Search

Many Latin Americanist scholars have described large scale protests, in which indigenous people have been noticeably present, as part of the larger phenomena of indigenous social movements which started in the late 1960s and have grown in prominence with governmental attempts to adopt new liberal economic reforms (Brysk 2000, Lucero 2008, Postero and Zamosc 2004, Yasher 1998, Van Cott 2003). However, while many of the protests described by these authors did have a large number of indigenous participants and were organized by self-proclaimed indigenous organizations, these organizations chose to frame their struggles against neo-liberal economics in two different and sometimes contradictory ways. For example, The Confederation of Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), began as an indigenous organization dedicated to protecting indigenous culture, and first gained national prominence by protesting for cultural rights, such as the right to bilingual education. However, when the President entered into serious negotiations with the IMF in 1999, CONAIE once again took to the street, but this time the organization's platform held no mention of cultural rights. Instead of being framed as a protest for indigenous rights, the CONAIE framed the 1999/2000 protests as struggles for the rights of workers against neoliberal economic reforms imposed by the working class. The framing of the protests as a protest for workers' rights is particularly striking given the history of racism and discrimination that indigenous peoples have historically suffered at the hands of the working mestizo class. On the other hand, AIDESEP, a regional indigenous rights organization in the Peruvian Amazon, has continued to emphasize indigenous cultural rights even in the face of neoliberal economic land reforms. This paper will therefore look at case studies from Ecuador and Peru to determine why some indigenous organizations framed protests against the adoption of neoliberal economic reforms in terms of workers' rights, while others were framed in terms of indigenous cultural and land rights. In the end I find that the Peruvian organizations had weaker domestic networks than the Ecuadorian movements, and therefore relied heavily on the internationally salient frames of indigenous rights and environmental protection, while the Ecuadorian organization CONAIE was free to adopt more nationally salient frames. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]