Читать книгу After the Decolonial - David Lehmann - Страница 15

How can one think of social justice on the basis of the experience of indigenous movements? Taking as examples the Zapatistas and the less well-known but more institutionalized Colombian Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Cauca Valley Indigenous Regional Council – CRIC – which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2021), I emphasize institution building and the advancement of women. As noted earlier, the women who have been active in the Zapatista areas of Chiapas have had to work hard to challenge generations of subordination. In the CRIC, we observe women advancing to positions of responsibility thanks especially to its initiatives in the field of intercultural education. Both movements have had to build organizations able to deal with economic necessities, with land tenure and with governance, requiring traditional institutions to be reformed substantially. The CRIC is founded on two colonial institutions – the resguardo and the cabildo; the resguardo is a territorial concept denoting land assigned to indios, in a regime of collective entitlement, and the cabildos are the institutions governing their internal affairs. Judicial procedures have had to adapt to the requirements of the national judicial system which has recognized and incorporated them. We know little of how the Zapatistas have dealt with issues of law, especially as compared to the openness of the CRIC, but sympathetic observers have received explanations of their painstaking system of consultation and feedback between local and regional decision-making bodies. We have to take their word for it, but it would appear that they are establishing procedures that are more in keeping with modern ideas of participatory democracy than indigenous concepts of authority, despite the constant reiteration of the formula mandar obedeciendo (‘taking command while obeying’), drawn from Chiapas indigenous culture.

There is an emerging pattern of judicialization of the indigenous and race questions, perhaps on the pattern of the judicialization of politics which has been much remarked upon in the region. In Colombia, the judicial system can intervene to rule on the correctness of indigenous proceedings. In Mexico, land tenure disputes involving indigenous title have long fallen within the purview of the state’s judicial system, not of indigenous customary proceedings (usos y costumbres).

The Brazilian affirmative action system for entry to universities has brought about what many would regard as a strange, even unacceptable, situation in which it is not unusual for judges to decide a person’s racial assignment, and for formally established university committees to review applications for entry via the race quota to check for ‘fraudulent’ self-assignments of skin colour. The quotas are in effect a positive discrimination system that reserves places for black, brown and indigenous people in a country whose chromatic race relations regime renders racial classification essentially contestable, so it is not surprising that disputes – even denunciations – may arise, leading to judicialization.

These examples are not evidence that universalist concepts of social justice are being implemented via the courts, but they do show that as a result of indigenous mobilizations in Colombia and of the adoption of affirmative action policies in Brazil, universalist criteria of law are being applied to the causes of indigenous or Afro-descendant justice. The road, however, can be rather rocky: judicial involvement in land tenure in Mexico and the implementation of local government in accordance with usos y costumbres in Colombia have not been immune to the influence of organized crime, guerrillas or paramilitaries. The most complete case of confluence of an indigenist rationale and the judicial system that I have found is in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where the entire electoral system was reformed in the 1990s to allow institutional recognition of usos y costumbres. Yet this has also brought the national and state electoral authorities into an oversight role in which they have intervened to enforce legislation concerning women’s participation and gender parity in elections in the face of persistent chicanery.

Indigenous movements press governments to pass legislation and to make resources available, but it is noticeable that in order to survive and evolve over time – like the CRIC and the Zapatistas – they have to build institutions of their own, and we see how in those processes women come to the fore.

We can see contrasts by comparing the weakness or absence of indigenous movements in Mexico outside Chiapas and in Chile where indigenous claims are mobilized in fragmented ways and have not developed institutionally. The difference arises from a lack of depth which would enable them to extend their activities, in Chile, beyond the ceremonial role of shamans to, for example, governance, education, the law and land tenure. Yet the Chilean Mapuche struggles and the repression inflicted in their region by the government have made their cause emblematic for the nationwide movement to democratize the country’s democracy: in Santiago’s Plaza Dignidad (as it has been popularly re-baptized) the only flag to be seen at regular demonstrations is the Mapuche flag – no party emblems, no national flag – and a Mapuche woman was elected president of the country’s Constitutional Convention in 2021.

The goals of indigenous movements are very often the same as those of other movements, such as those fighting for housing in cities and not least those fighting for human rights. They are in the forefront of causes of universal concern, for example, contesting mining licences in vulnerable environments like the Amazon and the Andean highlands and Guatemala, and resisting illegal mining especially in the Amazon. Conflicts over mining and indigenous rights claims to territorial autonomy and over environmental defence are often one and the same.

This universalism was particular evident in the early days of the Zapatistas. In conjunction with catechists trained by the Archdiocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, they were defending people from different ethno-linguistic groups who had been forced to migrate as a result of the shift to cattle rearing in highland estates where for generations they worked in semi-feudal conditions. Those people were indios but had been living in conditions of servitude rather than in corporate communities, and their leaders were steeped in the rhetoric of liberation theology and secular revolution. They were most certainly victims of racial oppression, and the banner of indigenism served as a rallying cry, as a source of solidarity and importantly as a magnet attracting the sympathy of a certain current of international opinion, but the restoration or protection of indigenous culture formed but one part of their demands. Their movement was inspired principally by a demand for land, for the confirmation of their tenure of land they were already occupying, for socio-economic improvement, and for freedom from repression by the state and landlords. Even before the armed uprising in 1994, they were building institutions, forming cooperatives to manage land they had occupied in the Lacandón forest – but these were not indigenous community institutions.

Evo Morales played this counterpoint between indigenist and other themes like a virtuoso. He cleverly proclaimed the country’s indigenous vocation in terms which made the word ‘indigenous’ itself an ethnic category while downplaying the recognition of numerous ethno-linguistic groups within it. The Constitution drawn up under his auspices recognized formally a long list of nations with their own languages and legal systems, but the recognition remained on paper. He may well have feared the divisive effects of such multiple recognitions, and those whose livelihoods depended on the fragile ecological equilibrium in the Amazonian lowlands were an obstacle to his hydrocarbon-driven neo-developmentalist strategy.