Toledo’s improbable rise to the summit of Peruvian politics should mark a historic victory for a people still largely condemned to second-class citizenship. But his election doesn’t exactly represent the triumph of Indian Power. Although he often invoked a 15th-century Incan emperor in his nearly two-year quest for the presidency and proclaimed himself “a stubborn, rebellious Indian,” the Stanford-educated technocrat will never be mistaken for an activist. He named no full-blooded natives to his cabinet and his free-market policies, the cornerstone of his political program, are aimed at courting foreign investors more than his 11 million indigenous countrymen. The significance of Toledo’s triumph lies elsewhere: in an era of high-tech and unbridled globalization, a son of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples can succeed by embracing the modern world without renouncing his origins. “The challenge facing leaders today is to succeed in this competitive, globalized world without losing our identity,” Toledo told NEWSWEEK. “I see no contradiction between consuming the culture of CNN and the Internet and speaking [the Incan language] Quechua.”
Inspired by a newfound pride in their heritage, natives are asserting themselves in ways that would have seemed unthinkable only a decade ago. The leader of Ecuador’s grass-roots indigenous movement struck a short-lived alliance with disgruntled Army colonels to overthrow the country’s unpopular president in January 2000. A kind of latter-day Indian chic is taking hold in Brazil–where it is becoming honorable and even trendy to tout one’s Aboriginal roots. Anthropologist Joo Pacheco of Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum has noticed renewed interest among younger indigenous Brazilians in the culture of their elders. “Not so long ago indigenous parents made a point of speaking Portuguese and refused to teach their kids traditional languages,” says Pacheco. Now “more and more Brazilians are rediscovering an identity they once denied out of shame or fear.”
More important, increasing numbers of indigenous Latin Americans are enrolling in universities–and using their education to break the chains of prejudice and oppression. Victor Cardenas was born into a poor Aymara Indian family living on the Bolivian shores of Lake Titicaca and later earned degrees in philosophy, education and public administration. In 1993 he became the first member of Bolivia’s indigenous majority to be elected vice president and helped push through long-overdue reforms in his country’s education system. Luis Macas identified a gaping hole in Ecuador’s institutions of higher learning when he became the first native to win a seat in the National Congress in 1996. Now he’s setting up an Intercultural University of Indigenous Peoples to offer degrees in natural medicine, native jurisprudence and alternative economic development.
Technology and globalization have given native tribes new ways to fend off perennial poverty and dependence. A Bolivian agricultural cooperative called El Ceibo uses low-interest loans from international aid agencies to build a cocoa trade worth $1.3 million in annual sales, and it counts European and Asian buyers among its expanding client base. Colombia’s first native state governor, Floro Tunubala, elected last year, recently unveiled a $137 million economic-development program that will use funds from Canada and three Western European nations to promote the export of organic fruit, coffee and medicinal plants to North American and European markets.
One reason all this progress is happening now is that in the last two or three years there’s been a sea change in Latin American society; de facto apartheid is no longer acceptable. In bygone eras, indigenous people were either brutally exploited and robbed of their homelands or treated with the kind of demeaning paternalism that prompted Brazilian legislators to enact laws declaring them “relatively incapable” of looking after their own affairs. But in the eyes of an increasingly watchful world, politicians from Mexico to Colombia are moving to enshrine native rights and opportunity. (They’ll be under the microscope again this week as the United Nations opens its Conference of the World’s Indigenous Peoples in New York.) Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proudly acknowledges his partly indigenous extraction, and the 1999 Constitution drafted by his ruling party formally recognizes the overriding claims of the country’s 300,000 indigenous citizens to traditional lands.
But the new wave of political pronouncements has yet to yield real results, and for every success story there are hundreds of broken promises that carry on a centuries-old pattern. Colombia and Venezuela, for instance, have approved constitutional reforms that set aside a minimum number of congressional seats for their Aboriginal communities, but critics have dismissed those steps as politically correct window dressing. The 1993 election of Cardenas as Bolivia’s first native vice president helped produce new laws that affirmed indigenous land rights and replaced mandatory Spanish instruction with bilingual education. But a scarcity of teachers qualified to teach Aymara and Quechua has limited the impact of the new policies. And even the populist Chavez broke a personal pledge and approved a controversial plan to run a power line through the Pemon Indian homeland in the pristine Gran Sabana wilderness of southeastern Venezuela.
