The Way of the Communitee

Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves

The Way of the Communities is a necessary book that makes another world emerge. It is a book that
broadens the theoretical horizon of emancipatory or anti-systemic political struggles, according to
the term that best suits you. It is a book that fits in the context of "systemic chaos" (Arrighi) within
which the modern-colonial capitalist world system has been submerged since the 1960s. The Añuu
author, José Ángel Quintero Weir, who is also an anthropologist-linguist from his academic training,
has this primacy of feeling-thinking in two different matrices of rationality that are revealed through
a dense and intense mode in the first part of the book: "Really starting for real."i The first part
highlights the coloniality of knowledge implicit in the coloniality of power, to use the terms of
tradition in constructing de-colonial thinking in its from Abya Yala / Latin America, and to which
this book is ascribed.
In this sense, Quintero Weir's book is inscribed as part of the theoretical-political struggles
involved "in the raigal crisis of the pattern of power in the modern euro-centered capitalist world
system", as Amauta Aníbal Quijano tells us. It is the crisis of this pattern of power; this crisis,
derived from the contradictions that manifest themselves in as a state of practice in conflicts
through which groups / ethnicities / peoples and social classes may express themselves concretely.
This is the condition of the possibility of formulations such as that The '
power was built from Abya Yala / Latin America as it was considered a region / an empty continent,
of non-beings.
The book brings us, not only a lucid critique of the Eurocentricist universalist pretension of
the superiority of a specific form of knowledge, science, but also, it extends the horizon of
knowledge for us. It shows us the "waste of human experience" (Boaventura de Sousa Santos),
represented by colonialism and its permanence in both the coloniality of knowledge and power that
still limit us especially when it offers us sources of rationality typical of the Añuu, the Wayuu, the
Bari and the Yukpa, towns originating in western Venezuela, more specifically, Lake Maracaibo and
the Sierra de Perijá.
Among the Añuu, which Quintero Weir suggests as a characteristic horizon of feeling-
thinking of the original peoples, nothing is in the strong sense of the verb to be in the tradition of
the European hegemonic thinking; at least, since the Renaissance, because everything in the world
emerged by their doing in their own relations with others. Thus, the being-doing is present in
everything when it emerges as a verb. This acquires enormous meaning in a village like the Añuu
that lives by the waters of Lake Maracaibo and that exists from the the first colonial presence of the
Spaniards until the present presence of the colonial/national/empire of the Venezuelan/North
American/Russian and Chinese mining companies, as the author details in the second part of this
instigating book.
It is this being-doing-emerging, which makes them belong to the world, to the space-time
that does doing-being-emerging, and, thus, they do not separate subject-object, nature-spirit, nor is
it possible to conceive of how someone can believe that the world and its entities belong to them. It
was through contact with this town of the waters - the Añuu - that the first colonizers called this
land, it was new for them, but it was millennial for the peoples who lived there, called Little Venice
- Venezuela. In short, the invaders, self-styled colonizers, only saw themselves, and, as the Brazilian
poet-singer Caetano Veloso says, "Narciso finds ugly that which is not his mirror". Thus, the same
name as the country - Venezuela - brings the marks of the coloniality that inhabits us, the name is no
longer enough of America as the homage that the Europeans gave themselves, ignoring other
denominations like: Abya Yala, Tawantinsuyu, Anauac, Pindorama, Ivi Rupá, between so many
others. In this way, the book, as part of the struggles for the recognition of these peoples, that is, for
Dignity, extends our knowledge about our societies that thus, they are more plural and richer than
we believe the coloniality of knowledge as part of the coloniality of power that crosses our
asymmetric relations social and power, and that prevents this wealth of experiences can dialogue.
With this we enter the second part of the book: "The fight in and through territory".
The struggle for Dignity is not just a struggle for identity- as if it were a cultural struggle, as a
certain kind of post-modern multiculturalism wants. On the contrary, it is a struggle for the material
conditions of production/reproduction of life, in short, it is a fight for territory. And here, once
again, the material and the symbolic do not separate, at least, not in the cosmo-experienceii (term
that the author prefers, rightly, to cosmovision) of the añuu, wayuu, bari and yukpa. The author
insists on saying that this is co-extensive to the original peoples of all Abya Yala/Latin America.
Thus, the author shows us how the separation between space and time, between history and
geography, and the prevalence of time over space forms the tradition of hegemonic thinking through
its coloniality. The evolution of society takes place outside the territory, a concept that gains
enormous theoretical-political meaning because it implies thinking society in its relations with the
material conditions of production/reproduction of life and thus, knowledge with feeling, then, it is a
knowledge that is recognized as a debtor to the material conditions of possibility. It is not more
knowledge about the world but a knowledge with the world.
The book points out many possibilities of a dialogue with other matrices of rationality, other
traditions of thought that were relegated by the coloniality of knowledge and Eurocentric power,
even in Europe itself. As was the sensuality of Condillac and the logical material of Gaston
Bachelard that gave us not only The Poetics of Space but several volumes of Water and Dreams.
Thus, Quintero Weir's book can help the Europeans themselves to get rid of Eurocentrism. It points
to us from another world / another feeling-thinking, an effectively non-essentialist dialogical
perspective. The matrix of rationality presented to us is not enough- Añuu, Wayu, Bari and Yukpa -
does not settle on a verb that, by itself, refers to essentialism - the verb to be - as Ludwig
Wittgenstein teaches us. The possibilities of dialogue opened by this book are enormous; dialogue,
that to truly exist, implies that these people are in our horizon of senses, that is, in the space that can
not be empty.
The chapter on the oral construction of history is a true gift. It gives us a consistent
testimony of the vigor of the repertoire of knowledge that original peoples have to update the story,
to make the story current, to make the story active. The legacy of Nigalee, which almost always
accompanies the singing of e'inmatualeeiii, shows us how these people sing their origins and their
processes of constitution. Nigalee is an important reference in the re-existence, and the rigor
repeated of his action is almost always open to other records that update the story, they make the
history current, they make history act, they emerge.
The book addresses with vigor both the liberal and Marxist tradition that, until now,
hegemonized the theoretical-political debate. Like many of the intellectuals today, that build a
tradition that was also initiated before the liberals and Marxists, such as Guaman Poma de Ayala
and Thoussaint de L'Overture, the author of The Way of the Communities went through the Marxist
tradition, as did José Carlos Mariátegui and Aimé Cesaire, and, today, Aníbal Quijano, Felipe
Quispe, Pablo Mamani and the Subcomandante Marcos. It is by knowing this tradition that has so
inspired the emancipatory struggles in our continent and to experience concretely the territorial
struggles that the original peoples face, is that it makes us feel with all the force the limitations of
the progressive governments that were recently established in Latin America, especially the
Bolivarian revolution that is underway in Venezuela, perhaps the one that most rhetorically covers
an anti-imperialist discourse.
The author gives us quite consistent information in relation to the distance between the
intention and the gesture, between the discourse and the practice, in what is perhaps, the perspective
of the author, is a place of privileged enunciation for this criticism: the place of indigenous peoples
that are being violated by mega-projects such as IIRSA and its national complements, in the
Venezuelan case, the Great Homeland Plan, in the Brazilian case the Growth Acceleration Project -
PACiv- and the "A Revolutionary Road for an Integrated Country: Roads and bridges", in the case of
Bolivia. Here, the abstract character that epistemologically separates space and time appears
rigorously with all its force (and violence) in the territory. The expropriation of these populations
that have always been there. They fought against colonial domination and continue to be invisible in
the documents of the IIRSA and of those national plans, since these regions continue being
considered as demographic gaps and, thus, open to occupation and colonization, in truth, invasion.
In the Venezuelan case, the stimulus that took into account these populations after the arrival
of Chávez to the government was the possibility of seeing their demarcated territories, it was not
enough to prevent the coloniality of power from showing itself in full force (and violence). After 14
years of the Bolivarian Revolution, no more than 10% of the lands have been demarcated, as well as
the refusal on the part of the authorities to recognize that these peoples do not want land or
haciendas, but territories where they can exercise their autonomy. There has even been a theoretical-
political regression in the body of the law of the new constitution in relation to the previous legal
determinations through the denaturalization of the concept of territory, since these peoples were left
with reduced rights to their habitat. Habitat is a biologizing concept that ignores the enormous
meaning that people introduced into the theoretical-political lexicon. Thisis evident in the struggle
of the Kuna Yala in Panama, of the Miskitos in Nicaragua, of the indigenous Chimanes, Tsimanes,
Yucares and Trintarios in the TIPNIS in Bolivia. The indigenous Barí, for example, lost 70% of
their territory throughout the twentieth century, by concessions made by national governments to
American oil companies. It is to be noted that these territorial losses were made after independence,
which validates the thesis of Aníbal Quijano that in Latin America the end of colonialism did not
mean the end of the coloniality The same can be observed in Chile, where the Mapuche territories
were kept under control of the original peoples until 1860 when the invasion occurred Chilean
against the Mapuche.
The Way of the Communities shows us with facts and data how the expropriation
ofterritorial identity of the native peoples traces the continuity of the various republics in
Venezuelan that Bolivarianism did not manage to finish. Also, in the last election in Venezuela, the
two candidates, Capriles and Maduro, disagreed in all points except in the manifest destiny of
Venezuela as an exporter of raw materials, such as oil, gas, iron, coal, gold and coltan. It does not
matter that to export iron they have blocked several channels of the Orinoco delta so that the river
gained more volume of water and, thus, allow larger ships to circulate exporting more iron and,
with that, more than 3000 indigenous people from the Warao people died. Most of them had to
return to the jungle because large areas became impracticable for agriculture, either by acidification,
waterlogging, or by desertification, all in the name of development.
This began in 1967 with the closure of the Mánamov pipeline. The Orinoco-Apure pipeline
would continue in 1973, "with the discovery of a uranium deposit in the north of Brazil on the
border with Venezuela in the territory of the Yanomami Indians, when the same transnational
companies - Orinoco Mining and Betelhein Steel - on the Venezuelan side. They were in charge of
financing and directing the studies of raising resources, as well as the projection of its extraction
and use". Hugo Chávez Frías commissioned, along with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to inaugurate
in the year 2000, the electrical infrastructure that would link El Guri in Venezuela to Boa Vista in
Roraima, making the axis of integration that, since 2000, became part of the IIRSA. This reveals the
continuities that are shown under the discontinuities. It is important to note that the Indigenous
"habitats" demarcated during the Bolivarian revolution are coincidentally all outside these Axes of
Development, be it of the IIRSA, or the Great Homeland Plan. In this meaning, the name of the
Yukpa Cacique Sabino Romero gains relevance, the same person that, being chavista, was
persecuted and murdered, as well as his father and other relatives, with the complicity of
government agents for their actions and omissions, for fighting for their territory and autonomy, as
the book emphasizes. Sabino Romero insisted that they did not want haciendas, while affirming the
community as a way.
Finally, it should be noted that the Way of Communities is done by walking, as Che Guevara would
say. And, more than a promise of a happy future that would occur in a Utopia that rigorously means
no-place and, thus, something that is located outside of space, the Way of the Communities does not
separate past, present and future, therefore, everything is presentified in the moment, where the past
becomes present and the future is concretely invented. The Way of the Communities is, thus, a path
that is taken with the communities in the present that way they are doing, emerging.
 There is the great lesson that we have been experiencing since the struggle of the Miskitos
between 1979-1989, on February 27, 1989 with the Caracazo, the Great Marches for Life, for
Dignity and for the Territory in Bolivia and in Ecuador in 1990, with the Zapatista Uprising of
1994, in the Cochabamba Water War of 2000, which largely contributed to weaken the neoliberal
agenda in our continent. And, all this, in a time when the traditional lefts were in crisis under the
rubble of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which shows the vigor of those struggles that were raised with
others theoretical-political horizons showing that the path is the communities and that this book is a
testimony.

