MARTIN EDWIN ANDERSEN

Chapter Six

Indian Lands, Ungoverned Spaces,

and Failing StatesA nations existence [is] a daily plebiscite, just as an individuals existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

Ernest Renan

Individuals and groups resorting to violence, one U.S. expert noted, habitually find or create ways to operate with impunity or without detection. Whether for private financial gain (e.g. by narcotics and arms traffickers) or for harmful political aims (e.g., by insurgents, terrorists, and other violent extremists), these illicit operations are most successfuland most dangerouswhen their perpetrators have a place or situation that can provide refuge from efforts to combat or counter them. Such places are often called safe havens, and potential safe havens are sometimes called ungoverned areas.

The fact that Latin America is the worlds most urban region means, among other things, that both resources and state presence are often significantly skewed away from rural areas considered the homelands of indigenous peoples. These regions, ungoverned, under-governed, misgoverned, contested and exploitable areas, together with those countries verging on the status of failed states, are also some of the most prone to becoming safe havens for lawless groups. They include both the conflictive south of Mexico and part of the northern border with the United States; the Belize-Guatemalan border running along the Western Chiquibul Forest; the Lago Agrio area on Ecuadors border with Colombia; the Darien jungle gap between Colombia and Panama, the quarter of Colombian land under the control of its small (barely 2 percent of the national total) Indian population, and even areas in the south of Chile.

That the clandestine industrialization of narcotics enjoys safe haven in several regions of Latin America is a staple in mass media coverage. Less attention is paid to the fact that it affects the health and security of Indians, as well as frequently pollutes the lands in which they live. Cocaine production, for example, devastates the environment in and around indigenous communities. Its effects include deforestation, pesticide use, water pollution, chemical dumping, the promotion of mono-agriculture and soil erosion, and the loss of bio-diversity and traditional knowledge of plant species. Evo Morales and others point out that coca leaf cultivation has traditional medicinal, cultural and religious uses (chewing the leaf at high altitudes can help ward off hunger and fatigue) in traditional Aymara and Quechua communities dating to the time of the Inca, and therefore should not be controlled by the state. (Two Inca emperors named their wives after the venerated leaf; the honored consorts were bestowed with the plants sacred title, Mama Coca. The only object that the emperor ever carried himself was a coca pouch, which he wore around his neck close to his heart.) However, nearly all the coca used for chewing is grown in Las Yungas, a mountainous, semi-tropical Bolivian region where the high altitude offers an ideal climate for the high-quality crops. In places where most coca leaf is producedBolivias Chapare and Perus Upper Huallaga, both significantly lower altitudes than Las Yungasthe plant was not cultivated historically, is of much lower quality, and is almost entirely dedicated to the cocaine trade, creating staggering environmental, public safety and health challenges. Ironically, and tragically, stories abound in the sierra about how coca leaf meant for traditional consumption needs to be exported from Las Yungas to the Chapare for use by the coca growers.

According to Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderon, each year in his country three hundred thousand hectares of tropical rain forest are destroyed as the land is used for coca plants and the industrialization of cocaine. However, as falling agricultural prices and neo-liberal reforms increase the stress on Indian communities, some of which also face demographic explosions, so too has the U.S.-sponsored war against drugs meant to suppress the production by Indian farmers of coca leaf, marijuana and heroin poppy crops. Despite the palpable damage these activities can wreck on Indian lives and a revered Mother Earth, these efforts to quell the free market for illegal drug production are sometimes portrayed as the result of racially or culturally oriented repression. The public relations war was made even more difficult after the Paez Indians from Colombias southwest region sought to market a fizzy beverageCoca Sekmade of coca grown legally for traditional uses. The sale of the apple cider-colored drink tasting something like ginger ale, which quickly became a hip replacement for Coca-Cola among the countrys urban young, was banned by the Colombian government, along with other coca-derived products, in February 2007 outside of Native American reservations, where the right to grow coca is protected by the countrys constitution.

