SANTIAGO, Jun 6 (IPS) - The ”war on terror”, identified in Amnesty International's annual report as a new source of human rights abuses, is threatening to expand to Latin America, targeting indigenous movements that are demanding autonomy and protesting free-market policies and ”neo-liberal” globalisation.
In the United States ”there is a perception of indigenous activists as destabilising elements and terrorists,” and their demands and activism have begun to be cast in a criminal light, lawyer José Aylwin, with the Institute of Indigenous Studies at the University of the Border in Temuco (670 km south of the Chilean capital), told IPS.
Pedro Cayuqueo, director of the Mapuche newspaper Azkintuwe, also from the city of Temuco, wrote that the growing indigenous activism in Latin America and Islamic radicalism are both depicted as threats to the security and hegemony of the United States in the ”Global Trends 2020 - Mapping the Global Future” study by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC).
. . .
The reporter said the emergence of increasingly organised indigenous movements and the strengthening of their ethnic identities become, in that view, targets of ”the so-called low-intensity warfare doctrine, a renovated version of the National Security Doctrine” that formed the basis of U.S. interventionism in Latin America from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.
The indigenous question would thus appear to form part of what the United States sees as future threats to its hegemony.
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28962
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