Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

Elusive Right to Land Inflames Indigenous Protest

LIMA, Nov 10 2008 (IPS) - The right of indigenous peoples to land is consecrated in most Latin American countries, although government compliance is subject to conflicting interpretations of that right.

In the past two decades Latin America made advances in signing international and national instruments to recognize and protect the rights of indigenous peoples. The problem is that these laws are not always heeded by governments, which has fuelled calls to protest.

For the Indians, the land is associated with vital sustenance, but also with the way they perceive the world, and is linked to the culture and inheritance from their ancestors — and what they will leave for their own descendants.

With large native populations, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru ratified Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), adopted in 1989 to ensure territorial, social, cultural and economic rights for indigenous and tribal peoples.

All, except for Colombia, voted in 2007 for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“In theory there is an important recognition, but in practice it doesn't exist,” Colombian Senator Jesús Enrique Piñacué, of the Indigenous Social Alliance, told Tierramérica.

The biggest hole in the Colombian indigenous panorama is that the government does not bring policies and measures that could affect their communities to the indigenous groups for consultation, such as the government's approval of private investment in their land. Consultation with the native communities in this regard is required by Article 6 of Convention 169, says Piñacué.

Starting Oct. 12, Colombian indigenous groups led an unprecedented mobilization in open defiance of policies of President Álvaro Uribe and in demand for recognition of their collective rights.

In that country of 44.6 million people, of which 1.6 million are indigenous, the decades-long civil war kills an indigenous person every 53 hours, and since 2002 at least 54,000 have been expelled from their ancestral lands, according to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.

Colombia's 1991 Constitution recognized native populations as autonomous and with the right to collective ownership of their lands, and the right to maintain their own languages, beliefs and justice systems.

Colombia did not vote in favor of the UN Declaration, citing problems with national security, because the document recommends against conducting military actions in indigenous territories. If such activities are to take place, the native community should be consulted.

In August, in the Peruvian Amazon, the local indigenous communities staged massive protests to demand the reversal of several decrees that promote private investment in their lands.

Congress agreed to reverse two of the most controversial decrees that had been approved in the context of the free trade agreement with the United States.

But the government insists that ILO Convention 169, ratified in 1994, does not give the communities the right to veto activities that are conducted on their land, and as such has only established informational workshops as “consultations” with the people about mining and petroleum concessions that have already been granted to corporations.

“Many officials don't even know the content of the agreements, and others misinterpret it,”, Graham Gordon, of the non-governmental Peace and Hope Association, which participated in drafting the civil society report about compliance with Convention 169, told Tierramérica.

Peru was one of the main proponents of the UN Declaration, but the government now emphasizes its “non-binding” character.

Article 42 of the Declaration maintains that the UN and the states party to it “promote respect for and full application of the provisions of this Declaration and follow up the effectiveness of this Declaration” — which is not a legal disposition of an obligatory nature.

The Peruvian Constitution, of 1993, recognizes the cultural diversity and political participation of peoples as groups, but it refers to native and rural communities who occupy 55 percent of the farmland, and not indigenous peoples, which would imply recognizing them beyond a territorial delineation.

Ecuador has made major advances in indigenous rights. After the June 1990 uprising of the Inti Raymi, led by the Ecuadorean Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), the indigenous movement turned into a key actor on the national stage.

As such, the lawmakers who reached Congress as part of the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement/New Country led the ratification of Convention 169 in 1997 and, the following year, the constitutional recognition of prior consultation of indigenous communities before initiating exploitation of natural resources on their lands.

This year, with the new Constitution approved on Sep. 28, Ecuador declared itself a plurinational and intercultural nation — not just multiethnic. Thirty-five percent of the population is indigenous, according to native groups.

However, indigenous leader Luis Macas, former CONAIE president, explained to Tierramérica that the new Constitution should have established not just prior consultation, but prior consent of the local native populations, because only then would the government be obligated to comply with their wishes.

Indigenous groups have announced an uprising if large-scale mining operations begin on their lands, but President Rafael Correa insists that the plans will provide funding for social development projects in their communities.

In 1990, Mexico was one of the first countries to ratify Convention 169, but its measures “have not rooted in the reality of the giant and ancestral problems” that the native peoples face, Nahua Indian Matías Trejo, a sociologist at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, told Tierramérica.

Under pressure from the Zapatista guerrilla movement in southern Mexico, the 2001 Constitution recognized “the pluricultural composition of the country,” sustained in indigenous peoples “who conserve their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions or part of them.”

But the government continues to be the one that determines what to do with the territories of the 62 indigenous ethnicities in Mexico, where 11 million are native out of a national population of 104 million people.

Unlike other countries in the Americas, in Mexico there are no signs of massive indigenous mobilizations. Forty percent of indigenous Mexicans age 15 or older have not completed primary school, and of them 18 percent have not had any schooling at all.

More than 40 percent of their homes have earthen floors and are not built to withstand extreme natural phenomena like earthquakes or floods.

In Peru, the poorest district in the country is Balsapuerto, in the Amazon forest. More than 90 percent of the native peoples living there do not have basic services.