ABSTRACT
In Bolivia in 1990, 700 indigenous men and women walked 400 miles from Trinidad to La Paz in a “march for territory and dignity”, a 35 day procession that “managed to shake up public opinion” and forced the Bolivian government into negotiations (Albó 1996). In the same year in Ecuador, a week-long national uprising organized by indigenous peoples paralysed the country’s traffic and commerce. In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú, a 33-year-old K’iche Indian woman from Guatemala, won the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that just a decade earlier would have seemed unthinkable – in the early 1980s, as part of a brutal counter-insurgency strategy to eliminate guerrilla forces, Guatemala’s indigenous peoples were being massacred by their own government with US military aid and the international mainstream media were all but ignoring their plight (see Box 7.1).
