By Carolina Vásquez Araya on October 24, 2021
photo: Bill Hackwell
“When I was born they put two tears in my eyes so that I could see the size of the pain of my people.” (Humberto Ak’abal)
The life of the indigenous Latin American brings, from birth, is the fate of resistance. Centuries have passed and the original inhabitants of this exuberant continent have gradually lost their territories and, during this cruel and unjust process, their roots have been uprooted to impoverish them, tame them and turn them into slaves. Without land or power, their struggles end on the ground of their bodies. This is how colonization became eternal and inevitable, resting on the pillars of racism, discrimination, dispossession and the guarantee of impunity for those who perpetrate their extermination.
The process of “pacification” of the territories inhabited by the native peoples has been nothing more than a genocidal policy conceived in the nuclei of economic and political power. The communities, however, remain firm in the defense of their rights and one generation after another manage to survive despite the constant threat of eviction and death. There is no country on the continent where native peoples have the status of citizens with full rights and opportunities. In all our Latin American nations they have been persecuted as if they were the invaders. And, in all of them there is talk, without shame or embarrassment, of the “indigenous problem”.
Meanwhile, the urban centers populated by a mestizo society indifferent to the reality of other regions and other communities, perpetuate the status by endorsing, with their vote and their passivity, the abuses of political classes sold to big business and submissive to the dictates of an international community allied with the multinationals. The loss of ancestral territories is added, then, to the irremediable destruction of the habitat of valuable species and abundant natural resources, property of the nations devastated by greed.
Indigenous resistance to the invasion of their territories, their towns and villages, their fields and their environment – submerged in underdevelopment by the force and will of those who try to evict them – hangs by a thin thread: the awareness of their rights. Against them, the entire legal apparatus has been instrumentalized from the centers of power, with the objective of justifying the application of repression when these communities exercise their right to protest and demand to be heard. In the meantime, the hired assassins at the orders of big capital are dedicated to identify, and assassinate their leaders, and harass their legitimate authorities.
From where we are, in the comfort of our bubble, we observe the tragedy of our compatriots as if they existed in another galaxy, far away from our small daily life. We have not understood that the pain of
others is our pain and that their tragedies will strike us at the very core of our indifference. That the colors of their textiles and the harshness of their destinies are also in our genetic code. While we deny reality, it places us in front of our inability to accept an identity rejected by pure habit of repeating stigmas.
This prurience of feeling alien is what condemns our countries to be cheap suppliers for the first world; a reality that resembles the mill wheel in its eternal spinning, plunging us into misery. The resistance of the native peoples to the depredation and corruption of the authorities should be the general struggle, the battlefield should also be the great avenues, those where we feel alien to the evolution of history. If not, it will be sooner rather than later when we will be plunged into catastrophe.
History repeats itself over and over again, but the victims are always the “others”.
Source: El Quinto Patio, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano – English