Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back
When gold and silver becks me to come on
King John Act 3, scene 2
This brief post is not designed to analyse. Rather, it is
aimed at merely opening a window onto a political and socio-economic landscape
that receives virtually no attention in Australia. Latin America shares many structural
and underlying parallels with Australia. Indeed the economic, social and
cultural linkages are both longstanding and substantial (link here), yet they
rarely come to the forefront of public debate and consciousness.
I previously posted on these issues in February (link
here).
In this post, I want to focus briefly both on the continuing
dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Brasil and recent development in
Bolivia.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, titled ‘Blood Gold’ (link
here), Jon Lee Anderson reports on the impact of the seemingly
unstoppable onrush of small and illegal gold miners into the Amazon, and in
particular, into the lands of the Kayopo people. The article is notable for the
way it weaves together contextual history (only 900,000 Indigenous people
remain of the estimated eleven million who resided there in 1500 AD when the Portuguese
colonisers arrived), national politics under President Bolsonaro (‘the agencies
that look after the environment and indigenous concerns are practically defunct’),
the cultural impacts on Indigenous people in the face of the onslaught of
unregulated capitalism, the lawlessness of the Amazonian frontier, and the
potential global implications of deforestation and unregulated mining.
On this latter point, Anderson quotes an American biologist
and authority on the Amazon on the interplay of droughts and fires leading to
less rainfall, more fires and further deforestation. The Amazon produces 20
percent of the worlds rainfall, and on present trends is on course to flip from
being a carbon sink the size of the continental United States to a carbon
producer.
In relation to the conflict between Indigenous peoples and
illegal miners, Anderson reports without comment the racist attitudes that
drive both ongoing violence and lawlessness and national public policy. A
spokesman for a goldmining advocacy group complained about the existence of Indigenous
reserves: ‘It’s just not viable….They should reduce the size of the reserves,
especially in these places where whites are now living. That would pacify a lot
of people.’
I strongly recommend Anderson’s article.
In relation to Bolivia, recent weeks have seen the overthrow
of the populist Indigenous President Evo Morales. The circumstances of Morales fall
from power are complicated and in many respects unclear. Perhaps more
importantly, the implications for Bolivia, and in particular, its majority Indigenous
population, are yet to fully play out, although it appears that the prospects
for a return to democracy in the near future are bleak.
For readers who are interested, I list four articles below
addressing these developments. They are each quite different in their
analytical starting points, and share differing ideological dispositions. Nevertheless,
taken together, they provide a deeper and better picture of the state of play
than any one on its own. If I had to pick one article to read, it would be the
Webber & Hylton article listed first.
‘The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Macho Camacho’: Jeffrey R Webber and Forrest Hylton on
the coup in Bolivia, Counterpunch, 18 November 2019, (link here).
Nick
Estes ‘Is Bolivia turning into a rightwing military dictatorship?’, The
Guardian 26 November 2019, (link here).
And
an alternative view from Mascha Mounk ‘Bolivia should worry autocrats
everywhere’, The Atlantic, 26 November 2019, (link here).
Concluding Observations
It
may seem slightly strange to focus on developments in Latin America, but I do
so because I am convinced that there exist many structural parallels between the
challenges facing Indigenous peoples in Australia and in Latin America. Indeed,
the value of Latin American perspectives is that they provide in many cases a
much more vivid and focussed illustration of the issues that nevertheless are
in play in Australia.
We
too have our histories of racism and frontier violence. We have a public
ideology focussed on economic development at all costs with the implication
that it is just not valid for there to be an opposing viewpoint. We have our
own policies of climate change denial. We turn a blind eye to divide and rule
tactics designed to push Indigenous opponents of ‘development’ out of the way. And
while we enjoy a much more robust tradition of the rule of law and good
governance, we also have a number of very worrying examples of those legal and
political norms breaking down.
A
key lesson from Latin America for Indigenous Australian interests, and particularly
their advocacy organisations and thought leaders, is that reform and progress
is not a one way street. Given the right conditions, the progress of the last
fifty years could be threatened and reversed. The world is a volatile place and
the rising tide of the last fifty years could easily begin to ebb.
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