From NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) | 2 Sep 2010

Indigenous peoples across Latin America have in recent years taken a leading position in defending national sovereignty, democratic rights, and the environment. A renewed cycle of capitalist accumulation in the region centered on mining, hydrocarbon extraction, and agro-industrial monocultures has sparked the new round of indigenous resistance. Drawing on organizational and political legacies of the peasant and agrarian struggles of previous decades, indigenous groups in the 1980s and 1990s grew and gained strength from an international arena in which governments were encouraged to recognize and promote cultural and minority rights in return for continuing debt relief and development aid.

In a wave of constitutional reforms, Colombia (1991), Guatemala (1993), Mexico (1993), and Peru (1993) took the unprecedented symbolic step of recognizing the cultural rights of indigenous people. More recently indigenous political mobilizations in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) have led to constitutions that recognize those states’ plurinational character and, in the case of Bolivia, establish limited autonomy for indigenous peoples. While these state-led reforms represent one response to indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition of cultural identities and rights, they have done little to address either their long-standing demands for justice or their rejection of the extractivist economies, environmental devastation, and rampant social inequality that characterize neoliberal capitalism.

This issue of the NACLA Report explores the contributions and creative possibilities of indigenous movements at a moment when indigenous politics has moved beyond requests for state recognition and inclusion. In this period “after recognition,” indigenous activists, organizations and communities are challenging both the claims that liberal national states exert over indigenous resources and territories, and the misplaced social and economic priorities of neoliberal capitalism.

The creative force of indigenous political mobilization as a catalyst for broader popular political struggles was brought to world attention on January 1, 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation took over several cities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Despite the Mexican government’s military and media offensive against the Zapatistas, which continues to this day, the 1994 uprising—timed to coincide with the first day of the North American Free Trade Agreement—helped launch a national debate about democratic participation, autonomy, economic justice, and political inclusion. In the years since 1994, Zapatista organizations have drawn on indigenous philosophies of authority and community to articulate ideals of direct democracy and political participation that go well beyond liberal models of both representational democracy and cultural recognition.

The Zapatista challenge emerged in response to a neoliberal economic model that reduced social spending, deregulated key industries, dismantled unions, undermined workers’ rights, and deployed increasingly authoritarian measures against social movements, ranging from the criminalization of public protests to full-scale counterinsurgency doctrine. These measures, together with neoliberalism’s ongoing commitment to environmentally destructive industries like oil, mining, logging, as well as large infrastructure projects and single-crop commercial agriculture, pose the most severe threat in history to indigenous survival.

Even as Latin American popular movements face severe challenges from both the global economic crisis and the policies of their neoliberal states, indigenous organizations throughout Latin America are responding to both state repression and the uncontrolled looting of their countries’ natural resources, with new and creative perspectives on development and the crisis of the liberal nation-state. In doing so, they confront the region’s elected governments, including the new progressive nationalist governments, which have had difficulty thinking past the economic development model promoted by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization: fostering capitalist expansion through exploiting natural resources.

In the face of this, indigenous peoples ask why it is always necessary to privilege profits over life, to defend the rights of corporations and not the rights of Mother Earth, and to treat nature as a resource for the taking. In the terrain of politics as well, indigenous mobilizations have challenged the dominance of vertical decision-making on both the right and left, and the neoliberal state’s tired mantras of national security and economic interest.

A significant case is the 2008 Colombian minga, which propelled the country’s indigenous movement to the center of the political stage (see “Colombia’s Minga Under Pressure”). With this massive national mobilization, indigenous peoples demonstrated their capabilities to convene a broad range of social and political forces, and to articulate a platform of action that directly challenges the Colombian neoliberal state’s commitments to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, militarization, mining, and industrial agriculture.

Despite significant advances, indigenous movements continue to face serious challenges. Neoliberal agendas allow no room for the negotiation of territorial or political rights, and the entrenched racism of Latin America’s criollo or mestizo elites makes it difficult fo r indigenous perspectives and voices to be heard. Examples of this abound. In Mexico, indigenous communities have confronted the failures of the state judicial system, as well as increasing violence from state police, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers by forming community police who work to enforce their constitutional rights to autonomy and peace (see “Indigenous Justice Faces the State”).

In Brazil, indigenous territories and ways of life are directly threatened by the Lula government’s unwavering support for massive hydroelectric projects, such as the Inambari dams, which will flood more than 113,000 acres of rainforest on the Peruvian-Brazilian border, or the Belo Monte dams, which will divert more than 80% of the Xingu River (see “Brazil’s Native Peoples and the Belo Monte Dam”). In Peru, the political elite’s and mining sector’s disdain for Mother Earth directly threatens the survival of indigenous peoples, yet communities from the Andes and Amazon have joined forces to resist state efforts to expand extractive industries and to deny indigenous rights (see “El buen vivir”).

