Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo entered office in July 2001 raising ethnic banners to mobilize the masses against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of his predecessor, Alberto Fujimori. Labeled as a modern-day Pachacútec—the Incan emperor widely credited with expanding and renovating the ancient empire—and waving the rainbow-colored flag of the Inca, Toledo configured his place within a centuries-old mythology still lodged in the popular Peruvian consciousness: the return of the Inca.1 But he mixed these strategically deployed images of his Incaic ancestry with the adoption of a coastal and urban cholo status, thanks to the clear signs of upward mobility afforded to him by a prestigious education at Stanford University. In the Peruvian imagination his popular nickname, “El Cholo,” connotes someone who has emerged from humble Andean roots to achieve a less provincial, and thus—according to Peruvian racial logic—an implicitly less “Indian” status.
During his electoral campaign and the battle against Fujimori’s attempts to steal the election, Toledo continued to rely on these contradictory symbols related to Peru’s racial hierarchies. He was at once an ascending Andean prophet, a capable coastal politician, the new Inca messiah and only the latest in a long line of “indigenous mestizos.”2
Toledo’s gestures to the Inca past are not new to mainstream Peruvian politics. Paying rhetorical homage to Peru’s Incaic roots has long been prominent in the political discourses of even the most aristocratic and evidently non-indigenous Peruvian ideologues, nation-makers and indigenista intellectuals. Historian Cecilia Méndez aptly describes how the political elite has historically constructed Peruvian nationalism with constant rhetorical praise for the purity of the Inca past. Implicit in this, she perceptively adds, is the disparagement of assimilated present-day indigenous people. Peru’s nationalist ideology, she says, is best captured in the phrase “Incas sí, indios no” (“Incas yes, Indians no”).3
Since assuming office, however, the Toledo administration has lessened its use of neo-Incaic symbolism. It has been forced to move beyond this conventional posturing in the face of overtly political demands from social movements that have tired of facile rhetorical flirtations with Peru’s pre-Columbian past. Movement leaders from both Andean and Amazonian regions now seek to unite their causes, putting an end to decades of organizing separately under different banners: the Andeans as “campesinos” and the Amazonians as “natives.” They are clearly motivated in their move toward ideological unification and political invigoration by more than just the particularities of Peru’s national historical context. Indeed, they are participants in an emerging ethnic movement—patently global in size and scope—that seeks legitimation from a regime of rights, responsibilities and opportunities afforded by a transnational indigenous citizenship.
During last year’s independence day celebrations, Toledo made a clear concessionary gesture to the country’s growing indigenous movement. Faced with single-digit approval ratings and continual threats of removal from office, he was undoubtedly anxious to heal at least one of the many political wounds from which his administration had suffered. He delivered a speech to Congress proposing the creation of a Development Institute for Andean, Indigenous, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).
The forthright announcement of a new multicultural institute conceals much of the political complexity and dispute that brought the proposal into being in the first place. It followed a year of controversy over first lady Eliane Karp’s initiative to establish a state agency that represents the interests of Peru’s ethnic minorities. Notably, the year-long dispute served as a catalyst that provoked a strengthening of what was previously a weak, virtually non-existent alliance between Andean and Amazonian community leaders who now seek to explore the political potential of global indigeneity.
The first lady’s initiative, the National Commission on Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (CONAPA), had come under frequent attack by indigenous leaders and members of Congress. CONAPA’s detractors claimed the effort masked some potentially nefarious private interests and moved forward despite growing discontent among indigenous organizations. Toledo’s legislative proposal to create INDEPA signified the possibility of a new start by recognizing the troubled relationship between the first lady’s ethnic rights agency and those whose interests it was meant to address.
