Copyright by Per Ole Christian Steinert 2003 Dissertation Committee for Per Ole Christian Steinert certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND ETHNO-POLITICAL STRATEGIES THE STRUGGLE FOR ETHNIC RIGHTS: A COMPARISON OF PERU, ECUADOR AND GUATEMALA Committee: Bryan Roberts, Supervisor Ronald Angel Robert Hummer Henry Selby Peter M. Ward ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND ETHNO-POLITICAL STRATEGIES THE STRUGGLE FOR ETHNIC RIGHTS: A COMPARISON OF PERU, ECUADOR AND GUATEMALA by Per Ole Christian Steinert, M.A., Siv. Ing., Cand. Real. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2003 DEDICATION To independent thinking … If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of a contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind (...) But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. J.S. Mill, On Liberty And to the person involved… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievements, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. JFK on Theodore Roosevelt, December 5, 1961 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Having done a few things and visited some places over the years, I thought I had touched on everything worth my time within the known universe of man. And still, these years at the University of Texas at Austin, allowing my mind to freely search new territories - like a cow following grass where its mouth goes - have added new dimensions that, along circuitous paths, should lead to the overwhelmingly inspiring fieldwork of this study. Having had the opportunity to study at UT has indeed been a privilege. I owe warm thanks to those UT professors, all being my eminently inspiring classroom teachers, who recommended me for the Ph.D. program - Drs. John Higley, Bryan Roberts, Peter Ward, and Henry Selby - the last three also serving on my supervisory committee. And I owe the Asháninkas of the community of San Miguel and elsewhere in the Peruvian Amazon, who courteously accepted me into their families and with their grace, warmth and dignity, opened my mind to unknown perspectives. And my appreciation goes to the many, summing into the hundreds, who magnanimously during the odyssey of this research did snowballing on my behalf, put their time and enthusiasm at my disposal, and/or taught me about aspects of their societies books cannot relay - Liv Haug, Jaime Velásquez Salas, and Alfonso Diaz-Luy prominently among them. However, this author jealously claims for himself the blame for all errors, misunderstandings, foibles, and follies as revealed in this text. Two research grants from the Mellon Foundation - one received in May 2001 for a pilot study in Peru and Ecuador in preparation for the research reported here, and another in April 2002 during the fieldwork - are gratefully acknowledged. v PREFACE One of the most intriguing socio-political phenomena of the last 10-15 years in Latin America is the emergence of the rural Indians as a force on the national political arena in a number of countries, notably Ecuador and Bolivia. How quietly this has taken place is exemplified by the relatively few academic papers and books written on the subject and the near-absence of any mentioning of the trend, including in institutions specializing on Latin America. A related enigma, given the structurally marginalized situation of these populations and the number of their constituents, 36 million at the latest count1, is that these mobilizations have been overlooked or received hardly any attention by ‘rights’ and ‘social society’ analysts. To characterize the climate, Warren (1998: 9) refers, among other examples, to a prominent social scientist who concluded as late as 1988 that New World indigenous groups were too fragmented, assimilated, and marginalized to press for wider political goals - ironically, the same year the Ecuadorian movement, CONAIE, received the government’s official recognition. Gelles (2002: 240) refers to, as one explanation, that the Indian culture, provocatively present in the rural Andes and an important basis of the Ecuadorian movement, have been denied, ignored, or denigrated by dominant scholarly discourses and by policy makers in the Andean countries alike. Making these reflections, I hasten to emphasize that I make a distinction between, on the one hand, ethnic mobilizations with the ambition to influence the political premises of their society - in other words, an effort with the goal to change the premises of the mestizo state - and, on the other, the manifestation of this phenomenon in the form of ‘identity policies’2, a term much favored among anthropologists. The former is the topic of this study. The two categories overlap, but while both categories have to succeed on the ‘inner’ front, i.e., mobilizing their constituencies, the former must, in addition, establish itself as a force on the ‘outer’ front, toward the society at large. 1 Warren (1998: 8). 2 Moore (1997), referred to by Hale (1997: 568), defines the term identity policy as a reference to “collective sensibilities and actions that come from a particular location within society, in direct defiance of universal categories that tend to subsume, erase, or suppress this particularity. Location in this sense, implies a distinctive social memory, consciousness, and practice, as well as place within the social structure”. But, as the practice is, not everyone lives up to that standard of precision. Melucci (1989: 46) states that “the term ‘identity’ is inadequate because it has come to have a variety of meanings. In fact, conflicts are always conflicts of identity: actors attempt to push others to recognize something which they themselves recognize; they struggle to affirm what others deny.” vi To have national ambitions means, first, that the ideas of the mobilization, its ideology, must reach and win support from a much larger audience, including groups that are sympathetic to the cause but not necessarily a part of the core constituency. Second, the leadership must be able to juggle a larger diversity of expectations and demands. And, ultimately, it must successfully interpret the political landscape and counter its opponents, being it the State or other powerful adversaries. If one uses the description that members of these two categories represent people struggling from the margins to gain voice and power, the challenges confronting the ‘voice’-seeking category become a subset of those confronting the ‘power’-seeking one. Seen from a theoretical point of view, the two categories may not differ much. As the ambitions of each are carried out in practical work, however, they will confront widely dissimilar obstacles in their ethno- ideological, political and organizational work. There exists an extensive theoretical literature on the ‘voice’-seeking category focusing specifically on identity policies. It tends, however, to emphasize on the ‘inward- looking’ aspects: Why did these mobilizations arise? How do they differ from traditional social movements? How to describe them? This literature also addresses epistemological topics of importance to the search for an identity and the discourses chosen to construct identities. Wade (1997) exemplifies this approach very well, discussing certain groups that have neither the ambitions nor the resources to make a dent on the national stage; they are looking for cultural denominators of value to themselves, which might also give them a voice in the society at large. Not having the ambition or resources to mold the premises of the nation-state to one’s liking does not mean that one’s presence is unimportant. When social mobilizations promoting identity policies do not have the resources for a more formal presence, say, in the form of a nation-wide organization, they may specialize in symbolic challenges to the status quo that offer alternative interpretations of individual and collective experience. Their impact may reach farther than one would expect as they provoke reactions that render power visible and thus negotiable in unanticipated ways. To my knowledge, no studies have been done focusing on the factors from the level of ‘nuts-and-bolts’ upward of ethnic movements to establish why they succeed or fail, contending that both ‘external’ (environmental) and ‘internal’ conditions are crucial. One reason may be, as I will argue, that it may not have been perceived that the Latin vii American ethnic mobilizations represented a phenomenon that outran the reach of theory at the same time when social movements were on the decline in the North (Foweraker 2002). Another may be that the prospects of finding common denominators, assuming they exist, also seem less promising for this category than analyzing identity policies per se. One thing is to approach an emerging social phenomenon, as in the latter case, on which there exists a consensus that it represents something new, explain it, and characterize it. Quite another is to do an assessment of the social consequences of a potentially political force on the rise.