Indigenous political forces face similar challenges in those countries where progressive governments—brought to power, to varying degrees, by indigenous movements—continue to promote mining and other extractive industries, to deny rights to prior consultation, to ignore indigenous territorial autonomies, and to directly threaten both the environment and indigenous life. In Ecuador, indigenous movements have confronted the Rafael Correa government’s developmental strategy, which privileges mining and oil, and in September 2009 they mobilized to protest legislation that threatened to remove control of water resources from local communities and open the way for privatization of water. Correa responded by labeling indigenous leaders “terrorists.”1 In Bolivia, indigenous movements have also joined to confront the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, over the distribution of profits from gas and mining opera¬tions and the determination of autonomous territories, and even to demand the outright abolition of extractive industries (see “Bolivia’s New Water Wars”).

Indigenous organizations in different countries have articulated similar responses to extractive economies. In 2009, at the IV Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya-Yala, held in Puno, Peru, 5,000 delegates from across the Americas issued a declaration in which they offered “an alternative of life instead of a civilization of death.” In its call for a “global mobilization in defense of Mother Earth and the World’s People,” the summit acknowledged that this struggle—and the global crisis it addresses—demands a broad alliance with non-indigenous social and political actors.2 The summit’s anti-capitalist, anti-systemic platform resonates with declarations put forward by the Zapatistas, the World Social Forum, and other Latin American indigenous and popular organizations.

As indigenous movements act to hold their elected governments to account, they are not asking merely for recognition or for increased electoral participation. Their goal is not to participate in more of the same but to build something better. They question the primacy of an economic model that values private profit over life and the Mother Earth. They also remind us that popular and oppositional politics must look beyond elections and state-centered models of representative democracy that have historically marginalized and silenced not only indigenous peoples, but also a wide spectrum of disenfranchised and poor populations. They ask us, above all, to think creatively about how our commitments to political change must start not with a quest for power, but rather with respect for life, and for the ways of life and mutual well-being that indigenous organizations call el buen vivir.

1. Servicios en Comunicación Intercultural Servindi (servindi.org), “Ecuador: En escalada represiva Correa acusa a líderes indígenas de terroristas,” June 30, 2010.
2. See Marc Becker, “Moving Forward: The Fourth Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples,” June 12, 2009, nacla.org/node/5891.

Doug Specht and Sarah Capes examine how Indigenous voices have struggled to be heard at COPs – until now

This article was originally published in The Geographical Magazine at:  https://geographical.co.uk/news/is-indigenous-leadership-a-priority-at-cop30  We are grateful to Doug and Sarah for their permission to reproduce the article in The Violence of Development website. Doug is the co-editor of The Violence of Development website.

The organisation of COP30 has posed extraordinary challenges from the outset. Belém, tucked deep in the Amazon, ill-equipped for the arrival of tens of thousands of global delegates.

Basic infrastructure struggled to keep pace: accommodation, transportation, catering, and even sanitation all proved to be harder to get ready than anticipated.

Yet, as Brazil’s President Lula remarked during the opening, perhaps these constraints are wholly appropriate. COP30 is designed to bring the conference, literally and symbolically, back down to earth. This city, surrounded by Amazon forests and waters, faces the urgent reality that ‘climate change is not a future threat but is already a tragedy playing out in the present,’ to quote Lula’s opening words at the event.

Recent COPs have landed in settings far removed from the gritty immediacy of climate impact. Sharm El Sheikh, Dubai, and Baku, each a hub for fossil fuel economies and international business, have offered up their coastal luxury and strategic positioning to market themselves as epicentres of innovation, finance, and future-facing development.

These venues, replete with comfort and spectacle, placed COP at a considerable remove from those whose lives most directly intersect with the changing climate. Lula’s vision for COP30 is a striking departure. The Brazilian president insisted on a summit shaped by local people, their traditions, and their foods, staging what has been hailed as ‘the COP of the people’ and, crucially, an Indigenous COP.

The impact is immediately apparent in the sheer scale and presence of the Indigenous caucus. At this summit, the number of Indigenous participants dwarfs previous years. Their presence is far from symbolic: Indigenous peoples occupy every corner of COP, attending as experts and as rights-holders. Their testimonies speak to the slow, relentless violence of ecological change, the devastation unleashed by extreme events, and the persistent injustices of poorly planned, so-called climate ‘solutions’. Yet, they also bring vital strategies, grounded in Indigenous knowledges and technologies, for mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building.