Itaipu, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Planet Terra, Solar System, Milky Way, in this 11 September
2013, 40 years ago a dream-nightmare that made us learn that the path is made with the community
of life, with dignity, with territory.

Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves

The Way of the Communitee

The Indigenoue thinking in Latn American Philoeophy

The conetructon of the vacuum

Some years ago, the Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza, in his novel "Garabombo the Invisible ",
presented the story of an indigenous leader representing his community, in an endless and
indefatigable walk through Peruvian governments offices claiming ancestral rights that had never
been attended. Then, for Garabombo, in such offices, nobody attends him, nobody listens to him,
nobody sees him: Garabombo was invisible.
Such occurrence, written with mastery in literary fiction, does not seem in any way alien to
the reality lived by Latin American indigenous cultures, on the contrary, it seems be a common
story despite its dramatic reality. So, for example, in 1995, near the Sierra de Perijá, in the state of
Zulia, in western Venezuela, a massacre of indigenous Yukpavi by the Venezuelan army provoked an
angry mobilization of these communities in protest against the national government. When the
Yukpa leader Jesús Terán was questioned by a journalist during his march through the city of
Maracaibo about what they expected from the government in the middle of the conflict, he
answered categorically: "If it is to wait, we do not expect anything, because he (the government),
pretends we are not here. He acts as if he does not see us." In this way, reality and fiction seem to
confirm bluntly what has been the experience of an "invisibility" suffered by or subjected to the
indigenous cultures of America throughout more than 500 years of history.
But this dramatically contemporary reality is not in any way casual. Rather, it is the result of
a process that we could summarize as a way of seeing that was historically built from the conquest
and colonization of the continent. Indeed, upon the arrival of the conquerors and, as José Juan
Arrom very well points out, a wholisitic vision of two opposite images is going to form the basis for
the configuration of the concept about the original peoples. Thus, for example, Columbus defines
them from the following influential points of view:
"Naked and innocent" (the natural man), "good servants" (the economic man), "of good wit, that quickly
learn" (the social man) and "easy to convert to Christianity" (the religious man). But behind these multiple
facets a fundamental perception appears: without clothes, without weapons, without iron, without apparent
religion, without knowledge of the value of things, they lack culture"vii.
To this image in which the "Indian" is configured as a void of culture, another one will be added
in which all the possible adjectives of bestiality are attributed to him. For an example, here is
a description of the friar Tomás Ortíz, also cited by Arrom, and that towards 1512 said among many
other things, the following:
 "These are the properties of the Indians where they do not deserve liberties: they eat human meat on the Tierra
Firme; they are sodomites more than any generation; there is no justice between them; they walk naked; they
have no love or shame; They are stupid and crazy. They do not keep truth if it is not totheir benefit; they are
inconsistant; They do not know what advice is (...). They are beastly and are privy to be abominable in vices.
(...). They are not capable of doctrine or punishment (...) They have no art or skill of men"viii
So we have that, on the one hand, the indigenous lacked culture not only in their condition
of "good savage", moreso, they were also bestial in their condition of "Caribes". In this way, the
justification of slave subjugation or its physical liquidation was fully conformed in the vision that
the conqueror and the colony elaborated of the "Indian". However, one more element must be
added. The fact is that the conquerors, likewise, faced an unimaginable cultural diversity in our
continent. A large number of groups of cultures and languages occupied particular spaces as long
and wide as the whole geography. Such diversity, likewise, became part of the vision about the
"Indian". Given the idea according to which the world was homogeneous or, at least, capable of
being so under the aegis of a single religion and a single political-economic order, that diversity was
totally abominable. Therefore, a new way of conceiving the original inhabitants of America was
concretized from the term "Indian", with which the entire indigenous population was homogenized
while they tried to erase the diversity of their cultures. But, also, the term "Indian" had a
homogenizing synthesis through content, in turn, of the visions previously described but that can be
summarized in the following definition: "living" without being product of the condition of their race
were evidently "inferior".
Throughout the colonial period, this concept became an unobjectionable "truth". On its basis
the whole system of colonial/imperial domination was structured and still persisted during the
independence period and the formation of the nation-states in our republican era. The idea of an
"empty continent", or
"The Christian concept of world civilization implied the emptying of a continent. By one side meant to
programmatically understand the New World as an empty continent of history, of real communities and life; on
the other, it supposed the establishment in that emptied world of the logical and universal principle of a
transcendental and absolute identity: the empty I, the colonizer subject" ix.
In this way, the principle of "emptiness," equally corresponding to the idea of "non-being" of the
original peoples, bases the colonial/imperial system and its continuity, the colonial-internal system,
which implied the consideration of the original cultures as objects that can be "domesticated",
"assimilated" or "integrated" in the historical process marked by the idea of progress towards
modernity and whose goal is set by the Western European countries.
From this essential vision, the social sciences have not escaped and, very particularly, in the
Philosophy. In fact, they have been responsible for producing the readings and adjustments of those
western concepts, categories and models capable of being introduced into our "non-being", in order
to fill our "emptiness" and, in this way, make our "visibility"; that is, to make ourselves visible in
the "universal" concert of modernity. In its effort to detect and construct the elements of "being"
Latin American, Philosophy and History have started from the supposed "a-historical" condition, or
at least prehistoric of the original peoples and cultures of America that, in any case, and only in
relation to the "great civilizations" can be objects of a symbolic claim in the conformation of an
identity, but not as living elements capable of providing a model civilization in the definition of the
social, religious or cultural system, and even less, economic-political system of our nations. It is, in
any case, a past concluded, that at most, could revere itself even with "respect", but it is unable to
be heard or to feel, then, his "visibility" only has mural-like quality, a fresco that is engraved but
immovable, a mark of "our exoticism", but irrelevant and archaic when it comes to the possibility of
being seriously considered as a way of life, as a worldview, as Philosophy. Therefore, Latin
American philosophers and historians have believed in starting from "zero" in their endeavor to
give us a face. In that effort, the routes have followed the same course and, of course, culminate in
the same emptiness and, in this way, that is, by starting from this false premise that is built and
justifies the impossibility of culminating in a proposal that is not the more or less authentic
adaptation of the same categories that the West provides to fill our "emptiness" of "being" or, to
clarify- Salazar Bondy's words:
 "It's about the fact that philosophy has started among us from scratch; that is, without the support of a
vernacular intellectual tradition that indigenous thinking was not incorporated into process of Spanish-
American philosophy."x
In function of this objective, we start from the inherited idea of colonial/imperial thought according
to which there is a "unique history", which is equivalent to saying that there is a culture "Unique"
and, therefore, there will be a single philosophy, in the same line of trajectory for the that all the
peoples of the world are advancing inexorably, in the same direction as the modernity and progress.
The fact that some peoples, such as Latin America, had not reached so far or, is lagging behind on
that path, in part, owes precisely to its "failure" in the process of cultural homogenization; that is,
the unique construction of culture or a unique culture for which, the annihilation of past of the
original peoples or their definitive integration into the "majority culture" is primordial task; what
undoubtedly extends our condition of "emptiness" over time and our "non-being" Westerners.
For the Latin American historical and philosophical tradition,
"The unique future with a unique culture, is out of the question; even more, that must be the foundation of
hope. And that is a vision shared by apparently opposite ideologies, such as currents of Marxism, on the one
hand, and those of capitalist liberal thought, on the other. "xi
What we intend to say and, properly speaking, is that the idea of the "empty" and "non-being" Latin
American has its origin in a ethnocentric and Eurocentric vision according to which, the original
inhabitant of America was and is unable to produce any philosophical contribution, given his
condition of inferior "race". In any case, their contributions are eminently "folkloric", part of the
"cultural heritage", but never "essence" that forms a particular Latin American worldview; that is,
non-Western.
Thus, the construction of a Latin American Philosophy has been subject to the notions of
"emptiness" and "non-being" of the Latin American, as heirs of the "emptiness" and the "non-being"
of their original peoples or, as Zea rightly points out: "The new philosophy in the name of progress,
civilization and even Humanity in the abstract will deny if not only the full humanity of Latin
American, its fullness "xii.
In any case, for some authors, if the construction of a Latin American philosophy is possible
it cannot be if it is the result of the construction of a single story and a single culture, homogeneous
and solidly constituted; the history and unique culture that summarize what is considered its
essential contents that would define a "being"; that is, the disappearance of "emptiness"; but equally,
the history and unique culture where the presence of the original peoples must be understood as past
concluded by defeated. Getting them to consider this is not possible, it is to risk that the project ends
up representing an aberration and a setback, then, that constitutes the image of what should no
longer be, it is the image of "emptiness" that with great theoretical and intellectual effort, history
and philosophy have been proposed to fill with content, of "being". Unfortunately, and, as we will
see more ahead, this search, without the presence of the thought of the original peoples, has not
been but the expression of the process that some authors call the coloniality of knowledge, the
expression of the coloniality of power still present in Latin America and that, in the current
moments, has entered into severe crisis before the crisis of the contemporary western social
sciences.

