Nadine Jansen In Pool

democracy in the Middle East on Cesar Garavito Vargas Llosa

elexpectador.com
http://www.elespectador.com/columna-240231-los-indigenas-de-vargas-llosa
Opinion acknowledges for the deceased.

criticize a Nobel is as politically incorrect as to speak ill of the dead. And the winner is suffering the slow death of seeing his work turned into reading flattering fashion-those things that "must read" on holiday or mention at a cocktail party.

Fortunately, the well-deserved literary prize Vargas Llosa may be the exception. Because Peruvian author writing has always understood as an invitation to criticism, the open discussion that blooms only in democracies that have defended all my life.

Well, one of the central debates of the recent work of Peru has to do with indigenous peoples. His latest novel, Celtic's dream, reconstructs the atrocities committed against indigenous Amazonian Colombia and Peru. And in his Nobel Lecture in Stockholm said that "for two centuries the emancipation of the indigenous is exclusively our responsibility and we failed. She is still a pending issue in Latin America. There is one exception to this disgrace and shame. "

Atrocities, shame, shame unlikely subjects for a beach read. Therefore, before the shipwreck in the reading discussion pop, it's worth asking some uncomfortable questions.

For example, what has been the Huitotos and other indigenous that, as told in the dream of Celtic, were killed, enslaved, mutilated, raped, robbed and branded like cattle by farmers in the Putumayo rubber a century ago? Today we know that genocide was such that, between 1900 and 1912, the native population fell from more than 50,000 to about 8,000.

What few know is that the Huitotos are now so threatened and vulnerable as ever. The risk is not rubber, but the coca, the mining boom and other economies that have attracted settlers, armed groups and entrepreneurs who are behind native lands. So is one of 34 people at risk for the Constitutional Court requested special protection in 2009. So population does not exceed the left by the rubber, and today is decimated by displacement forced to Leticia, Florence and Villavicencio. And so still waiting for answers to specific state court order, or life plan submitted to the Government a few years ago.

So readers who are horrified with what Roger Casement, Celtic in the novel, seen in Putumayo, they would be horrified with what today would find there, or the status of more than 60% of indigenous Colombians that, according to ONIC, are at risk of extinction by the same combination of violence, displacement, mining and other economic projects proceed without adequate consultation with the people.

The problem is that there is a gulf between indignation over past mistakes and a willingness to not repeat them. This is precisely where the wrong Vargas Llosa. With the same eloquence that has recounted the historical abuses, the indigenous movement has been criticized for opposing the commercial exploitation of their territories. Last year came against the lance in hand Peruvian Indians to stop the legislation that opened the country's Amazon to mining. And in 2003 ruled that unfortunate speech in Bogota, in which he compared to collectivisms indigenous movement with terrorists, based on the "spirit of the tribe, which seem "a rather ridiculous anachronism" and impede "the development of civilization and modernity."

So the "emancipation" of which the writer speaks is not decided by the Indians, but the only one considered possible: the market economy and "civilization." The same is said indigenous rubber tappers who hunted in the Putumayo.

* Founding member of DeJuSticia (www.dejusticia.org)