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Voices of the Unvanquished: Indigenous Responses to Plan Colombia

On August 7 The New York Times reported that "five homemade mortar shells were fired into the center of Bogotá as newly elected president Álvaro Uribe Vélez prepared to take the oath of office in the Congress." The attack killed 19 and wounded 70 people in poor neighborhoods near the Congress and the presidential palace. On October 22, another report said a car bomb killed two people and wounded 36 outside Bogotá’s police headquarters. Two days later, a grenade was thrown at a police truck, killing an 18-year-old officer and wounding 13 people on a Bogotá street.

Inter-American Court of Human Rights Rules in Favor of Nicaraguan Indians

On September 17, 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the highest tribunal in the Americas, released its decision in a case concerning the small Mayagna (Sumo) community of Awas Tingni, located on the forested area of Nicaragua's Caribbean coastal regional. In so doing, the Court affirmed the existence of indigenous peoples' collective rights to their land, resources, and environment.

Introduction: 25 Years of the Indigenous Movement in the Americas and Australia

For over 500 years, the chronicle of almost any 25 year period of contact between indigenous peoples and colonists in the Americas or Australia has been quite simple. The Indians and Aborigines lose. Each of their many groups has suffered new and unfamiliar diseases, military conquests, abortive uprisings, land losses, colonist encroachments, legal restrictions, simple neglect, and broad discrimination among other abuses. The last quarter century, however, has been qualitatively different.

The Routinization of Protest: Institutionalizing Local Participation

On June 25, 1996 a New York Times article detailed the Nicaraguan government's anger when Awas Tingni, an isolated Sumo Indian community, brought suit before the Organization of American States (OAS) and against the government after it granted a Korean lumber company logging rights to community lands. Another Times article on September 6, 1992 described the Ecuadorian government's "impatience" with Indian land and resource claims in the oil-rich Amazonian rainforest.

Demarcating Indigenous Territories in Nicaragua: The Case of Awas Tingni

The Mayagna (Sumo) Indian community of Awas Tingni currently is attempting to attain formal recognition of its broad territorial rights. Over the last several years a norm has developed internationally that affirms the right of indigenous communities to the lands they have traditionally used and occupied. This norm is incorporated in the 1985 Constitution of Nicaragua and in the 1987 statute adopted by the Nicaraguan National Assembly that established a system of autonomy for the country's Atlantic Coast region.

Forced Resettlements in Ecuador and Peru

In late January 1995, the Shuar and Aguaruna Indians along the border between Ecuador and Peru were forcibly relocated into refugees camps while Peruvian and Ecuadorian soldiers battled each other in hilly forests between the Cordillera del Condor and the Cenepa River.

Some Essential Not Simply "New," Approaches to Human Rights

This issue of the Cultural Survival Quarterly is, in a sense, a "double issue". One set of articles reviews the progressive entry of indigenous peoples into a formal international arena - the United Nations. The second set focuses on a single social movement in southern Mexico's State of Chiapas. Yet the themes are related. As Dalee Sambo, this issue's Guest Editor, notes, the events in Mexico led to a qualitatively different response - an Accord which considered indigenous rights, broadly defined to include their land and culture as well as physical abuses.

Chiapas Update

One week before this CSQ was sent to the printers, armed guerrillas, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, marched into San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Mexico's state of Chiapas. Here, and in several other towns, the violence drew world-wide attention to an area characterized by endemic inquality and conflict overland, resources, and labor since the early 16th century.

As the fighting continues, Mexican Scholar Jorge G. Castañeda wrote in the Boston Globe:

Grassroots Development: Not Just Organic Farming and Good Faith

Grassroots development - the term has a fresh, wholesome, democratic ring to. A group or a community takes control of the reins of change and works to determine its future, on its own terms.

The imagery it evokes contrasts with that of large-scale national development and the international funding it usually requires. Cultural Survival Quarterly has illustrated numerous cases in which national development is the outcome of decisions that are not only imposed on small societies but often violate their rights to land and natural resources.

Shuar Children: Bilingual-Bicultural Education

While the morning mist still hovers above the streams and rivers of the jungle east of Ecuador's Sierra de Cutucu, Shuar Indian adults head off to tend their gardens and pastures. Meanwhile, their children walk to a small building in the center of a recently nucleated settlement. It's new school, the settlements first in fact. Their parents built it.

Many schools in Latin America are constructed in a similarly communal way.

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