Around Latin America

-An eventual return to Honduras for exiled and deposed ex-president Manuel Zelaya may have gotten more difficult this past week. Honduran prosecutors are trying to attain a warrant to arrest Zelaya for "fraud, document forgery and abuse of power." No word yet on whether these same prosecutors are going to try to secure warrants against senator-for-life Roberto Micheletti for his own abuses of power.

-Even as we continue to ignore the violence in Mexico (and our role in it), there are daily reminders that it affects the entire border region, not just Juarez.

-Could a call for a "plurinational uprising" from Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador threaten Rafael Correa's administration and ability to remain in office through the end of his term?

-In appalling environmental actions, Argentina's army apparently is burning its garbage at a base in the Antarctic within 200 feet of penguin nesting grounds.

-Although there has been bad blood between the two countries for well over a century, Peru has put that aside in the face of the humanitarian crisis facing Chile in the wake of this week's powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake by offering construction materials to help its neighbor and occasional rival rebuild.

-Speaking of the Chilean earthquake, it turns out there will not be a single person on the planet who is not affected by the earthquake. The tectonic shift was powerful enough that it shifted the Earth's axis, resulting in a day that was 1.26 microseconds shorter.

-Brazil's indigenous Yanomani population has been devastated by disease and encroachment from outsiders in the recent past, and one scholar has a novel solution: prosecute Senator Jose Sarney, who was president from 1985-1990, with genocide for his role in letting gold mining companies enter into Yanomani territory, bringing with them disease and environmental degradation that have killed the Yanomanis and destroyed much of their homeland.

-On the subject of Brazil, there's also a nice little article up talking about the little-known (outside of Brazil) role of Middle Eastern immigrants in shaping the country's culture and politics over the last 100+ years, and it's well worth checking out.

-Finally, a pair of farewells to important Mexican figures. Writer Carlos Montemayor, whose fictional War in Paradise did much to shed light on the forgotten Mexican "Dirty War" of the 1960s and 1970s, died last week at the age of 62 (and the fact that a fictional work is the foremost work on the "Dirty War" speaks volumes about the absence of scholarship on the subject). And this week, Ana Maria Zapata Portillo, the last surviving daughter of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, died at the age of 94.

Around Latin America

-In good news from Guatemala, this past week, an army officer was convicted for his role in the disappearance of eight indigenous villagers in 1981. Colonel Marco Antonio Sanchez was sentenced to 53 years in prison, and three of his subordinates also received prison sentences. While this isn't the first incident of conviction in an "enforced disappearance" case, it does mark the first time that a high-ranking military officer has been convicted in such a case. Meanwhile, lawyers entered damning evidence from secret Guatemalan military archives in the case of charges of genocide against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who seized power in 1982 during Guatemala's 36-year civil war and who oversaw some of the worst crimes against humanity during the war. While Montt is far from conviction still, the fact that a jury has found Sanchez guilty, combined with the horrible details of the military documents in the Montt case, allow hope that Montt finally pays for his crimes. And while an acquittal would be an injustice, the simple fact that formerly-secret military documents have now become public, revealing just how horrible Montt's "administration" (and others during the civil war) were will deal a major blow to any efforts to rehabilitate Montt or the right in this war.

-In bad news for women's rights in Brazil, a Brazilian doctor who performed abortions was found dead in her car last week. Authorities are investigating whether Dr. Neide Mota Machado's death was a murder or a suicide. Machado had had her medical license stripped earlier this year, after she was accused of performing nearly 10,000 abortions in Brazil (where abortion is illegal save for cases of rape, severe deformation of the fetus, or of a threat to the life of the mother). For those who feel that making abortion in the United States legal only in the cases of rape, incest, or health risks to the mother, it is worth pointing out that over 230,000 women entered hospitals due to complications from botched illegal abortions in 2008 alone.

-Finally, one of the darker aspects of the U.S. embargo on Cuba emerged in a recent story that alleged that "a dozen Cuban children with heart defects were forced to endure unnecessary surgery because the U.S. embargo blocked them from receiving American-made catheters." While the U.S. apparently made such exports to Cuba legal back in 1992, the paperwork is enough of a "hassle" that medical companies have little reward in going through all the bureaucracy imposed by the limited embargo, which allows medicine to get to Cuba. Even so, after $142 health care items were approved to go to Cuba in 2008, only $1.2 million worth of goods actually reached the island, according to this report. While I question the use of the term "genocide" to describe unnecessary surgeries on 12 children, there is no denying the fact that the embargo has very real consequences upon the daily lives and even survival of many Cubans, and this story just offers one more very stark reminder of that fact.

A Disturbing Legal Position Against Mapuches in Chile

As it nears its end, Michele Bachelet's government in Chile has been remarkably successful. However, it all hasn't been roses, and this is one of the uglier aspects of her four-year administration:

Small groups of Mapuche Indians have so rattled Chile by seizing forests, burning buses and attacking police to demand land and autonomy that the leftist government has turned to dictatorship-era measures to quell the violence.

The government of President Michelle Bachelet is prosecuting Mapuche activists with secret evidence, protected witnesses and other tough aspects of an anti-terrorism law inherited from Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who jailed and tortured Bachelet's father and sent her into exile.

The police crackdown has left a stain on Bachelet's otherwise strong human rights record, with UNICEF, the UN Human Rights Commission and other international organizations expressing concern that elderly people and children are being abused.

Bachelet's response has been that, while she understands the claims of the Mapuches and the centuries of crimes the Chilean state has committed against them, she also has "said nothing justifies the violence, which so far has left four Mapuches dead and 100 convicted or jailed, at least 34 of whom are being tried on terrorism charges."

