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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