Indigenous leaders responded to Toledo’s announcement by setting out to work on a proposal for constitutional reforms that would address the collective rights of Peru’s constitutionally recognized “campesino” (Andean) and “native” (Amazonian) communities. Peru’s major Andean and Amazonian organizations submitted the proposal to Congress in October 2004 and held a press conference in Lima in which the leaders of “peasant” unions and “native” organizations publicly reaffirmed a shared identity as “pueblos indígenas” (“indigenous people”).4
Méndez’s ideological formulation now faces the possibility of a significant inversion: “¡Indios sí, Incas no!” No more romantic rhetoric. Peru’s indigenous peoples are clearly focusing on indigenous rights legislation as the ultimate source from which an effective politics of recognition will emerge. The epigraph of an earlier proposal prepared by indigenous organizations expressly for Toledo’s administration is similarly resolute: “For a Constitution for everyone … indigenous peoples and communities stand and be counted.”5
The government has responded to these demands with new and contradictory indigenist rhetoric similarly influenced by tendencies originating from outside Peru’s national context. Worldwide trends toward an inclusive multicultural politics shaped the state’s revised indigenous agenda from the beginning. These trends consist of complex attempts to reconcile the rights and responsibilities of the individual citizen with those of collective citizens, which are often defined by a combination of racial and ethnic status, cultural criteria and a history of past wrongs for which the group seeks restitution.6
The Toledo Administration’s embrace of this deceptively innocent global rhetoric illustrates how contested “multiculturalism” is as an ideological program, particularly when utilized in the top-down fashion characteristic of Peru’s political culture. CONAPA represented the Toledo Administration’s attempt to institutionalize this multicultural rhetoric. Although the agency got off to an apparently good start, it experienced a series of difficult growing pains as it sought to establish a participatory multicultural framework explicitly modeled on similar efforts in the region—particularly, Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reforms. To CONAPA’s credit, however, it called together national-level organizations representing Amazonian and Andean communities to propose reforms to the Constitution that would grant greater autonomy to Peru’s ethnic minorities and promise greater inclusion in national and local governments.
Karp resigned from CONAPA midway through 2003, stating it was time for the entity to be under the direction of a person representing one of Peru’s ethnic minorities. Following her departure the commission spiraled deeper and deeper into a series of public scandals. Part of the conflict resulted from the poorly managed appointment of her successor. Initially, Toledo and Karp offered the job to Gil Inoach, a member of the Aguaruna peoples, in June of 2003. Inoach had recently completed his second term as president of the Interethnic Association of Development in the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP), an indigenous Amazonian organization, and had actively participated in CONAPA’s initial phases. But according to Inoach, they later retracted the job offer because he refused to accept a pre-packaged list of persons the President and first lady planned to invite as acting members of the commission.
“They presented me a list of persons that would make up CONAPA, which I looked over,” says Inoach. “Then I presented another list as a counterproposal, arguing that if CONAPA was betting on a change toward an inclusive state, then it would be advisable that CONAPA be composed of indigenous representatives that were authorized and representative … because of that, they later told me I was not ready to take over its presidency.” The position went temporarily to Miguel Hilario, a member of the Amazonian Shipibo-Conibo peoples. Because Toledo and Karp failed to consult indigenous organizations on either candidate’s nomination, several indigenous leaders interpreted their actions as a clear instance of secretive bureaucratic cronyism.
Other factors also added to the crisis that plagued CONAPA. First, Karp’s decision to accept a privately funded research project on indigenous movements, following her pro-bono work to create CONAPA, raised questions among members of Congress regarding her motives. Secondly, allegations surfaced accusing CONAPA of grossly mismanaging a World Bank “indigenous” fund. And finally, it was revealed that ranking members of CONAPA had close associations with consultants to a plan that would extend gas-extraction activities in a natural reserve inhabited by an isolated native population.7
The conflict over CONAPA came to a head on August 14, 2003, when 36 signatories from Peru’s major indigenous organizations publicly declared their refusal to recognize the institution as representative of their interests. Their declaration cited a series of tough criticisms about CONAPA’s bureaucratic inefficiency, its lack of legal status and its increasing tendency to “act behind the backs of indigenous organizations.”8
These debates about indigenous leadership and the events following Karp’s resignation contributed to a dramatic yearlong standoff. As late as April 2004, Toledo was still restating his faith in CONAPA. However, the relatively young umbrella indigenous organization, the Permanent Conference on Peru’s Indigenous Peoples (COPPIP), which coordinates with both Andean and Amazonian community organizations, continued to push for a completely new institutional framework. Leaders from COPPIP, the Amazonian-based AIDESEP and three other national level indigenous organizations called community delegates to Lima to discuss CONAPA’s government-backed constitutional reform process. Among the other organizers was the increasingly important National Coordinator of Communities Affected by Mining (CONACAMI), an environmental organization born in the late 1990s. CONACAMI’s main base of support is found in various Andean “campesino communities” that are now being encouraged to reconsider their status as “indigenous” through their association with Peru’s ethnically defined organizations. All the controversy led to Toledo’s July 2004 proposal for the creation of INDEPA.
