From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

2 POWER AND POLITICS I HAVE RIGHTS, THEREFORE I AMHOW CHANGE HAPPENS CASE STUDYA REVOLUTION FOR BOLIVIA’S CHIQUITANO PEOPLEOn 3 July 2007, after 12 years of unremitting and often frustrating struggle,the Chiquitano people of Bolivia – a group numbering some 120,000people – won legal title to the 1m-hectare indigenous territory ofMonteverde in the eastern department of Santa Cruz. Evo Morales, thecountry’s first indigenous president, and several ministers attended theceremony. So did three elected mayors, ten local councillors (six women,four men), a senator, a congressman, and two members of the ConstituentAssembly – all of them Chiquitanos.Such an event would have been unthinkable even a generation ago.Until the 1980s, the Chiquitanos lived in near-feudal conditions, requiredto work unpaid for local authorities, landowners, and the Church, andprevented from owning land.The Chiquitanos are best known outside Bolivia as an indigenousgroup that survived some of the worst impacts of colonisation on Jesuitreducciones (missions), where they became adept baroque musicians andbuilt extraordinary churches that still attract tourists to the region.Their story was told in the 1986 film The Mission.In the nineteenth century the Bolivian government colonised theeastern lowlands. During the ensuing 30-year rubber boom, thousands ofChiquitanos and other indigenous peoples were enslaved on rubberestates. Despite the radical revolution that swept the highlands in 1952,in the isolated East, indigenous families continued to be bought and soldalong with the estates where they worked.Change began to stir in the 1980s, as indigenous identity slowly beganto replace the class-based peasant identity promoted by the nationalismof the 1952 revolution. For the first time, the Chiquitanos began toidentify themselves as indigenous people, with their own particulardemands, and rapidly built their own Chiquitano Indigenous Organization(OICH), representing more than 450 communities. As one elderlywoman explained: ‘Only a short while ago did we begin calling ourselvesChiquitano Indians…We look alike, we were all handed over to thebosses… they called us cambas or peasants until not long ago.’CASE STUDY31