LA CASA EN EL SIGLO XVII

In Chapter 6 I analysed the roots of the Baguazo beyond the simple analysis that relates it to Garcia’s neoliberalism, his ‘dog in the manger’ ideology, and the unconstitutional decrees he enacted. This short-time memory might be complemented by relating the Baguazo to the deception carried out by the state against the Awajun in transforming an area that was supposed to be constituted for ecological protection into a mining one, but still this interpretation neglects a comprehensive analysis of the underlying causes of the conflict. I suggested that to understand the Baguazo it is necessary to understand the legal and ontological violence that historically has been exerted against the

‘indigenous’. The logic of coloniality has allowed ranking and governing the Indian in discursive and material ways, and this logic has been maintained in the different colonial and post-colonial settings in Peru.

166 The Law and the different projects of transforming the indigenous territory into private property or communal property, or transforming their social organisation into socialist cooperatives or liberal companies, are examples of how coloniality has been deployed through a legal violence reproduced in the Andes and in the Amazon, in the past and the present. The way in which indigenous peoples have been portrayed as savage and primitives, or the way in which official discourses have denied indigeneity in order to convert the Indian into a peasant or entrepreneur, are examples of an ontological violence, a coloniality of being, exerted in the Andes and the Amazon. This ontological violence has been deepened even by well-intended intellectuals who ranked the Amazonian indigenous peoples as even more primitive than the Andean Indian and ignored their politics of self-determination and territoriality.

This process of dispossession of territories, resources and identities has been normalised; the silent and slow violence that it represents only became evident in situations in which the resistance and the repression became spectacular such as occurred with the Baguazo. It does not mean that the Baguazo has no special significance. In Chapter 7, I analysed the institutional changes generated by the Baguazo, however, I discussed how the new institutionality still expresses the logic of coloniality over indigenous peoples by subjecting their destiny to the ‘national interest’.

Indeed, the Baguazo is neither an end nor a beginning, since the process of dispossession remains today. One of the most important aspects of this process becomes evident with the aftermaths of the Baguazo: the re-emergence and denial of indigeneity.

Indeed, the Baguazo fostered the rise of indigenous politics as a national issue, which involves indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the re-emergence of indigeneity in the Andes. Whereas indigenous politics in the Amazon has always been explicitly ethnic, in the Andes the ethnic character is taking form again after the supremacy of political articulations around the category of campesino. In that sense, indigenous peoples claim their right to re-invent themselves, to be what they were, to reconstruct their past and take advantage of a present in which indigenous rights have been globalised. Yesterday’s campesinos are becoming today’s Indians. Have indigenous peoples the right to reinvention?

One answer to this question claims that the very idea of indigenous rights should not exist. Kuper (2003) argues that indigenous rights contradict the formal equality guaranteed by the democratic liberal system. In that sense, indigenous peoples would seek privileged rights over others to take advantage of the system. In Peru this argument is shared by many politicians, companies and technocrats, who argue that the search for a differential treatment derives from a political interest (Santillana, 2013).

But is there a real problem in having a political interest? One of my interviewees studied Law with me in a public university in Lima and always presented himself as

‘serrano provinciano’ (born in a small town in the Andes); he was proud of knowing Quechua and to have a father member of a peasant community. During his university years, he always talked about being a politician and returning to his town to be the Mayor. However, he never presented himself as indigenous, until recently. Now he is a lawyer with postgraduate studies in Environmental Law and occupies a public position in the state and considers himself as indigenous. He comes back often to his town to construct political articulations for a future political contest and has acquired the membership of the peasant community of his father (he has that right by being son of a

167 comunero). He also has helped the community to negotiate with a mining company for proper compensation for a project undertaken on its land.

