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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.

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.

Development and Resource Management - Mexico's Huichol Carpentry Workshop

Four main tributaries How through, the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico's state of Jalisco carving precipitous canyons several thousand meters deep; the sandy soils of the surrounding mountains allow a forest composed largely of scrub oak and pine. Until quite recently, this combination of formidable terrain and poor soils allowed the resident Huichol Indians a rare, and for them desirable degree of isolation.

Anticipating Colonos and Cattle in Ecuador and Colombia

Awa-Coaiquer Land and Resources Management Project

Who and where on earth are the Awa-Coaiquer Indians? Such questions would have remained largely unanswered, even in Ecuador and Colombia, but for an article in the Sunday color supplement of Quito, Ecuador's El Comercio printed in early 1982. Part of the explanation is geographic; the people live in dispersed settlements that span the Ecuador-Colombia border along the isolated western slopes of the Andes amidst the world's wettest tropical rainforest.

From Coca to Cocaine in Indigenous Amazonia

Many Amazonian Indians, similar to their Andean counterparts, have shifted the status of the coca plant from one among hundreds in their house gardens to a cash crop. Others are obtaining higher profits by processing the leaves into a paste - PBS, which is refined further to produce the white powder, cocaine hydrochloride. Almost overnight segments of a population which, by and large, had been involved only marginally in the cash economy, have become conspicuous consumers.

Miskito/Sandinista Negotiations - The Saga Continues

Nicaragua's Miskito Indians are again front page news. This time it's for two reasons and, significantly, not for a third. First, formal peace negotiations between the rebel Indian organization MISURASATA and the Sandinista government stalled in late May. Second, three days after these negotiations ended, Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, announced that communities forced to move from the Rio Coco border with Honduras to the Tasba Pri resettlement camps could return home. It was this forced relocation that originally thrust the Miskitos onto the front news pages in early 1982.

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