When we speak about the Indigenous situation in the countries of Latin America, we confront the dramatic reality of forbidden societies to whom, in essence, the right to land is denied. Without a doubt, our fundamental concern lies in seeking an answer and demanding, immediately and in open struggle against oppressive governments, the right of Indigenous peoples to exist as nations with their own governments, whether associated with a central government or autonomous.
The fact that a progressive human being opposes the expropriation of Indigenous lands and speaks out against cultural intrusion is, without question, a coherent response aligned with a humanist spirit and a sound sense of equality among human beings. Ignoring the realities of Indigenous peoples is not only a lack of social commitment but also complicity with those who suffer dispossession in their own lands.
Now, beyond defending the rights of Indigenous peoples, I believe we must first determine the causes of the evil, because failing to determine the causes of the evil is to contribute to it by not identifying the party responsible for crimes against humanity. How is it possible to solve a problem without determining its causes?
If we go back to the past, immediately after the rise of capitalism following the discovery of the Americas, everything became a matter of conquering territories and domesticating the savages. In the name of God, people were killed and empires were built upon destroyed empires.
Capitalism is the creator of racism, and capitalism is responsible for the Indigenous problem, which manifests itself in an indigenist movement as a mere current of cultural demands in Latin America, supported only by sporadic and well‑intentioned solidarity. This diversionary racism consists of trying to create small islands or small independent republics within the empire of the struggle for justice, and is nothing more than political escapism, denying the true culprit of the problems: unrestrained capitalism.
Racism and misery against the Indigenous peoples of Latin America are components of the capitalist mode of production and a symptom of the exploitation of man by man, as in all class‑divided societies.
It is no surprise that the North American Indian was declared an inferior race and, through this maneuver, his extermination was justified, establishing an influence throughout the Americas regarding the Indigenous situation. This problem, which impacts many of us, was also addressed by Karl Marx in the first volume of *Capital*:
“Those men, virtuous and irreproachable Protestants, the Puritans of New England, granted in 1703, by agreement of the Assembly, a reward of 40 pounds sterling for each Indian scalp and for each captured redskin; in 1720, the reward was 100 pounds per scalp; in 1774, after declaring the Massachusetts Bay branch in rebellion, the rewards were as follows: 100 pounds sterling of new coin for each captured man; 105 pounds for each woman and each child; 55 pounds for each scalp of a woman or child; 50 pounds.”
Now, after this bloody history, the question we must ask ourselves is very simple: how do we put an end to the destruction suffered by Indigenous peoples? Without a doubt, the answer is very clear. We must all rise up against the system of oppression responsible for this crime and, together, fight to eradicate it so that it may never happen again. We must destroy these capitalist expressions and establish a just society where every human being has the right to be a person, in a frank anti‑imperialist stance.
The Indigenous situation has been invoked many times throughout the history of the Americas, to the point that, in 1879, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were driven—pushed by English and U.S. capitalists—into the War of the Pacific. Thousands of reasons were put forward, and one of them, very important, was the restoration of the Inca Empire. Of course, this ruse was used to send all the Indians to die for capitalist interests, where transnationals fought for hegemony over the right to exploit various territories. It is no surprise that the American isthmus was destroyed and transformed into multiple nations titled Banana Republics. Here, each transnational decided to have its own country. Thus, the continent was divided into Tin Republics, Copper Republics, Wood Republics, Grape Republics, Wine Republics, Fish Republics, Electricity Republics, Banana Republics, and many other raw‑material republics administered by an international bank.
The Indigenous struggle, from the South Pole to the North Pole, went through the same tactics of control and pacification. Despite multiple attempts to control Indigenous peoples, in southern Chile the war of attrition imposed the need to establish a mode of pacification that would allow the development of new social classes, who slowly exchanged sandals for fine shoes and French tulle, and who saw the need to expand their borders to commercialize and exploit the rich territories.
Thus, among the attempts at subjugation through parliamentary means—a mode of dialogue that sought to persuade through reason rather than force—especially the parliament of 1726, only partial results were achieved, benefiting solely the invader.
It was in 1793 that the Treaty of Quilín and Negrete was signed in Chile, establishing the pacification of the Indians—a treaty that would later lead them almost to extinction. Here, whites and Indians gathered to negotiate, achieving a peace that concluded with the assignment of territories to the Indigenous peoples in what became known as Araucanía. Here they could live and maintain their systems of government, which were sustained by a cooperative society where no one owned the land—what could be called primitive socialism.
The same stratagems were used in the United States during the same period, after Pontiac, the great war captain, led the Ottawas in the Indian War of 1763.
During the war of 1763, Pontiac swept through the states of Tennessee and Pennsylvania, crossing the Ohio River line until besieging Fort Pitt. Here, during this decisive battle, the first bacteriological war known to humanity took place. The capitalists, feeling threatened, decided to throw blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians outside the fort, and in this way, under the cold winter, they managed to destroy the revolutionary forces. That is how it happened. The Indians suffered attrition from contamination, and the English ended up massacring them like beasts; Pontiac disappeared into the western forests of Illinois until he was later assassinated in 1769.
