One warm January afternoon, I was driving a Land Rover with some of my students over a virtually impassable road in Guatemala’s northeastern province of Peten. We had just entered Guatemala that day from Carmen Viejo del Benque in Belize, where we had spent the previous night in very commodious huts along the Mopan River just below the fortified Mayan ruins of Xunantunich. We were exploring the ruins but also visiting various contemporary villages of Kekchi and Mopan Maya. Now we were on the way to the unique city called Flores.
Flores sits on an island in the middle of Lake Peten-Itza, and its roughly two thousand inhabitants go to the mainland by boat or by a thin causeway about a mile in length. Foreigners sometimes visit the city because it is only an hour’s drive from Tikal, the classical Maya site that flourished from A.D .300 to 900, and which is in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by spider monkeys, parrots, jaguars, oscillated turkeys, and the poisonous fer-de-lance known locally as barba amarillo, “yellow beard.”
Lake Peten-Itza had another significance for us, however, because on its shore stood Tayasal, the last American Indian city to fall to the Europeans. Mayan refugees from the Yucatecan city of Chichen Itza founded Tayasal long after Tikal had been abandoned.
Protected by the remote location and the thick jungle of Peten, it did not succumb to the Spanish rule until 1897, when the army of Martin de Ursua conquered it before founding the modern city of Flores in 1700.
On the day of our visit, we pushed hard to reach Flores before nightfall to avoid trouble from either the guerrillas or the anti-guerrilla army units. Not long after crossing the border into Guatemala we had passed the army camp, which displayed menacing hand-painted signs proclaiming that therein was the best army in Central America and threatening death to all guerrillas.
To stress the point for even the illiterate, the signs exhibited graphic pictures of the fierce soldiers attacking the guerrillas.
Because of the tense situation, we had been forbidden to bring in a Land Rover, which could easily have been seized by the guerrillas, but through negotiations at the border, we had managed to slip it into the country. Several weeks later that deed caused me to be detained by Belizean soldiers when I was back in Belize, but on this first night in Guatemala, I thought only of getting our group to the safety of Flores before dark.
Still several hours away from our goal, we came upon an Indian village, but because of the late hour, I had no intention of stopping.
Even before the Land Rover crossed into the village, I smelled the evening fires mixed with the thicker odor of animal manure.
Like most of the villages we had seen on the road that day, it was liberally sprinkled with small blotches of paint in the official colors of the army unit stationed in the district. Their sign appeared on every signpost, house, or utility pole in the area. As I drove slowly through the ruts in the road, swerving to avoid gaping holes, small children, and pigs, we suddenly descended on the main plaza, which offered nothing more than an open field of hardened mud surrounded by rambling single-story houses.
On the edge of the plaza, I suddenly had to stomp on the brakes to avoid crashing into an army blockade. The soldiers rushed over and motioned with guns for me to pull in behind three other vehicles. Unlike those at other blockades we had passed through, these soldiers showed no intention of letting any of us pass. We sat in silence.
Feeling cramped inside the Land Rover, the students and I got out to stretch, but two young soldiers excitedly motioned us back inside by threatening jabs in our direction with their automatic rifles. Even though we could not pass, the soldiers seemed only marginally concerned with us.
Aside from a few guards, most of the soldiers ran around the village rounding up all the Indian men and bringing them into the plaza.
Once the men of the village had assembled, the soldiers stood around them in an armed circle ordering the Indians to stand in straight lines at attention. While several soldiers strolled menacingly through the ranks of Indians, the commanding officer harangued the group. Although we heard his angry shouts and saw his flailing arms, the distance and the wind prevented our understanding what he was saying. After nearly half an hour the commandant ordered the Indians into two long lines facing one another for a series of military drills that involved pointing rifles at one another point-blank and pretending to shoot.
Satisfied that they had mastered this exercise, the commandant marched his Indian civilians toward our blockaded caravan of three pathetic vehicles. Under the watchful guidance of the soldiers, who barked orders continuously, the Indians ordered all of us from our vehicles. Slowly, they searched each vehicle in turn. They went through our duffel bags and knapsacks as well as the assorted collection of foods we carried. They pulled and pushed on every gear and lever, managing to damage the fourwheel-drive mechanism of our Land Rover. After deciding that the car contained nothing of interest for them, they separated us from one another and searched us in the same way.
Only after this exhausting search did they interrogate us, with blistering speed: Who are you?
What are you doing in this guerrilla zone?
Why are you so far from the main highway?
Where are you going?
Where are you coming from?
Do you have any weapons?
Finally accepting that we posed no threat, the soldiers barked at us for being on the highway so late and warned us that even though they were allowing us to pass, we might not be so lucky up ahead when we ran into another unit.
By the time they released us it was nearly dark. Before we reached Flores that night, three more army units stopped us along the road, and each time the soldiers badgered us with increasingly belligerent questions as the night grew later and we therefore increasingly provoked suspicions. In this way we unexpectedly came to experience the Fusiles y Frijoles or “Guns and Beans” campaign of the Guatemalan army to pacify the Indians when practical and to kill them otherwise. What we had witnessed that evening had been one of the peaceful efforts by the army to lecture the Indians on resistance to the guerrillas, to instill a fear of the military, and to teach them how to protect their village against the rebels.