Another example of the overlap of indigenous peoples, illicit groups, and ungoverned spaces, is the Brazilian tri-border area with Venezuela and Guyana, where small indigenous communities populate the remote region; Brazilian officials point to reports that the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas are operating there. We cant leave empty spaces, warned Col. Jose Hugo Volkmer, a former U.N. military observer in Sarajevo in the 1990s and the head of the Brazilian airmail service (Correio Aereo Nacional/CAN). Empty spaces get occupied. If we dont occupy them, then our neighbor will. Along the U.S.-Mexican border, in a remote desert area between Phoenix and Hermosillo, members of the twenty-four-thousand strong Tohono Oodham tribe, whose members are used to traveling through informal gates along the frontier, now encounter violent Mexican drug and human traffickers, who force the tribe from its traditional villages, off the land and their way of life in Mexico. (On the other side of the law, an elite team of U.S. Native American trackers, known as the Shadow Wolves, is at the cutting edge of a layered border defense, patrolling the sandy expanse where the Tohono Oodham live in order to capture the criminals. They use an ancient sign-reading skill called sign cuttingreading and following minute clues, such as footprints, broken branches or tire tracksin a seemingly empty landscape. The trackers are recruited from several U.S. tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache.)

. Renan, Quest-ce quun de nation? delivered at the Sorbonne, cited in Homi K. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and Narration.

. David Spencer, Reexamining the Relevance of Maoist Principles to Post-Modern Insurgency and Terrorism, unpublished manuscript 2007; A groundbreaking analysis of this phenomenon is found in Robert D. Lamb, Ungoverned Areas and Threats from Safe Havens; Final Report of the Ungoverned Areas Project, prepared for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, U.S. Department of Defense, 2008; The strategic relevance of ungoverned spaces is discussed in Angel Rabasa, et. al., Ungoverned Territories: Understanding and Reducing Terrorism Risks.

. Lamb, op. cit.

. It is interesting to note that the Colombian Constitution of 1991 recognizes the existence of indigenous criminal systems, with Articles 246 and 330 giving Native American authorities the right to exercise judicial functions within resguardos (Indian reserves), in keeping with their own rules and custom, provided that these do not contravene either the Constitution or ordinary Colombian law. (On this point, see, Juanita Chaves, Criminal Justice and Indigenous People in Colombia, Indigenous Law Bulletin, online at: www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/LIB/1999/73.html; A penetrating look at Colombias indigenous movements is found in Joanne Rappaport, Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia.

. William Golden Mortimer, Peru: History of coca, The divine plant of the Incas; Douglas Farah, Into the Abyss: Bolivia under Evo Morales and the MAS, International Assessment and Strategy Center, June 17, 2009, pp. 15-16, online at HYPERLINK "http://www. strategycenter.net/docLib/20090618_IASCIntoTheAbyss061709.pdf" http://www. strategycenter.net/docLib/20090618_IASCIntoTheAbyss061709.pdf.; confidential interview with a Bolivian human rights activist.

. See, for example, Marcelo Ballv, Mother Coca Wins in BoliviaCan Evo Morales Foster World Coca Market? New American Media, December 21, 2005; Jessicah Curtis, Colombia Calls Cocaine Users Predators of the Rain Forest, The Huffington Post, December 8, 2008; Sibylla Brodzinsky, Colombias Indians bank on coca drink becoming the real thing, The Guardian, December 14, 2005; Sergio de Leon, Coca-Cola Vs. Coca-Sek in Colombia, The Associated Press, May 10, 2007.

. Tom Phillips, Healed by the Amazon angels, Guardian Unlimited, December 21, 2007.

. Tim Gaynor, Mexico drug gangs muscle border tribe out of homes, Reuters, December 2, 2007.

. Native American Trackers to Hunt bin Laden, March 12, 2007, online at: HYPERLINK "http:// www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21364526-2703,00.html" http:// www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21364526-2703,00.html; Shadow Wolves, November 9, 2007, http://www.kold.com/global/story.asp?s=7337853&ClientType; A number of the trackers have extensive law enforcement experience and have been called upon to train border guards and other security officials in countries around the world. They have also been sent to join the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistans borders and to train local border units in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

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