WikiHome

Indigenous Peoples, Lands, Forests and Tenure Policies in South America

Marcus Colchester

Director, Forest Peoples Programme

Indigenous Peoples of South America

The Indigenous Peoples of South America are those who trace descent from the peoples inhabiting the continent prior to its colonisation by Europeans. Most of these peoples have now had very long histories of contact with colonial and post-colonial nation states and economies and have developed new ways of living and organising their lives to suit these changing circumstances. Many also remain strongly attached to their ancestral lands, their languages and identities but seek recognition and accommodation by the national societies in which they are now embedded. Some Indigenous Peoples in Amazonia, often after bad experiences in the past, choose to live in isolation from outsiders.

Following their “discovery” and conquest, South America’s Indigenous Peoples suffered a shattering loss of numbers due to introduced diseases, conquest and enslavement. European settlers saw Indigenous Peoples as primeval people who lacked law, rulers or religion and who needed to be brought under the tutelage of the Church and the Crown, by force if necessary. Those who resisted could legitimately be used as slaves. Indigenous Peoples fared little better following the wars of independence in the early 19^th century and by the end of that century many people of European descent believed that all the Indigenous Peoples were doomed to die out.

However, since the 1970s there has been a strong revival of Indigenous numbers, pride and political strength, expressed through a myriad of novel organisations, campaigns and new initiatives. Revised constitutions now recognise Indigenous Peoples as vital components of national societies and laws affirm their rights to their lands and territories and to a measure of autonomy. In some countries, these rights have been extended to so-called ‘Maroons’, descendants of African slaves who fled life on the coastal plantations and recreated forest-based societies in the interior of the continent.

Land Policies

The colonial powers, with few exceptions, denied the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands. Lands, with their associated villages, were instead handing out to colonists to manage. On the coasts and in the highlands, most Indigenous Peoples were thus brought under the control of the newly established land-owning elites during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The people were treated as serfs, and later as peasants, subject to onerous demands to yield up labour, rent and taxes. The nearer hinterlands were granted to missions and churches, which were given extensive powers to control lands and settlements, exercise their own jurisdiction and even raise private armies to control rebellious communities. However, large areas in the forested lowlands remained beyond the effective reach of both Church and State administrations.

Since independence, pressure on land has gradually extended the control of the State. National frontiers were, for the most part, clarified by the end of the 19^th century and lands were gradually mapped, classified and handed out to the responsibility of various ministries or local governments. Where lands were not owned according to colonial land grants or subsequent land titling, they were mostly classified as unoccupied State lands. This included huge parts of the territories of Indigenous Peoples. The powers of the missions were, for the large part, legally curtailed during the 20^th Century.

Since the 1960s, agrarian reforms have transferred significant proportions of coastal and highland areas back to Indigenous Peoples and peasants who were however, on the whole, not supplied with the tools, seeds, organisational skills, access to markets and finances needed to make their holdings prosper. Only recently have highland economies and societies experienced a revival of identity, culture and organisational capacity. Not all highland peasants assert an identity as indigenous peoples, although pride in an indigenous ancestry is growing. In many areas, lands remain highly contested between land owning elites—those who have acquired lands through agrarian reforms—and indigenous peoples. Leftist insurgencies, drug cultivation, imposed conservation schemes, tourism ventures, and recently resurgent forestry plantation corporations complicate the struggle for land.

In the lowlands, extensive areas of lands and forests have begun to be transferred or allocated to Indigenous Peoples. The tenures offered vary greatly. For example, in Brazil, Indigenous Reserves and Indigenous Parks remain State lands to which the Indigenous Peoples hold ‘permanent’ possessory rights. In Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Guyana, land titles to own small areas around villages may be granted along with a recognition of village councils to hold and administer these areas – the details vary widely. In Panama, Bolivia and Colombia more extensive areas have been transferred as comarcas, territories and reserves (resguardos), with legal recognition of communities’ jurisdiction over such areas, somewhat hedged about with restrictions on whether communities can commercially exploit the trees. The law in Venezuela is progressive but to date only limited village titles have been allocated and no extensive areas (referred to in law as indigenous habitat) have yet been recognised. Suriname is the only country that provides no means for recognising indigenous peoples’ rights in land. Uruguay is considered not to have indigenous peoples although some of their descendants are just beginning to publicly re-assert their identity. Pressure on lowland Indigenous Peoples’ territories – notably from ranching, agribusiness and colonisation, logging, plantations, protected areas, oil exploration, mining, road building and dams – continues to intensify.

Forestry Policies

Conventional (‘colonial’) forestry institutions, laws and policies were late to appear in South America as most countries acquired independence from European powers before western ideas of ‘Scientific Forestry’ became part of the colonial policies in the mid-19^th century. The exceptions were Suriname, Guyana and French Guyana, where the forested interiors were subjected to the control of colonial forestry officials, and then gradually submitted to the jurisdiction of forestry departments, from the late 19^th century onwards.