That may be. But last I checked, the deaths have been Mapuches, and not non-indigenous Chileans or agents of the state. And what is more, even if you don't think "violence" is the proper way for Mapuches to express their discontent, I really don't see how relying on the anti-terrorist laws of an extremely violent and repressive government is the correct response, either. Even if you do think it's the correct response, that doesn't justify attacks on elderly women and children, nor does it justify illegal and unconstitutional searches of Mapuche homes or the violation of basic rights.

Naturally, no president of any country is perfect. As the use of this Pinochet-era dictatorship law and the treatment of the Mapuches indicates, Bachelet's policies on and treatment of Chile's Mapuches may be the darkest stain on her administration.

Images from Bolivia's Constitutional Referendum

Earlier this year, Bolivia passed a new constitution, and as Erik commented at the time, "The indigenous majority again flexed their political muscle, taking control of the nation from the eastern whites who had oppressed them for the last 450 years."

This week, I came upon some excellent photographs from the vote, originally put up online in February. They're a powerful visual example both of the support Morales does have (in spite of rhetoric from the whiter eastern Bolivian elites who hate Morales with a passion). They really capture the atmosphere of some of the vote on a new constitution in ways that no article or printed word could, and are worth checking out. Above is just one photo, but I encourage you to look at the entire collection.

The Ways In Which Climate Change Is Already Affecting Cultures As Well As the Environment

This article on the Kamayurá people in the Amazon offers just one more reminder of the tragic effects climate change is having not just on flora and fauna, but on people and cultures, too:

Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

[...] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

This is absolutely right. In our concern over climate change, there seems (at least to me) to be a disconnect between the damage the environment is and will sustain (often illustrated in images of rising waters, receding glaciers, or increasingly arid locations) and the real effects these changes are already having on people. In part, at least in the U.S. and Europe, this is a matter of luxury - the populations are relatively well-off enough that issues like declining food availability and the threat of cultural extinction seem far-off or even non-existant (does anybody stop to consider the death of American cultures, or even sub-cultures?). Yet there are other parts of the world that are already dealing with these possibilities, not just in terms of declining food availability or changing landscapes, but of real threats to the survival of their cultures and beliefs. Nor, as the article points out, is it limited to Brazil - cultures in the U.S. are already facing danger:

"Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

All this serves as just a stark reminder that climate change isn't just a threat that could radically transform the world for the worst if we don't do something about it now. It's already begun to take its toll on many peoples, and to ignore that fact is to ignore the fact that climate change isn't a future threat: it's a clear and present danger.

[Also, as an aside, I'm more than a little bothered that the second word (and first non-article descriptor) in the article is "naked." Could we appeal to exoticizing stereotypes, please? Were they naked? Probably. But factuality isn't the issue. What exactly does their state of clothing have to do with the rest of the article? Nothing. It's just appealing to basic, stereotypical images that portray indigenous people as exotic beings who don't wear clothes, without providing anything of substance to the main point of environmental change in the report.]

Alan Garcia, Racist

Indigenous Peruvians are protesting their government allowing multinational corporations to mine and log their lands without their permission. Not surprisingly, the racist president of Peru, Alan Garcia, could not care less. In fact, Garcia is sending in the military to put down the protests. He claims,

"We have to understand when there are resources like oil, gas and timber, they don't belong only to the people who had the fortune to be born there,"

Uh-huh. That's code for, "we don't care about the rights of Indians. We are taking your resources, you won't see one red cent for it, and you can't do anything about it."

There is a history of western environmental groups stepping in to make a positive difference in these situations. In the early 1990s, Ecuadoran indigenous people protested against oil exploration. They made connections with western environmental organizations who then put international pressure on the oil companies and the government. Interestingly, the big enviro groups made a deal with the oil companies that was then rejected by both their own members and the indigenous groups. The corporations then pulled out. In that case, it wasn't that the indigenous groups weren't interested in developing their resources. But they wanted control over the operations and real assurances that it wouldn't lead to the destruction of their land and society. I suspect it's the same in Peru.

But ultimately, you have to have a president who is willing to listen to international pressure on these issues and I don't know that Alan Garcia would do so. Arguably the worst South American leader not named Alvaro Uribe, Garcia has never shown much willingness to do what is right and to work with the poor people of his nation in any constructive way. It's particularly unlikely he's going to do that here with a $2 billion offer for the oil from the French company Perenco on the table.

Moreover, his stance, his words claiming that all Peruvians own these resources, and his use of the military suggest the worst kind of racism toward indigenous peoples. This racism has long plagued South American nations and often manifests itself over resource extraction. The indigenous people have usually lost these battles. Unless the West steps in here and applies some pressure, it's likely that they will lose again.

An Eventful Week in Brazil: Argentine Agreements, Challenging China, and a Major Court Ruling in Indigenous Rights

Brazil and Argentina met this week to re-affirm their economic and political relations. The meeting itself sounded innocuous enough - standard diplomatic promises to "iron out" some minor trade issues over things like import licenses on shoes and textiles (exciting!), as well as Brazil signing a deal with Argentina to help with the recent nationalization of Aerolineas Argentinas.

While that all seems minor enough, the language on China coming out of a business leaders' meeting between reps from both countries during Presidents Kirchner's visit was far more interesting. It's no secret to anybody that China has become a growing power in trade with Latin America. However, not all that trade is good, even for Latin America, as it has also been flooded with inexpensive products that undercut national economies in South and Central America, and reps from that meeting between the two countries didn't pull punches in mentioning China's role in the hemisphere, either commenting:

“The objective now is to fight against the common evil, Chinese products which are sold at dumping prices[...] With bilateral differences back on the right track, we must address the outside enemy."

That's some pretty tough talk there for an issue that hasn't really come up yet. Of course the Argentine and Brazilian business leaders who met have their own interests to defend, and Chinese products no doubt cut into their market somewhat. Nonetheless, even if criticisms of Chinese products undercutting local companies in South America seems fair enough, referring to China as "the outside enemy" raises eyebrows a bit. If this had come from Kirchner's or Lula's mouth, it would be even more shocking and newsworthy, but even as it stands right now, it does hint at future issues facing Latin American economies as they try to increase relations with China without having their own national companies and economies being undermined by cheaper Chinese products.

