[IPSM] 'War on Terror' Has Indigenous People in Its Sights

[hhazel at gmail.com]

 'War on Terror' Has Indigenous People in Its Sights
Gustavo González*

SANTIAGO, Jun 6 (IPS) - The "war on terror", identified in Amnesty
International's annual report as a new source of human rights abuses,
is threatening to expand to Latin America, targeting indigenous
movements that are demanding autonomy and protesting free-market
policies and "neo-liberal" globalisation.

In the United States "there is a perception of indigenous activists as
destabilising elements and terrorists," and their demands and activism
have begun to be cast in a criminal light, lawyer José Aylwin, with
the Institute of Indigenous Studies at the University of the Border in
Temuco (670 km south of the Chilean capital), told IPS.

Pedro Cayuqueo, director of the Mapuche newspaper Azkintuwe, also from
the city of Temuco, wrote that the growing indigenous activism in
Latin America and Islamic radicalism are both depicted as threats to
the security and hegemony of the United States in the "Global Trends
2020 - Mapping the Global Future" study by the U.S. National
Intelligence Council (NIC).

NIC works with 13 government agencies, including the CIA (Central
Intelligence Agency), and is advised by experts from the United States
and other countries. Cayuqueo described the report as "a veritable
x-ray" of potential "counterinsurgency scenarios" from now to the year
2020.

In the process of drafting the report, NIC organised 12 regional
conferences around the world, one of which was held in Santiago in
June 2004.

The reporter said the emergence of increasingly organised indigenous
movements and the strengthening of their ethnic identities become, in
that view, targets of "the so-called low-intensity warfare doctrine, a
renovated version of the National Security Doctrine" that formed the
basis of U.S. interventionism in Latin America from the 1960s to the
end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

The indigenous question would thus appear to form part of what the
United States sees as future threats to its hegemony.

In Latin America, the Andean subregion is seen as the "hottest" area,
because of the growing political role played by well-organised
indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, but also because of the
impact on indigenous peoples of armed conflict and drug trafficking in
Colombia.

Farther south in the Andes mountains, Mapuche organisations in
southern Chile and Argentina have become more and more radical in
recent years in their claims to their ancestral territory, demands for
autonomy and the creation of indigenous reserves, and defence of the
environment, which is threatened by transnational mining and forestry
corporations that are granted tax breaks and other incentives by
governments.

"The indigenous nations exercise and preserve a profound democratic
essence in their organisational and decision-making structures, but
transnational corporations foment their exclusion from society and
push indigenous people to violence, which could translate into armed
struggle," Aymara leader Juan de la Cruz Vilca told IPS in Bolivia.

In Bolivia, 70 percent of the population of 9.2 million identify
themselves as indigenous, and the indigenous movement, along with
other sectors, is demanding a constituent assembly to rewrite the
constitution and "re-found the republic" to grant self-determination
to the country's 36 native groups, added de la Cruz Vilca.

The activist, the former president of Bolivia's Confederación Sindical
Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, a peasant farmer union,
accused foreign oil companies of backing the demands for regional
autonomy put forth by business and large landowners in the wealthy
eastern regions of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni, where the
country's natural gas reserves are concentrated.

"Behind that movement lies a hidden plan aimed at generating a violent
reaction by the indigenous movements, in order to justify external
military intervention," he maintained.

"It's true that indigenous peoples are a threat, from the point of
view of the political and economic powers-that-be. They see us as
terrorists, but we aren't, because our struggle is open, legal and
legitimate," said Ricardo Díaz, an indigenous lawmaker with the
leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), the strongest opposition
party in Bolivia.

In Ecuador, indigenous people account for an estimated 40 percent of
the population of nearly 13 million.

For the first seven months of the government of Lucio Gutiérrez, who
was removed from his post by Congress on Apr. 20 after a week of
protests, the Pachakutik Movement, the political arm of the powerful
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), formed
part of the administration.

CONAIE president Luis Macas told IPS that if his movement, "which
guides the indigenous struggle along peaceful channels, didn't exist,
the poverty in which our communities, and the Ecuadorian people in
general, are steeped could become a breeding-ground for the emergence
of organisations that could try to change the social situation through
violence, but that hasn't happened," said Macas.