For the most part, in the rest of South America official forestry was only introduced as part of foreign assistance programmes during the 1950s and especially 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, forested lands have progressively began to be zoned and officially classed as “forests”— in the sense of jurisdictions — and Forestry Departments have been set up to administer these areas with newly established cadres of foresters trained to apply the law and the new science. The laws and institutional capacities are still in a rapid phase of evolution. State forests were only made law in Brazilian Amazonia in 2006. Newly fashionable trends like forest certification, community forestry, decentralization, “forest law enforcement”, high conservation value zoning, forest protection and carbon offsetting are now being grafted onto systems with little institutional capacity or history of forest management – which may or may not be a good thing.

In the highlands, deforestation had for the most part run its course long before formal forestry was introduced. Most forestry efforts thus focus on reforestation and plantations development. Where local land rights are secured or respected the options range from the promotion of community woodlots for local markets and domestic consumption to (sometimes imposed) out-grower schemes for industrial use. More controversially in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador reforestation by private sector corporations planting fast-growing species for their pulp and paper mills is being promoted leading to conflict with peasant and Indigenous Peoples who also claim rights to the same areas.

In lowland South America natural forests remain extensive and Amazonia constitutes the largest area of tropical forest on the planet. Natural forest logging for export started on the coasts in the 16^th century – the extraction of brazilwood for its red dyes gave the country its name - but industrial-scale logging only developed more recently, taking off in Brazil and Guyana in 1960s and only moving into the central Amazonian plain, alongside the road-building programmes, in the 1970s and 1980s. East of the Andes the logging bonanza is even more recent. In Brazil, most logging areas, where legal, are secured as privately owned lands but, in the rest of South America, most formal forestry is secured through the hand out of concessions on State-owned (and often indigenous claimed) land. However, illegal logging is estimated to supply between 20 and 50 of the annual cut. Pressure on forests in lowland South America remains intense with dry forests and savannahs – cerrado, caatinga and the Chaco – experiencing even faster clearance than the wet forests of the Amazon and Orinoco. Despite international calls for restraint since the 1980s, rates of forest loss are as high as ever and new pressures, for example from soya and biofuels, are intensifying efforts to convert forests to farmlands.

Customary Systems of Land and Forest Use

The massive population losses suffered by Indigenous Peoples since the conquest have fostered an illusion that indigenous systems of land use had almost no influence on the natural vegetation systems of the continent. New research however now substantiates indigenous peoples’ and early explorers’ accounts that the continent was once much more thickly peopled, more managed and modified than previously thought. Along the Andes, from western Venezuela and northern Colombia down to northern Chile, intensive farming and pastoral systems, had developed over thousands of years providing the basis for extensive systems of trade and the rise of numerous civilisations, only the latest of which, the Inca and Chibcha were encountered and recorded by Europeans. Productive farming was sustained through the retention of upland forests and pastures, extensive terracing and sophisticated irrigation systems, with diet and local economies being sustained by intense trade up and down hills and valleys with protein and grains from the highlands being complemented by forest products, roots and tubers from the lowlands.

In the lowlands, too, large parts of what are now thinly populated ‘virgin’ forests turn out to have sustained extensive raised-bed agriculture, turtle farming, road systems, tribute based chieftaincies and sophisticated systems for managing and improving forests and savannahs in ways that not only enhanced productivity but also biodiversity.

Projects by indigenous peoples themselves to record and revive their customary systems of land use are only now getting a chance to take effect, as long buried knowledge and half forgotten skills are being recalled and reapplied. Only with secure rights to lands and to manage and control natural resources can these projects flourish, meaning that social and economic systems that had evolved over thousands of years—and had then been smashed by conquest, colonialism and imposed modernisation—have only now had less than a generation to re-establish themselves. Yet a growing body of evidence is already beginning to show that areas under indigenous ownership, control and management, in both the highlands and the lowlands, tend to have higher biodiversity, better forest restoration and slower rates of forest loss than areas under State control or private ownership. Satellite images from the Brazilian Amazon show starkly how indigenous reserves stand out as islands of green in areas of extensive forest loss. Even strictly protected areas have proven to be no more likely to halt forest clearance.

Probably the most important lesson to be learned from a review of South America’s forests and Indigenous Peoples is that the early impressions of conquerors, surveyors and scientists have proven to be completely wrong. Time and again local realities have proven to be more sophisticated, more viable and more enduring than outsiders have supposed. Giving scope for indigenous self-determination will not come without challenges and change but seems far more likely to lead to sustainability than the imposed prescriptions of, even well-intentioned, outsiders.

Posted 9 August 2007