• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1759 0

still exists in parts of the region today. In Latin America, as in the countries of southern Africa, colonizing Europeans and their descendants seized the best land, often either killing the indigenous majorities around them or turning them into servile laborers. The oppression of the Amerindians was justified by, indeed seemed perfectly natural in light of, a deep belief in white superiority, particularly fashionable in Europe in the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding frequent revolutionary upheavals, enormous ethnic intermixing, and the rise of a pro-mestizo ideology, economic and political power in the region have remained largely concentrated in the hands of a small, “white,” and to a certain extent hereditary elite.

In Bolivia, for example—where in the 1950s the revolutionary president Victor Paz Estenssoro extended universal suffrage and free education to Amerindians and conducted genuine, significant land reform—political power was never truly transferred to the country’s impoverished, largely illiterate indigenous majority. (Estenssoro himself was from a wealthy landowning family and had a privileged education studying law and economics.)

23 The same is true of Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru, where indigenous peoples represent a majority or near-majority of the population. Democracy in Latin America has historically been more formal than actual; elections notwithstanding, party control and political power have nearly always remained in the hands of the European-blooded, educated, cosmopolitan elite.

Moreover, money has a way of reasserting itself, especially in chronically poor countries. With the exception of Cuba, none of the Latin American or Caribbean countries ever became socialist economies. Within a few decades after the early wave of nationalizations, all the countries of Latin America swung back to free market, pro-foreign-investment regimes. From Mexico to Venezuela, from Bolivia to Brazil, elite leaders—sometimes from the military, sometimes from the landowning class—aggressively reprivatized land, industry, mines, oil, and railroads, generating economic growth while reinforcing the power of the market-dominant “white” minority.

In Mexico after the Second World War, for example, President Miguel Alemán declared that “Private enterprise should have complete freedom. . . . [T]he state should guarantee the rights of businessmen to open centers of production and to multiply the country’s industries.” Shocking ordinary Mexicans, Alemán reprivatized the oil and mining industries that Cardenas had so dramatically nationalized. In Guatemala, after seizing power in 1954, a new pro-capitalism military government reconfiscated the land previously given to the country’s indigenous majority and reinstated the latifundia system. By 1964, Guatemala’s white-owned plantations, representing just 2 percent of total farms, occupied 72 percent of the country’s land. By contrast, the vast majority of the largely Mayan Indian peasantry owned either no land or too little land to survive. Today most barely eke out a living on less than two dollars a day, and roughly 60 percent do not know how to read and write. In all the Latin American countries—even in nominally democratic countries where Amerindians constitute a majority of the population—indigenous people have always been treated as politically and socially subordinate.

24

All this, however, may be changing. Globalization is transforming and in many ways destabilizing the societies of Latin America. Western pro-democracy and human rights organizations, often partially funded by the U.S. government, are working on behalf of, and helping to mobilize, a growing number of indigenous communities throughout Latin America. Their projects vary, but typically include the promotion of indigenous rights, the empowerment of indigenous communities, and litigation alleging racial and ethnic discrimination. Many of these initiatives are extremely valuable, and long overdue. At the same time, by raising ethnic consciousness, they may inadvertently and indirectly increase ethnic