Perímetro de Seguridad

For a young Awajun student of Political Science (Indigenous interview 2, 20-10-2012), what led to the Baguazo was the lack of concern shown by governments towards their indigenous population. Even more, he argues that beyond the questioned decrees, the state since the beginning of the Republic until today has excluded indigenous peoples from their own territory. Western legality has been the form in which indigenous peoples have been excluded from their own territories, even in cases in which this legality recognised some indigenous rights. That is, the exclusion from indigenous cosmologies through the inclusion deployed by liberal legality. This legal violence is located at the very core of events such as the Baguazo. To understand this process it is important to analyse with detail a key legal institution for indigenous peoples: the community.

121 The community is a legal creation that has colonial roots. In fact, the antecedents of the community are the Andean ayllu (the social basis) and the Iberian commune (the external pattern of reference) (Matos, 1976; Golte, 1992). The ayllu was the basis of the socio-legal organisation of the Inca Empire: it was a group of individuals that recognised the same ascendancy and were common possessors of a land worked collectively. A group of ayllus together constitutes a marka, a higher territorial space (Miguez, 2010).

Mainly in the Andes, the Law of Spanish conquest allowed the exploitation of natives through the constitution of encomiendas, a title granted to conquerors with the condition that they settle down and live in the area (Ramírez, 1996). Then, during Virrey Toledo regime in 1570 the legal figure of reducciones (reductions) or pueblo de indios (Indians towns) was created based on the ayllus and marka (Del Castillo, 1992). The reducciones were re-settlements and grouping of disperse ayllus, respecting land possession for communal usufruct (Matos and Fuenzalida, 1976). The aim of this organisation was to control indigenous populations, to collect taxes, use cheap labour and foster catholic indoctrination (Matos, 1976). This regime consolidated exploitation mechanisms such as mita and yanaconaje in favour of the encomienda and central and regional power. The Yanaconaje was a labour system in favour of individual Spaniards in which the Indians undertook compulsory work for free in exchange for a plot to maintain their family. The mita was a compulsory labour system under Spanish dominion in which each community had to provide each month 1/7 of its men between 18 and 50 years old to Potosi and Huancavelica mines. The mita was officially abolished in 1810 but in reality, apart from its more oppressive forms, it did not disappear in the Andes. Other taxes such as the camaricos (contribution in species) were maintained even by Republican governments until 1854 (Fuenzalida, 1976).

But the history of conquest is also the history of resistance. After the imposition of colonial rule there were several voices that protested against colonisers abuses. De las Casas’ argument for the humanity of Indians against Sepulveda’s denial of Indians’ human condition is the first ontological debate between two Western logics: one humanitarian and the other instrumental. The Mestizos Garcilaso de la Vega (1539- 1616) and Guamán Poma de Ayala (1550-1615) were also early defenders of Indians against Spanish abuses. The former in his Comentarios Reales attempted to rescue Inca tradition and proposed to solve the conflict with mestisaje (Chang-Rodríguez, 1984); the latter denounced Indian exploitation directly to the Spanish Crown and wrote Primera

Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno, a subversive book which denounced colonisers’

injustices and analysed the social status of Indians during the first decades of colonisation (Chang-Rodríguez, 1984; Ferrari, 1984).

The resistance was also made through the appropriation and transformation of Spanish legality and culture. The conformation of communal systems allowed the people to maintain part of their resources and traditions: organisation, language, technology, beliefs and values (Matos, 1976), so it allowed the coexistence of Andean and Christian cults. The latter is expressed through the veneration of a patron saint of the community (introduced by the indoctrination policies); the former is expressed through the maintenance of Andean cosmology: the Pachamama (mother earth), the mountains, dead people, animals and other ecological components considered beings of good or bad spirits (Matos, 1976). Another means of resistance were the rebellions led by Inca descendant Santos Atahualpa (1742–52) in alliance with Ashaninka peoples in the

122 Central Jungle, and the simultaneous Andean rebellions of Tupac Amaru II in Southern Peru and Tupak Katari in today’s Bolivia (1780–82) (Rénique, 2009).

The abuses faced by indigenous peoples supposedly would have finished with independence, but this was the beginning of a process of violent inclusion. One of the main debates at the origin of the Republic was if indigenous communities must be dissolved or not. From the liberal argument of Simon Bolivar the communities were a colonial institution that must be suppressed in order to transform Indians into free citizens of the new nation (Del Castillo, 1992; Barclay, 2001). Thus, Bolivar eliminated the legal protection of communities so they were transformed into groups of small landlords. However, in the vast majority of national territory, the abolition of protected barriers of the colonial era constituted the point of departure for systematic dispossession exerted against the communities and the development of a new class of feudalists (Matos and Fuenzalida, 1976).

Moreover, the elimination of black slavery in the 1880s generated a labour crisis which they attempted to overcome with the importation of Asian ‘coolies’ and the reinstallation of yanaconaje. The yanaconaje allowed, within a special contractual type of leasing, the exploitation of huge areas without the landlord making major investments or assuming the risk of production. It served as well to consolidate the necessary workforce by generating an indirect mode of exploitation (Matos and Fuenzalida, 1976).

The community as a legal category, then, is part of the indigenous history of decomposition, re-composition, plunder and also resistance among Andean indigenous peoples. This legal model was later transplanted to Amazonian peoples but ignoring their different reality and historical process. Not only politicians and policymakers ignored Amazonian indigenous peoples, but also the indigenists, who focused on the Andes, neglecting the Amazon.