JESUS DE MACHACA, Bolivia – In Ecuador, the Shuar are blocking highways to defend their hunting grounds. In Chile, the Mapuche are occupying ranches to pressure for land, schools and clinics. In Bolivia, a new constitution gives the country's 36 indigenous peoples the right to self-rule.
All over Latin America, and especially in the Andes, a political awakening is emboldening Indians who have lived mostly as second-class citizens since the Spanish conquest. Much of it is the result of better education and communication, especially as the Internet allows native leaders in far-flung villages to share ideas and strategies across international boundaries.
But much is born of necessity: Latin American nations are embarking on an unprecedented resource hunt, moving in on land that Indians consider their own — and whose pristine character is key to their survival.
"The Indian movement has arisen because the government doesn't respect our territories, our resources, our Amazon," says Romulo Acachu, president of the Shuar people, flanked by warriors carrying wooden spears and with black warpaint smeared on their faces. (...)
Indians make up one in 10 of Latin America's half-billion inhabitants. In some parts of the Andes and Guatemala, they are far more numerous.
Yet they remain much poorer and less educated than the general population. About 80 percent live on less than $2 a day — a poverty rate double that of the general population, according to the World Bank — while some 40 percent lack access to health care.
The threats to Indian land have grown in recent years. With shrinking global oil reserves and growing demands for minerals and timber, oil and mining concerns are joining loggers in encroaching on traditional Indian lands.
Nowhere is Indian power so evident as Bolivia, which elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in December 2005. Morales dissolved the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and Original Peoples, calling it racist in a country where more than three in five people are aboriginals.
In February, voters approved a constitution that creates a "plurinational" state and accords Bolivia's natives sovereign status. Time-worn models of aboriginal government, community justice and even traditional healing are now legally on equal footing with modern law and science.
In the capital of La Paz, "cholitas" — Indian women in traditional bowler hats and embroidered shawls — now regularly anchor TV newscasts. "Miss Cholita" beauty pageants are in vogue and native hip-hop stars headline at nightclubs.
At the presidential palace, Morales — a former Aymara coca farmer who knew hunger as a child — makes a point of lunching periodically with the lowliest of palace guards. Morales is ensuring that profits from natural gas and mineral extraction are distributed equitably and that water — whose privatization in the city of Cochabamba spurred an uprising in 2000 — is never again privatized. He's also pushing to make electrical utilities public.
Morales has founded three indigenous universities, formalized quotas for Indians in the military and created a special school for aspiring diplomats with native backgrounds. And he is promoting a campaign to demand that all public servants be fluent in at least one native tongue.
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The legal groundwork for the empowerment drive by Latin America's Indians was crowned by a September 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Though nonbinding, it endorses native peoples' right to their own institutions and traditional lands. It has been almost universally embraced by Latin American governments.
It has also helped Indians win some major legal victories. _In 2007, the Supreme Court of Belize ruled in favor of Mayan communities that challenged the government's right to lease their lands to logging interests.
_A similar ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on behalf of the forest-dwelling Saramaka maroons in Suriname reinforced that indigenous groups must give consent to major development projects.
_Last December, Nicaragua's government finally granted collective land titles to the Mayagna people, complying with a landmark 2001 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that it had no right to sell logging concessions on Indian land.
_The following month, Colombia's Constitutional Court deemed more than 1 million indigenous people "in danger of cultural and physical extermination" and told the government to protect them.
_And in May, Brazil's Supreme Court ordered rice farmers to leave the long-disputed Raposa Serra do Sol reservation — 4.2 million acres (1.7 million hectares) inhabited by 18,000 Indians in the Amazon's northernmost reaches.
Despite the legal rulings, Indians remain second-class citizens.
Only one indigenous representative has ever been elected to the national congress in Brazil, according to the government office that oversees issues related to Indians, who occupy vast areas of the Amazon though they account for less than 5 percent of the population.