The existence of a burgeoning national movement moving toward the consolidation of Andean and Amazonian interests under an ethnic banner may take some by surprise. Many observers continue to insist that there is no significant indigenous movement in the country.9 In fact, Peru is often cited as a notable exception in the Latin American context, an aberration from general trends of the regionalizing and globalizing ethnic-based political claims now trumping class-based politics. Explanations for this vary but they inevitably assume that the Peruvian national context is somehow peculiarly insulated from today’s global indigenism and Latin America’s growing grassroots indigenous mobilization.
Some prominent Peruvian thinkers have provided an impressively deep historical and cultural analysis to explain what they perceive as a lack of ethnic identity-based movements among Peru’s Andean communities.10 In this view, “indigenous” identity remains a highly devalued political currency for native Andeans. Instead of appropriating their indigenousness as an appealing political tool, the argument continues, Andean peoples in Peru still articulate political projects for progress by utilizing other, non-indigenous ideologies. They adopt the symbols of ethnic hybridity and social mobility implied by mestizaje and “cholofication.” Or when staking explicit political claims, they identify themselves as agrarian campesinos, utilizing a class-based rather than ethnic paradigm. Considering the explosion of ethnic politics during Toledo’s presidency, it might be time to rethink these assumptions. It is important to note not only the emergence of new ethnic-based organizations that integrate Andean and Amazonian leadership, but also the realignment of older “campesino” organizations that now seek solidarity with ethnic organizations.
It is true that use of the term “indígena” remains uncommon in many Andean communities when compared to “campesino” or provincial forms of self-identification. But the increasing circulation of “indígena” in peasant and ethnic movement organizations suggests something about the impact of global ethnic politics in Peru and the possibility of a rediscovery of indigenousness in the Peruvian Andes.11 Many commentators alleging the “insignificance” of Peruvian indigenous movements have failed to perceive how this broader global context is transforming Peru, as it has many other Latin American nations.
The emergence of joint Andean and Amazonian indigenous claims in Peru during the Toledo presidency is partly the outcome of processes that predate the administration and that extend beyond the country’s internal regional dynamics. Peru’s emerging ethnic movement draws significantly from several international arenas of rights claims and social advocacy that are decades in the making and central to indigenous projects everywhere. These include conventions recognizing indigenous peoples’ rights—the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, for instance—and other ongoing indigenous agendas within diverse contexts like the UN or the Organization of American States. The dramatic worldwide impact of indigenous-environmental advocacy alliances is also of great importance.
Since the early 1980s, the UN has become the primary legal context in which indigenous leaders infuse local causes with a more universalistic notion of indigenous rights and cultural citizenship. Through the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, the UN helped promote and release the “Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in the early 1990s and declared a decade for indigenous peoples starting in 1995. The Draft is emblematic of global multiculturalist ideology at work. It proposes to recognize a series of collective rights that would redress the wrongs indigenous populations suffered under European colonialism and the assimilationist campaigns of postcolonial nation-states.
These international legal proposals, debated extensively by indigenous representatives, are careful to define collective rights in concert with the West’s historically dominant notions of human and individual rights. Attempting to tie indigenous peoples to the rule of law within liberal state democracies avoids the thorny issue of ethnic separatism, which most indigenous groups do not advocate. But it still legitimates contemporary discourse about distinct indigenous “peoples” possessing a fundamental right to collective “self-determination.” Ideologically, this guarantees them a sense of semi-autonomous existence within their respective nation-states and allows them to perceive themselves as part of an emerging indigenous citizenry on global and regional scales.
In international legal contexts, indigenous identities are most often defined by a combination of cultural, linguistic, historical and political criteria. But self-ascription as indigenous remains essential. This leaves the door open to those in the process of discovering or, in the case of Andeans in Peru, rediscovering their indigeneity. Furthermore, it raises hotly debated questions about who exactly can be considered indigenous as particular groups arise to claim the rights and responsibilities associated with this status.
Unquestionably central to this bundle of emerging rights and responsibilities are those directly associated with environmental justice and the privileged moral position indigenous peoples have come to occupy with respect to the environment. Although promoting indigenous peoples as inherently conservationist is a matter of great contention, one thing is clear: since the end of the 1980s, many indigenous groups have emerged as the most visible global representatives of environmental conservation.
