[Indigenous concerns have animated the protests raging this week in Colombia. A one-day general strike called by leftist groups has morphed into a sustained insurrection that presents the biggest challenge yet to the rule of right-wing President Iván Duque.]
By Ishaan
Tharoor
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Bolivian
riot police fired tear gas to break up a massive funeral procession that
turned
into an anti-government demonstration in La Paz on
Thursday.
(Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP)
|
This month, Bolivia’s conservative interim
leader, Jeanine Áñez, proclaimed herself president with a Bible in hand. It was
a provocative gesture — not simply because Bolivia is constitutionally secular,
but because it was widely seen as a jab against the indigenous traditions
espoused by ousted president Evo Morales.
That same week, Luis Fernando Camacho, a
prominent Áñez ally and right-wing businessman, made the subtext clear. “We
have tied all the demons of the witchery and thrust them into the abyss,” he
declared at a rally, gesturing pejoratively to the native customs and spirits
occasionally invoked by Morales, who worked to uplift Bolivia’s huge and
long-neglected indigenous population. “Satans, get out of Bolivia now.”
After more than a decade in power, Morales’s
dramatic exit from office — he is now restless in exile in Mexico — was
prompted by a nudge from Bolivia’s security forces, which said his departure
was needed to quell days of mass protests against his rule. Áñez and the
interim regime that replaced him have styled themselves as the restorers of a
constitutional order that they claimed Morales manipulated to extend his reign.
But their short time in power has been marked by a right-wing revenge mission, including
grim scenes of indigenous protesters gunned down in the streets.
There is a lot that is inflaming politics in
South America at the moment. The continent is in the grips of a kind of “Latin
Spring,” a wave of popular uprisings that have filled city streets in Chile,
Ecuador, Bolivia, and, most recently, Colombia. The upheaval has humbled
governments and forced leaders to flee their capitals. Protesters across the
region resent deepening economic inequities, the toll of austerity and the
perceived corruption or highhandedness of the political elites presiding over
their nations. Their collective anger has even prompted calls in some countries
for political revolution and the wholesale remaking of the social contract.
But amid South America’s 21st century
discontent, there is also an older antipathy. Indigenous populations constitute
impoverished majorities in some South American countries and marginalized
minorities in others. In Bolivia and Brazil, reactionary backlashes to years of
leftist rule carry an unmistakable contempt for both nations’ indigenous
communities and the perceived privileges they were afforded by socialist
governments.
Meanwhile in countries such as Ecuador and
Colombia, indigenous protesters have been on the front lines of demonstrations,
chafing against systems erected on top of centuries of discrimination. Earlier
this year, an indigenous-led uprising forced Ecuador’s president to flee Quito,
the capital. The protesters relented only after the government agreed to
restore fuel subsidies that many indigenous farmers needed to transport goods
to market.
Indigenous concerns have animated the
protests raging this week in Colombia. A one-day general strike called by
leftist groups has morphed into a sustained insurrection that presents the
biggest challenge yet to the rule of right-wing President Iván Duque.
“Duque, whose popularity has fallen to 30
percent in the latest Gallup poll, is accused of failing to fully implement the
peace deal signed in 2016 by then-President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC to
end Colombia’s civil war after 50 years of strife,” noted my colleagues.
“Dissident guerrillas and other armed groups continue to fight in the nation’s
rural conflict zones. Five indigenous leaders were killed in the southern
province of Cauca in October; more than 700 community organizers and indigenous
leaders have been killed since 2016.”
“In my community, in my department of Cauca,
they’re killing our social leaders in our indigenous lands … they’re killing us
selectively,” said Almayari Barano Yanakuna, a 48-year-old indigenous woman, in
an interview with Al Jazeera in Bogota.
That sense of victimization is all too
apparent in Brazil as well. Since coming to power this year, President Jair
Bolsonaro, a hard-right firebrand with a lengthy record of anti-indigenous
comments, has systematically loosened environmental protections in stretches of
the Amazonian forest that is home to indigenous communities. That, critics say,
has contributed to a devastating spike in deforestation, largely by illegal
loggers, miners and ranchers. Their predations have brought them into conflict
with indigenous “guardians” of the forest, who have held the line against land
grabbers but are now at greater risk under Bolsonaro’s negligent watch.
“Our lands are being invaded, our leaders
murdered, attacked and criminalized, and the Brazilian state is abandoning
indigenous peoples to their fate with the ongoing dismantling of environmental
and indigenous policies,” the association of Brazilian indigenous peoples told
my colleague Marina Lopes. “The Bolsonaro government has indigenous blood on
their hands.”
Bolsonaro has waved away criticism.
“Deforestation and fires will never end,” he told reporters in Brasilia this
past week. “It’s cultural.” But his current nonchalance belies his past as a
fringe politician grinding his ax against the special reservations afforded to
indigenous and other historically marginalized communities.
On the campaign trail in 2017 and 2018, he
vowed that he would not allow a “centimeter” of indigenous land to be
demarcated for protection, saying that it was Brazil’s right to develop the
economic potential of its territory. Two decades earlier, though, Bolsonaro was
more blunt about his worldview: “It’s a shame,” he told the Correio Braziliense
newspaper in 1998, “that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the
Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”