Latn American Philoeophy and Coloniality of kno ledge

The establishment of the colonial/imperial system with the conquest and colonization of America,
was not only the implementation of a system of political-economic domination in a determined
region but it also made possible the structuring, for the first time in history, of a global economic-
political system. That according to which, the colonialist nations had the right to occupy and exploit
territories and human groups was a function of development, both of their own economies and of
what they considered the "Humanity", that is, "Their humanity".
But every political-economic project requires an ideological substratum of support, very
weak though this may be. In this case, the colonial/imperial system was structured on the basis of
the concept of "race" as a justifying floor. The concept of race, in this way, naturalized relations of
domination while justifying such relationships for the supposed immanent inferiority of the
dominated. It was, in effect, the application of the principle of natural slavery of Aristotle. In this
way, the inferiority of the "race" of Native Americans not only justified the expropriation of their
territories and their exploitation and servitude, but that incapacitated as producers of judgment, of
reason. For example, Edgardo Lander quotes J. Locke in his Government treatise when he says:
"Let him (the man) plant in some inland, vacant places of America," that man thus colonizes empty lands of
America, a territory that can be considered legally empty because it is not populated by individuals who
respond to the requirements of their own conception, to a form of occupation and exploitation of the land that
produces, above all, law, and rights, most importantly, individuals "10.
In this way we arrive to the establishment of the language of the owner and private property.
Therefore, this idea does not correspond, in any way, to the attractive vision of a lone thinker but,
on the contrary, it corresponds with a vision of the world, a paradigm of an entire culture in a
historical moment and, perhaps even between us and, as the "ours" of ourselves. All the later history
of America is based on two articulated processes: that of modernity and the colonial organization of
the world based the concept of "race". But, equally, "with the beginning of colonialism in America,
not only the colonial organization of the world but - simultaneously - the colonial constitution of
knowledge, of languages, memory and the imaginary "xiii. Well, Europe not only concentrated within
its power all of the natural or mineral resources as part of the new pattern of world power. Europe
did not only control world production and organized the relations of production based on racial
differences but it also concentrated, under its hegemony, the control of all forms of subjectivity, of
culture and, of course, of knowledge. In the words of Aníbal Quijano,
"They expropriated colonized populations -among their cultural discoveries- those who they were more apt for
the development of capitalism and for the benefit of the European center. Secondly, they repressed as much as
they could, that is, in measured variables, depending on the case, the forms of knowledge production of the
colonized, their sensory production patterns, their symbolic universe, their patterns of expression and
objectification of subjectivity "xiv
It is this, then, the framework in which scientific discourses and moral theories were
institutionalized, jurisprudence and critical discourses and the production of art in Latin American
discourses that, in their essence, did nothing but record the ontological rupture that the system of
colonial/imperial domination was built: through the idea of "race". Paradoxically, this basic idea
would not have been possible if it had not come from one of the fundamental separations produced
in Western culture, and that comes from the Judeo-Christian separation between God, man and
nature. Namely, the idea that God made the world causes the world to be separated from God and,
therefore, lose all sacred condition. In turn, the fact that God made man in his image and similarity
allows this one (man), dominion and control over non-sacred nature by God's will. Such an
ontological rupture between reason and the world, implies that the world loses its significance and
appears before man as a dead element, as an object of property and destruction. This difference with
indigenous thought, as we will see in the next section of this work, is profound and radical.
This, then, is the framework on which discourse and thought in the search for the Latin
American "being" was founded; that is the construction of their Philosophy. Hence, many of the
deniers of the possible existence of a Latin American Philosophy insist on the need that
"philosophy" has for a general, universal and historical system for its existence. The heirs of
Eurocentrism, unable to detach from the coloniality of knowledge, do not find any possibility to
construct a proper thought, unless it is not a specific adaptation to "Universal philosophical
systems" specially developed by the West.
But still the proponents of the certain possibility of the origin of a Latin American
Philosophy are based on the premise that such a possibility is only given as an act of one's own will,
for reasons of "thinking" from a space and in an "independent" way or in function of independence.
For them, it is about the exercise of reason in function of our particular problems, analyzed and
rationalized from and with the philosophical categories provided by the West but submitted to the
rigor of our spaces of particular problems that, in any case, the past must leave behind. Everything
that represented the colonial/imperial model, as well as everything that destroyed or "invisibilized"
the original cultures corresponds to that past that, in the current moments, is only possible to find in
the backlogs that our countries show before modernity or development. But that is a stumbling
block that the wise use of Philosophy and Western science, very well can help us resolve and settle.
In short, it is about the continuity of lack of awareness and negation of other forms of
thought, the wisdom and knowledge of the thought of the original cultures of America, these will
never become forms of "thinking" and "knowing" properly speaking, minimized by concepts such as
"animism", or magical or mythical "exoticism", they will never fit the dimensions of a philosophical
system proper, that is, of that according to the established colonial model.
This ethnocentric disqualification of "thought" entirely corresponds to the establishment of
the colonial/imperial system. That, even after the independence and constitution of the republics
persists to this day. This is true because of the rupture of the supposed process of independence and
the republican period with the formation of the Nation-States on the continent. It did not imply a
break with the colonial system of thought; on the contrary, this process reproduced in its essence a
system that generates what has been called internal colonialism that is nothing other than the
reproduction of a colonial system whose operation is based on the denial of the "other" that "is
present" but "is not", it only "is" as a symbolic image of the past. In this way the continuity is with
coloniality insofar as it insists on its identification with thought and "being" western.
The coloniality of knowledge is nothing other than the institutionalization in America of the
Western thought as the "only" way to explain our "being". That is the basis on which all our
institutions, especially the academic ones, have been raised, they are those that reproduce the
fundamental principles of what we have been calling Eurocentrism. In this sense, we share with
Edgardo Lander that in this worldview the central axis is the notion of modernity, which
encompasses four basic dimensions: 1) the universal vision of history associated with the idea of
progress; 2) the "naturalization" of social relations as "human nature" in liberal-capitalist society;
3) the naturalization and ontologization of the multiple separations of that society and, finally, 4) the
necessary superiority of the knowledge that this society produces (the science) above all other
knowledge.xv
The universal character that European historical experience imposes as well as the different
forms of knowledge that it develops in the process of understanding its own reality, become the
coloniality of knowledge, the only valid way to understand that and all realities. "This knowledge thus
becomes the pattern from which can analyze and detect the shortcomings, delays, brakes and perverse impacts that are
given as product of the primitive or traditional in all other societies. "xvi
Therefore, Latin American Philosophy must possess that same "universal" condition. Thus,
the cultural diversity evident in Latin America, generated by the millennial presence of original
cultural diversity becomes a stumbling block from where responses from the process of integration
and assimilation of the so-called indigenismos, the historical repetition of "invisibility", much more,
have been given. They are considered minorities without the ability or the political quality to
influence the national or continental society.
The process of the naturalization of modernity becomes an unavoidable and unique reality,
by nature, to which all the peoples of the world are obliged to face. So, in the construction of Latin
American political-economic systems a Philosophy has to make use of and the adaptation of
successful models of modern thinking. In this meaning, the presence of the original cultures in the
current level of development of the modernity becomes, for our countries, a "problem" to resolve
and for which, a Latin American Philosophy, also, has to produce answers. The calls for theories of
Latin American identity and Folklore studies have contributed enormously to the idea of the
indigenous as a symbolic element of identity but only up to that point. Therefore, any other higher
consideration would imply a break with the "naturalness" of the modernity that is understood as
unique and irreversible.
The ontological condition of the dualisms and separations elaborated by the West are also a
determining factor in the non-consideration of peoples' thought originating as part of a Latin
American Philosophy in that, such separations do not exist for that kind of thought. Thus, the
man/nature separation; primitive/civilized, backwardness/progress; etc., are still part of the
conceptual and epistemological framework of our thinkers all of which, makes them impervious to
the indigenous vision in which such supposedly contradictory dualities are not so and, for that
matter, make man Western always a stranger, individual in the world, that which grieves him.
Finally, the supposed superiority of western knowledge and thought have also become part
of the entire institutional and academic skeleton of our Latin American societies. We understand
"science" as a superior form of knowledge, we also understand as Philosophy that which is
validated by the system built for that purpose. All thinking outside of such system or, not subject to
it, can be considered as "idiosyncrasy"; "a peculiar way of seeing the world"; "folklore", "magical,
religious or mythical vision "and, at the most and with great effort, "thought", always at a level
much lower than what is considered a Philosophy as such; that is, as it occurs in the West.
In this way, the consideration of the possible existence of an Indigenous Philosophy or a
philosophizing of indigenous peoples in Latin America is plainly discarded by many. Therefore, to
raise such a consideration supposes an unacceptable disproportion unvalued by western
philosophical "wisdom". In any case, it can be accepted as a particular "thought" and susceptible to
be the object of study of its own "Philosophy". Accepting such a possibility would imply a real
break with the foundations of that which has represented and still represents the coloniality of
knowledge that, we know, is not possible without the prior existence of a coloniality of power, the
political structure on which it exists, precariously and in the midst of the worst and permanent crisis
of contradictions, our Latin American countries.
Accepting the real existence of an indigenous philosophy supposes the rupture with a vision
of time and history on which all the political, economic, social and cultural scaffolding has been
built throughout these 500 years of Latin American existence. It is recognizing that the "vacuum"
has been elsewhere and not precisely where it was placed from the conquest until present. It would
be, practically, a new conversion; this time, of another sign and made by others. A conversion that
happens by accepting our non-western condition. It does not leave this approach to feeling out
utopia. However, I have there our dilemma; while the philosophy of the native peoples is not
assumed as forming a fundamental part of a Latin American Philosophy it will be impossible to this
same task or, as Quijano says:
"Here the tragedy is that we have all been driven, knowingly or not, willing or not, to see and accept that
image as ours and as belonging to us only. That way we are still what we are not. And as a result we can never
identify our true problems, much less solve them, except in a partial and distorted way. " xvii

Philoeophy of "Being" and "Doing"