Also in Brazil, the Supreme Court refused to split up an indigenous reserve half the size of Belgium in the Amazon. White farmers had insisted it was too much land for the twenty-thousand indigenous inhabitants, while logging, mining, and agricultural companies had said the reservation's existence (required in the 1988 constitution) was "an obstacle to growth."

This is a major victory for indigenous rights and the environment in Brazil, and I have absolutely no sympathy for either the farmers nor the corporations. The damage farmers, miners, loggers, and agribusiness have caused in the Amazon is already irreparable, and the cycle probably won't end without measures like the court's ruling. While indigenous people will still obviously need to cultivate the land in ways they seem fit, and while I hate essentialist notions of indigenous peoples as being "in harmony" with the earth, I think it's a fair bet that they will manage the forest in the reserve better than logging and mining companies do - hell, by simply not clearing hundreds of acres a month, they'd be managing the environment better than the corporations. It's also a huge victory for re-affirming indigenous rights in Brazil, which often go unheeded in a society that considers itself a wide spectrum of racial mixture, but which often leaves indigenous peoples out of the equation in the present even while acknowledging their past.

The ruling won't just make all of the entanglements and problems go away. Violence will persist, and even some indigenous peoples don't like the ruling and feel it perpetuates racist stereotypes by trying to keep the indigenous communities "cut off from modernity." Nonetheless, the importance of this legal precedent cannot and should not be ignored, either. The Constitution of 1988 said that indigenous peoples were to get their traditional lands back, and when the businesses and farmers, miners and loggers, pushed and pushed, trying to effectively undo the constitution, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution stands, and the reserves cannot be split up. And that alone is a major step for indigenous rights in Brazil. We can only hope it leads to real gains for the communities, the environment, and Brazil overall.

How History Has Ruined Everything

The introduction paragraph to Lynn Foster's A Brief History of Mexico, Revised Edition states 

"The democratic reforms in 2000 that ended 70 years of party domination in Mexican politics by the Partido Revolutionario Institutional (PRI) have swept in a new era in Mexican history..... The corrupt party leadership that so long ruled Mexico has ended, and everything from labor relations to indigenous rights has been affected.  Moreover, these momentous changes, unlike so many others in Mexican history, were accomplished peacefully.  The political confidence of Mexico today could not contrast more sharply with the ominous foreboding described in the earlier edition of this book."

Yeah, it's true that some things have changed now that there is a new party in power, but there is certainly no more "political confidence" now than when the PRI was in power, and the Mexican distrust of their government is not going to change any time soon.  If you ask any indigenous person, nothing has changed.  They are still discriminated by almost every government policy and regarded as backward people who don't want to "develop."  

We visited with some members of the indigenous community of Amatlán in the state of Morelos.  They told us that not long ago, some people from the government wanted to come visit the community to offer a proposal for a development plan, and the community welcomed them.  But when they proposed a program for developing fish farms in their town, the community members just laughed.  Every year, there is a period of 5 months where water is so scarce that they barely have enough for their basic needs!  How are they ever going to develop fish farms?  Of course they refused the proposal, and no doubt the government reps when back to their people and told everyone that those damn indians don't even want to develop...  So clearly, there are still problems with the Mexican government.

This is the problem capital-H History and history books in particular: they always portray history as a past struggle that has resolved itself already.  In elementary school, we learned (a little bit) about the struggle for women's rights, which basically went like this: "Women used to not have the right to vote.  Can you imagine?! But now they do!  Yay!  Thanks to the women of the past, women don't have to fight for their rights anymore!"  Similarly, the history of race relations in the US goes like this:  "Black people used to be slaves, but then they weren't!  Then they were segregated, but not anymore!  Yay!  Everything is perfect!"  History books teach us not to recognize current systemic problems because it only shows us how they have already been fixed.  No different than a fairy tale, history books only feed our need for a happy ending.

So basically, history teaches us to be complacent and to accept the status quo - Thanks!

Challenges Facing Indigenous Peoples in Brazil

There were a couple of articles of note in the New York Times recently on indigenous issues in Brazil. The first deals with the growing struggles an indigneous group is having with drugs in the western-most part of the country in the Amazonian basin, where Brazil shares a border with Colombia and Peru. With the drug trade in the region growing, and with a non-indigenous town where drugs and alcohol are legal (they are illegal on the reserve) only a few miles away, growing numbers of Tikunas are getting involved in both the supply and demand sides of the drug trade: some are helping to smuggle the drugs across the border from Colombia and Peru into Brazil, while a growing number of Tikuna youths are becoming addicted to cocaine.

At a loss of what to do as traditional tribal authority has eroded, the Tikunas are turning to the government for assistance:

“We want government officials to help us save our children, so they don’t take part in these ruinous practices,” said Oswaldo Honorato Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariaçu chief. “Every day the situation gets worse. The younger generation does not obey. They do not show respect for our authority as chiefs. They need to learn respect.”

This is a rather new and interesting (albeit sad) portal into indigenous-state relations in Brazil. In Brazil, indigenous groups are not subject to most Brazilian laws, and the police are not allowed to enter reserves. The fact that the Tikunas (and maybe other groups in the region, now or in the future) are at such a loss as to be willing to cede at least some of that independence to the police in order to get a grip on the drug problem shows how bad things have gotten.