Ironically we had come to Peten to visit the site where the Indians had surrendered their last city holdout nearly three hundred years ago; yet, continuing Indian skirmishes delayed us in route. In the past decade, several hundred thousand Indian men, women, and children have been killed in skirmishes, raids, retaliatory maneuvers, and acts of sheer terrorism against them.
Almost all of these Indians have been part of the approximately two million Maya living in the area. The Indians usually resist in a fairly passive way; yet they continue the struggle and use violence when all else fails them.
The history of America is the history of constant resistance and periodic armed revolution against the Old World forms of tyranny. No matter how many times the indians lost, and no matter how many tribes were permanently obliterated, other Indians continued the struggle. The perpetual Indian wars of the last half millennium have taken many ideological and tactical forms, but they have always focused on the basic issues of land, food, and human rights.
Today the Indian problems of governments in Guatemala, Peru, and Nicaragua seem to be quite different from the Indian problems of the U. S. government. Yet, only a historically short time has passed since the Indians of the United States rose up in a series of wars much like those being fought by remote Indian groups in Latin America in the twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century, the Indians frequently initiated campaigns of resistance that rejected many of the white influences, including Christianity, while opposing the new settlers. One of the most important such movements started among the Creek or Muskogee Indians of the southeastern United States. They lived in approximately a hundred autonomous towns called talwa, but they organized themselves into a loose confederacy. Like the Iroquois, they had matrilineal clans, and their political organization centered around elected councils. Perhaps because of their proximity to Mexico, they had large mound pyramids in their territory, showed similarities in art, and they played ball games similar to those of the Maya and Aztecs.
Like other “civilized” Indian nations, the Creeks had slowly adopted many traits of European life in the three hundred years of contact beginning with the visit of Hernando de Soto in 1540.
They still grew their native crops and wore buckskins, but they also used cotton clothing spun by the Creek women on spinning wheels. They cultivated wheat to make white bread, and they allowed schools and Christian churches in their communities. In 1720 a woman of the Wind Clan married a French army officer, and thus began the development of a native aristocracy of mixed bloods who sent their children to France and Britain for education.
During the first three hundred years of contact, the Creek leaders played a systematic policy of neutrality toward the Spanish who occupied Florida to their south, the French who occupied Louisiana to their west, and to the British who had already pushed them out of South Carolina and Georgia to their east. The Creek Nation traded extensively with Jamaica and the Bahamas as well as with the Spanish in Pensacola, the French in New Orleans, and the British in Savannah and Charleston.
Even though the aristocratic clan members spoke English, French, and Spanish, and were often literate in classical Greek and Latin as well, many of them claimed they could barely speak their own Muskogean language. The Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, who was part French and part Scotch as well as Creek, preferred speaking to his people through interpreters as though he could not speak his native language. Under McGillivray, the highest military office of the Creek Confederacy, called the tustenegee, was offered to a French officer, LeClerc Milfort, in an effort to modernize the Indian army between 1778 and 1796.
Milfort then married McGillivray’s sister Jeanette to secure a permanent place in Creek society. The Indian elite lived in houses modeled after the plantations of whites, and some of them owned slaves. Because their European educations often surpassed those of the nearly illiterate white colonists, great resentments arose between the two groups.
McGillivray fought hard to hold back the whites and to unify all of the Creeks and other southern Indians in a single confederacy. To do this he played the Spanish, British, and Americans against one another much as a modern Third World country might play off the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1778 he was made a colonel by the British, and then in 1784 the Spanish signed a treaty giving him a monthly salary and granting him a monopoly in Spanish trade. In 1790 with the Treaty of New York, George Washington raised him in rank to brigadier general and gave him a secret annuity of $1,200. The Spanish raised this sum to $3,500 in 1792 and recognized him as superintendent general of the Creeks and Seminoles. The Spanish also recognized him by treaty as the emperor of the Creeks, a title that the British later accepted as well. McGillivray sought some guarantee of Creek sovereignty, but his nation had to accept an inferior position as a protectorate destined to become a white territory and eventually a state of the United States [Spicer, p.24].
The unity of the Creek Nation dissolved after the Revolution and the death in 1793 of Alexander McGillivray, its last leader.
LeClerc Milfort returned to Paris in 1802 to agitate for the Creeks from the court of Napoleon, but aid never came. Alexander McGillivray’s children refused to return from Europe, and no new leader arose.
In 1812 when a new war broke out between Britain and the United States, two of McGillivray’s nephews announced that the time had come to purge their nation of the settlers. The eldest discarded his European name to take on a Muskogean name that meant Red Eagle in English, red being the Creek color of war.
Red Eagle apparently adopted some of the ideology of the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh when he launched a movement to purify the Creek Nation by driving out many of the evil European influences.
