Indigenous precariousness in Latin America: lessons for Australia?

                                                                 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).

Jim Schulz ‘The rise and fall of Evo Morales’, NYRB 21 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.