"We are not a threat to the world, or to the United States. On the
contrary, we hold out a hope, an alternative for humanity," said
Feliciano Valencia, coordinator of human rights in the Association of
Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, in the southwestern Colombian
province of Cauca.

The shamans (traditional healers) "had warned that very difficult
times lay ahead, with a black cloud hanging over our territories," the
Nasa indigenous leader commented to IPS, saying the Colombian
government was already following policies aimed at the persecution of
social and indigenous movements even before the "Global Trends 2020"
report was issued.

The Nasa people number around 150,000, making them the second-largest
indigenous group in Colombia, which is home to 90 aboriginal
communities that make up around two percent of the population of 44
million.

Although Colombia's 1991 constitution granted autonomy to indigenous
peoples in their reserves, that provision is not respected, and there
are continuous occupations of land by the military and irregular armed
groups, said Valencia.

He also protested the spraying of coca and poppy crops and the
displacement of indigenous peoples from their land by those interested
in getting their hands on natural resources.

Chilean Deputy Minister of Planning Jaime Andrade Huenchucoy, the
government agent in charge of indigenous affairs, told IPS that the
native peoples in his country represent no threat of destabilisation
or terrorism, as described in the NIC report.

José Santos Millao, one of the Mapuche members of Chile's National
Corporation of Indigenous Development, remarked to IPS that the U.S.
intelligence services "suspiciously or stupidly" cast the protests of
indigenous peoples as part of "terrorist" tendencies, in order to
distort their "legitimate demands."

In Chile, 6.4 percent of the population of 15.2 million identify
themselves as indigenous members of six ethnic groups, although other
estimates put the proportion at 10 percent.

In neighbouring Argentina, meanwhile, native peoples make up between
1.5 and 2.0 million people, out of a population of 37 million.

In both Chile and Argentina, the Mapuches comprise the biggest indigenous group.

The land conflicts that are currently raging began with the arrival of
the foreign mining, oil, forestry and water companies, Mauro Millán,
leader of the Mapuche Tehuelche Organisation of Argentina, told IPS.
"The United States is trying to depict the reaction of the Mapuche
people in defence of their land as an internal security problem facing
our countries," he said.

In an interview with IPS, Rafael González, spokesman for the Committee
of Campesino Unity in Guatemala, said that "since the Sept. 11 (2001)
terror attacks (on New York and Washington), anyone who criticises the
establishment is dubbed a terrorist" by the U.S. government.

In the view of anthropologist Pedro Ciciliano at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico, the NIC report is "exaggerated and
fraught with errors typical of U.S. intelligence based on biased
information."

"Indigenous people can be considered a threat, because they are poor
and are pressing for their rights, but they don't represent a
terrorist threat," the anthropologist told IPS.

In Brazil, where 400,000 indigenous people represent 0.2 percent of
the population, it is absurd to say their demands and protests have a
destabilising effect, said Jairo da Silva, deputy coordinator of the
indigenous council of the northern state of Roraima, and Paulo Maldós,
a political adviser to the Missionary Indigenist Council, which has
ties to the Catholic Church.

Maldós commented to IPS that Latin America's indigenous people are in
the midst of an "ethnic reconstruction," which explains why the
declining workers' movement has been increasingly eclipsed by
associations of rural workers and peasant farmers.

He cited the case of Bolivia, where miners, previously linked by a
powerful, well-organised labour union, have been overshadowed by coca
farmers.

With respect to ethnic diversity, "the real destabilising factor is
the narrow-minded attitude of some states, like the Chilean state,
which refuse to recognise the country's multi-ethnic nature and to
design mechanisms that permit it to be expressed," said lawyer Aylwin.

"A state that recognises that multi-ethnic nature and establishes
political and territorial rights for indigenous people to allow them
to develop within their own cultures has much fewer problems in terms
of stability than states which deny that reality," he argued.

* With additional reporting by Marcela Valente (Argentina), Franz
Chávez (Bolivia), Mario Osava (Brazil), Constanza Vieira (Colombia),
Kintto Lucas (Ecuador) and Diego Cevallos (Mexico). (END/2005)