As precursors of the red revolutionary movements in Europe later in the century, Red Eagle’s followers took the name of Red Sticks (also called Baton Rouge in French) because they painted their ceremonial war clubs red. They hoped to return to the traditional Indian language, religion, culture, and way of life.
The reformists advocated a return to the sacred ceremonies of their people and to honoring the Master of Breath as the power in their universe. They emphasized the ritual importance of tobacco and of taking the traditional Black Drink, a concoction made from hex cussine, but they rigorously abstained from all alcohol, something which had been introduced and promoted by the settlers. The Red Sticks banned the use of European guns for hunting, since they were used mostly for the commercial hunting of skins and pelts and had thereby destroyed the native food supply. With simple yet astute ecological reasoning they asserted that the bow and arrow sufficed to feed the people without depleting the forests and destroying the game. Abjuring the use of guns would also pull the Indians out of the enslaving commercial trade that kept them in debt to the traders for ammunition and thus forced them to travel ever farther in search of ever more game with which to pay the debts. Some of the stricter Red Sticks harangued their fellow Indians to return to eating venison instead of beef and to native turkeys in place of European chickens as a way to save their forest homeland from becoming open pastures.
The movement identified European culture as the enemy, but it was not a racist movement against white people. Red Eagle and most of his brothers themselves had white blood, since their mother, Sehoy, had had several white husbands. Many of the Creeks sprang from mixed Indian-Scottish or Indian-African ancestry after extensive intermarriage with traders and escaped slaves. The Creeks, however. insisted that any child born of a Creek mother was Creek no matter if the father was French, African, or Scottish. Their revitalization movement emphasized cultural purity and adherence to a way of life but had nothing to do with blood lines, race, or genes. They freely admitted both whites and blacks who wanted to join them; one of the main war leaders and interpreters for the Creek Nation was a West African who escaped from slavery and became known among the Creeks as Souanakke Tustenukke and among the whites as the Prophet Abraham.
This mixture of Indians and blacks provoked fear among the white settlers, who had so recently been terrorized by the gruesome and successful slave revolts in Haiti and the ensuing massacre of the whites. The whites and their Indian allies began raiding and harassing the Creeks. The anti-Creek forces gathered their families and slaves together for safety and to plan a campaign from Fort Mims on Lake Tonsas in what is now Alabama. On August 30, 1813, some of the Red Sticks attacked the poorly guarded fort, and in the ensuing battle killed the 170 soldiers and their white commander, Major Beasley, and his mixed-blood second-in-command, Captain Dixon Bailey. The Red Sticks mostly relied on the traditional Indian weapons of bows and arrows and tomahawks. When they set the fort afire with flaming arrows, approximately a hundred civilians perished, some of whom were white but most of whom were Indians and mixed-bloods who owned slaves and thus did not support the Red Stick revolution.
To terrorize others who might try to invade Creek territory, the Red Stick soldiers scalped the dead and burned the fort to the ground. The Red Sticks killed the slaves who fought, but they spared the ones who did not. Labeled as one of the worst massacres of North American history, the tragedy torched the rage of the whole nation. The United States seemed in no mood to tolerate such incidents on its borders, especially when it was already fighting another war with Britain and Canada. In response, Andrew Jackson organized a Tennessee army to march against the Creek Nation. Meanwhile, the Creeks made hasty alliances with Spain to supply arms and ammunition through Pensacola in Spanish Florida.
Despite the arms from Spain and the support of the French, the Creeks lost the war, and Andrew Jackson ravaged their country during the winter of 1813-1814, killing Indians, blacks, and mixed-bloods indiscriminately. He finally crushed the Red Sticks at the Massacre of Tohopeka or Horseshoe Bend beside the Tallaposa River in Alabama on March 27, 1814. To count the dead Indians, the whites cut off their noses and accumulated a pile of 557 noses. They then skinned the bodies in order to tan the Indian hides and make souvenirs such as bridle reins. When the whites finished mutilating the Creeks, they allowed their own Indian allies to scalp the dead [Halbert and Ball, p.276].
The ensuing Treaty of Fort Jackson of August 9, 1814, opened the Creeks’ entire nation up to settlement and stripped them of most of their territory as the cost of the war.
In that same year, Britain officially recognized the Indians as a nation and not merely a tribe and vowed to protect their rights. The United States signed the Treaty of Ghent ending the war of 1812 with Britain, and Article Nine specified that all lands belonging to Indians allied with Britain must be returned to their Indian owners, but the United States stubbornly ignored this provision.
Andrew Jackson never overcame his hatred for the Creeks, and when he became president he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and forced the surviving Creeks to abandon their lands east of the Mississippi River by the Treaty of Cusseta, which the Creeks signed under duress. Now they were to be sent to Indian Territory, where they might form another buffer state separating the. United States from the Mexican territories. The American army together with their Cherokee allies invaded the Creek Nation and forced the remnants of the Creeks into detention camps. Settlers claimed many of the Indians as slaves to work the newly established cotton plantations. Soldiers chained the remaining Creek men one to another in a long chain gang, and the women and children followed them as they blazed the path that soon became known to the world as the Trail of Tears. In the decade ahead, many more Indian nations had to follow the same route.