Some natives worry that even if indigenous leaders force governments to make good on their promises, embracing modernity could mean losing their identity (following story). But for most that remains a lucky conundrum; five centuries of abuse and genocide have left their mark. Most of Guatemala’s 4 million indigenous scrape by on incomes of less than $2 a day, and only an estimated 40 percent can read and write. Indigenous Peruvians are almost twice as likely to be hospitalized as their non-Indian compatriots, yet have far less access to doctors or drugs. Tuberculosis and malaria are once again spreading among indigenous Brazilians after a recent decline. And the percentage of indigenous Latin Americans who reap the fruits of higher education is still minuscule. In Brazil, the region’s most populous country with 170 million people, only two natives have master’s degrees and 10 others are licensed to practice law.
Discouragingly, even native attempts to harness globalization can backfire. The Kayapo Indians saw a ready source of income in the prized mahogany trees of Brazil’s Xingu River basin and cut illegal deals with lumber companies. The operations soon depleted the nearby forests, and the community’s revenue base dwindled along with the local fauna. Natives say they are learning a valuable lesson. “We can’t embrace the modern world unprepared,” cautions Marcos Terena, a professional pilot and respected indigenous-rights advocate in Brazil. “We have to know how to master the white man’s machines.”
Ironically, long-impoverished natives now face the curse of rising expectations. As promises go unfulfilled, indigenous leaders are warning of growing unrest. In Venezuela, the Pemons have already resorted to demonstrations and the sabotage of electricity pylons–so far to no effect (the government plans to inaugurate the power line later this month). In Mexico, the Zapatista rebels, who made world headlines in 1994 when they took up arms in Chiapas state, are fuming over the recent passage of a watered-down indigenous-rights law. Their sympathizers blocked highways throughout Chiapas last week in a fresh round of grass-roots protest.
Even if the indigenous pose even less of a military threat to modern states than their ancestors did to the Spanish viceroys, they can resort to civil-disobedience tactics that sometimes hike the cost of unwanted investment projects to unacceptable levels. In recent years, disillusioned Mapuche Indians in southern Chile have set fire to commercial logging machinery. Government officials have tried to appease Mapuche militants by promising to hand over ever larger tracts of land to the tribesmen. But amid the continuing unrest, lumber-industry companies have seen the value of their investments decline, and many of them are looking to wind down operations.
Similar protests by indigenous groups have extracted concessions in neighboring Bolivia, and now their leader, Felipe Quispe, has formed his own political party in anticipation of a possible run for the presidency in next year’s elections. “We indigenous peoples are like foreigners in our own ancestral lands,” says Quispe, better known to his followers as El Mallku (The Great Condor). “The white colonial minority still has all the power, but the Indian is on the path to take power sooner or later.”
That prediction sounds farfetched and could only come to pass in a country like Bolivia, where indigenous citizens outnumber non-Indians 3-1. In other nations like Colombia and Brazil, where the indigenous make up a tiny fraction of the population nationwide, their clout will always be limited to provinces where their numbers are most concentrated. There success is likely to remain the province of a small, educated elite who ultimately conform to the standards, values and demands of the Western world.
For Toledo, education–while maintaining one’s identity–remains the surest path to progress. The Peruvian president might have spent the rest of his life in seedy Chimbote if he hadn’t met two young American Peace Corps volunteers who helped him apply for a scholarship to attend high school in San Francisco, California. Not surprisingly, Toledo wants to install computers in rural schools and introduce millions of chiefly indigenous youngsters to the wonders of the Information Age. “My life has been a constant struggle against obstacles,” he says. “My ethnic background obviously created more of those obstacles, but it’s clear in my mind that education is an important leveling factor [that] eliminates a lot of that racism.” Now the challenge for Toledo–and Latin America–is finding a way to make modernity work for more than just one ambitious bootblack.