However, I'm not really sure what the police could do from either a theoretical or practical standpoint. The police themselves, after listening to the Tikuna's case, are unwilling to do much, simply because they feel the law doesn't really let them, even if the Tikunas themselves are soliciting help. They may be right, and it's definitely a murky legal issue. What is more, though, I'm not sure what the police could do. It's not like they don't have jurisdiction over Tabatinga, the neighboring non-reserve city, and the drug trade is absolutely flourishing there. Although I don't mean to question the decency of the police, I find it hard to believe that at least a few corrupt cops in what is far from a "metropolitan" part of Brazil are not at least implicitly involved with the burgeoning trade, even if it's just payoffs to look the other way (though I do not doubt, either, that many police in the area do want to do all they can to combat the problems in Tabatinga). Finally, given the police's record in places like Rio when it comes to the drug trade, I'm not even sure a stronger police presence is really the answer (though, to be fair, dealing with a very poor Amazonian border city is far different from dealing with the favelas in Rio).

And then there's the way in which Brazil deals with drug abusers. Unlike in the U.S., where drug abuse is a crime, in Brazil, it's treated as a social problem, as the article also points out:

Brazil treats drug users as victims who require treatment, not as criminals. They are usually sentenced to receiving drug-addiction treatment and performing community service in lieu of serving prison time.

I realize that's an extremely novel approach to drug abuse, but it also means that the police realyl aren't supposed to be involved with problems of drug abuse (and that's an important distinction between the indigenous reserve and the favelas - in the latter, they aren't combatting drug abuse, but drug trafficking).

And, if that weren't enough, there's the simple difficulty in patrolling the border. Brazil has historically had a very weak presence in the Amazon and its borders with Colombia and Peru (the dictatorship actually used the simple creation of a highway through the Amazon as a marker of Brazil's "progress"; it was never completed, fortunately). Brazil is enormous (larger than the United States if you take out Alaska), and it simply doesn't have the infrastructure, with police or other governmental agencies, to put the kind of strong state presence in the region that might deter the growing drug trade.

Finally, there's the fact that this isn't just Brazil's problem. Being so close to the borders of Peru and Colombia, those countries have to patrol their borders, too. Despite all of his talk, Uribe hasn't really done nearly as much as he claims in the anti-drug battle; it has simply shifted some, and is increasingly turning towards Brazil, Argentina, and even Europe. This just reinforces how un-winnable the "War on Drugs" is, and I may sound like a broken record player, but until countries like the United States deals with this issue on the demand side rather than the supply side (something Brazil has already done a much better job of addressing simply by recognizing drug addiction is a social, not a criminal, problem), then these issues will never go away.

In much more positive news, Brazilian courts have cleared the way for the federal government to establish an indigenous reserve "larger than Connecticut" in the Amazon basin. This is absolutely huge (and not just in terms of land-size). The court found that Lula's establishment of the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve, near the Venezuelan border, is legal, culminating a long-fought process:

The reserve would be one of the largest protected indigenous areas in the world. It has set off a sharp controversy over property rights, the limits of government authority and the rights of Indians to their original lands.
The reserve was decreed by Mr. da Silva’s government in 2005 after a legal battle of more more than 20 years. At more than four million acres, it encompasses about 42 percent of Roraima State and is 11 times bigger than the city of São Paulo.

If this does go through (and, at least from a legal standpoint, I don't think there are too many roads left available to challenge Lula's decision - but more on that in a second), it will be enormously important both for indigenous policy and environmental policy in Brazil.

The legal declaration is all well and good; however, I can't help but believe that actually enforcing this decree is going to take more effort from the government. According to the report, the area is inhabited by rice farmers, cattle ranchers, and even the remnants of an old gold mining industry. None of those groups is terribly interested in leaving, and each has a powerful voice in national and local politics. Lula's administration absolutely cannot just rest on the legal declaration of the court. I have little doubt that it will take a significant governmental presence, particularly military forces and national bureaucrats (local politicians simply cannot be trusted in cases like these, as they have absolutely no interest in protecting indigenous rights over the wealthy landowners - the latter, not the former, helped those local politicians arrive in office in the first place), as well as NGOs for indigenous rights and environmental protection. Fortunately, the government has shown a willingness to have this involvement, having already begun dispatching federal police to the area to evict farmers. The farmers are resisting, but it's still good that the government has begun establishing a strong state presence to enforce the decree and court decision, and one can only hope this will go through and set a new precedent for indigenous rights throughout Brazil.

Did Brazil Have an Urban Civilization Prior to European Colonization?

For the first time ever, the answer would seem to be, "most likely, yes." In an article published in Science this week, a team of archeologists makes the first strong argument for the existence of an indigenous Amazonian urban network prior to European arrival in Brazil.

This really is big news to scholars' understanding of the pre-European history of Brazil, about which we know virtually nothing. While we have learned much about the Nahuas (of which the Aztecs were but one part) and Mayas of Mexico and the Incas of Peru through their large, concentrated civilizations and their writing systems, we know very little of Brazilian indigenous peoples prior to 1500 beyond the fact that they had four basic language groups, they operated in small nomadic groups that would occasionally battle other groups, and we have a slight familiarity with their religious beliefs and worldviews, passed down from when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil in 1500. However, even our knowledge of these groups is based mostly on coastal indigenous groups, and not those from the Amazonian basin. While scholars have imagined for awhile that there might have been larger, more concentrated indigenous groups within the Amazon, there was little evidence forthcoming on this beyond some archeological finds of ceramics that raised twice as many questions as they answered. So the fact that there is now evidence of an organized urban civilization in the Amazon prior to European arrival is indeed huge news for Brazilian and Latin American history, archeology, and anthropology.