Some of the Creeks sailed for the Bahamas and the safety of the Union Jack, while others headed south for Cuba and protection under the Spanish. A few of the Creeks and the former slaves with whom they had intermarried continued to fight from the swamps under Osceola, one of Red Eagle’s lieutenants. Their struggle combined elements of both a slave rebellion and a war of resistance against the invaders. Known as the Seminoles from the Spanish word cimurrones, meaning savages or runaway slaves, they and the slaves who joined them fought a long hard war until the whites captured Osceola and imprisoned him in Charleston, South Carolina, where he died in 1838.
Repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century, other Indian groups rose up to pursue the quixotic quest of the Red Sticks for an autonomous Indian culture, preaching the pan-Indian doctrine of unity. A succession of prophets in various tribes appeared to announce a new ritual, a sacred object, or some new magic that was guaranteed to rid the Indians of their increasing oppression and free them from the twin threats of ethnocide and genocide.
The Ghost Dance movement arose in the western United States and culminated in the unprovoked slaughter of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children at the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890.
Soon after the Red Stick revolt of the Creeks, the Yaquis rose up demanding that the newly independent nation of Mexico restore some of the rights of the Indians, since the Indians had helped secure Mexican independence by fighting against the Spanish. From 1826 until his execution in 1833, the Yaqui Juan de la Gruz Banderas led his nation in a war against Mexico. In a campaign to return to the golden era of Indian society, Banderas claimed that the Indian Virgin of Guadalupe had told him to restore the empire of Moctezuma. Just as they had asked the viceroy in 1739, once again they sought their traditional rights to free elections and self-government, including the right to elect their own mayors of their communities and governors of their small nation [Hu-DeHart, p .37].
This war lasted intermittently until 1908, when the Mexicans imposed the final solution of deporting the Yaquis to work to death as virtual slave laborers on the sisal plantations of the Yucatan. The United States government assisted by deporting back to Mexico all Yaquis who sought asylum in the Territory of Arizona.
At this time the Yucatan needed laborers because it was just recovering from its own long wars with the Maya. In a revival of Mayan religion with some Christian overtones starting as early as 1847, the Indian peasants followed the “talking cross” in hopes of freeing themselves from white domination. They fought for years, retreating into the most remote parts of Mexico and Belize under dogged pursuit by the Mexican army. Eventually they lost, but they helped pave the way for a larger uprising in the twentieth century that became the Mexican Revolution.
Today these Indian revolts rarely receive attention as political movements. Instead they are dismissed under the general term of “uprisings,” as though the Indian were much too primitive to have a high degree of social consciousness or any notion of political ideology. Even partisans of the Indian movements tend to glorify these efforts as the last desperate acts of a people yearning to be free but lacking an understanding of the political realities around them. Often these Indians had well-developed ideologies, but they framed them in religious terms and in the imagery of nature rather than in the political vocabulary of Europeans. Today, it is sometimes difficult for us to accept the Master of Breath as anything more than the naive formulation of a benighted people, but such terms merely represented political, ecological, and religious concepts that seem to have little place in our modern world. Far more than quixotic surges of a doomed race, these wars were portents of the liberation movements that would sweep the world in the twentieth century when other colonized people in Africa and Asia would rise up more successfully against the imperial powers controlling them. The repeated failures of the Indian movements during the nineteenth century prepared the way for the successes of other peoples in the twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century, many books dealt with the political institutions of the native Americans. Once the Europeans abandoned the eighteenth-century notions of the noble savage, they began to examine Indian institutions more closely and objectively.
LeClerc Milfort wrote a description of the southeastern Indians, which he published in Paris in 1802 as Gen. Milfort’s Creek Indians. This went beyond the usual adventure story of captives held by the Indians to explain something of Indian political and cultural institutions. More scholarly works followed, such as those of Thomas Jefferson and most particularly Lewis Henry Morgan’s League of the Iroquois in 1851.
Karl Marx, in particular, developed a fascination with the political activities and economic lives of the Indians. From his reading of Lewis Henry Morgan, Marx sharpened his appreciation of the delicacy and sophistication of Indian political institutions, particularly as evidenced in the League of the Iroquois. At the time of his death in 1883, Karl Marx was in the midst of an extensive study of the American Indians; he had filled several notebooks with material on them in 1880 and 1881. Friedrich Engels, as the collaborator and literary executor of Marx’s estate, assembled and rewrote this material to form The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published in 1884 with the subtitle In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan.