I asked him: why do you become indigenous now, being at the same time a well-paid state official? He answered: “Why not? Why cannot an indigenous undertake studies, be educated in Lima, work in important public offices, enjoy technology, travel around the world and still be indigenous? The problem is that people believe that an indigenous must be poor and live in his village and this is not the case”. (Indigenous interview 32, 11-06-13)

I was not surprised that he did not consider himself indigenous during our university years. He reminds me of the strong racism when he lived in Lima (and that he still suffers under certain circumstances), and that the term indigenous was not as popular as it is today. He defended the idea that he was a provinciano proud member of his village and he argued that today he has the right to express his indigeneity openly and take advantage of a world system that recognises indigenous rights.

In my opinion, formally, to be ‘indigenous’ is only to use a label recognised by international standards (which could be Indian, aborigine, or any other). What is important is that through this label the people who consider themselves as member of a distinct cultural heritage that “resists to die” (Indigenous interview 32, 27-12-13) express their indigeneity (a specific cultural identity and social system). The fact that in the past many people did not express themselves openly as indigenous but as campesinos or provincianos must not avoid the possibility for them of re-inventing themselves as indigenous.

This happens also with political organisations. The case of the National Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining (CONACAMI) is paradigmatic. It is an Andean social movement that changed its perspective in the last years, from an environmental defence organisation to an ethnic movement, influenced by Bolivian and Ecuadorian organisations (Vittor, 2009). CONACAMI leader Palacín (2009: p. 376) argues: “we are reconstructing our identity; the name indigenous, Andean… whatever is just a juridical recognition; we are constructing an indigenous movement in Peru and this is an irreversible process”.

This right of re-invention, however, is usually denied with the argument of mestizaje.

For example, Santillana (2013) argues that it is possible to accept the existence of indigenous peoples in the Amazon, but in the Andes all people are mestiza since the colony, and mestizaje is the general tendency for all Peruvian society. These types of arguments serve the interest of extractive activities within indigenous territories: by deleting indigenous peoples you delete indigenous rights for territorial defence.

The argument of mestizaje is not new. Mestizaje was a colonial bio-political discourse which appears as the only alternative to indigenous population to overcome their backwardness. In the last century the politics of mestizaje became politics of campesinos (for those who remained in the Andes) and cholos (for those who migrate to the cities). In that context, structural Marxist promoted the ‘evolution’ of Indians to become peasants and in this way to engage with modernity. De la Cadena (2005) argues that the most important epistemological opposition to this move was proposed by the indigenist writer Jose Maria Arguedas in his novel Todas las Sangres. He denied the

168 leftist and conservative projects of conceiving a single modern subject by proposing an alternative indigenous subject, which can be critically allied of the Left but without losing its own rationality. In this way he proposed an alternative political ontology and epistemology, admitting the importance of Western reason but at the same time its impossibility to completely translate indigeneity (De la Cadena, 2005).

Arguedas’ ontological and epistemological struggle admitted that in spite of centuries of oppression, indigenous ontologies and epistemologies are alive and that mestizaje was not the destiny of Peruvian different cultures. De la Cadena (2005) has shown how even in the cases in which we can talk about mestizo people, indigeneity should not be displaced. Mestizaje from the very beginning was more complex than a biological or cultural mixture: Indian people could be considered mestizo, and mestizo people could be considered Indian; there is also a social ranking between the white mestizo and the Indian mestizo (Santos, 2010), then, mestizaje does not entail mixture but a new system of classification and hierarchy based on personal social relations, the identification of an ancestral, the social position or the appearance.

Therefore, mestizaje is more a political category than a cultural or biological one. De la Cadena (2005) talks about ‘indigenous mestizos’ since they articulate an identity project that does not oblige to choose between being indigenous or being mestizos, but to maintain indigeneity in their own way. In that sense Manuel Zapata (in Walsh, 2006) reconfigures the idea of mestizaje not as the erasure of the oppressed or a hybridisation, but as a political proposal of de-alienation and a decolonial consciousness inspired by the struggles of oppressed peoples. Mestizaje, thus, is not a negation of indigeneity but a platform in which indigeneity can still be articulated.

