Indigenism, imaginary ethnic groups and real criminals

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 16/12/2024

Guest columnist.
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We have to admit something: the left is the master at constructing false narratives and deceptive stories. A clear example of this are all the collectives that were created after the Tricontinental in 1968 and the Sao Paulo Forum in the early 1990s.

Without the slightest shame, they stopped shooting homosexuals to lead LGBT marches. Nor did it bother them that Ernesto Guevara, El Che, became an emblem in feminist marches, when in his private life he sexually abused his employees, one of them an elderly woman over 70 years old. Furthermore, it was Guevara himself who said: "Bolivian Indians are like animals," something that does not matter to those who use his photograph as a fetish for indigenous movements.

Here a valid question is: Is indigenism really a way of vindicating the original peoples of Latin America?

In Bolivia we have antecedents of indigenism coming from the pen of Fausto Reinaga, who, with a rhetoric very similar to the racism of the Nazis, spoke of the need to "liberate" the Indian from the individualism of the West. At the regional level, the declarations of Barbados, promulgated between 1970 and 1990, although using a more sibylline language, say exactly the same thing.

At this point, another question is worth asking: In 2024, can we affirm the existence of indigenous peoples in Latin America?

For me, a simple Bolivian writer and professor, to be writing these lines at this moment, read carefully, 6,824 people had to reproduce since 1492, which is the year of Spain's arrival in America.

Furthermore, most people can trace their family tree back three or four generations at most. However, thanks to genotyping, a look back into long-forgotten millennia is possible. In other words, no one can claim to be an individual of exclusively Aboriginal blood because that is, basically, a statistical and biological impossibility.

As for cultural issues, I have news for you: we are Hispanics, and our daily life cannot be understood without the influence of Spain, starting with such basic things as language and gastronomy. In this regard, Carlos Rangel, in his book: From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary, explains that it was the Spanish who brought pigs, cows, chickens, lambs and horses to America. I don't think it is necessary to point out that these are the proteins consumed in all dishes in Hispanic America.

Therefore, if indigenism is nothing more than a sum of fallacies and sophisms, and no one can claim to be a pure-bred indigenous person, their claims and arguments have no real validity. However, they were used for something else: to camouflage and justify the crimes of figures such as Evo Morales, Álvaro García Linera and Felipe Quispe (El Mallku).

In fact, indigenism hit so hard that figures from the Bolivian "opposition" do not dare to call Felipe Quispe what he was: a criminal. For example, Jorge Quiroga, on the occasion of Quispe's death in January 2021, on his X account, published the following: "The Mallku was the most relevant Aymara leader of recent decades who defended his ideas with uncompromising firmness, engaged in dialogue and fulfilled his commitments."

In conclusion, indigenismo has disguised gang members, drug dealers and hitmen as imaginary ethnicities. They are not indigenous, they are criminals.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».