‘War on Terror' Has Indigenous People 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" globalization.

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 José 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 organized 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-organized 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 organizational 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.