We will depart at this point from the given facts and according to which, all people who have
created a language possesses a particular worldview expressed in its language, a manifestation of a
thought system; that is, of a philosophy. "In other words, all peoples have their language (...), every
people is philosophizing in their philosophy. It does not matter if the academic philosophers
recognize or not."xviii Inasmuch as every language incorporates the vision of the world of its
speakers, then, these speakers consciously or unconsciously express their way of seeing reality
according to a cosmovision structured in their language. Talking does not correspond to a mere
individual act but, is substantive of the speaker's culture, it is the activation of their thinking system
every time he speaks.
Thus, for example, for the Añuu in the Lake Maracaiboxix region, their first impression
generated by the presence of the conquerors configure and register with the word phrase: "Ayouna"
an expression through which the action of "arriving", "docking" or "emerging" from/by "them". In
effect, the word-phrase is structured syntactically with the affixes: a- whose presence attributes an
action lived directly by one subject and not another. The affix -y- that indicates a directionality in a
displacement and that, when in position prior to the verb -ou- "emerge", implies the action of arrival
or arrival. Finally, the personal pronoun "na", which corresponds to the third person of the plural:
"they". Trying to make a more or less literal translation of the phrase we would have something like:
"from there / arrived / them" or, a less literal and much more generic: "the close ones". How is it
possible to observe, the organization of the phrase implies that "they" have been "emerged" by the
action of an element that is understood: the waters. Therefore, "they" is a subject more experiential
than agent; that is, it suffers more than an action. Such "action" experience is typical of all the
elements present in the world and that is how they are defined by your "to be". The syntactic
structure of the phrase speaks to us, from its construction, of the existence of a correspondence
between the naming and the thought that makes the construction of the given name, then, of certain,
"1] Through language we name reality; 2] we name reality as we perceive it; 3] By belonging to different
cultures and nations, we do not all have the same perception of reality. Therefore, 4] we relate in different
ways to the same reality. In conclusion, the languages make us grasp the different worldviews of different
cultures (...), we underline the intimate link between language, culture and society "xx
Thus, the way the Añuu name the conquerors corresponded to a vision according to which, all
things are defined either by their "being" and/or by their "doing" in the world. In this case, those
who "emerged" "from or from there" performed the same operation that the Añuu in the mythical
time in which they sprang from e'inmatualeexxi to "be" in the world. Therefore, the one that
performs the same action as the original Añuu is configured as an "equal", although different. This
is fundamental to understanding the historical fact of the difference in the interpretation of the
presence of the conqueror in the Lake Maracaibo basin for the different cultures that, in effect,
inhabited the area. Thus, if for the Añuu the conquerors were at first "an equal though different", for
the Wayuu, they were" alijuna "; that is, "mounted molars". For the Wayuu, inhabitants of the semi-
desert zones of today's Guajira Peninsula, in effect, it was not about "different equals", but about
real strangers that very quickly brought to light the condition by which, from the first vision they
provoked, they reject them [the conquerors]. Therefore, naming is not only a vision of what is done
but in its conceptualization as a product of interpretation within the framework of a worldview of a
culture about the event itself. On the other hand, the different name will also generate different
behaviors on the part of indigenous groups with regarding the presence of the conqueror.
However, it is convenient to further clarify the context about that first vision definition
Añuu. Indeed, the first European incursion into the Lake region of Maracaibo is made by Americo
Vespucci with Alonso de Ojeda and it was fundamental. The visit was mainly exploratory; that is,
without any interest in populate or produce settlements in the area. The first designation from the
Añuu population with which Vespucci primarily makes contact, because these are the inhabitants of
its banks, was made completely in accordance with the sustenance of their expressed worldview in
their language that links the Añuu to the action of emerging and, of course, living the waters. The
Wayuu, the Bari and the Yukpas will not come in contact with the Europeans until much later, in the
process of colonization of the territory. So, it was not Ambrosio D'Alfinger who, on behalf of the
German bankers known as the Welser, takes possession of the region and ventures into it with the
very precise objective of extract in the shortest possible time, everything that can be shipped as
wealth. There was not, then, in that second European incursion, the slightest intention of exploring
to describe or make cartographies (in Vespucci's case), or to found or settle. That raid was, properly
speaking, of eminent plunder. It was disappointing for the looters and terrible for the Indians.
Unlike other regions of America, that of the Venezuelan West was nothing but a region on its north
and east side at lake, semi-desert, without gold, or silver, or pearls, and, in the south and west, a
tropical jungle humid and hot, conducive to diseases for strangers and populated by Indians
disposed to combat. So, in that first stage of the conquest and population of the region, with the
only thing that D'Alfinger and his men could carry was enslaved humans of those who, the Añuu,
became the majority of the contingent. It is from this second incursion and, the successive ones,
(Alonso de Ojeda and later, Alonso Pacheco), that both their denomination and the position against
the Europeans changed. For the Añuu, the "ayouna" are now "waunnü": "the one who kills us",
"evil spirit that appropriates the soul of men." Thus, peace has been broken and the new definition,
equally corresponding to the worldview, it is no longer made from "being" but in function of the
"doing" of the other in the world; so, by virtue of "being" the whites are "Ayouna" that emerged in
the waters, that in their vision makes them men, but under of their "doing", obviously, they are not
human beings.
This is basic to understanding the thinking system of many of the original cultures of
America. As it is possible to observe, the definitions are not made by virtue of separations or
separations generating contradictory dualities around what defines the "being". However, they are
produced; first, for the effective consideration of its "presence", of his "being" in the world. In this
sense, it is very important to emphasize that in the languages of the indigenous groups that we have
mentioned (we were about to say that in all the indigenous languages of America), there is no verb
"to be", but the syntactic structure fundamental to these languages is given from the verb "estar" [to
be]. Second, the definitions are produced by the consideration of "doing" what is "in" the world.
Thus, there is no separation or difference between things and men, between nature and men, then,
both "are" in the world and, both of them have a determined "to do" that is what differentiates them
but which, however, is in turn determined by virtue of its no difference by "being".
This relationship of "being" and "doing" generates a new element in such a system of
thought that defines it in a unique way. It is the fact that, not having differences between man and
things, man and nature, results in "everything lives", then, everything has its "to do". Even the dead
have their "being" and their "doing"; is say to live. Let's better explain this with a new relationship.
Joukai is the word to designate in Añuu both the one who is born a boy and the day when
there is barely a dawn. Conformed by j- (singular third person pronoun "he"); -ou- (already
mentioned verb "emerge") and -kai (which in addition to the masculine indicator suffix is, likewise,
noun of "sun"). Its reverse, the "dead", is designated by the word-phrase: outikai, composed of -ou-
(emerge); -Ti suffix distancing indicator or distance and, "kai", already described. As is evident,
both the one that is born and the one that dies performs the same action of "emerge" the difference
is given because, in the case of "dead", its action of "emerging" is towards distancing, it is
understood: distance from world of the living but that is comparable to the end or the death of the
day. However, the "is" (still) present in the world although distanced from the vision of the "living";
but that "being distanced" will also define an equally different "doing" that is corresponding to his
"being".
It is not our intention, nor is it the opportunity, to continue along this line that we consider
fundamental for the understanding of Latin American indigenous philosophy. Our intention is to fix
these three elements that are essential and that can be found in a large part of the systems of thought
of the cultures of Latin American indigenous people; namely, the principles of "being", "doing" and
the fact that "everything lives" that, in our opinion, configure a framework within which everything
is structured the system of thought contained in the very structure of the language. In other words,
we agree with Lenkersdorf by saying that,
"Languages contain in themselves cosmovisions that explain the particularities of the linguistic structures,
idiomatic expressions and, in total, the idiosyncrasy of languages determined. In this way, they extend through
all the branches of the languages and make up guidelines for philosophizing."xxii.
Likewise, these three central principles are going to imply answers in the social order that will be
revealed. The fact that "everything lives", then, everything that "is" has its "doing" results that man
is always responsible in his relations with the nature, then, such a relationship occurs between equal
elements, between interacting subjects "making" life possible within a vision of harmony. There is
not, then, the relationship subject-object, born of the vision of separation between man and nature,
which supposes the determination of a system of behavior governed by an ethics of the same
quality, of a conception of justice and of an equally corresponding social order. In other words,
"Cosmovisions are related to the behavior of people, because this does not contradict the cosmovisions, and
thus the cosmo-experiences that, in turn, are made explicit in philosophizing ethics and the field of justice. In
short, the presence of the worldview in all the bifurcations of the branches of the language, conforms in
different ways in the philosophizing of a nation or a determined culture ".xxiii
Thus, the concepts of property, production, work and, of course, social relations both in production
and among humans in general, will correspond to these idiomatic ramifications that express the
vision of the world and the norms of a resulting coexistence. That, in the case of the original
populations, are completely contrary to those imposed by the European conquest, colonization and
its current expression in the internal colonialism of the contemporary nation-states.
However, and as a very important point to finish this section, we believe it is vital to
reference the fact that for many Amerindian cultures the condition of such is not given but by comes
about by rigorous observation of such constitutive principles of its system of thought. That is to say,
and, following the example of Añuu, the fact of considering "equal different" to Europeans is
closely related to the interpretation of principle of "being". Thus, the idea of "race" is canceled by
principles of greater transcendence. In other words, for the Añuu, anyone who in their "being" and
in their "doing" corresponds to your worldview is an equal, is an Añuu: a human being that emerges
in world to be and to make it, while doing it.
In the same sense, the teacher Lenkersdorf points out in the case of the Tojolabales, who
"Tojol" is not a question that is definitively defined by the origin of the womb, it is rather a
condition determined by the "doing" of men so, "Tojol" becomes a challenge for everyone.
Reaching the "tojol" is always a "Tojol", that is, "tojolabalizar"; what it is like saying to become a
true man. Finally, what we want to draw attention to is the fact that you are "[we are] Indians by
commitment and not for reasons of race, not to wear sandals or things like that. From the Tojolabal perspective, the
same criteria are applied in reverse. We are not Indians because we identify with the dominant society. " xxiv
So it is possible to produce the inverse process on which we have marched so far and that
has been imposed through the coloniality of power and knowledge the so-called dominant culture.
However, for this it is essential to consider these cosmovisions in the process of building a Latin
American philosophy, which supposes to understand its fundamental principles as well as to discard
prejudices that have been built throughout our history. It implies a shake up of everything that we
have understood our "being". Generally, it is about accommodated interpretations, sometimes, in a
forced way, of western concepts and models. All of which constitutes the challenge that the
Tojolabales speak to us or "do" in a world in which "everything lives", as posed by the Añuu and
that the West disqualifies with the "nickname" of animism but that implies an ethical notion of the
world that is able to enhance the sense of man's responsibility to the world and that he is responsible
only and, precisely, for being free.