Still, as amazing and fascinating as this new evidence is, and for as many questions as it raises about pre-European history in Brazil, it isn't so revolutionary as to change the general history (vs. archeology) of Brazil compared to the rest of Americas. Scholars often say that one of the reasons (and I strongly stress that it is only one of several) that Portuguese colonization of Brazil was so different from the Spanish colonization of the Americas was the fact that the Spaniards ran into civilizations like the Inca, Nahua, and Maya, the likes of which the Portuguese never had to contend with.This remains the case; for decades and decades, the Portuguese did not bother to really colonize deep into Brazil, preferring to remain on the coast and only going in as the resources demanded (as in the case of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, where gold and diamonds were found). While the Spanish Crown set up its basic governmental institutions, such as the viceroyalty and churches, to subject and convert the large concentrations of indigenous peoples to its rule, the Portuguese continued throughout their colonial period to have limited contact with indigenous peoples, both as the latter were affected by disease and as they retreated further inland while the Portuguese established themselves on the coast. In one of the better ironies of Brazil's history, the Portuguese crown was far more hands-off with its Brazilian territory than the Spanish crown was with its colonies, up to the moment in 1808 when the Portuguese crown became the first European royal family to ever visit one of its own colonies when Dom Joao was displaced by the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, the concentrated efforts to force conversion and submission of the indigenous in Brazil was never as strong as it was in Spanish America because the Portuguese simply never had to deal with those large urban civilizaitons directly. (And that's not to say that the Portuguese weren't brutal in their treatment of indigenous peoples like the Spanish; they, too, were an awful group. They just had fewer indigenous people in toto than the Spanish did.)

So is this find going to completely transform and destroy our previous understanding of Brazilian history from 1500 onward? Most likely not. Still, the fact that we are for the first time getting evidence of any type of urban civilizations in the Amazon is major and exciting news (and I am a dork, so it's really exciting).

Political Rights for Indigenous Women in Oaxaca

The legislature in the Mexican state of Oaxaca just passed an electoral reform that, among other things, forces all state and local elections to be held at the same time, and now grants a constitutional right to hold referendums and plebiscites. However, the most interesting part of the law is that it now guarantees indigenous women the right to vote and run for office in a number of municipalities across Oaxaca that use indigenous customs to choose local public officials. In 2008, its shocking that women can still excluded from the political process in a country considered to be democratic (although indigenous governments in the U.S. can be just as exclusionary and discriminatory).

Oaxaca has an interesting dual system for choosing municipal officials. Mostly indigenous municipalities are allowed to select leaders through what is called usos y costumbres, which can range from large community assemblies to smaller council of elders meetings. The rest of the municipalities rely on the traditional political parties and electoral process to select their leaders. Usos y costumbres has been operating since the 1990s, but has come under criticism for its exclusionary practices and its lack of consistency across elections. Some have also argued that it increases postelectoral conflict. The use of indigenous customs to select leaders has also led to the exclusion of women in many of these municipalities from the political process, despite constitutional guarantees in the Mexican Constitution. Its nice to see that at least the local government in Oaxaca recognized the problem and has done something about it.

For more information on the reform in Spanish, click here or here (sorry, nothing I know of is available in English!)

The Amazon, Indigenous Rights, and A Brazilian General's Complete Failure to Understand the Constitution

Randy points us to this story about Brazil's Amazon policy and brewing tensions. To summarize: a little-known (to the rest of the world) part of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 states that ancestral indigenous lands, including in the Amazon, were to be returned to the indigenous groups within 5 years. While that hasn't happened, Brazil has been making efforts, slowly but surely, to see this happen. However, in the Amazonian region in particular, there has been escalating violence as the government tries to evict people living on lands that are owed, as the constitution declared, to indigenous groups. In order to complete these efforts, the military has been brought in, but apparently, at least one member of the Army in the region is less than pleased with the government's efforts:

"At a raucous seminar on national sovereignty at Rio de Janeiro's Military Club, the head of Army's Amazon command, Gen. Augusto Heleno Pereira, attacked the federal government's indigenous policy as ''regretful and chaotic.'' He even suggested that the army would refuse to remove the settlers."

''The Brazilian army does not serve the government but rather the Brazilian state,'' Pereira said.

Um, no.

Randy is exactly right in explaining how flawed this logic is:

Brazil's constitution calls for all ancestral indigenous lands to be demarcated and turned over to their respective tribes. Pereira serves the Brazilian state and the state is defined by the constitution. A military man who doesn't understand that has no business being in the military.

And it doesn't stop there: when democratically-elected Brazilian jurists wrote a new constitution in 1988 (3 years after the end of the dictatorship), they were especially careful to be explicit and detailed in outlining the military's role within the state, and how the military's role is to defend the functioning of all branches of the state, especially the presidency, regardless of political party. In short: constitutionally speaking, in Brazil, the military can never again (as long as this Constitution survives) overthrow a "government" to save the "state"; any time the office of the presidency, regardless of what party represents it, is threatened, the military's job is to protect the functioning of the executive branch and the state, and not to overthrow it the president and assume control itself.

It's disturbing enough that a high-ranking officer doesn't seem to get the constitutional role of the Brazilian military. But really, this is only one reason Pereira's statements are so disturbing. Back in 1964, when the military overthrew Joao Goulart, they used a similar logic. At the time, as Brazil's economy was struggle and the cold-war ideologies led right-wing forces to believe that anything from the left was "communist," the military decided to overthrow the leftist Goulart and take control of the country. Their logic at the time was that Goulart was leading the country to a civil war (the same phrase that the author uses at the beginning of this Amazonian article, I'd poinit out), and that the only way to "save" Brazil was for the military to "overthrow the government to save the state." Of course, the military then went on to entrench itself in power through 5 presidencies, authorizing torture and the murder of "subversives" and rewriting the constitution not once but twice, all in the name of "defending the state."

Of course, it's unclear if Pereira's opinions and comments reflect any broader military brass beliefs he could be a lone voice within the higher ranks of the armed forces. And I'm certainly not saying that Brazil is on the cusp of another military overthrow of the elected leader and/or a dictatorship simply because the military used similar reasoning to justify its 1964 coup of Joao Goulart and its 21-year-long dictatorship. Any time a military official anywhere in the world says the things Pereira said is disturbing, but given the history of this line of thinking and Brazil's recent history (the dictatorship only ended 23 years ago), Pereira's "logic" is really, really disturbing. I'm fully with Randy on this - Pereira should be kicked out. This won't happen, and he very well may have been privately censured already within the armed forces, simply because many do not want to ever see the military involved in politics again.

