Latin American Sectors

With a tradition that comes from centuries of resistance to Spanish domination, indigenous peoples show a democracy’s most genuine base that stunted representative democracies that emerged in Europe and transplanted to the American continent in a marred copy. If the indigenous, majority populations in several of the current Latin American countries, deepen these practices of direct democracy in the form of its political authorities, immediately become challenges to the traditional powers of their countries and U.S. imperialism, and may converge with the more rebellious tendencies of other social sectors such as the industrial working class, unemployed urban and, ultimately, all sectors that the capitalist system and even more so the neoliberal policies of recent years have been segregating and impoverishing. In other words, indigenous movements are emerging in the same new common horizon of social and political change that other similarly marginalised groups rise, betting on new forms of direct, participatory democracy, all of which is a challenge open to the status quo, traditionally conservative and racist and with a deep anti-indio feeling. In this regard it is interesting to consider the Declaration of Quito that concluded the continental meeting 500 years of resistance India, in July 1990, preparatory of the counter-Summit of celebrations that took place on the occasion of the meeting (or clash?) of two worlds in 1492: Indian peoples in addition to our specific problems we have problems in common with other classes and popular sectors such as poverty, marginalization, discrimination, oppression and exploitation, this product of the neocolonial domination of imperialism and of the dominant classes in each country. Without being an option Marxist in the strict sense, the indigenous movements in Latin America have a potential for huge social change. Or, at least, they are an open for the dominant capitalist powers confrontation, whether the local aristocracies or transnational capital, especially Americans. Their specific demands as ancestral peoples immediately convert them into political subjects of change, meanwhile claimed things that the years of colony and after peripheral capitalism when the formal independence of the States in which developed, it has denied.