberal programme (put forward, as in Bolivia and Chile, by clever young
US-educated economists) was greeted with street protests in Caracas on an
unprecedented scale. The so-called Caracazo of February 1989 marked
the start of the fight-back in Latin America against the neo-liberal order.
The protests were perceived as regime-threatening, the army was called in
to crush them, and more than a thousand people were killed. A further decade
of economic and political deterioration (involving two attempted military
coups, the successful impeachment of the President, and the collapse of
the country’s principal bank) led to the implosion of the corrupt old political
system and the eventual emergence at the end of the 1990s of Colonel Chávez.
After Venezuela
came Ecuador, where a political explosion in 1990 marked the formal start
of the new politics in the Andes: the emergence of indigenous movements
demanding their political rights. That year a hundred indigenous activists
occupied the cathedral in Quito, to demand action from the government to
resolve a land dispute in the Sierra. Later in 1990 the unrest spread to
Bolivia where indigenous groups from the lowlands of the Beni began a long
protest march to La Paz, their anger provoked by another neo-liberal phenomenon:
the arrival of foreign logging companies moving onto their land.
The demonstration
in Quito sparked an insurrection throughout the highlands, and the government
was obliged to recognise CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities,
as the legitimate voice of the Indian majority. CONAIE had been established
a few years earlier, in 1986, by Ecuador’s 11 principal indigenous nations.
Land conflicts
and the increasing politicisation of the indigenous movements led to the
creation of Ecuador’s first indigenous political party in 1995. Pachakutik,
or the Movement of Pluri-national Unity, developed a radical rhetoric that
went far beyond a demand for the recognition of land rights. The initial
three slogans of the movement were ‘no corruption, no lies, no idleness’
[‘ama sua, ama llulla, ama kjella’], but eventually it came out with
more specific complaints against the Quito government’s neo-liberal programme,
moving into top gear when the government, with IMF advice, adopted the US
dollar as the national currency.
In January
2000 a rebellion was ignited by Pachakutik supporters, backed by young army
officers. They seized the Congress building in Quito and brought down the
government. Colonel Luis Gutiérrez, one of the young officers, was elected
President three years later with the support of Pachakutik. This first experiment
in the Andes of an alliance between the military and the indigenous movements
lasted for less than a year, for Colonel Gutiérrez refused to abandon the
neo-liberal policies of his predecessors. He retained the US dollar, and
Pachakutik withdrew its support. A further rebellion in 2005 led to his
overthrow and replacement by an interim President, Alfredo Palacios.
Meanwhile
something similar was taking place in Bolivia, where the indigenous movements
had also organised a Pachakutik movement in the 1990s, with the same three
demands as the movement in Ecuador - no corruption, no lies, no idleness.
Felipe Quispe, their leader among the Aymara, talked of the communal Eden
that had existed before the Spanish conquest, and, like the indigenous leaders
in Ecuador, he often used the anti-capitalist language of the anti-globalisation
movements. He called for capitalism to be replaced by an economic system
based on the three ancient pillars of pre-Colombian society, and for the
country’s artificial borders to be redrawn. Quispe was soon overtaken in
political realism and in popularity by Evo Morales, another Aymara leader,
who allied himself to politicians outside the indigenous movement, notably
Alvaro García Linera (who would become his Vice-President). Their political
group, the Movement to Socialism, secured support beyond the indigenous
population in the mestizo middle class and in the relics of the old
trade union movement.
As a result
of the drastic closure of the tin mines in the 1980s, the class-conscious
and highly unionised mining workforce, now without work, had been translated
from the cold plateau of the Altiplano to the semi-tropical coca fields
of the Chapare. There these former miners cultivated coca, the most profitable
work available. Their unscheduled move had an unexpected impact on the country’s
politics, for their old union activism, deployed in this fresh setting,
was soon to join with that of the emerging indigenous movements to create
a successful electoral tide.
At presidential
elections in June 2002, Morales came a close second to Sánchez de Losada,
a right-wing millionaire with close links to the American embassy. A year
later, in October 2003, La Paz was given over to demonstrators protesting
against his privatisation programme. The indigenous population streamed
down from the hills to attack US fast-food outlets and supermarkets, and
Sánchez de Losada fled into exile in the United States, to be replaced by
his deputy, Carlos Mesa.
The popular
protest bubbling away in the Andes had a particular focus on the various
neo-liberal attempts to privatise the municipal water supply, a project
that proved particularly offensive to indigenous opinion. Demonstrations
in Cochabamba in April 2000 led to the cancellation of a water contract
with the US firm Bechtel, and similar protests in El Alto in January 2005
led to the withdrawal of a French water firm, Lyonnaise des Eaux, which
had been operating there since 1997.
Protests
in Bolivia against water privatisation were soon extended to the government’s
apparent ‘give away’ of the country’s oil and natural gas reserves, and
these led in June 2005 to the resignation of President Mesa and to the eventual
electoral victory of Evo Morales in December.