Many indigenous movements now strategically display their cultural traditions, material practices and spiritual values as symbols of sustainable societies in opposition to the rampantly destructive tendencies of corporate capitalism. However, images of the indigenous as spokespersons for sustainability do not merely circulate as symbolic currency. They also serve as political capital convertible into real-world opportunities. Indigenous rights are now closely entwined with the recognition that global measures for environmental conservation are needed to address the ills of a resource-hungry world economy. The worldwide move toward promoting ecologically sustainable development by international aid institutions increasingly broadens the forms of support indigenous groups receive along with their chances for establishing a successful political platform.
In Peru, the international advocacy networks and conservationist alliances of Amazonian movements in the 1980s and 1990s helped create the ideological space necessary for Andeans to reevaluate their “peasant” status and consider exchanging it for, or combining it with, that of “indigenous.”
The agrarian identity of Peru’s Andean peoples was made official by the state’s re-classification of Andean “indigenous communities” as “peasant communities” during General Juan Velasco’s reformist military revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the revolution also gave birth to a distinct popular political consciousness that did define itself in ethnic and cultural terms. The Velasco state, for instance, recognized Amazonian peoples’ titled settlements as “native communities.” Influencing the military regime’s recognition of Amazonian nativism were the pioneering efforts of the indigenous Amuesha Congress, which was founded in 1969 and incorporated the first ethnically federated Amuesha communities. Velasco enacted the Native Communities Law in 1974, resulting in the rapid growth of local organizations among all the major ethnic groups in the Amazon and the birth of the national organization AIDESEP, which has sought to represent Amazonian peoples nationally and internationally since 1980. Both local and national Amazonian organizations were engaged with international actors—missionaries, researchers, activists and others—since their founding in the 1970s. This movement was decidedly “global” well before “globalization” became part of our everyday vocabulary.
The Amazonian natives’ organizational efforts initially sought to federate and protect their newly won communal land holdings. During the 1980s, the movement expanded and diversified with the emergence of dozens of new local federations and a rival national-level organization. AIDESEP and its founding president, Evaristo Nugkuag, played an absolutely critical role in expanding the global reach of the Amazonian cause. In 1984 he received help from the international nongovernmental organization Oxfam to host an international meeting in Lima.12 AIDESEP invited national indigenous organizations from four other Amazonian countries, resulting in the creation of the now globally recognized Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations from the Amazon Basin (COICA). Nugkuag, who eventually served as president of both AIDESEP and COICA, became a key promoter of a strategic global alliance between Amazonian and environmentalist organizations. During his tenure, COICA and its participating indigenous organizations, invited every major international environmental NGO to Peru in 1990 to sign the Iquitos Declaration. The document formalized a strategic eco-indigenous alliance between Amazonian natives and global conservationists.
Only since the 1990s have the political projects of Andean and Amazonian Peruvians started to converge. Key sectors of the peasant leadership are exploring the potential of an alliance based on sharing a distinct form of ethnically and culturally defined citizenship. The indigenous umbrella organization COPPIP, which resulted from a 1997 human rights meeting in Cusco, seeks to realign the Andean “campesinos” with the Amazonian “natives” under an explicitly indigenous political program. Amazonian leaders initially played a strong role in the organization and promoted the expansion of an indigenous agenda to address the interests of Andeans. Leaders of Peru’s “peasant communities” became increasingly involved in COPPIP when the organization forged a close alliance with CONACAMI’s Andean-based anti-mining initiatives. Through advocacy and several massive protest marches, CONACAMI has sought to draw attention to the environmental impact of foreign mining activities in Andean communities. It has also tried to counter the threat posed by constitutional articles changed under Fujimori’s neoliberal reforms that regulate community land titles and impede communal land management. Leaders from these organizations have come to recognize how well their environmental and community rights concerns fit within a broader indigenous rights framework.