The book is a paean to Morgan’s work among the Iroquois and to the American Indians themselves. Engels wrote joyfully in the preface to the first edition that “in the kinship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key to the hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman, and German history”
[Engels, p.6). Using Marx’s notebooks, which draw from Morgan as well as from missionaries and other writers who dealt with the Iroquois, Engels describes in minute detail the organization of the Iroquois Confederacy, the tribes, the clans, and the various offices and sachems. He concludes that aside from the classical civilizations of Peru and Mexico, the “Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social organization achieved by any Indians,” and he reduces their organization to ten basic principles, which he discusses in detail. Engels calls this “a wonderful constitution” under which there are “no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, king, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits and everything takes its orderly course” (Engels, pp .84ff].
The kinship states of the Indians became in Marxist thought exemplars of primitive communism. Living as they did without the “state” or private ownership of property, the Indians knew neither exploitation nor social class. As Engels described life among the Iroquois, there “cannot be any poor or needy the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war.”
They became in Marxist theory the ideal to which industrial communism would return once the workers smashed private property, classes, and the state. The final communist society would be an industrialized version of the Iroquois social system in which “all are free and equal the women included” [Engels, p.87].
This image of a utopian future offered inspiration to generations of revolutionaries and reformers, but the image quickly lost any connection with the Iroquois or any other Indian group. Marx and Engels translated the Iroquois image into a European one that fit their own materialist theories. Subsequent political theorists and activists cut from these ideas their own African and Asian ideologies, but the Indians were dropped from the theories and future generations pushed them once again into the nether regions of world consciousness.
By the twentieth century it appeared that the Indians had finally been crushed in America. In Minnesota in 1862 the United States army defeated the Dakota Indians, and on the day after Christmas of that year, the military hanged thirty eight Dakotas in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass public execution in the history of the United States. The cavalry easily crushed the last uprisings in the United States, and despite General George Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 the whites’ victory in the United States seemed assured. The Maya rebellion in the Yucatan had apparently failed, and the Indians in South America seemed to have accepted the fact that liberation from Spain did not change their subservient position in the hierarchy of their new countries that claimed to be democratic republics.
In 1911 the United States grew confident enough of its permanent defeat of the Indian nations that an Indian named Ishi went on display at the museum of the University of California as the last Stone Age Indian in America. He had been born to a small group of Yahi Indians who had been steadily hunted to extinction, leaving him as the sole survivor, who was finally captured and lived out his last five years at the museum.
In this context, the world was shocked during that same year of 1911 by the greatest uprising of Indians ever, and the Indians scored their first major victory against the whites in over four hundred years of intermittent struggle. That victory came in one of the American backwaters, in the south of Mexico, where the Indians rose up under the mestizo Emiliano Zapata (1877?-1919), and in a long decade of bloody war they destroyed the power of the haciendas and overthrew the urban white elite that controlled banking, newspapers, businesses, churches, and the land. In the protracted struggle a million Mexicans died.
Zapata led a movement different from any other in history. Unlike so many of the Indian uprisings of the previous century, Zapata’s was not a religious movement. The followers of Zapata fought an openly political and economic campaign, as proclaimed in their simple motto, “Land and Liberty.” Zapata issued his statement of purpose, called the Plan of Ayala, on November 25, 1911, telling the world that “we are partisans of principles and not of men” [Riding, p.61]. His group did not fight merely to oust the old dictator in favor of a new one or to replace one caudillo with another; nor was it merely a race or ethnic war against the whites. The Indians sought to destroy the cruel and oppressive system of dictators and the white oligarchy that kept the Indians enslaved as peons on large haciendas and ranches.
To emphasize their adherence to traditional values, the Indian soldiers of Zapata wore the loose white cotton pants and wide sombrero that Indian peasants had worn for centuries instead of the khaki uniforms and helmets of European soldiers. As the Indian army moved through the south, fighting with their poor and simple weapons, they seized the large estates and divided the land among the Indian peasants. Zapata’s followers created peasant banks and schools and empowered local councils [Galeano, p.138]. Their struggle was a true revolution that actually redistributed the whole bases of pnvate property and sought to build an entirely new social order. In this it showed a far more radical bent than did the earlier French and American revolutions.
The Indians under Zapata inspired other groups in the north to rise up, but there most of the Indian tribes had been destroyed in a series of nineteenth-century wars. The remnants had been incorporated into mestizo society, and were organized into rival gangs and private armies rather than into traditional clan and tribal units. The leader of one such group was a mestizo who was named Doroteo Arango (1877-1923) but preferred the more exciting alias Pancho Villa. He led a war in the north much like that of Zapata in the south.
The turning point for Villa’s campaigns came in 1914 when he fought a battle to take Zacatecas on the site of La Bufa, the first Mexican silver mine, which had begun the painful centuries of forced Indian labor.
This Indian revolution was uniquely American. The political activists of Europe had claimed revolution as the exclusive domain of the urban workers, of the proletariat.
Since 1848 in Europe one wave after another of workers’ movements had tried to overthrow governments through armed struggle or through ballots, but they all failed.
Communists and socialists seemed to be the vanguard of the future, but they had great trouble enacting that future.
Zapata knew, however, that the working classes of the cities had long since been absorbed by urban life; they offered little hope of a true revolution. For Zapata, the potential for revolution lay in the rural Indians, the campesinos, or peasants.