The Popol Vuh Livee

In 1994, when the indigenous uprising in Chiapas took place, the surprise was not the armed
uprising of an indigenous population, how many times have they occurred over a long history
beginning with the conquest until today? Thus, a new indigenous rebellion, a new Latin American
guerrilla would not have surprised anyone nor would it have generated so much coverage in
national and international media, unless the definition of their combat slogan was, precisely, to raise
weapons to destroy weapons; that is, an armed rebellion whose openly stated goal is not to "take
political power." In such a way, although it sounds paradoxical and even contradictory, the
indigenous people of Chiapas did not take up arms because they believe in the war but for believing
in peace. Hence, their rebellion was armed and is subject to a very superior slogan to the power of
arms. It says that their aspiration is to be themselves: indigenous, autonomous, free and dignified
communities. It is in this way that we can understand what serves as motivation in one of his first
statements to the world:
"We talk with each other, we look inside ourselves and we look at our history: we saw our oldest grandparents
suffer and fight, we saw our parents with fury in their hands, we saw that not everything had been taken away
from us, that we had the most valuable thing, what made us live, that made our steps rise above plants and
animals, and we saw brothers, that was dignity all we had, and we saw that the shame of having forgotten it
was great, and we saw that dignity was good for men to be men again, so it returned to live in our heart, and
we were still new, and our dead called us, again, to dignity and to the fight "xxv.
These words, are not only loaded with great poetry, that's the least important part, rather that poetry
has the forcefulness of real dignity in action, in movement. It is also necessary to observe that the
road to hidden dignity is not easy to find after the shame of years of domination. The search is
inward and, we are not talking about inner metaphysical meditations, about individual yoga
exercises, we are talking about a collective internal search only possible to perform through
something so obvious and, at the same time, invisible as collective work; the work and the fight
from the "us".
Within that inner perspective, not only is the hidden dignity rescued under layers of shame
that was generated by centuries of domination, of denial, of that "emptiness" to which everything
was thrown as a civilizational model but also the rescue of a language that equally corresponds to
that vision of the world, which emerges alive, back, as coming from the depths of the imaginary.
Thus, the call becomes alien to any of the political declarations of rebel or revolutionary movements
of Latin America. The call is not only for the indigenous communities, not even for the Mexican
nation in particular but, effectively, the call is addressed to the entire continent and the world.
In this way it is possible to understand then, why just a small set of communities that make
up the great state of Chiapas, is shaking a whole country of more than 100 million inhabitants and
moving the whole world? The dimension of this approach does not have to do with a transformation
of national laws in favor of indigenous laws. It is not a list of economic, social, cultural and policies
exclusively for the Indian peoples. It is not a new requirement of recognition of the existence of
different cultures or members of a global nation-state. It is not about the demand for a better
government, a more understandable government, capable of sitting down to "hear" the approaches
of the communities (one that listens to them is another thing). What has been raised has to do with
the construction of a new model of country and of society; a general transformation of the nation-
state itself and that can not occur but from their own collectivities. They are not demanding a treaty,
although this may be a political step in the process, but it's not just that. It is not the requirement of
a new legal constitution, written, proclaimed and loaded in the pocket to be shown. It is another
much more simple and utopian, in the best sense of the term. Its about an approach to the
construction of a new civilizatory model, with new ways of understanding coexistence, democracy
and social participation, based on other systems of thought radically different from that which until
now has governed our destiny; it is about construction from the "we"; that is, it is our re-
construction. That "we" implies the defenestration of the idea of "power", fundamental notion for
the political system of the West and on which the colonial/imperial system and the internal
colonialism that still persists and, for which, the subject has to be converted, necessarily, in object,
in the same stratification process and by the action of the same power structures. However, we must
say that the idea of power is not parallel to capitalism but, from the moment the State arises, the
relations of power are established as a "natural" condition to the State itself.
Power relations separate relationships between citizens and drive political decisions,
turning the latter into a matter of "professionals" for those that the common is not prepared and, so
it has to entrust them to those who, from that moment become "those who rule", the rest, "those
who obey". We have said that such an assertion not only corresponds to liberal-capitalist thought
but, precisely because it is granted a "natural" condition, the "Left" have assumed it, not only as
necessary, but as inevitable.
The Zapatista approach is its ultimate aspiration is not precisely that it becomes "the
struggle for power". It is not only in a deep questioning against the old thought of "modernity" in its
liberal version, but also, in its Marxist version of history and social struggles. But through this
approach of the indigenous people of Chiapas and its Zapatista organization, it is possible to root it
within a vision of the world that necessarily extracts it from traditional anti-systemic movements,
putting the emphasis, precisely, on a conception of the world corresponding to the imaginary and a
thought system of another radically non-Western civilization.
The principle of "leading by obeying" is strongly opposed to the "leading by commanding"
idea of power as a "professional" exercise; what implies a denial of power, corresponding to the
vision according to which the order of the world is defined by the "being" and the "doing" of all
things in the world; that is, by a relationship between equals in the process of "making" the world.
In other words, what we want to make clear is that the political approach of the indigenous
movement of Chiapas accentuates a reconstruction of the world, which assumes a new way ("that
of the first ones") of seeing the world and of relating to it, what will lead us to a new way ("that of
dignity") of relating to men between the men. Relationships to be given not through power
relations, but through those of consensus, determined by the search from the "we", to build what is
good and the beautiful in one inseparable action.
As we see, it is not a pragmatic political program of a political organization, but of
guidelines corresponding to a system of thought that is much grainier and complex. In other words,
it's about that for the first time, and, firmly, indigenous thought is proposed as a political philosophy
capable of encouraging a project of transformation in the midst of the crisis of our nations. It is
indigenous thinking in its political concretion that is presented as a path and hope, as a possible
utopia.
In this sense, they recover from memory the central principles that constitute their vision of
world and contextualize them. Then, despite the opinion of many of its deniers (both right and left),
the approach of the indigenous people of Chiapas is not a proposal to a return to the Mayan past. It
is a recovery of what in the construction of our "emptiness", the coloniality of power and the
coloniality of knowledge has hidden but that it is still there, deep in us, saying and giving reason
why our steps they rise on plants and animals. It is a recovery of "dignity" that defines us and that,
from now and into the future, has to guide our "being" and our "do".

Confidence, language and orldvie

*1

(Truet in Añuu thinking)

Truetng the ord and the Añuu vieion of truet

At the outset, we must say that there is not a word in the Añuuxxvi language that can directly refer us
to the meaning of trust; even more, we fear that this occurs in most languages of the original
cultures of America. This fact, without a doubt has its causes and, of course, generates implications
that will certainly constitute the essential motive of this work.
But, whatever it may be, we can not help but share the general idea according to which,
"Trust (...) is a basic fact of social life"xxvii, which is why we force ourselves to find in the Añuu
language a term or proposition that comes close or, better said, that accounts, in some way, for that
feeling, which only becomes possible in the context and in the process of constructing what
constitutes their worldview; that is, their system of thought. Likewise, in the execution or daily
concretion of that worldview there is what we call cosmo-experience [cosmovivencia]xxviii and
within which (it is common to all cultures), the community is continually striving to resolve the
need to "Recognize what is foreign and make it familiar"xxix; that is, to make familiar the unknown.
By this we mean that the fact of the inexistence of a term directly equivalent to that of trust,
does not necessarily suggest the absence of the fact of trust as a social phenomenon or as inherent to
the functioning of the community. Without it however, we can not fail to draw attention to this
point, therefore, this omission or lack of presence does suggest in some way that the idea or concept
of trust is in the Añuu, at least, differently, which is in direct relation to a world view that is
radically different from the West and of which language accounts for its omission or its different
way of naming it. This is so because, in effect, "The language is not separated from the way we see
the world, but it manifests our worldview "xxx
The fact of trust is expressed not only by different words by virtue of the difference of
languages but, even referring to the same fact, the speakers (of the Spanish and Añuu), can not
name it using the same syntactic structures for how much, indeed, they do not see it from the same
perspective or, rather, can not see it in the same way, they do not see the same thing nor the same
fact.
In effect, the language; that is, every language is constituted while expressing in images
(raw material of the conceptsxxxi), ideas, the world of ideas, all of which is not another thing that the
configuration of a thinking: the thinking of culture. It is possible to capture because, although it is
true that society needs language as a medium for communication, it is no less true that language, in
addition to presupposing activities, people and things that you name and record, is also an important

1 Article presented at the Seminar "Self-knowledge and identity in philosophy, social sciences and literature" facilitated
by Dr. Carlos Pereda. UNAM-Mexico 2003.
influence in the doing of men as soon as they conform their thinking and their actions. It is there that
the interaction between language and society is indisputable.
Definitively,
"When we speak, we name the things we see as we see them. The naming function is inserted in the culture to
which we belong. It is not an individual act that occurs in each one of us every time we are talking. Because of
the social insertion we do not usually become aware of the fact that with language we name reality, we name
the world we see "xxxii.
Thus, returning to our point of departure, the inexistence of a term is definitively substantiated in
the Añuu language to designate the idea of trust. Instead, we can register its existence as a fact; in at
least two ways, both corresponding to the two aspects that we consider central to the system of
Añuu thought and, according to which, everything is defined according to being as the presence of
the subject in the world, and, as far as doing what corresponds. It is known that for everything that
is, it is in the world as it expresses itself through its doing. In other words, for the Añuu everything
is defined in relation to the way of being in the world and, at the same time, in as to what this being
has in itself its doing in virtue of which, it is defined and named.
In this sense, the noun trust can be built in the language of the men of water according to
two elements: a) You have confidence about what is shown in a good state; b) it is possible to trust
in that or that which, in the exercise of its doing, is done well; that is, it is shown as effectively
complementary to everything that surrounds it or with who it is related. Thus, the word confidence
in the Añuu language can be expressed by: kanaraa, which is configured by the root: -ana- referred
to "well", "good" prefixed by the attributive k- that grants the property of the good or that has the
property of being good, finally, the suffix -raa that is a kind of superlative that when accompanying
the term thus created, it asserts the condition of reliable because it is very good, appears as very
good or because it acts very well or, for good. In other words, only what is presents and acts well or,
for good, is reliable or is trustworthy.
On the other hand, it is important to highlight the fact that in the Añuu language there is no
verb "to be", a category that appears as essential for Western thought. A) Yes, we can say that the
philosophy of the Añuu is determined by these conditions: being, the doing, and the non-existence
of the verb "to be" and, these three conditions indisputably determine the character and conditions
in which men's relationships occur with the world and nature; the relationships between the Añuu
themselves and, finally, the relations of the Añuu with the "others". By this we mean that trust is not
an immanent state of the subject, but the result of a way of being in the world, what you can only
show through the full exercise of your doing. That is equivalent to saying, permanently act as a
complementary subject and be complemented by others, that is, to be present through very good
work in their relationships with others.
Let's try to explain this much better. For this, we will allow ourselves a relative detour.
Woulee is a term used as self-definition or self-identification by the Añuu. Its meaning is linked to
space and the way in which its presence occurs in that space. This can be deduced from the
observation of the internal structure of the term in which: w- corresponds to the pronoun of the first
person plural "we"; -oues an existential verb that implies "emerge" or "sprout". We say that it is a
verb existential following the definition of Lenkersdorfxxxiii in the sense that in the presence of this
type of verb, the subject of the sentence does not execute an action but, rather, lives it or
experiences it Finally, -lee, which is a possible location suffix to translate as "from here" or "in this
place".
So we have the term woulee, it's more of a sentence with full meaning in nominative
functions and whose translation could be: "we emerge from here". Such a phrase is used, as we have
said, as a term of self-identification without becoming, but rather as an indicator of origin or, better,
belonging to the place, to the waters where the Añuu "are". In this way, the condition of "emerge"
imposes a belonging above the idea of property; this is, for the Añuu, by saying woulee, they
express their belonging to the place: the waters from which they emerge. Therefore, it is not
possible to have a property relation on the occupied space but quite the opposite.
That is on the one hand; on the other, it is understood that it has been and is the space that
makes life possible. In this sense, it is the world that fulfills the function of subject agent, whereas
men are, rather, in the position of experiential subjects, then, they live the experience of the action
executed by the water through its unspoken presence in the prayer woulee.
This idea is fundamental to understand what we have called being. It emerges from the
perspective of vision according to which the waters are a "living element", that emerge or make the
Añuu emerge. Thus they define themselves as men who belong to the water from which they have
emerged and lived from time immemorial until the present. They emerge from the waters to be and
execute their own doing. In this way, the condition of belonging to space and not vice versa,
determines that the relationship that the culture establishes with it is not in any way of confrontation
with nature, of which, no doubt, and, on the contrary, the culture understands it as something alive
as long as it is capable of giving life, yours included; that is, nature lavishes its own life as men and
as society. The world thus becomes totally reliable insofar as it is the one who provides the life and,
practically, stops or allows them to emerge in order to be in the world for the men with their own
doing.
It is this framework in which we can understand that which has been called trust. That is,
trust encompasses the internal and external and through which, one orders the sense of the world,
the meaning of man's relations with the world and the relationships between men. Being in the
world, for the Añuu, is trusting in the world with its doing that makes possible the life of everything
present, for it, the world is worthy of: kanaraa.
As we see, such reasoning is totally contrary to modern rationality. Beginning with Bacon
and Descartes until our days, nature and the world are strange, that is, unreliable, so, it is assumed,
to understand them and above all, to dominate them, man must be and remain definitively separate
from the world and nature in distrust of the being and doing of the world and nature. Man can rise
above the world and nature, dominate and control them (according to Bacon), or while we perceive
through the senses and since the senses can deceive us, the prudent thing is to not trust in what
deceives us (according to Descartes). In any case, it is understood that the truth is based, first of all,
on the distancing of man from the world and nature, and, secondly, the need for doubt and denial of
the world and the nature as such. It is this idea of truth founded on doubt and denial that allows
Western modernity to "reify" the world, objectifying it in a contrary way. Thus, it is only possible to
bend to obtain from it what is useful only to the man who thus has managed to rise above all
species, nature and the world.
In this way, if for the Añuu being in the world is, in truth, being within the world; for the
former, the truth is only possible to obtain it by standing outside or at a distance from which it is
possible for man to "observe" and "rationalize" the world. However, these confronted visions will
necessarily generate two concepts and two forms of exercise the fact of trust, which will be
manifested historically and in a manner very particular at the moment when both perspectives
confront each other.
However, and despite the fact that it is polemical to expose this point, we will leave it for
now and move on. We are interested in leaving one sufficiently poised to analyze how the evidence
of the fact of trust, both in the Añuu worldview contained in their language, as its exercise in the
daily life of its cosmo-survival.