It is not only through anti-neoliberal environmentalist rhetoric that Peru’s Andean organization leaders follow the example of the Amazonians and assert a renewed interest in pragmatic community politics. Movement actors also explicitly justify their claims by looking to the international legal arena for political possibilities. They hope to intervene in Peruvian politics by engaging in that broader global sphere of post-cold war ideologies, which reward initiatives of the indigenous more readily than protests of the peasantry. Tellingly, COPPIP’s declaration from its Second National Congress in 2001 denounced the ideological effect of the Velasco regime, which “erased from juridical and political language the denomination ‘indigenous communities,’ substituting for it ‘peasant communities,’ taking away the only name for our identity the colonizers allowed us.” Of course, “indigenous” resonates with its own complex historical ambivalence, particularly in the Peruvian Andes. But in contemporary circumstances it takes on a certain appeal by virtue of its adoption into international legal settings and its successful and strategic use by other marginalized ethnic groups. Citing virtually every known UN legal proposal and international agreement that favors indigenous peoples, COPPIP leaders go on to declare, “It is our inalienable right to retake this [indigenous] identity, and to use it as an internationally recognized juridical status.”13 Indeed, they began retaking this indigenous platform in 1997 when the organization was founded, long before Toledo’s ascent—and, as it turned out, his descent—as Peru’s new Pachacútec.
In word and action, Peru’s Andean leaders are joining with their Amazonian counterparts to explore the possibilities of a shared indigenous framework. The contentious trajectory of Karp’s initiative and Toledo’s resulting concessionary gesture to Peru’s indigenous movement, hints at the political potential of the movements’ increasing unification. This trend shows they are clearly drawing from a global movement and moment, and their emerging ethnic (and environmental) alliance is gaining momentum. Where exactly the steady globalization of Peru’s indigenous movement will lead is to be determined as much by the force of global indigenism as by Peru’s internal region-to-region and president-to-president dynamics. For now, it is probably a safe bet that Toledo, having arrived to office with the pomp and circumstance of an Incan emperor’s second coming, will leave with a more pragmatic view of Peruvian politics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Greene is assistant professor of anthropology at Florida International University. He is currently working on a book titled Customizing History: Indigenous Movements, Cultural Politics and the Neoliberal Order in Peru.
NOTES
1. “Peruvians Elect an Inca Ancestor; President Wins Anti-Spanish Racial Vote,” Toronto Star, June 5, 2001.
2. I borrow this phrase from anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena. See her Indigenous Mestizos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
3. Cecilia Méndez, “Incas sí, indios no: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and its Contemporary Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 28, 1996, pp. 197-225.
4. “Indígenas y campesinos demandan cambios legislativos,” Servindi Actualidad Indígena, Vol. 1 No. 6, October 29, 2004.
5. “Consulta indígena sobre la reforma constitucional,” a document prepared by the indigenous organizations COPPIP, AIDESEP, CONACAMI, COICAP and CONAP from a meeting held April 12-14, 2003.
6. On multicultural reforms in Latin America see Donna Lee Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). On multiculturalism more generally see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). On guilt and historical restitution see Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations (New York: Norton, 2000).
7. “Comisión de fiscalización encuentra irregularidades en la Conapa,” El Comercio, June 24, 2004. Zachary Martin, “Peruvian Indigenous Organizations Declare CONAPA Defunct,” Cultural Survival Weekly Indigenous News, 2003.
8. “Declaración pública de los pueblos indígenas del Perú ante la crisis institucional de CONAPA,” document signed August 14, 2003, by representatives of COPPIP, AIDESEP, CONACAMI, COICAP, CONAP and others.
9. Xavier Albó, “Ethnic Identity and Politics in the Central Andes,” in J. Burt and P. Mauceri, eds., Politics in the Andes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Kay Warren and Jean Jackson, eds., Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Deborah Yashar, “Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and Democracy in Latin America,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 31 No. 1, 1998.
10. Carlos Degregori, “Movimientos étnicos, democracia, y nación en Perú y Bolivia,” in C. Dary, ed., La construcción de la nación y la representación ciudadana en México, Guatemala, Perú, Ecuador, y Bolivia (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1998). Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos.
11. Here, I owe thanks to Cecilia Méndez for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. She pointed out that thus far “indígena” status seems to circulate mostly at the organizational level and has not really been revived at the community level where other forms of identification are much more common.
12. See Richard Chase Smith, “Las Políticas de la diversidad: COICA y las federaciones étnicas de la Amazonia,” in Stefano Varese, ed., Pueblos indios, soberanía y globalismo (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1996).
COPPIP, II Congreso Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas del Peru, 2001, http://webserver.rcp.net.pe/convenios/coppip/Py_Consulta.htm.