And still, the story so far is one of persistent marginalisation. The UN’s endorsement of Indigenous peoples as an official constituency in theory rarely translates into impact when the decisions of COP are carved out in practice.

Too often, their distinct collective rights, outlined in international agreements such as UNDRIP and the Paris Agreement, are lost among the welter of other interests, private sector, finance, youth, local governments, and vulnerable communities. At COP28, references to Indigenous rights appeared only in generic introductions, buried deep within paragraphs copied from previous agreements, and were notably absent when it came to the central rules and guidelines on climate action and finance.

A critical point of difference, and one frequently misunderstood, lies in the approach to the natural world. Where mainstream climate conversations often reduce landscapes and ecologies to resources for human use, the relationship between Indigenous communities and their environments has always been one of reciprocity and respect. These relationships go beyond survival: drawing from their environment for food, water, shelter, transport, and medicine, they return a reciprocal care that safeguards the well-being of both people and place.

Even where environmental degradation has made traditional ways difficult or impossible, the underlying ethos remains: the future of people is inseparable from the future of the land. This sense of connection, at once deeply practical and profoundly philosophical, is largely missing from the hermetically sealed spaces in which much of COP is conducted.

During COP28 in Dubai, several Indigenous delegates raised to the author the question of how one could ‘feel’ the climate crisis through air-conditioned meeting rooms and windowless conference halls. How could delegates truly grapple with the scale of environmental loss when ensconced in man-made landscapes where even the grass is plastic, and the sun and water exist as little more than materials for technological “solutions”? How can the world’s most powerful decision-makers, cut off in climate-controlled offices, hope to lead on something they experience only in the abstract?

President Lula’s own opening statement at COP30 echoed this reflection. Quoting Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa, he warned that city thinking is clouded by the smoke and noise of machines. Lula underscored the centrality of Indigenous territories to genuine climate change mitigation and expressed the hope that simply being in the Amazon, surrounded by the complexity and calm of the forest, would inspire the new clarity and humility necessary to recognise both the inequalities and urgency of the crisis. In Belém, the city itself still incomplete, the daily realities of climate and community cannot be shut out.

This year has brought a convergence both geographical and symbolic. The region is home to millions of Indigenous people and hundreds of distinct peoples The waterways that thread through the Amazon shaped the journeys of hundreds of delegates, many arriving after weeks of travel. They came together not just to bear witness, but to strategise and build solidarity, their very journey a statement about enduring presence and continuing agency.

At the opening plenary, the Indigenous caucus set out its demands with directness and precision. International human rights standards, including UNDRIP, must be protected within all aspects of climate transition, and this includes explicit recognition and safeguarding of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact, as well as redress for the impacts of extractive, unsustainable economic practices.

All frameworks for climate finance should ensure direct, flexible, and culturally appropriate access, which means a recognition of indigenous financial mechanisms and the ability to make autonomous decisions about expenditure and investment. There must be full representation at every stage of decision-making, from national plans to international actions, alongside legal guarantees protecting territory, governance, and knowledge.

Moreover, this participation needs to not end at the point of being listened to but must ensure that these interventions are truly heard and contributions taken into account in decision making. Crucially, the roles of Indigenous women, youth, and persons with disabilities must also be acknowledged: participation must be real and meaningful, not notional.

None of these asks are radical. Everything requested here exists already in the language of international agreements, but their actualisation remains elusive. What the Indigenous caucus is asking for is not new promises but delivery on old ones, and a profoundly practical engagement with the experience and expertise that they alone bring.

Does COP30 mark a genuine step-change? There is a sense, emerging from the city’s climate, its rivers and forests, its unavoidable proximity to nature, that this could be a different sort of summit.

This time, perhaps, the unique perspectives and voices of Indigenous peoples will echo not only in the theatrical spaces of plenary but in the final documents, the rules, and the funding flows that make COP decisions real. The crisis is not abstract; the Amazon and its peoples, so often erased in international debate, are finally impossible to ignore. If hope is a fragile resource, it is one that COP30, rooted in the Amazon, may nurture in a way that previous conferences could not.

Ultimately, climate action is not a technical fix, but a question of how people and places exist together. The challenge now is to turn recognition into reality and to ground the future of climate policy in the lived wisdom of those who have lived with the forest the longest.

Sarah Capes is a PhD researcher working on issues of environmental justice and human and Indigenous peoples’ rights at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

Dr Doug Specht is a Chartered Geographer, a Reader in Cultural Geography and Communication, and Head of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster.

This article was added to the TVOD website at the same time as Doug Specht’s article ‘What a COP out!’ which appears in Chapter 10 of the website.