Consequently, Zapata made no effort to organize the workers but stuck to a peasant revolution. Even though his forces took Mexico City, they did not plunder it or occupy it for long. He and his men returned to their homes, where he kept his headquarters in the small town of Tlaltizapan near Yautepec. In his campaign, Zapata emphasized cultural and ethnic ties uniting his people in their struggle for a generalized justice rather than the specific agenda of one political ideology.
The rest of the world did not know what to make of this revolution in Mexico. It was the first of the twentieth century’s great revolutions, but because the “civilized” world was busy fighting World War I, they had little attention to spare for this remote corner of the earth. The subsequent Russian Revolution, which was urban, Marxist, and working-class in orientation as well as much closer to the Europeans, seemed easier to understand, and many people then dismissed the Mexican Revolution as an eccentric anomaly in a barbaric land.
Zapata never sought public office for himself; he let the city people enjoy that. The presidency of the nation fell into the hands of Venustiano Carranza, while Zapata continued living his quiet life on his ranch. Zapata watched the government carefully, and when it appeared that Carranza might not legalize the land redistribution and reform already enacted by the Indians, Zapata rose up again and denounced the president in very undiplomatic terms. Zapata accused Carranza of having betrayed the revolution and of having fought merely for “riches, honors, businesses, banquets, sumptuous feasts, bacchana is, and orgies” [Harris, p.281].
Carranza could not let such an insult to his macho honor pass unanswered, but he also knew that he could never defeat Zapata’s Indian army in battle. Carranza therefore laid a trap for Zapata, and on April 10, 1919, Carranza’s military supporters assassinated Zapata after luring him to a secret meeting with a man pretending to be his ally. The Indians had won the war, but with the assassination of Zapata, they began to lose the peace into the hands of a new mestizo and white elite that was shrewd enough to run a whole country. The new leaders institutionalized the revolution, made the Indian into a glorious symbol of the new Mexico, and relegated Cortes to the status of a hunchbacked demon. They redistributed land, and in time they nationalized the oil industry. But the Indian revolution made a country that was to be ruled by others.
The impact of this Indian revolution was not entirely lost. Thus, when Joseph Stalin exiled fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1929, it was to Mexico, home of the first revolution, that Trotsky retreated. In subsequent decades other revolutionaries from the undeveloped world have also looked to the Zapata revolution for guidance in peasant warfare.
Zapata and the success of the Indian revolution in overthrowing the old established order in Mexico inspired other Indian groups throughout the Americas. The next notable success did not come until a generation later in distant Bolivia. As early as May 1945, the natives of Bolivia formed an Indian assembly. Rejecting the name “Indian” or “Indio” as insulting and degrading, they formed a National Federation of Peasants and from that time demanded to be called “peasants” or campesinos. The government met their demands to restore to the Indian communities their ancient land rights, and for the first time the government allowed the Indians in the mines such as Potosi to unionize [Arnade, p.188]. They even recognized the Indian marriages outside of the Catholic church as legal and binding.
Despite the concessions and even the genuine support of the Bolivian government for the reforms, the oligarchic families refused to turn over their land and instead lynched the president and his aides in 1946. The oligarchy began a repressive era, trying to wipe out the gains of the Indian peasants and miners and return them to feudal servitude. Even though Indians, who composed about two-thirds of the total population, still could not vote, the next election saw a moderate victory against the oligarchs.
The small middle class of mestizo merchants and teachers had voted against the oligarchy, but rather than surrender any power at all, the oligarchs used the army to stage a coup and to rule through a junta. Finally unable to find any peaceful alternative and being persecuted unmercifully, the Indians ignited a Zapata-style revolution in the remote parts of the Indian heartland in agricultural areas. The Quechua Indians of Cochabamba rose against the hacienda system that kept them as virtual slaves.
Other groups spontaneously followed around the nation, including the Indian miners of Potosi. They killed off rich families and appropriated the land for themselves.
Armed with machetes and knives, they paralyzed all transportation, closed down newspapers, burned out exploitive merchants, and attacked any oligarchs or soldiers who stood against them.
Like the followers of Zapata, the Indians lacked such basic skills as literacy that would have allowed them to make a government and control the country. They were forced to rely on the middle class and urban whites, mestizos, and cholos, as they contemptuously called Hispanicized Indians, to make the new government. The government came under the leadership of Victor Paz Estenssoro, who had been forced into exile by the oligarchs.
His Revolutionary National Movement (MNR) party unified a leftist coalition of xenophobic elements who preached anti-imperialism, anticommunism, and antifascism, but lacked a clear ideology of its own. This strange combination of Trotskyites and extreme nationalists legalized the Indian seizure of the land and mines. They organized a new government in La Paz, and in their first acts proclaimed universal adult suffrage, broke the power of the army, and closed down the military academy. They redistributed land, nationalized the mines and other large companies, limited the amount of land one person could own, ended all forms of the Indian servitude known as pongueaje, reestablished communal Indian lands, and created various types of mining and production cooperatives owned and operated by the workers.
