Neoliberal Globalization and Historical Debts owed to the Indigenous Peoples

Miguel Palacín Quispe

28/07/2008

Opinión

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History is a continuous process, not the account of a determined set of facts in a delimited space of time. This is why, when we talk about the historical debts owed to the Indigenous peoples, we do not just refer to the period between the European invasion of Abya Yala and the Creole independence of America. The historical debt has been fed and growing over 515 years, just as the colonization of our countries has been restored with the complicity of the Nation States.

Neoliberal globalization and its commercial agreements are part of this process. The objective is still the same: occupation of our territories, devastation and exploitation of our natural goods, and intents to annihilate our thousand-year-old culture to impose its model of development and to “integrate” us into modernity and into the voracity to destroy nature, putting the whole planet in danger.

In spite of this long process, we, the Indigenous peoples, are alive, ¡kachkaniraqmi!, as we say in our mother tongue. And we have passed from resistance to propositions. Because we have much to say and much to contribute in the building of a different world, one in harmony with our Mother Earth, Pachamama.

Breaking Point

Until 515 years ago, a variety of peoples and nationalities occupied the Abya Yala, living in harmony with nature, with a logic based on the satisfaction of everybody’s needs, and not on accumulation.

The European invasion broke with this process, through blood and fire. What followed was the imposition of the sword and the cross. In this order, the priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of the Liberation Theology, wondered: God or the gold of the Indies? The answer was and is the gold, even if the crimes were committed in the name of God.

The Archives of the Indies prove it: only between the years 1503 and 1660 (half of the period Spanish occupation lasted), 185 thousand kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver made their way from the

Americas

to San Lucas de Barramedas.

Modern Europe, the one that undertook its economic boom, has been possible only thanks to this plundering. Accumulation has established itself since then and until today as the beginning and end of its economic models.

But the historic debts owed to the Indigenous peoples are not limited to the resources looted. It is also an ecological debt, because the model of extraction of natural goods and of accumulation of capital also destroyed our way of life, of organization and practice in coexistence with Pachamama. It was the beginning of the extractive activities that poison our soils, our water, and our whole environment. And it affects our way of life.

The debt even covers much more. Ever since the European invasion, production no longer served to feed us but rather the enrichment of just a few and our plundering. Our sovereignty and food security, until then guaranteed by “good living”, were violated, too. And to achieve this, the worst forms of exploitation were applied, not only with the Indigenous, but also with the black slaves.

The Catholic Church was a key actor in this process, because it participated and became rich with this plunder. Also because it played an important role in the ideological repression with its cruel “eradication of idolatry”, predecessor of the “Tribunal del Santo Oficio”, wrongly named “Holy Inquisition”. It was physical and cultural genocide.

The priests that came, together with the European soldiers, built their churches on top of ours. Our graves and holy sites were destroyed. And this is part of the historical debt owed to the Indigenous peoples. The return of our temples and holy sites is a historical claim we will not renounce.

Independence?

The liberal ideas and their model of a one-Nation State reached our continent and excited the Creoles, who wanted independence from the Spanish crown to strengthen their economic power, based on the oppression of the Indigenous peoples. Just like in the novel El Gatopardo, they wanted to change everything so nothing would change. The Indigenous peoples were excluded from the independence process – they were still as colonized as before. This was the birth of the monocultural, exclusionary Nation States.

How did the European Liberals bring the ideas of the French Revolution to

America

? Cuban author Alejo Carpentier illustrates it very well when reminding us in his novel El siglo de las luces that the same ship that brought the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was also the one that brought the guillotine. Once again, new ideas were imposed by means of bloody repression.

The truth is that the Independence was no such thing. It was just a switch of one colonizer for another (or others). The independence wars (just like the Conquista, three hundred years earlier) were financed by European capitals that were in rivalry with Spain, and their goal was to secure the rich natural resources of the “new” continent, in order to keep their so-called industrial revolution running. The so-called “external debt” has its origin there. Ever since then and until now it has been a debt contracted outside of and against the interests of our people. And to pay it, the Creole states keep on plundering our resources.

The Creole Republics, with their state structure that excluded the Indigenous peoples, were mortgaged on foreign capital from their beginning, offering as security our natural resources. First it was yellow gold, then it was black gold, and these days, everyone has their eyes on the blue gold: water. These natural goods are mainly found in our territories. And so the historical debt keeps on snowballing. It includes the victims of the repression which is the answer to the justified protests against this plundering, as a part of the continuing violation of our rights.

Neoliberal Globalization

World War II divided the world into two major blocks that competed for economic and political hegemony. Between these two frontlines stood the poor countries and, inside of them, the most vulnerable ones: the Indigenous peoples.

In the course of the 20^th century, the foreign debts of the poor countries grew excessively, and they have been used as a means to apply pressure to impose policies through the international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

And so the historical debt owed to the Indigenous Peoples kept on growing, because the invasion of our territories and the plundering have intensified, thanks to technological progress. This process was reinforced at the end of the Cold War, when neoliberal globalization began to be imposed, with the politicians of the so-called Washington Consensus and their new God: the Free Market, which only grants advantages to the transnational corporations for the plundering of our natural goods (minerals, gases, fuel, forests, biodiversity).

Due to the disastrous consequences for our peoples, the social movements grew, too. With a new political actor: the Indigenous peoples and their historical and contemporary claims setting the agenda. To which the answer is repression, criminalization of the protests and militarization of our territories.

The free trade agreements are a substantial part of neoliberal globalization. They satisfy the geopolitical and economic interests of the developed countries and transnational business. And the Association Agreement being negotiated between the European Union and the Andean Community is no exception, although they pretend to mask it by including pillars such as “political dialogue” and “cooperation”, but in fact, the trade aspects are dominant. And the absence of voices of the Indigenous peoples becomes obvious in the announced “dialogue with civil society”.

One proof for this is that the European Union is negotiating with governments that are developing an accelerated process of deepening neoliberalism and criminalizing social protests (Colombia and Peru), where the main victims are the indigenous peoples in whose territories the natural resources are found, the freshwater springs and the biodiversity the transnational enterprises are eyeing voraciously.

In short, the trade agreements, no matter under which disguise, will keep on multiplying the historical debts owed to the Indigenous Peoples. Debts that need to be recognized immediately.

Recognizing the Indigenous peoples as creditors of historical debts would mean stopping the plundering, exploitation and invasion of our territories; demanding the restitution of the occupied territories and of our holy sites; denouncing the illegitimacy of the external debt and asking for its complete and unconditional cancellation; rejecting the politics of the international financial institutions and the transnational corporations which encourage the plundering; prohibiting biopiracy, the trading and patenting of ancestral knowledge and medicine; and demanding respect for and recognition of our ways of living, our languages, cultures, practices and belief systems.

This is all part of our struggle, for which we live and stand up strong and united, around our ancestral principles of duality, reciprocity and complementarity, to overcome the traps of “developmentism” and to move on from resistance to the construction of power. Because our way of life is not exclusionary: it offers an alternative for the whole of humanity. (Translation: ALAI)

- Miguel Palacin Quispe is general Coordinator of the Coordination of Andean Indigenous Organizations (CAOI). Article published in Spanish in América Latina en Movimiento, "Unión Europea - América Latina y Caribe: 500 años después" No. 431-2 mayo 2008.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/128897