A Mounting Crisis for Brazil's Indigenous Groups

This is not good:

The year 2007 was particularly violent for indigenous people in Brazil, with 76 murders, an increase of 63 per cent over 2006, the Missionary Council for Indigenous People said Monday. The report from the group linked to the Catholic Church said the increase is mainly due to the sharp rise in violence against indigenous people in the southern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where there were 48 murders in 2007, almost 150 per cent more than the previous year.

[...] 'The Cimi still considers that the main reason for the increase
in violence is the confinement to which the indigenous peoples of the state (Mato Grosso do Sul) are constrained, particularly those of the Guarani (groups),' the report said. 'That is proved by the fact that, of the 48 murders in the state, 14 happened in Dourados, where there is a higher concentration of indigenous people per hectare.'

The treatment of indigenous peoples in Brazil is already awful, and has been for a long time. As in the United States, many groups have been forced onto reservations far smaller than their traditoinal landholdings, only far more recently than in the U.S. (the report mentions how Guaraní groups lived on 3 million hectares of land in the mid-20th century, yet are now confined to 40,000 hectares, a loss of 2.6 million hectares in only 50 years).

There are many reasons for this: ever since the 1950s, presidents have pushed for growth (industrial and agricultural) without considering or caring about the effects this would have on indigenous peoples, and Brazil's bursting population has increased demand for agricultural production; the relative failure of the government to adequately set up a strong governmental office that could effectively protect indigenous land and rights in the "backwater" parts of the country, like Mato Grosso (though given the history of the BIA in the U.S., I'm not sure such offices are always helpful, but it may help); and the pervasive belief throughout society that Brazil doesn't really have any more "Indians," or if it does, they aren't "real" Indians because they do things like wear blue jeans (I'm not making this up - see this book for a good modern analysis and documentation of this phenomenon) leading to a complete unawareness and apathy towards the indigenous peoples' plight in Brazil.

These factors all probably have a role in the increase in indigenous people's deaths last year. Hopefully, the government and human rights groups, as well as the indigneous groups themselves, will be able to reduce this and combat it and (although this is idealism on my part) make society both nationally and internationally more aware of the problems they are facing today. Still, this is bad, all around.

Argentina's First Beatified Indian and Issues of Identity

This Sunday, the Roman Catholic Church will beatify Caferino Namuncura, an Argentine Mapuche who died of tuberculosis while training to become a priest at the age of 18. Beatification is the first step in what may lead to canonization (beatification occurs after the first miracle attributed to a subject; canonization only happens after the second miracle) . Namancura is notable because he is the first Argentine indigenous person to be beatified (the Church only canonized its first American Indian in 2002, when Juan Diego of Mexico gained the honor).

There are several interesting issues at play in the beatification of Namuncura. First, it is the first under Benedict XVI's policy of beatifying and canonizing in the subjects home country, rather than in Rome. Thus, the ceremony will happen this Sunday in Chimpay in Patagonia). Second, there is the issue of ethnicity and religious colonization. While Cardinal Nercone is cited in the BBC piece as saying that Namuncura "was a role model for many, many young people" whose "ideal was to serve his people." Mapuche Indians in Argentina view the issue differently, rightfully condemning the genocidal campaigns the Argentine military launced against the indigenous people of Patagonia in the late-19th century and saying Namuncura's handover and conversion were part of this process of militaristic imperialism. Many Mapuche are offended by the cooptation of Namuncura by the Catholic Church, both in the past and now in the present sugar-coating and simplification of his story (as each and every beatification has exactly that effect on an individual's biography).

More interesting to me, though, is a quick comment in the Yahoo story that points out that Namuncura "has a wide following among the Argentina's poor." Anybody who has traveled to Argentina knows that the class divide also intersects frequently with racial categories; there are a far more disproportionate number of poor indigenous peoples than the "whites" of Argentina (indeed, the only beggars and homeless people I saw in Buenos Aires were clearly of indigenous ancestry). This isn't to say that there are no poor whites. However, the disparity is obvious and present.

What strikes me about all this is the ways in which different groups are competing over Namuncura's identity. The Church has its own (obvious) reasons to add another saint, particularly one from Argentina (and indigenous to boot!); likewise, the Mapuches understandably want to resist this and maintain Namuncura's identity as part of their broader struggle to address their own issues of identity and the genocide [and while that word is often misused, that's exactly what happened in the Argentine case - the military set out to completely kill off the indigenous peoples of Argentina] they suffered in the 19th century and beyond at the hands of the Argentine military (often with religious complicity). The less obvious element in all this is the poor, who are also often indigenous. Framed in terms of identity, they can relate to him both in terms of economy and ethnicity. Of course, it is the masses whose opinions are left out of the reports on Namuncura's beatification - instead, it is the traditional (but not necessarily in the bad sense) framing of the beatification as "Church hagiography vs. Indigenous resistance to cooptation". Yet the thousands of indigenous Catholics who have multiple reasons to relate to Namuncura are left out of the equation, even while it's their devotion that makes the beatification possible. It just reminds us once more how complex race relations and issues of identity in Argentina (where many people still deny the existence of "real Indians") can be.

Forests, Nicaragua, and Hurricane Felix

This article from last week stresses the importance of environmental protection. I was certain that when Hurricane Felix was bearing down on Nicaragua as a category 5 hurricane, we would be looking at massive deaths, not so much from the hurricane itself, but from the mudslides that seemed would follow (particularly given how Hurricane Mitch turned out a few years ago). Although 65 people (as of now – see ourlatinamerica.blogspot.com) have died, the death toll is far less than what many (including myself feared).

