The New York Times (June 11, 2005) had an op-ed byWilliam Powers, "Poor Little Rich Country." Some Americans have always looked to Latin or South America as examples of nations and cultures who did not have the "race" problem the United States has had. However, over the past few years, I have been hearing more and more about the race issue by those who have lived in the region. Until the Times piece, no one has seemed to focus on this. Native Indians have been protesting for some time in Bolivia, but in the last few months the protests have become more intense.
The reason for the protests includes: But this is not about walling off a Wal-Mart-free utopia; it's more of a struggle over who has power here. An American Indian majority is standing up to the light-skinned, European elite and its corruption-fueled relationships with the world.
You might say that Bolivia has colonized itself. When the Spanish Empire closed shop here in 1825, the Europeans who stayed on didn't seem to notice - and still don't. Even within Latin America, the region with the greatest wealth inequality in the world according to the World Bank, Bolivia is considered one of the most corrupt, per Transparency International's annual index of political dishonesty. It's also divided along a razor-sharp racial edge.
Highland and Amazon peoples compose almost two-thirds of Bolivia's population, the highest proportion of Indians in the hemisphere. (It's as if the United States had 160 million Apaches, Hopis and Iroquois.) And while native people are no longer forcibly sprayed with DDT for bugs and are today allowed into town squares, Bolivian apartheid - a "pigmentocracy of power" - continues.
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