A similar
story has been unfolding in Peru, hitherto less exposed to indigenous politics
than the other Andean countries. The terrible cost of the repression of
Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrilla movement of the 1980s, which
led to more than 70,000 deaths, left people with little appetite for politics.
Yet in the year 2000 a coalition similar to that in Ecuador, of military
officers and indigenous organisations, supported a rebellion by two young
officers, Ollanta and Antauro Humala. Their rebellion accelerated the downfall
of the neo-liberal government of Alberto Fujimori, and in subsequent years,
the Humala brothers created a countrywide organisation with an indigenous
and nationalist agenda that sought to resurrect the government and geographical
space of the Inca empire.
Their movement’s
magazine, Ollanta, selling more than 60,000 copies each fortnight,
campaigned against privatisation, globalisation and the free-market system
adopted by successive Peruvian governments. Ollanta’s message went
down well in a country where more than half the population is Quechua or
Aymara. Peruvian social movements were closely watching events in Bolivia
and demonstrations in Arequipa in 2002 halted the sale of local water companies
to a Belgian firm.
Antauro Humala
organised a fresh rebellion in January 2005, seizing the Andean town of
Andahuaylas with a group of 200 former soldiers. Their call for the resignation
of President Alejandro Toledo secured the support of thousands of local
people, who came out on the streets to express their solidarity. Government
forces soon regained control of the town, but the explosive potential of
the Andean highlands stood revealed.
Ollanta Humala
became the frontrunner in this year’s presidential campaign, distancing
himself from his brother’s version of what has become known as ‘ethno-nationalism’
on the grounds that it was too right-wing. Ollanta prefers the left-wing
language of Hugo Chávez.
Latin
America’s white elite has been virulently hostile to the emergence of the
indigenous movements in the Andes. In Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist
and former right-wing presidential candidate (now a Spanish citizen), is
an outspoken critic, accusing them of generating ‘political and social disorder’.
Society faces a choice, he says, between civilisation and barbarism. This
is the age-old cry of Latin America’s white settlers, an indication of their
unwillingness to come to terms with the indigenous peoples whose continent
they have usurped.
Similar sentiments
have been expressed by the opposition in Venezuela, where the pronounced
hostility to Chávez from the old ruling elite comes more from race hatred
than from class prejudice. Chávez has not hurt the rich in their pocket,
only in their amour propre. By addressing the neglected question
of the black and indigenous majority of the population, he has reminded
the rich whites of the real nature of the society in which they live.
The prevalence
of the free market, once thought to presage ‘the end of history’, has certainly
thrown up some intriguing new actors on the political stage, although maybe
it is too early to map out their ultimate impact. The indigenous movements
are by no means homogenous and have a disconcerting tendency to quarrel
and divide. Each ethnic group has its own traditions and its own leader,
and unites with others with difficulty.
Yet their
presence at the political centre is now well-established. Their flamboyant
eruption signposts the creation and growth of a cultural resistance to the
globalising trends that have swept the world in the years since the collapse
of communism. As well as bringing increased poverty to the already poor,
the onslaught of economic neo-liberalism was also accompanied by a cultural
invasion that has affected the development of individual countries in important
ways: the import of American-style consumer habits has influenced what people
grow and what they eat, where they shop and what they wear, and what they
watch at the cinema and on television.
Globalisation
had also brought a particular form of liberal democracy, often at odds with
local tradition. Old political parties have been undermined and cast aside,
while new forms of political campaigning have arrived as part of a package
‘Made-in-the-USA’. Huge sums have been spent on election advertising, particularly
on television, and on the commissioning of marketing and opinion polls.
Freshly revived concepts have been encouraged, like ‘civil society’ and
‘human rights’, that have little echo in Latin America’s traditional political
vocabulary.
While the
new cult of globalisation has been accepted by Latin America’s dominant
elites, their position is increasingly insecure. They remain delicately
balanced above a seething mass of discontented humanity. The problem for
the globalisers is that Latin America is composed of many countries with
little cultural or social homogeneity. The white settler elites may welcome
the culture and practice that comes from another settler society, but these
are anathema to the indigenous inhabitants, at war with the settlers for
five centuries.
In breaking
away from the political parties of the white settlers, and in giving their
support to their own emerging movements, the indigenous peoples are promoting
and sustaining the growth of a new cultural nationalism that is beginning
to erode the forces of globalisation.
Three countries
so far have embraced the cause of cultural nationalism at the level of the
state - Castro’s Cuba, Chávez’s Venezuela, and Morales’s Bolivia. All have
supported the struggle of the indigenous peoples, and all have emphasised
their own history of liberation struggle going back over the centuries.
All have sought to give value and respect to their traditional underclass,
and to use their sense of history as a weapon to defeat the globalisers.
In
doing so they have revived an argument in Latin America that goes back at
least as far as Simón Bolívar and José Martí. ‘Our history is different
from that of the United States or Europe’, they argue. ‘Our culture is different,
our politics are different, and so too is our economic system. And our countries
have a right to define what our future will be, without being told what
to do by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade
Organisation.’ Maybe such ideas may be seen eventually as a force for change,
and not just in Latin America.
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