After 65 years of South America's most persistent authoritarian governments, the Paraguayan people elected an opposition candidate president of the country. In doing so, voters ushered in what many hope will be the final transition to democracy. René Harder Horst's analysis of indigenous policy under the dictatorship arrives at a most fortuitous time. It can inform not just the academic discourse of indigenismo, but the political struggles of ethnic minorities in this complex multi-ethnic society.
The Stroessner Regime and Indigenous Resistance in Paraguay details the policy of the Paraguayan dictatorship toward its indigenous minorities. In doing so, Horst explores the effects of authoritarian policies and the reaction of indigenous groups to what has been, for the most part, a destructive process of state–minority relations. The book follows indigenous policy from the rise of Stroessner through the end of the dictator's reign in 1989, an era that made Stroessner the longest-reigning dictator of Latin America's authoritarian governments. From the very start, the action of the Paraguayan government was based in self-interest and convenience. The early years of the regime were focused on Stroessner consolidating power and suppressing opposition. Comprising less than 1 per cent of the population, indigenous groups were never perceived as a political or military threat. In addition, in a country where the vast majority of peasants spoke Guarani and lived from subsistence farming, it was often difficult to distinguish the small portion of the population that claimed its native roots. Any attention to them was an afterthought; the government could afford to ignore a small and silent minority.
As Stroessner's hold on the country was solidified, his government distributed the country's wealth of land and forests to co-opt the political elite and mollify the peasantry. In the 1960s and 1970s, the move to transform the Chaco into cattle ranches and the forests into cotton fields brought the developing nation-state into direct conflict with the indigenous groups. To overcome the ‘problem’ posed by native peoples in the path of progress, Stroessner opted for a policy of assimilation. Indigenous peoples lost both rights to resources and political support from the state. Horst documents how funding for the national Indian agency was reduced and indigenous communities were expelled from their lands. Paraguay's indigenous peoples were relegated to the edges of the national society. The official expectation was that they would assimilate into the mass of the rural peasantry.
As elsewhere in Latin America, indigenous communities refused to disappear. Indigenous groups responded forcefully to the destruction wreaked by policies of assimilation. Horst offers a detailed survey of the actions of non-government agencies that worked for and with indigenous communities. Native groups formed alliances with the Catholic Church, anthropologists and indigenistas. As the regime wielded its iron fist against peasant groups, indigenous activism became one of the few arenas for popular action against the government. This apertura culminated with the organisation of a pan-ethnic indigenous organisation, the Marandú project, advised by non-native intellectuals and dedicated to helping the dispersed indigenous communities. In 1975, the activism of native peoples and indigenistas proved too much; the government moved with force against Marandú, and its advisors suffered jailing, torture and expulsion from the country.
Activists adroitly managed worldwide attention to the repression of indigenista organisations in Paraguay, promoting a wave of international action supporting indigenous rights in the country. By the 1980s, in response to international pressure, the Stroessner government was distinguishing peasants from indigenous peoples in both policy and practice. The state created a series of indigenous-controlled colonias under the administration of the Instituto Nacional del Indígena and a council of native peoples to advise the state on indigenous affairs. The process was institutionalised in 1990, when indigenous peoples finally won unique legal protection for their lands and cultures. In effect, the new policies toward native peoples represented a shift from assimilation to differentiation.
Indigenous identity is increasingly understood as a complex construction of lived experience, indigenous agency, and national and international forces. In Paraguay, political recognition of their identity was sought by indigenistas and indigenous groups as a means to garner unique rights, based on claims of indigeneity. Horst makes clear that exerting an ethnic identity distinct from the mestizo majority led to the isolation of native peoples from the arenas of political power. The analysis points to the fact that the government transition from a policy of assimilation to one of differentiation led to an exclusion from national political representation. In effect, indigenous peoples were offered the choice between assimilation and disenfranchisement.
Even as it focuses on the actions of the state and indigenistas, this book could benefit from a greater awareness of the importance of indigenous power and resistance. The demise of Marandú ushered in an exclusively native ethnic federation, the Asociacion de Parcialidades Indígenas, which became the training ground for a generation of indigenous leaders – leaders who were at times fearless in opposition to the state and at other times co-opted by the bureaucracy of power.
At a more general level, the work calls into question the concept of the Indígena in Paraguayan society. Paraguay is a multi-ethnic society in which the differences between indigenous groups are often greater than the differences between many natives and the national society. What does the concept of indigenous mean in this setting? What is the mythology of the native in the national consciousness? It would be useful to analyse the differing agendas of the diverse indigenous groups of the country. This book explores several interesting cases, such as the attempts by the government to sedentise the Ayoreo and the Ache, but could extend this attention to a more thorough analysis of the sedentary indigenous groups that became models for government policy, notably the Pai-Tavytera and the Ava-Guarani.
Finally, this analysis of the politics of exclusion under dictatorship raises serious questions about the rights of ethnic minorities in increasingly democratic societies. Despite its brutality, the dictatorship maintained a popular base among many indigenous groups that is unrivalled by more recent democratic institutions. As Paraguay moves toward democracy, indigenous groups are losing power in the face of popular voting and technocratic development programmes. Having won the struggle for identity differentiation, they continue to suffer political exclusion today, even as the current democratic movement finally takes hold in the country.