Apparently, the reason for this relatively low number of deaths among the Miskitos and others in Nicaragua is simple: forests. The forests also apparently helped to slow down and reduce the hurricane’s strength by offering a natural “barrier” against which the hurricane was acting (the simple rule of physics about action/reaction). Not just that, either – thanks to the forests, the ground remained rooted, and as any elementary schoolchild can tell you, plants prevent erosion. That’s apparently exactly what happened this time in Nicaragua.

All of this just goes to show one more way in which protecting forests will save lives in the future. Erik is usually the one who points this out, but it can never be re-stated enough – we must work hard to protect the forests around the world. The benefits will go beyond the simple (though by no means trivial) issue of oxygen/carbon dioxide cycles and greenhouse effects. Forests (and other environmental “resources”) save more lives than we care to acknowledge, and the case of Hurricane Felix is just one more example of that.

Rigoberta Menchú and the Guatemalan Presidential Elections

This article on why Mayan, indigenous human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize and presidential candidate Rigoberta Menchú finished 6th out of 12 in the Guatemalan election (garnering 3% of the total vote) is fascinating. It gets into traditional political reasons why she fared relatively poorly (it was her first time running, she’s never been a candidate for anything before, etc). However, what’s of real worth in the article are the reasons for her low performance based on politics of identity, gender, and race.

Many people tend to assume that “Mayans” are one culture, one people, one language, unified in the way that the Incas or the Nahua (of which the Aztecs were but a part) were. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Spaniards who tried to enter the Yucatan and Central America in the 16th and 17th centuries often described the Mayan “empire” (based, in part, on the massive constructions at places like Chichen Itza and Copan), they Mayans were never unified. They have remained, through the centuries, very loosely bound linguistically, and there hasn’t been the level of political unity and organization that could constitute an “empire”. This isn’t to say the Mayans have ever lacked political organizational skills – they simply weren’t a broad, unified group that covered lots of territory in a single ruling entity. This is pretty common knowledge to those who study Latin America, yet the broader misperception persists, despite the Mayans in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador having very different dialects and even languages, cultural practices, and political organzation and beliefs.

The article does a great job in making clear the diversity within the ethnically Mayan groups, whether it’s distinguishing the linguistic variations from one tribe to another; bringing up how gender norms and the patriarchal system in many Mayan communities, particularly among the elderly, may have worked against her; or discussing how Menchú is seen as an outsider despite being Mayan, simply because she has tended to be more involved in the international human rights movement, travelling often, than staying in Guatemala in her community.

I agree with the article’s assessment that, should she choose to run in 2011, she may have a better chance, simply because she’ll have more experience and knows better what she needs to do (though I find the article’s mentioning of the Mayan Calendar’s prediction for something amazing in 2012 to be a little….colonialist – in the sense of “ah, those indigenous traditions” – it’s not intentional perhaps, but if you’re going to mention some central aspect of their cultural beliefs, why include that one?). Still, it’s a good article that does a fine job dissecting why she may have only gotten 3% in a country that’s officially 40% indigenous.

Welcome back to reality, Benedict

The pope has apparently woken up from the slumber he was in when he was in Brazil last week. Taking back previous comments about indigenous peoples, he has now said that it is “not possible to forget the suffering and the injustices inflicted by colonizers against the indigenous population, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled.” This comes in the wake of his claims last week that American indigenous peoples had been "silently longing" for Christianity when Europeans arrived, and that nothing was "imposed" on the indigenous populations.

While it's not an open "mea culpa," it's nice to know one of his advisors finally got a hold of a history book and explained to Benedict what actually happened.


...UPDATE - Check out Randy's post for quotations on what the colonizers actually did (and I'd add that, while Bartolome de las Casas' writings were very political, designed to spur outrage, and thus at times embellished, they are still ultimately based on things Casas saw).

Because forced conversion was such a great idea

While in Brazil, the Popet (who had already gone after abortion, pentecostals, marxists, and others) couldn't just leave quietly into the night. After claiming that he supported neither capitalism nor marxism (apparently, the pope is either a closet socialist or prefers the feudalism of the old days - I'm guessing the latter).

Instead, he had to go after indigenous groups, contradicting pretty much every historical detail we know about indigenous "conversions" to Catholicism in the Americas by claiming that Brazil's indigenous had been "silently longing" for Christianity when the Catholic priests arrived. Thus, claimed the pope, "the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas." And in its missionizing, the church had performed a wonderful duty by "purifying" indigenous peoples, and that any reversion to their ancestral practices must be considered a step backwards.

Not surprisingly, indigenous groups whose ancestors were tortured, enslaved, or just plain killed via war and disease in the efforts to Conversion in the Americas are a little upset over this, and the sheer stupidity of it is something else. John Paul II (not exactly a "liberal" pope, having gone after liberation theology and pushing for the withdrawal of the Catholic church from politics even as the poor used the gospels to mobilize and try to improve their lives) himself apologized to indigenous peoples across the hemisphere for the Church's treatment of them throughout the previous 500 years. Yet Benedict apparently disagrees with his predecessor, and apparently would re-convert and "purify" the indigenous peoples all over again if he had to (forcibly, if necessary).

This was really just the icing on the cake for a trip that saw Benedict go after drug addicts, women seeking control of their own bodies on the abortion issue, any abortion supporters (one headline here read that he threatened a "mass-excommunication", or "excomunhão" to all supporters), and many more. Boz puts the Pope's trip to Brazil the best: "To briefly round up the trip, the Pope attacked (in alphabetical order) abortion, authoritarianism, capitalism, contraception, divorce, "ethical relativism", gay marriage, hedonism, indigenous religions, liberation theology, Marxism and Pentecostalism (along with Catholics who are too much like Pentecostals).

He then encouraged everyone who is left to attend church because attendance seems down recently."