"The 'doing' that makee ue".

Now, we have mentioned before that it is possible to record the fact of trust in the context of the
Añuu worldview, at least in two ways. The notion of trust in the Añu is built from the confluence of
two key ideas in which his worldview is sustained. In the previous section we made reference to one
of these key ideas, the relation between man-space as part of the relation man-world that is
expressed in the concept of to be that is manifest in the expression woulee.
The second key idea of this worldview is that which we have called the to do. In it, it is
understood that in the world "everything lives", and, as everything in the world has it in itself or
exercises a certain doing that equally defines it. In this way, everything has its to do "even the
stones" and this is possible because everything lives "even the dead. "
 This idea, present in many non-western cultures, has been cataloged by the anthropology as
"animism", a condition that is attributed to a primitivism supposedly proper to these cultures that are
considered prehistoric. This vision, almost a stigma, owes in part to that,
"The difference between the types of societies that have traditionally been studied by anthropologists,
traditional societies, and the types of societies in which they normally live, modern, has been raised in terms of
primitivism. But this could be better considered in terms of the development that these systems of thought and
action have been ordered and reinforced (...) from the old complex of inherited practices, accepted beliefs,
habitual judgments and emotions that were not taught "xxxiv.
That is, what is considered a "simple" or "magical" way of seeing the world, constitutes for these
cultures an angular point on which all the scaffolding of the social, material and, above all, ethical
life of society rests. Though this may be very foreign to the reality that this worldview can be
understood, it corresponds to a vision of the reality that is rooted in it and it is from there that one
establishes their familiarity with the world. We can not deny this is linked in part of its action with
religious belief but nevertheless, it is not this instance that defines it as such. In this sense, we
disagree with Luhman when referring expressly to these cultures, he states that:
"In simple social systems a safe way of life which, went beyond trust in other specific individuals, was
established (...) through assumptions based on religion about the existence of what is real, the natural and the
supernatural, through myth, language and natural law"33.
We must disagree because, in the first place, it is not possible to classify human societies as simple
and complex, since, in fact, there would be no way to demonstrate with certainty what that would
define the condition of simple in the universe of human and social relations that they are, by the
way, always complex. Such designation or classification seems to respond more to a reductionism of
the author, which makes for what in their language, is considered as belonging to reality. So, when
we say that for the Añuu culture everything lives even the stones, we do not try to signify a magical
condition of the culture or that effectively the Añuu believe that the stones could very well jump in
a certain moment and attack us like beasts. It is, in any case, that their presence in the world (that of
the stones), places them in the same horizontal plane with with respect to men who, in turn,
discover with their doing, the doing of stones, in terms of its "ability" to serve for making tools,
grinding hands or weapons for war.
In this way, trust in the context of the Añuu worldview only occurs in the constant execution
and harmony of these two key ideas which, are permanently intertwined in their daily life. Of last
account, the existence of the real or unreal thing is required in the language that is used, that is,
"reality is not what gives meaning to language but what is real or unreal is shown in the sense that
the language has". In other words: "Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given by the
language we use"xxxv. In this meaning, to better clarify without deviating from our subject, we return
to the Añuu language.
In effect, the verb to do in the Añuu language can be expressed in two ways; the first one
significantly refers to blowing, breathing or encouragement of the house, thus, aeiña is the
expression conformed by a- attributive prefix that singularly modifies the term that prefix, in this
case: e-noun of father, but that also corresponds to: breathing, blowing, in this sense, the noun is
verbalized to become: to encourage, to blow that acquires its final condition through -ña,
substantive of house as a home. Thus, aeiña is to make a home, to encourage the home. As we see,
in this meaning of doing the primordial is the condition of sustenance of the home, of the family.
The second, is more related to the meaning we intend, then, corresponds to the expression of
what is meant by the process of building a way of living, that is, is representative of everything that
makes up the true belonging to the culture, is, in end, the expression of your identity. We refer to the
expression: wakuwaipawa with which the Añuu define their condition as men of water by their
doing, which is only possible through a permanent exercise of its cosmo-experience that is only
achievable through the permanent vigilance of that doing according to their worldview throughout
their lives. We say this, because the Wakuwaipawa expression is linked to the meaning of process
of building a path resulting from a doing that is proper, particular, individually and socially. In other
words, we are what we do in the process of construction of our lives, individually and socially.
This is understandable insofar as the expression is configured by: wa- us, our; -ku- to walk,
to transit, to retrace; -waipa- our way, because: wa- us, our e, -ipa- stone, sand; and, finally, -awa
which is a reflective suffix whose presence causes the action to be reversed on the subject that
executes it. So, a possible translation of the phrase would be: we walk our own way. However, we
know that the use of this phrase only applies to all those things that they do or, better, what men
must do to "be" real Añuu. Such is the way that what the subject (us) does, reflexively or
reflectively, at the same time, it constitutes it as that subject and not another. In this sense, a
translation closer to the meaning of the phrase would be: "what we do makes us", or also: we make
our way to be us.
We could also say that the word-phrase wakuwaipawa has an external meaning directed to
cover the actions or activities that identify the Añuu and that are linked to their daily tasks as well as
to the set of customs, traditions and patterns of coexistence that sustain culture as such. But, on the
other hand, the term has, say, an inner or deeper sense, with which the Añuu try to express that what
we do makes us men; or better, human beings. That somehow, it dissociates this doing as the "sole
property" of the Añuu and, on the contrary, it acquires the dimension of a doing that makes any man
a human being. This double character of the term is indicative that for this worldview, the condition
of Añuu or its identity, is not given solely by the domain and exercise of the set of traditions and
customs of the group, not even for the fact of having been born from a womb Añuu but it requires
something more. "Being" Añuu implies that, in their doing, men must be able to maintain balance
and harmony with the space of their being and, of course, with the men with whom they relate; in
that sense, "being" Añuu more than a condition defined by genetic or cultural affiliation is, rather,
something like a permanent challenge to maintain that balance between being and doing is what
definitively, the wakuwaipawa expression refers to.
In this way, we could say that the first trust or confidence in the world is intrinsic to the
worldview of the group and that, in the case of Añuu, is presented to us as the permanent harmony
between being and doing, that is, between woulee and wakuwaipawa of their daily reality, thus
creating an atmosphere or field of familiarity that is capable to make men brothers as human beings,
whether they are Añuu or not, and, it is to this precisely, what is called in its strictest sense:
wakuwaipawa. Therefore, everything that is somehow able to enter this field of the domain of
Wakuwaipawa is a subject of trust. On the contrary, everything that for some reason it leaves or
breaks with the meaning of this field is strange or it is missed, which implies the source of distrust
and suspicion, or because one feels a threat. Thus, the challenge of being Añuu is in the permanence
of the subject within this field.
In the context of what we have called the cosmo-experience, this translates into the fact that
the Añuu seek at all times in their relations with the "others", to approximate the horizon of their
wakuaipawa to the horizon of the "other", or we can say in terms of Luhman, that it is about a
process of reducing the complexity of the relationships with the "others". In this sense, when the
doing of the "other" despite its external differences, for some reason is seen as susceptible to
entering the field of wakuwaipawa, the Añuu try to incorporate them through different social
mechanisms that go, from the exchange of the eminently material, going through the adoption of the
stranger as a son or the delivery in adoption of a child, until the marriage alliance. Here if we agree
with Luhman, when he says that: "In the case of trust, the reduction of complexity takes special
forms cause of its subjective nature. Such forms can be described as changes in the level at which it
absorbs, or becomes a tolerable uncertainty "xxxvi.
However, this resource for provoking familiarity as a precondition of trust, it is good to say
it, it occurs as a result of the perception of being and doing of the "other" in affinity or, at least, as
close to wakuwaipawa. Thus, it is possible to understand this first trust, rather than as an animal
faith, as a faith in the world, in what is in the world as an equal in their being, very much in spite of
their external differences, and, as an approach in making one susceptible to being perceived as a
form of wakuwaipawa equally valid In this way, the exercise of trust can be verified among the
Añuu, even today, as a relationship between the way of being in the world and a doing that must
correspond but that, in any case, it must be expressed through a harmonic balance that ultimately is
what ends up making the subjects (beings humans, animals, plants and all presence reliable or
trustworthy elements.
The oral conetructon of hietory 2*

The voice of ainmatualee

In times of yaguasaxxxvii, the old women of the Añuuxxxviii families in the lagoon of Sinamaica sing
the memory of "e'inmatualee"xxxix. Such a word indicates, not just a space that needs a horizon,
specifically, the point of view where they find the heavens with the waters; but also, a time the
Añuu record as the beginning of their history. In that place, "woulee" was produced; that is to say,
"Our emerging from there". E'inmatualee then, is the heart of the world from where the Añuu
emerged to populate the waters; it is the space and the time where they opened to the world to "be"
and "do." Well, it is in times of Yaguasa that the e'inmatualee, whose text is interspersed
continuously, that the story that accounts for the what happened when, at the same time, strange
Europeans sprang into the world. The episode was extraordinary and immediately terrible. It is
symbolized by the rushed and nervous flight of all the yearlings transfigured into: moray eels,
storks, caiman, alligators, otters and all the animals that inhabit the estuary area that represent the
diverse families that make up the whole community. Faced with the fierce onslaught of strangers,
all fled to the hidden region of Karoo or "the place of mirages", today called Sinamaica.
The song is interpreted before the whole family and its execution must observe the rigor of
the events; that is, even though each interpreter can execute it by asserting his skill in the art of
singing, the content is specified by the repetition of the keywords that enclose their meaning. The
interpreter cannot, in the case of this song, provoke fundamental change, what they sing-narrate is
an historical event, a fact that has forever marked the destiny of the community. It is a document
that cannot be violated in the essence of its meaning. On its precise execution depends the only
interpretation valid and validated by the community as well as its continuity over time.
Through the analysis of the Canto de e'inmatualee, from the Añuu oral tradition we will try
to clarify the fact that it constitutes the substrate of our effort: oral construction of history.
That is to say, through its oral tradition, we will see the process of the construction of history
and the fact of the historical consciousness of the communities of indigenous peoples to whom
"History" has denied them the possibility of such capacity for construction and consciousness. We
will show that the denial of historical consciousness and the ability to build the history of
Amerindian cultures, not only has been the result of the process of European colonial expansion and
for whose justification the "History" became a fundamental tool in the hands of the conquerors but
that, such a vision of "History" has had continuity in the work and thought of our Latin American
historiography. It is the manifestation of what some authors point out quite rightly, like
Eurocentrism, and much more precisely, as the coloniality of knowledge in Latin America. In short,
we intend to provoke debate that "what has been written so far about these stories is primarily a
discourse of power from the view of the colonizer, to justify its domination and rationalize it"xl. This
is about of the negated, unheard word. It is history as a story but fundamentally as an interpretation
that has been placed in the concluded destiny. We pretend to finally prove, that every construction
of history directly corresponds to a language, whose execution puts into action a determined
worldviewxli; so that, both the form and the content of the constructed history will be, then, the
effort of interpretation of the facts from the language and the cosmovisión of those who build it.

