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Without exception, the coup in Ecuador that four weeks ago brought down democratically elected president Jamil Mahuad was described by the U.S. media as an uprising that had naturally sprung from the country’s indigenous population and was eventually supported by the military. But it did not explain that the stage for the action that once more interrupted Ecuador’s constitutional continuity was set back in 1990, when Latin American communist parties invited representatives of all other movements of the most extreme left to a meeting in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. There, and in an another meeting in Mexico City two years later, a strategy was forged to find ways of surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was leaving all Marxist-Leninist parties and its fellow travelers adrift, without the key political patronage and funds provided by Moscow.
They were not shy about proclaiming their plans. Realizing the days had ended when they could persuade the better informed voters of the benefits of their ideology and gain political space in free elections, they openly and widely announced that the future of their movement resided in indoctrinating and mobilizing the less-informed indigenous masses, which in different degrees in many Latin American countries are socially and economically marginalized.
The objective was legitimate; the way it has been sought is not.
Instead of going to the root of the problems that alienate indigenous peoples from the rest of society and holds back their development — some of their own making, many not — and seeking their vote, the extreme left initiated a campaign of disinformation amongst those peoples that only served to increase their alienation, stimulating the idea of insurgence and rebellion against the “system” but without providing them with any notion of what would come next. Of course, the leaders of this movement—most of them not members of the indigenous populations—would know what to do when they took power;
A dress rehearsal for the movement was the armed uprising in Mexico’s southeastern state of Chiapas on January 1994, in which a so-called Zapatista National Liberation Army claimed representation of the region’s indigenous population, launching a sophisticated world-wide fax and Internet propaganda campaign.
Once it managed to mobilize vast masses of the disinformed among the indigenous population in Ecuador, the hard left had the help of some of the uniformed—a group of colonels who backed up the so-called “indigenous uprising.” At the last minute, however, some of the wiser top Army officers realized that without foreign economic help the country would slip into total chaos, and for that aid to be forthcoming some semblance of democratic continuity was necessary. They backtracked on their initial support for a junta that would have included a representative of the insurgents—not an Indian, by the way—and a colonel that supported them and, instead, they called upon vice president Gustavo Noboa to assume the presidency.
However, to the astonishment of observers, Noboa set to carry out the policies of deposed president Mahuad, including the dollarization of the nation’s economy—fiercely opposed by the insurgents—as a move to fight a deep economic crisis, suggesting that the top army chiefs sacrificed Mahuad to quell the rebellion but realized that his policies were right for the nation and, moreover, didn’t want to see Marxists gain a toehold in Ecuador’s government.
A similar situation is developing with an indigenous group in Colombia, and U.S. reporting on the matter is also lacking in background that could help in understanding the issue. Furthermore, in this case American environmentalists are contributing to the disinformation campaign.
The U.S.-based Uwa Defense Working Group, which claims it represents the Uwa indigenous tribe from the northeast of Colombia, is attacking Occidental Petroleum, the U.S. oil group, for planning to start drilling in the next few months in search of an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of oil in that region, as a result of a deal worked out with the Colombian government. Colombia is a net petroleum exporter and its oil shipments represent 30 percent of total export earnings, but without more oil it would become a net importer of crude by 2004,
The Uwa, who number only 5,000, first hit the headlines in 1996 when they threatened to commit collective suicide if Occidental’s drilling plans were not halted. The drill site falls outside the legally recognized Uwa Unified Reserve, even after the Colombian government increased it from 150,000 acres to 500,000 acres (100 acres per member of the tribe). But, with the help of Amazon Watch, a California-based environmental group, the tribe claims the oil drilling is within larger, traditional ancestral territory.
U.S. media have reported the Uwa’s allegation that development of the site would be damaging to the tribe and the environment because of the likely increase in violence by leftist terrorists, who have attacked Occidental’s existing pipeline more than 600 times in the last 12 years, leading to the loss by Colombia of 2.1 million barrels of crude oil that spilled into the soil and rivers. But, either nor reported at all or buried deep down in stories is the fact that the left-wing guerrilla group called the National Liberation Army, which routinely targets pipelines and other oil infrastructure, has orchestrated the Uwa’s protest against a resource that is of vital importance for the future of all Colombians, including the Uwa themselves.
Claudio Campuzano is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com