The fate of the Indian revolution in Bolivia somewhat paralleled that of the Indian revolution in Mexico. The Indians had destroyed the old, but they lacked the education and resources to takeover the country and run it. By virtually any standard, the revolution failed. Politically, even though Paz Estenssoro has been the most important politician of the era and was reelected president in 1985, the nation has had a series of rightand left-wing governments and four coups since the revolution, and there have been over a dozen attempted coups and revolutions. Economically, the oligarchs were crushed, but the country has deteriorated; it has had the worst inflation rate in the world and the lowest standard of living in South America. Soldiers seized power from time to time, but they rarely even controlled the cities for short periods before being ousted. The national government has even been seized by a combination of narcotics traffickers and the military, but even they could not control the nation and surrendered the government in humiliation.
Despite all this apparent failure of the Indian revolution in Bolivia, one might argue that unlike the Mexican Indians, who surrendered power to the urban elite, the Indians of Bolivia continued to resist every source of political, economic, or military domination. If the government does something harmful to the people, demonstrators immediately take to the streets. Peasants who are too poor to pay a single dollar for a bus ticket will march a hundred miles to protest. Miners bomb government offices with dynamite stolen from their jobs. If the army tries to occupy a town, the peasant women with their children strapped to their backs sit down in front of the tanks. Such scenes breed frequent violence as soldiers shoot miners and peasants kill politicians.
Despite all that, there has been less killing than in Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, El Salvador, or Haiti.
Bolivia has suffered no tyrants as in Paraguay, no long military rule as in Chile and Brazil. The Indians of Bolivia live in desperate poverty, but they did break the bonds of servitude that enslaved them for four and a half centuries. They chose and maintained their impoverished and insecure liberty in place of their impoverished but secure slavery. In this regard theirs takes honor of place as the first Indian revolution that worked.
In Cuba the revolutionary movement of Fidel Castro also borrowed some of the peasant strategy of Zapata and Mao, but by and large it operated as a Soviet-style revolution dependent on urban intellectuals such as Castro himself and aides such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara of Argentina. Cuba, being one of the least Indian nations of America, afterward found it very difficult to connect with the revolutionary movements among Indians in countries such as Guatemala or Bolivia.
After the success of Castro’s revolution in Cuba, Guevara served for a while in the new cabinet, but then left Cuba in 1965 to extend the Cuban-style revolution to Bolivia, which seemed to him so ripe for yet another revolution. Che Guevara hoped to reignite and then control the forceful power of the Indians as rebels in a revolt that would spread through the Andes and throughout Latin America. The Indians ignored Che, in large part because they could not understand him. He spoke Spanish and they spoke Quechua. He came from a rich Spanish-Irish family and had been educated in the university. He came there from the big city of Havana to enlighten the Indians in their benighted peasant world, and to them he was just one more white foreigner trying to tell them what to believe and what to do. After two years he had not recruited a single peasant to his cause, and in 1967 the notoriously weak and ineffective Bolivian army tracked him down and killed him at Yuro Ravine, claiming he was a CIA agent.
The Cubans had more success among the whites and the mestizos in the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, which had only a small Indian population. The Indians refused to participate, for they saw the movement as a threat to their Indian identity. Rather than join the revolution, many of them took up arms against it and started their own guerrilla movement, fighting for Indian autonomy within the nation of Nicaragua.
The revolution of Zapata had a profound impact on a young Peruvian, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, who went into exile in Mexico in 1923. Even though he was not an Indian, he became intoxicated with the revolutionary Indian movement of Mexico and even went to live with a group of Mexican Indians for a while as a schoolteacher. The following year he formed the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), or Popular Revolutionary American Alliance, which was to be a unified revolutionary movement of Indians and urban workers throughout the Americas. Despite his efforts to make it a pan-American movement and his travels through several Latin American countries attacking the United States and defending the struggle of Sandino in Nicaragua, the movement did not attract much attention. When Haya returned to Peru, he fashioned APRA into a major voice of the left, heavily anti-imperialist and anti-United States. He considered the Indians to be an admirable but essentially passive people whom he would liberate when he achieved his anti-imperialist revolution. His movement preserved some Indian trappings, but it was essentially inspired by European thought. In 1985, Alan Garcia Perez became the first APRA candidate elected president of Peru, but by this time the party had lost most of its Indian traces and had become just one more leftist party.
The role of the Peruvian Indian in revolution was worked out instead by the dark, partially Indian Jose Carlos Mariategui, who came from rural Peru. The communists condemned him because he wrote of the importance of Indians rather than economic classes in his theory. The international communist movement under the control of Moscow preached an orthodoxy based on class and wanted to minimize ethnic or cultural divisions among people as merely artifacts of the oppressive class system. Mariategui wanted to combine the European ideals of industrial socialism with the rural socialism that had been practiced for centuries by the Incas. The sickly, crippled Mariategui [Werlich, pp.178-87] died on April 16, 1930, at the age of thirty-five, but he left a powerful legacy of ideas if not action. Because of his extensive writings on revolution, many political groups, including APRA, claim him as one of the inspiring founding fathers of their movement, but none has done so as enthusiastically as the group called Sendero Luminoso.