Therefore, the mestizaje argument against indigenous rights is as wrong as the argument that denies indigenous rights based on the ‘equality before the Law’. This argument disregards the dispossession, violent inclusion and discrimination exerted by powerful elites against indigenous peoples (Kenrick and Lewis, 2004). In fact, the premise of this position is erroneous: we all are equal and share a similar past. That is not the case. In Peru there are different trajectories of inclusion, exclusion and exploitation and those who maintain or vindicate essential features as peoples, must have a right to be recognised as indigenous beyond the different labels historically imposed by the state’s open or friendly assimilation.

In sum, the definition of the indigenous must be relational rather than essentialist (Canessa, 2012; Saugestad 2001 in Kenrick and Lewis, 2004). In this way, the focus must be on the fundamental questions of power and dispossession of those who alleged being indigenous: “indigenous describes one side in a relationship between certain unequally powerful groups of people” (Kenrick and Lewis, 2004: p. 9). Thus, to be indigenous is to be in a claimant position for justice based on a historical relation (Canessa, 2012). In that sense, Bonfil (1977) argued that the Indian category expresses the condition of the colonised and makes necessary reference to a colonial relation.

But indigeneity is not simply a historical relationship but the continuity of power relations perpetuated by coloniality. That is why Canessa (2012) argues that we should not understand indigenous peoples as ‘cultural survivors’, but as inheritors of a colonial situation that has continued over time. Greene (2009: p. 14) suggests that “indigeneity is not a continuous with the prehistorical past but a constituent element of the historical

169 present… It does not emerge as an alternative path to modernity but as a path that begins and ends with modernity”.

It is true that colonisation created the ‘Indian’ and coloniality maintains the dominance on the indigenous. In that sense, indigeneity is a product of modernity. However it is much more than that. The very difference pre-modern/modern is misleading in identifying the continuity or novelty of indigeneity. The other (the Indian, indigenous, campesino, etc.) represents a different historical trajectory (another modernity) that supports its belonging to a specific people. The colonial relation helps to identify or define the indigenous but does not explain the whole indigenous world that is beyond this dialectic. The representation as peoples with territories from their perspective (and not from liberal multicultural perspectives) disrupts not only the liberal capitalist logic but also modernity itself.

This does not mean that indigeneity is isolated in its own logic. It is not simply about the past. The right to ‘re-invention’ means to look to the past in order to create something new. As has been suggested by a recognised scholar and activist: “there is a long struggle that we must undertake to reform the state and recognise in all levels the existence of indigenous peoples, but at the same time the peoples have to undertake also a process of reconstitution because the violent historical processes have affected them”

(Activist interview 3, 26-03-2013) . This is only possible by using legal, political and economic tools available in the current liberal capitalist context. The use of the legality, human rights discourses, the market and so forth, are ways to translate indigeneity and struggle for it today.

Therefore, past and current oppression, colonisation and coloniality justify the right to reinvention and to take advantage of the international system in order to reaffirm indigenous rights. In fact, the broad criteria established by international standards to define who is indigenous are inexorably open to interpretation, strategic use and opportunism (Kenrick and Lewis, 2004). But this fact should not delete a right of indigenous peoples to define their identity. Even more, the fact that many indigenous peoples re-invent their indigeneity responds to the globalisation of indigenous rights and discourses, and the dialogues between indigenous peoples and social movements, instead of being opportunistic or unexpected creations (Canessa, 2012). In that context, the state must be sufficiently flexible to recognise indigenous rights even in cases of doubt or ambiguity.

Therefore, indigeneity cannot be based only on history. It is a product of daily struggles and daily aspirations for a better future. In the next section I discuss the possibilities to articulate this indigeneity with the political projects of Buen vivir and interculturalidad.

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8.3. Globalisation, development and indigenous peoples: the