Happenings in Brazil

First, and more briefly, there's a story about the ongoing struggle of indigenous peoples in Brazil to reclaim land they once held. The article, while brief, hits upon all the issues at hand with the indigenous movement in Brazil - efforts to undo decades-old illegal land seizures, the government's past maltreatment of indigenous rights, farmer/indigenous struggles, use of the environment, racism, everything. Additionally, the story has extra interest, given that the recent reduction of the Brazilian government's environmental agency means indigenous peoples will be one of the most important groups at environmental protection. And for those maybe interested in the historical roots of the selling off of indigenous lands and their efforts to reclaim their lands, I give my HIGHEST recommendation that you check out Seth Garfield's book on the Xavante Indians.

Secondly, I would be slightly remiss to mention, in case you hadn't heard, that the pope is in Brazil. Not surprisingly, controversy has immediately erupted, as he goes after abortion again (nothing new here). In a rather novel idea for many United States politicians, Lula has announced that, while he does not personally "morally" approve of abortion, he is openly aware that it is a health need that the state should protect. While this is far from an open "legalize abortion" campaign on his part (which, to be slightly fair, would be a political disaster for him), it's far more than the Catholic Church will acknowledge, and thus, on day one, church and state have already butted heads here.

Of far more interst from the analytical point is exactly what the pope' s visit means to Brazilians. Ever since the 1960s, when Brazil was at the forefront of the budding liberation theology movement, Brazil has often diverged from doctrinal Catholic practices, particularly in philosophy and in liturgical practices (liberation theology hasn't even gone fully away, despite John Paul II's efforts). Many sectors of the media are covering the story from the aspect of "Pope trying to re-gather the flock in the wake of conversions to evangelicism and more evangelical-based liturgical services in the Catholic Church" (yet another example of the Church's efforts to be flexible and modernize to shepherd the flock. In an aside, the media in Brazil hasn't helped, tending to villify evangelical protestant churches and practitioners instead of actually addressing the shortcomings of the Catholic Church. Look, I'm no fan of evangelical religions, but if some guy in the rural areas finally overcomes his 20+-year bout with alcoholism and both he and his family are the happiest they've ever been, all because of evangelical beliefs, I'm not going to tell him, "sorry, you're wrong and damned, socially and spiritually".)

However, what's the most intersting to me is those individuals who are left out of the discussion altogether - the non-practicing (of any religion) in Brazil. I can't tell you how many people from my generation and younger I've talked to who completely refuse any religion. They almost always attribute this at least partly, if not fully, to their Catholic upbringing. And this isn't some teenage rebellion thing - the strictness, devotion, and fanaticism (I doubt Bill Donohue is going to be coming after little old me anyways) of the church (and sometimes of their family members) has not only driven them away from Catholicism, it's driven them away from religion altogether. Programming and shifting practices to the pious behavior of people like Marcelo Rossi don't help, and sometimes hurt even more the youth's interest in religion ("As if Catholicism weren't bad enough, now it's also looking like evangelicism. Get me out of here!"). Certainly, I have also met many people (some from the same traditional Catholic families that others have fled from) who still participate actively in the Catholic church, or in evangelical processes. Yet the tendency to view the Pope's visit as a mission to reconcile the growing presence of evangelicals in (still) dominatingly-Catholic Latin America ignores the complexity of and problems posed by those who have left the church and not gone to any other church. If Catholicism actually wants to address why its numbers are dropping (and if it doesn't, I don't care - I have numerous problems with the Church myself, to put it lightly), the number of converts to non-believing is one more example that, instead of blaming evangelicals, the church should look inwards a little more deeply.

Lots Going on in Latin America

There's a lot going on in Latin America this weekend that's worth bringing up. First, and most importantly in terms of states and peoples, there is a constitutional crisis brewing in Ecuador. President Rafael Correa is seeking Constitutional change, which is desperately needed in a country with an unfairly strong legislative and judicial branches, and a very weak presidency (hence the presence of 5 different presidents over 8 years). Correa is seeking to strengthen the executive branch, making the President actually be able to effect change in Ecuador without the traditional elites pushing him (or any subsequent presidents) against the will of the people who elected him. Still, the reinstatement of 57 of his opponents to Congress is going to make things difficult. There will be a lot more news coming from Ecuador, but hopefully, they will be able to get constitutional change established so that the President can actually try to help improve his country.

In Mexico City, the council is poised to pass a bill allowing Mexican women the right to an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. Latin America has almost uniformly rejected the right for a woman to have the option to chose a safe, medical abortion (of course resulting in numerous unsafe abortions, as well as an unfair ability for wealthy women to gain an "unofficial" but medical abortion while the poor are unable to do so). Although this bill is only in Mexico City, and is already facing fierce protest from many sectors of the traditional Catholics in ther city, its importance is huge, both for women in Mexico and as what could end up being the first step in the broader rights of women in Mexico and throughout Latin America.

Finally, there is (of course) Brazil. Lula is in the States this week, following up Bush's visit to Brazil two weeks ago. Of course, the media is once again portraying Lula as far closer and more friendly to Bush than he is (nevermind that just two weeks ago he called Bush's tariffs "nefarious"). While Lula is undeniably involved in open dipolmacy in a non-stand-offish way (I wouldn't quite go so far as to call it "friendly") with the U.S., it's not as if he's a Tony Blair or a John Howard or even a Pervez Musharraf. It looks like this visit will have very little outcome or major devlopments (though Bush's concession that he is willing to lower tariffs is alone at least a change from his usual "no way, nohow" approach).

And in an oddly short story, the Brazilian government is providing free wireless internet to Indigenous peoples in the Amazon as part of its broader goal to save the Amazon by combatting illegal and corporate logging in the Amazon. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure how this will help the illegal logging (I suspect the goal is building support networks and spreading info via the internet), but the story is so short, and it's unfortunately the only one I could find.