World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [39]
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But there are dangers, too—dangers that the region’s white elites have always been aware of. (“Bolivia’s rulers have always harbored a deep fear that the country’s Indian majority might one day rise up and kill them in their beds—or more realistically, trap them in their cities,” William Finnegan recently wrote in The New Yorker.)
40 Alejandro Toledo’s approval ratings have plummeted to 32 percent, as it has become increasingly clear that his pro-market policies will not immediately improve the lives of Peru’s impoverished majority. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Latin America, distinctively ethnic resentment against market-dominant light-skinned elites is on the rise.
In Ecuador, for example, the vigorously pro-market government led by President Jamil Mahuad was toppled in January 2000 by an Amerindian uprising that turned into a military coup. At the time of the uprising President Mahuad’s approval ratings had dropped to just 6 percent, and the coup appears to have been supported by a majority of Ecuador’s impoverished population, 40 percent of whom say they are “pure Indians” and 90 percent of whom are increasingly identifying themselves as “indigenous-blooded.” One triggering event for the coup was the decision by Mahuad—who is ethnic Lebanese, Harvard-educated, and part of the country’s white business elite—to replace Ecuador’s currency with the U.S. dollar as part of a larger plan to open up the country’s battered economy to international investors. The “dollarization” program was bitterly opposed by Ecuador’s largely Amerindian peasant majority, who saw “the measure as just another scheme by bankers and businessmen to further impoverish them.” “The dollar may be fine for mestizos and the big folks, but we are peasants and do not know how to manage dollars,” seethed Apolinario Quishpe, one of thousands of Amerindian farmers who marched on Quito.
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Ecuador’s recent upheaval was intensely anti-market and anti-globalization. It was also an explicitly Amerindian-based movement, led by the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), and deeply, angrily ethnic in its mobilizing rhetoric. “The shamans say change is coming,” thundered Fernando Villavicencio, one of Conaie’s leaders. “They say we are entering the age of the condor; they say that the Red Warrior has returned!”
42 In a country where not long ago newspaper advertisements offered haciendas for sale with Indians and cattle included in the price, Villavicencio’s championing of Amerindian blood has galvanized large, formerly “apathetic” segments of the population, unifying urban and rural poor alike, and pitting them against an “arrogant,” often corrupt white elite that represents only 7 percent of the population.
Even in Brazil, globalization is increasing racial and ethnic consciousness. Black identity and black power have begun to hit Brazil’s marginalized youth, in part through the ripple effect of American popular culture. Throughout the country’s garbage-filled favelas, or shantytowns, the angry lyrics of a U.S.-influenced but distinctly Brazilian rap and hip-hop movement can be heard. This movement is openly “un-Brazilian” in its relentless attacks on the country’s racial inequality. In songs like “The Periphery Continues Bleeding,” “Just Another Wake,” and “Surviving in Hell,” rappers aggressively expose social injustice against blacks, emphasizing that only 2 percent of Brazil’s university students are black, that three out of four people killed by the police are black, and that every