Language and orldvie in hietorical confrontaton

Now, starting with the last of our premises, we have already established in the previous chapter that
historically there are two visions of the event of the European arrival to the Lake Maracaibo region
which, in turn, generated two different forms of naming the event. Thus, with respect to the Añuu,

2 Article written to be presented in the seminar: “Historia e historiografía de América Latina” organized by Norma de
los Ríos. UNAM-México, 2003.
the first impression generated before the presence of the conquerors is recorded in the word-phrase:
"ayouna", this, referred to the action of "arriving" or "emerging" from "them". At the time, the
name of the Añuu to the conquerors corresponded with their vision of the world according to which,
all things are defined either by their "being" or by their "doing" in the world. In this case, those who
"emerged" "from or from there", they performed the same operation as the Añuu in the mythical
time in which they sprang from e'inmatualee to "be" in the world; therefore, the one who performs
the same action as the original year is configured as an "equal", although different.
This is fundamental to understand the historical fact of the difference in the interpretation of
the presence of the conqueror in the basin of Lake Maracaibo by different cultures that, in effect,
inhabited the area. So, if for the Añuu the conquerors were in a first moment "an equal though
different", for the Wayuu they were "alijuna", that is, "Mounted Molar", then, for the Wayuu,
inhabitants of the semidesert areas of what is today the peninsula of La Guajira, in effect, it was not
"different equals", but true strangers who mounted on their beasts and very quickly put in evidence
the condition by which from the first vision, caused its rejection. Similarly, for the Bari of the
southern area of Lake Maracaibo, the strangers were "labagdou"; that is to say "other people". In
such a way, then, naming not only expresses a vision of the fact but of a conceptualization of the
product of interpretation within the framework of the worldview of a culture about the event itself.
All of which will generate two behaviors equally differentiated on the part of the indigenous groups
with respect to the presence of the conqueror. However, it is at the moment when the process of
conquest begins and colonization with the incursions of Ambrosio D'Alfinger and Nicolás de
Federman in representation of the Welserxlii, and the subsequent ones of Alonso de Ojeda and
Alonso Pacheco that both the denomination and the position of the Añuu against the Europeans
change. For the Añuu, the "Ayouna" are now configured as "Waunnü": "He makes us sick ", "evil
spirit that appropriates the soul of men". This, inasmuch as peace had been broken, and, the new
definition equally corresponding to the worldview, is no longer from "being" but by virtue of the
"doing" of the subject; so, if for his "being" the European targets were "ayouna" that emerged in the
waters that, according to the Añuu vision made them men, by virtue of their "doing", evidently, they
were not humans beings. The result will be a resistance struggle that, in a very short time, would
end most of the Añuu population,
"... some of them confronted and fought to the extreme against colonial subjugation; for them there was only
the sword, the arquebus and the gallows. The others, that (those) received obsequiously and the they accepted
in their land; for them there were diseases, slavery and evangelization ".xliii
Thus, the interpretation of the conqueror about the indigenous peoples in no way had to do with a
vision of others as "equals in difference"; very much to the contrary,
"The first European that looked upon the reality of what today is America (...), was not the look of a virgin that
looks out at the unknown. It was a filtered vision - what isn't? - through reconceptions, convictions and
prejudices of a world that barely left the Middle Ages and began the adventure of its expansion beyond the
known limits. But there was not only ignorance and discovery; there was also a historical need to frame the
new realities within the framework of a project of colonial domination. "xliv
In this process of framing and possession, the "other" was named "Indian", term with which the set
of diverse cultures was homogenized insofar as they constituted not "an equal but different", but an
exploitable part in the process of expansion and development that would serve as the basis for the
colonial system. So, while they were able to establish differences and understand them, this
impelled the process of homogenization, corresponding also to his own view of the world as
something homogeneous or susceptible to be under the aegis of a single religion and a single
domain: Spanish. Such was the homogenization process carried out in two different ways; namely,
on the one hand, they divided and restricted the spaces of the different groups in a process of
atomization that it made possible its control and domination; on the other, they conceptually
wrapped them in a single category with what eliminated the difference while liquidating the
corresponding worldviews. In this way, the naming of the conqueror was exercised not by "being"
or "doing", but by what was considered his fundamental principle: the "being". So, everything
different was conceived as the image of "non-being": not being European, not being Christian, in
end, not-human being.
 The atomization was executed with the designation from the physical or bodily aspects,
ornaments or clothing but, above all, because of the small space that was reduced for different Añuu
groups that, certainly, in the region of Lake Maracaibo were scattered in different areas of the lake
but that, nevertheless, all together constituted one and the same culture. Thus, for the conqueror
there was not a single Añuu community but there were the Onotos, Aliles and Alcoholados, named
for the custom of smearing your skin with this vegetable: the Onoto (bixa orellana), used as a sun
screen. The Toas, the Zaparas and the Urabaes, by the Bay of Urawa and the To'u and Asaapara
Islands, occupied north of the lake. But those who according to their chronicles were the most
hardened and hated by the conqueror were always called by them Bobures (result of a deformation
of woulee), and the Quiriquires in the southern region of the lake. As well as on the contrary, the
Moporo and Tomoporo on the east coast of the lake were their most faithful and firm allies.
In effect, these were never culturally differentiated groups as these tribes were supposed to
be. In any case, the groups of same extended Añuu families periodically moved around the
riverbanks, especially motivated by the movement of the schools of fish which they have done over
millennia. That is, for the Añuu it was clear that each of those groups territorially settled in a space
of the same lake they were but the total set of all the Añuu. The cultural differences established in
relation to other groups that were evidently different such as the Bari, the Yukpas and even with the
Wayuu themselves with whom they share the same Arawak linguistic root. That spatial difference of
the Añuu families was used not only as part of the process of atomization and reduction, but as an
element of differentiation and bankruptcy of the sense of unity of the global community that, even
today, is capable of showing up.
However, just as it atomized and divided, the colonizer homogenized the groups to through
the designation as Indians to the set of cultural diversities found,
"whatever the peoples were to be discovered, they were already somehow located in the context of European
history: they would enter as marginal, eccentric, pagan and intrinsically inferiors. " xlv
The justification, rationalization and registration of this designation will correspond to the
"History", through the work, in a first stage, of the chroniclers. "With the chroniclers Spaniards
began the massive "discursive formation" of the construction of Europe/West and the other, the
European and Indian, from the privileged position of the place of enunciation located and
associated with imperial power"xlvi, and who will be responsible for describing the "natives" from
two perspectives, each one more harmful and ethnocentric. On the one hand, the Indians were
already because of their external appearance, as by their customs and attitudes were nothing more
than "living things" alien to any human condition, a question that many of these chroniclers
attributed to a determination of the geographical space and nature. Thus, for example, the
inhabitants of the lake, given their ungraspable relationship with the "always restless" waters,
became fierce and indomitable, for what their submission and slavery practically constituted their
salvation as "living things" that were possibly human. In this regard says Fray Pedro Simon
referring to Geographic determinism about the condition of the Añuu:
"This truth has been seen more clearly in these West Indian lands, since few people have been found among
the natives on their coasts that are not tasteless, rough, rugged, hard, fierce, stubborn, rough, indigestible,
raw, sour, villain, indomitable, intractable, and bent, or have most of these qualities ".xlvii
On the other hand, despite "possessing" all or a large part of these qualifiers, the natives were in
essence, empty beings, which had to be filled with the spirit of Christianity, and integrate them into
the Christian world, and, of course, the history of the world. The same empty condition made them
beings without history. In any case, this history began precisely at the moment when Europeans
made entry into their territories.
The idea of Catholicism and Spain as the center of the world was nothing new. Since times
of Alfonso X (El Sabio), the task of writing from Spain, the Universal History beginning from the
Biblical Genesis, the successive Spanish monarchies, until of course, Alfonso's. Thus, the
construction of history during the process of conquest and expansion of the Spanish empire in the
New World was undoubtedly, consubstantial with a historical tradition based on a worldview
according to which the Catholic Spain was the center of the world and, therefore, predestined by
God to dominate it and convert it to their particular faith.
 However, we must add to this ethnocentric vision the power attributed to the technique of
writing not only as the foundation of cultural superiority over "the others", but as the only possible
way to build history for the West. For the West, the spoken word has no validation until the moment
it is written. That is, the written word acquires the power of truth, insofar as the word of men is not
trusted unless it is in the written text. It is in this way, that precisely before making their warlike
attacks against the Indians, the Captain or military leader read in front of the indigenous community
they were about to attack, from the proclamation of the King that ordered them to surrender,
"I beg you and I require you to understand well what I have told you and take to understand and deliberate
about it all the time that is fair. Recognize the Church as lady and superior of the Universe World, and the
Supreme Pontiff named Pope in his name, and his Majesty in his place, as superior and lord and king of the
islands and the mainland [...] if you do not do it, or you put out a malicious delay, I certify you that with the
help of God I will enter powerfully against you and war against you and all the parties and as I can [...], I will
take your wives and children and make them slaves, and as such, I will sell them, and I will take your goods
and do all the evils and damages you can "xlviii
After the massacres and enslavement, the Captain himself would keep records of the events, so that
their actions were not only justified but also, left in written record of the "heroism" that
corresponded to them, given the stubbornness of those who, surely, never understood the word read
by the Waunnü before their onset.
Thus, the fundamental reasons for raising the intrinsic relationship between the language of
conquest and the fact of conquest, as corresponding to a worldview that makes of the conqueror the
subject of "History" and the "other" as an object of it, it seems to us, for the moment, sufficiently
demonstrated.