Founded as a political party in 1970 by Abimael Guzman, a mestizo intellectual who spoke Quechua, the group took its name, Sendero Luminoso, or “Shining Path,” from Mariategui’s words “hay que avanzar por el sendero luminoso del socializmo,” which exhort the people to advance along “the shining path of socialism.”
The group started as a legal political party in the highland district of Ayacucho, one of the poorest and most Indian parts of Peru.
By 1978, however, Guzman and his students decided that they could never bring about an Indian Peru by the ballot box, and instead moved their support base to mountain villages and declared a guerrilla war of terrorism against the government in 1980. The Sendero Luminoso exploited the ancient Quechua legend that somewhere in one of the mountains lived one of the great Incas, and when the time came he would ride out on a white horse, slay the Spanish, and restore Indian rule in Peru.
Combining this Inca mysticism with Maoist theory and practice, the mostly Indian army followed the Zapata guidelines for a peasant revolution against the urban elites that controlled the country. According to Guzman, his own work represented the fourth state of revolutionary thought that advanced from Marx, Lenin, and Mao on to Guzman. In this way, their revolutionary doctrine combined the best of European, Asian, and native American philosophy.
Another revolutionary group in the urban areas of Peru took the name Tupac Amaru, the name of the last rebel Inca who ruled a small area in Vilcabamba but was captured and executed by the Spanish in 1572. The same name was taken by the Indian headman Jose’ Gabriel Condorcanqui, who proclaimed an end to the slave labor of the Potosi mines. He led an uprising of the Indians throughout the Andes from as far as what is now Colombia into Bolivia in 1780. Like the North American colonists fighting for their independence against Britain at the same time, Tupac Amaru II wanted independence from Spain and an end to the rule of the Spanish-speaking elite in the Andes. He issued a proclamation accusing the Spanish of having usurped “the sovereignty of my people for three centuries” and of having “treated the natives of this kingdom like beasts” [Picon-Salas, pp.135-36].
His rebellion also failed, and he too was executed two years later.
In keeping with civilized practice, the limbs of Tupac Amaru II and his followers were scattered along the roads while their hands and heads went on public display in town.
The Tupac Amaru movement of the 1980s took its name and inspiration from the Indians, but its membership and tactics differed from those of traditional Indian movements. With alleged support from the Cubans and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Tupac Amaru faction pursued a traditional Soviet-style campaign of urban intellectuals and workers rather than peasants.
Nevertheless, the peasants preserved the memories of both the Tupac Amarus as symbols of their own struggle against the whites of the city. The name Tupac Amaru could be found scrawled on walls and other public places throughout Peru as a reminder to the whites of the tremendous potential for revolutionary justice that seethed in the Indian soul of Andean America.
Some of the Indian revolutionaries of America have incorporated Mao’s thought into their movements. The modern governments of countries such as Peru and Guatemala also learned a lesson from Mao in how to handle their Indians. Whether they knew it or not, the Indian rebels followed Mao’s dictum that the revolutionary should move among the peasants like a fish in the sea. The governments of Guatemala and Peru found that when they could not catch these fish, they would have to drain the sea. They embarked on policies of driving the Indians out of the area, To do this they killed many thousands of the Indians, burned down villages, razed crops, and disrupted the transportation of crops and goods in hopes of striking fear into the rest and forcing them to leave the country and move to squatter camps on the edge of the cities, where they could be more easily watched and controlled. The incident that I encountered in the Guatemalan village en route to Flores arose from just this attempt by the Guatemalan elite to drain the ocean of peasants.
Even though the last Indian city of Tayasal on the banks of Lake Peten-Itza fell to the European conquerors in 1697 and even though Ishi went on display in 1911 as the last independent Indian in North America, the struggle for Indian rights never stopped. In the process the Indians gave the world generation after generation of revolutionary inspiration.
The Iroquois served as a model for primitive communism, and the Europeans looked to the Incas as exemplars of how to manage a socialist economy without private property, money, or markets. But the Indians offered more than inspiration for European thought.
They also provided models of action. Many of the earlier efforts such as the Red Stick movement failed, but with the movement of Zapata, the world had its first truly peasant revolution.
Five hundred years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, the Indians are everywhere in America the poorest of the poor and the least powerful of all groups. Future generations, however, may look back on the twentieth century as the turning point in the struggle for Indian autonomy and power in the Americas. After four centuries of nearly constant losses, the Indians scored their first tentative victories. In the United States after centuries of losing on the battlefield and being shunned by the courts and government, the Indians started to win their cases in court and found a legal base upon which to protect some of their rights. In countries such as Mexico and Bolivia they won on the battlefield even though they lacked the power to translate that victory into a permanent improvement for them. Who knows what the next half millennium may bring for Indian rights?