When peace with the Indians was established in Chile in 1776, this implied disarmament and a truce for capitalism, which soon attacked the Indigenous peoples again, displacing them to the most inhospitable territories of the country, located in the southern forests that the English and Spanish fought to conquer for the crowns of emerging transnationals. This same episode occurred in the United States during the government of Andrew Jackson, who, through the law of March 10, 1830, authorized the displacement of Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River. Such practices were quietly carried out by the English and French in Canada, with the help of Protestantism and Catholicism. Now, it is no surprise that in Chile today there is talk again of displacing Indians to the Ninth Region while denying them the right to land and building hydroelectric dams over their territories that will erase their cultural vestiges.
When we speak of liberation struggles in Latin America, we speak of the independence of our nations and, with them, the independence of different groups and ethnicities, as well as the recognition of languages and the need to rescue them from capitalist destruction.
Now, we must make clear that before “Apartheid” existed in Africa, the system of human segregation already existed in the Americas—an expression repeated over the years and which Europeans recently experienced during the Second World War.
Faced with this Indigenous problem, José Martí, in an article published in *La Nación* of Buenos Aires on December 4, 1885, wrote: “They seize him in a narrow space, where he writhes among his cornered companions, with the entire horizon filled with traffickers selling him shiny trinkets, weapons, and liquor.”
Do we not know this from Europe against the Jews, where capitalism, in its great crisis, created a war that led multitudes to death for the benefit of capital? Do the apartheid of Blacks in South Africa, the ghettos of Jews in fascist Europe, the Indigenous reductions in Latin America, and the segregation of Palestinians not have something in common? Without a doubt, the answer is capitalist imperialism.
Now, these same criminals who uphold capitalism—those who lead nations into racial wars when they see their exploitation rights threatened—are the first to speak of human rights when they see an opportunity to weaken the forces opposing their practices of hatred, so that these social forces do not gain any anti‑capitalist advantage. We saw these indigenist manifestations of capitalism in Nicaragua, where capitalists appealed to the United Nations for the rights of the Miskito Indians.
The operation of the U.S. “green‑go’s” was very curious, as was that of others who fell into the trap. Under this operation, they were on the verge of launching a war in defense of the rights of these Miskito minorities—rights they had never before considered, but which at that moment were useful in the struggle against “communism.” Finally, when the reasons were too crude and it became impossible to prove the contrary, and worse still, when this humanist display provided a pretext to stir up the Indigenous situation within the United States itself, U.S. politicians, with their Protestant Christianity, decided to buy off mestizos and white mercenaries to lead them into a miserable war of brothers against brothers—all to defend the right of transnationals to exploit a territory and its people.
Years have passed, and the nation that once defended the rights of the Miskito Indians—once on the brink of going to war for these minorities—today, when the Miskito Indians die of hunger and disease like all Indigenous peoples of the continent, no one—not even the greatest humanists of capitalism—speaks about them. How curious.
Now, we see the same case in Colombia, where capitalism disputes a fertile territory rich in natural resources. Here, capitalism, with its great influence of the dollar, acts in favor of Black minorities while maintaining its bantustans for the Indians of the northern states, and still claims their rights, though no one listens. Capitalism, through NGOs under the slogan of “Civilism,” invests large sums of money in the ideological penetration of Black minorities, all to help establish a wall against the advance of “communism” and in clear defense—just like before—of an unrestrained capitalism that does not hesitate to kill homeless children sleeping on the streets of Cali simply because they mar the appearance of elegant neighborhoods.
The situation of minorities in Colombia and the Indigenous peoples in Nicaragua is the same, and it is the same story as always.
But how is it possible that today they speak of Indigenous rights in Colombia when in Guatemala—a nation that is 90% Indigenous—it is governed by a 10% white minority? Has no one noticed this reality? Why does no one speak out about the more than 300,000 Indigenous people killed in the recent uprising? Well, the champions of point‑blank shooting decided to silence the matter by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to an Indigenous woman, who would then be forced to silence her own people by calling for pacifist struggle and dialogue. Dialogues are nothing more than truces that capitalism takes in order to strike back later with greater force.
The question that strikes my senses is: why Colombia? Well, this smells like Miskito.
As we advance in our struggle toward a broad movement capable of defending in a synchronized manner the interests of the dispossessed, in open struggle for freedom, we will advance in our fight against racial segregation, Latin American apartheid, and the new bantustans of capitalism, as well as, fundamentally, toward the unconditional independence of Indigenous peoples and other peoples—not as a social‑Marxist charity or Christian social charity (known as indigenism), but as a form of anti‑imperialist struggle. In the same way that we fight for the independence of the Palestinian people without being “Palestinists”; in the same way that we defend Cuban independence without being “Cubanists”; in the same way that we oppose the bloody war imposed on the Colombian people without being “Colombianists.” Today we must fight for Indigenous nations without being indigenists, but by recognizing the legitimate right of peoples to self‑determination, taking into account that our enemy is imperialism, which always seeks to create an internal adversary for us—and today, indigenism is nothing more than a “Trojan Horse” that, with the assistance of NGOs, attempts to dictate to Indigenous peoples the path to freedom.