Subject: U.S. counterinsurgency to target indigenous movements? Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 07:10:55 -0500 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD0202E3F3F0@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
The second article can be read in
the context of the dramatic developments
over the past two days
in Indigenous-majority Bolivia....
ZG
PROTESTS WRACK BOLIVIAN CAPITAL;
President offers resignation
CNN, Wednesday, June 8, 2005 Posted: 1:19 AM EDT
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- Thousands of anti-government demonstrators have again
taken to the streets of La Paz, calling for immediate elections one day
after Bolivian President Carlos Mesa offered to resign.
Their weeks-old blockade has nearly paralyzed the capital of nearly two
million residents, where gas stations are closed, supermarkets are empty
and drinking water is scarce. On Tuesday, riot police clashed downtown
with miners, who detonated sticks of dynamite, but there were no reports
of casualties. In an evening broadcast, Mesa appealed to the Congress
president and lower parliament chamber chief to step aside and allow
early elections to halt protests, Reuters reported.
The protesters -- largely members of the country's impoverished Indian
population -- are calling for elections, the nationalization of
extensive gas and oil industries and a more even distribution of wealth.
Bolivia, with a population of 9 million, has long been one of South
America's poorest countries and a major recipient of international aid.
It is also the source of up to a third of the world's cocaine, according
to U.S. State Department estimates.
The protests have grown after Bolivia's Congress moved last month to
raise taxes on foreign oil companies that have flocked to the country to
develop its natural gas reserves -- the second largest in South America
after Venezuela. The measure was intended to calm street tensions, but
it only unleashed new street protests in a nation where
anti-globalization anger is high.
In a move widely seen to be a gambit to bring out popular support for
his government and secure a new mandate, Mesa offered to resign for the
second time in three months in a nationally televised address Monday
night. "I'm here to say I can't go any further," he said. Mesa, an
independent without a political party supporting him in Congress,
offered his resignation to lawmakers in March, but they refused to
accept it at that time, The president of the country's supreme court
called on the National Congress to meet Wednesday afternoon to analyze
whether to accept or reject Mesa's offer.
In a sign of increasing concern about conditions, the U.S. State
Department urged Americans to defer non-essential travel to Bolivia and
authorized the departure of non-emergency U.S. Embassy personnel and
their families. "The La Paz airport remains open, but some flights have
been cancelled and others diverted," a travel warning issued Tuesday
advised. "Travel from the airport to La Paz is subject to sporadic
blockades. Roads running north and south from La Paz, to Lake Titicaca
and Oruro, are blockaded and closed to travel."
Mesa took office in October 2003 when a bloody popular revolt over
free-market economic policies forced his predecessor, former president
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, to flee the country. Bolivia has a history of
unrest. Since breaking away from Spanish rule in 1825, it has been beset
by nearly 200 coups and counter-coups.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
'WAR ON TERROR' HAS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN ITS SIGHTS
Gustavo Gonzalez*
Inter Press Service News Agency
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28962
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.
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 Jose 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
Confederacion 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 Diaz, 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
Gutierrez, 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.
Jose 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 Millan, 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 Gonzalez, 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 Maldos, a political adviser to the Missionary
Indigenist Council, which has ties to the Catholic
Church.
Maldos 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 Chavez (Bolivia), Mario Osava
(Brazil), Constanza Vieira (Colombia), Kintto Lucas
(Ecuador) and Diego Cevallos (Mexico). .