The oral conetructon of hietory

The value given to the domain of writing will then support the placement of the Indian margin of
the History, and, its entrance to the same one will depend on the power that on that technique the
historian owns. Well, "already before stepping on the ground to conquer, Europeans, in their view
duly covered by a written authorization (the capitulation extended by the king - or the Catholic
kings), they consider stopping the unobjectionable right to occupy the land evoked in the real
"title".xlix The supposed ignorance of the writing on the part of the homogenized "Indians", placed
them permanently in a position to be ahistorical elements, or, at best, as pre-historic, from the
Enlightenment to our days, "History (...) is the experience of the historian. Nobody "does" it other
than the historian: the only way to do history is to write it ".l
History is like this in the hands of those who possess and master the technique of their registration
via writing. Any elaboration by others or contrary to this model will not constitute, nor historically
construct, much less represent in any way, awareness about history. It will be, in any case, of
mythical and exotic elaborations, products and singularities of primitive populations to which, only
the historian with his doings (his writing) and his conscience (interpretation-reason), will select
from among the facts and make them enter, pleasingly through into the "History".
In this way, it is possible to confirm that "the conquest or taking of possession does not
support, from the perspective of its actors, (not only) in the political-military superiority of
Europeans, but in the prestige and the almost magical efficacy that they attribute to writing".li It is
possible to problematize even more of these affirmations. For that, let's go back to our original
story.
One of the most important episodes of the song of e'inmatualee, is that which records the
decision of the children of Paraoute, old "outí"lii of the Añuu of Zapara Island (Asaaparaa), to
confront the Spanish guerrilla. Toulee and Nigalee, are their names. The second of them, became a
leader of the Zapara, Toas, Urabaes families that, allied with the Quiriquires, organized a force
capable of putting the Spaniards at bay and hindered their colonizing progress.
Nigalee constantly attacks the boats in the Barra del Lago, a favorable area with many
advantages for the natives. The sand bar is an uncomfortable area because of its shallow depth that
the large Spanish vessels, unable to maneuver, became targets easily attacked from the small and
light boats of the Añuu. So, singing he says:
"Toulee and Nigalee, are brothers
they oppose the passage of those who give death.
Then they go and say to the Asasparaa, where are your people?
And they say to the Urawa: where are the clubs?
And they say to To'u's, where are your eyes?
Eyes, people and clubs, just that and they will not emerge
the enemies of the waters.
And later ...
He came who claimed to be his brother.
In his word he said to be his brother,
but Nigalee no longer wanted war,
Then, he wanted to hear that it was his brother,
the one who spoke to him.
Brother with a knife hidden in the heart ...
He led the Asasparaa, and the toas, and the urabaes
and they all went after the word of Nigalee
after the word of the one who says he is his brother.
It was not his brother,
With a knife in his heart, he waited for them.
So says the song. Word that tries to register the historical fact is obviously transcendental for the
community. Thus, the character that gives condition to what has been considered a historical fact in
oral tradition is given to the implications of the same condition in the subversion of the social,
political, economic or cultural daily life of a determined society; the selection of an event of this
nature in the narrative construction for the oral transmission of the same allows one to appreciate
the historical conscience deployed by that community in the construction of its history. That is, the
selection of fact goes through the transcendence of the event in the development and continuity of
the culture. The fact that the history of e'inmatualee is interspersed, both the moment in that the
Europeans begin the conquest in the lake basin as the surge of a war of resistance personified in the
heroes of the community and constituted in two cycles of different time-spans, implies not only that
there is a deliberate purpose of construction of history but awareness of its continuity.
The selection made by the community and by the narrators of the story is susceptible to
verification in the development of the chronicle by the Spanish side. So, says Fray Pedro Simon:
"I'm Nigale." This was the main one of those Zaparas Indians, I do not know if [they did it] because he was a
cacique or to whom they obeyed, it is as if they were braver, as are some of these nations. The captain told
him: "Get in here, I'm very happy to meet you, because I'm Juan Pacheco, and you know I have obligation to
love you well. " This was said because the Nigale had been page of his father, the captain Alonso Pacheco, in
that town, when he founded it, as we said. Then Nigale responded in Castilian language (in which it was very
ladino): "well if you love me well, why are you coming to do the War on me and my people with these soldiers?
"liii
Indeed, the selection of the fact by the chronicler, is based on the importance that the flow of
products from the south of the Lake and the Andes region had for the colonial economy. Free transit
through the waters of the lake meant seeking the exit to the Caribbean with direction to Cuba and
Santo Domingo, and even towards Spain itself. The fact of that the Zapara, with Nigalee at the
head, dominated the exit of the Barra, constituted a of true vital reason and, therefore, its
confrontation and domination would obviously be more than enough reason for the historian to have
it in historical fact rank susceptible of being narrated as a significant episode in the development of
colonial/imperial power.
However, here is an important issue to underline, the interpretation of the fact as a problem
that corresponds to the worldview of the historian, that is, to his ideological condition, is more than
evident when confronting the two versions. Thus, Fray Pedro continues saying:
"The captain had not finished reasoning when Nigale had already fabricated the betrayal and I had to kill
them all ... " "They agreed, and that the next day the Indian would come to the Salina, about a league from the
bar, and he brought his people, because he was going with his boats to make it in befofre night. Nigale
accepted on the condition Captain and his soldiers would not to take out weapons. El Pacheco told him to do
so; also that neither he nor his people had to bring [weapons] "liv
The end of the story is none other than the same precise fact in both versions according to the
which, some of the Indians were disarmed, others not, and the defeat when most of his men were
passed to slaughter, and Nigalee transferred as a prisoner to Maracaibo, where on the following two
days, "they hanged them all. And with the Chusma, leaving little or none in the town of Laguna,
Captain Juan Pacheco and his soldiers took, in his two boats, the return of the port of Moporo and
from there to Trujillo, where he was received with great applause "lv
As is evident, for both constructions of the story, the facts are relevant and could be
considered as historical, in as much as it implied a radical change for the continuity of the process
in both cultures. Second, it is equally evident that among those involved in the event that there was
an approximation due to knowledge previous of both personages: Nigalee was the page of Juan
Pacheco's father, says Fray Pedro. Nigalee believed in the word of his brother, the song says.
Finally, the confabulation of the betrayal, it seems then to be judged by whoever constructs the
story. However, and taking sides in this matter, for us it is sufficiently clear on what side infamy
took place. It is evident that Nigalee and his people were completely disarmed, therefore, his word
had been fulfilled very much in spite of the chronicler strives to point out the cacique's unhealthy
intentions, "scheming in his mind" how to end the Spaniards. For him, on the contrary, Pacheco's
victory was produced not by treason but precisely, by superiority of wit and strategy, question that
corroborated, once again, the superiority of his race. But there is more, the same Fray Pedro
describes in his chronicle of Nigalee's defeat a detail worth noting, then, it gives clues about the
veracity of his story:
"They put the prisoners with secure guards and imprisoned them in jail, where they were until another day, so
sad and melancholy was Captain Nigale, he did not know how to behave in the occasion, that though many
desired him to speak since they caught him, they could not get a word out of him. And that night, when he was
imprisoned, hair by hair he pulled out his hair and whiskers and he ate them one by one." lvi
Indeed, even today, the action of hair removal by one's own hand, is an action that only the Añuu
men do when, ashamed, they feel that they have been deceived as children in transcendental
moments. It is a mutilation before the dignity lost in the naivety, or betrayal.

Time to tell the etory and tme of the etory

We have said in advance, that the song of e'inmatualee is interpreted almost exclusively in the
yaguasa season. This single temporal precision, given by the presence ("To be") of the wild duck in
the vicinity of the lagoon, is the mark of a conception of the time of history totally contrary to the
West. That is, the chronology is subject to its effective presence, this time, marked by the arrival
("ayou") of the wild duck or yaguasa. With its presence, not only the summer or dry season of the
region is marked, but that in the worldview of the community, it is the propitious time for the
restoration of world from the recounting of history. Such a recount can not be made except by
making a complete review of your process. That is, when interpreting the song of e'inmatualee has
to go to the beginning: the origin of the Añuu, whose presence was the result of their emergence in
the waters, which constitute the reason for their material and spiritual existence.
This reference to the origin becomes the matrix of the song, which gives it its historical
reason. The episodes to be interspersed may vary according to the intentions of the interpreter.
Thus, it is possible that for a singer, an episode considered to belong to the historical order can be
susceptible to being interspersed within the singing matrix. The episode of the arrival of the
Spaniards in their first appearance can be one of them, the same the episode of the Nigalee war, but
also others: the Naval Battle at the time of independence, and even others, much more recent
chronologically and that, are sung-told in an indistinct way, always protected by the original song of
e'inmatualee.
This is very important, it refers to a conception of history not as a straight and successive
line governed strictly by chronology, and, of course, always advancing inexorably towards positive
"higher stages", or progress; but for the Añuu and for the construction of history from orality in
indigenous cultures, rather, it deals with cycles interspersed in the matrix of the historical song par
excellence, which works, in this way, as the epicenter that propels concentric waves of history,
condensed in the possible intercalation episodes. On this path, history ceases to be a line to become
a process that men will have to interpret following the patterns of their worldview in each of their
cycles.
This does not mean in any way a mess of time, quite the contrary. Yes it is about another
time and another way of relating to him. From the vision of West: "Telling a story is to rise up in
arms against the threat of time, to resist time or dominate it."lvii For the Añuu in particular, and for
the Amerindian cultures in general, a story is not to resist or to dominate time, it is rather to flow
with it in its fundamental cycles, interpreted, from what constitutes the organizing center of the
world and of one's relations with the world: one's worldview.
This has led many students of oral history and oral tradition to understand these
constructions as elaborations without historical intentionality, but rather as frames for "visions of
the world". "Thus, the oral tradition is reduced to its nature as sources to explain visions of the
world (...) it became ethnographic data"lviii. Now, certainly, telling the story implies the need for its
preservation in the time, hence the construction of the special space in which it is related. A space
that is equally loaded with time. It is that the time of narrating is also an essential element in the
time of the narrated content, that is, narrative time and time of the narration are present in the
recovery of memory and historical construction. While it is a revision of the past in its implications
with the present what it constitutes, without doubt, a conscience and a deep practice of history, then,
its execution is equally supportive of internal cohesion as identity forger. In this way, it is
impossible to separate historical consciousness from ethnic identity while both are forged and
sustain permanently.
So, then, it's not just a particular way of holding an occurrence in one's memory, just as the
Western vision has tried to reduce it, but effectively the Amerindian peoples are aware that their true
history has been proscribed by a History built by the colonizer (both past and current
representatives). "They know that theirs is a hidden, clandestine, denied story. They also know that,
in spite of everything, that history exists and that its evident proof is the very presence of each
people"lix, it is the permanent recovery of historical time in the songs built with such time that they
become effective and present at the time of narrating.

Eurocentriem and coloniality of hietorical kno ledge

For scholars of the so-called "oral history" in both Europe and Latin America, these constructions
are, at least, suspicious of falsity or manipulation, precisely, by their condition of being oral. As if
the manipulation was exclusive of speakers and not of the written text equally, susceptible to being
forged or written as if it only will approximate the truth. So, for example, let's see the opinions of
some authors which Jan Vansina collects in his book on oral tradition. Vansina says:
"Robert Lowie warns that oral tradition does not usually have any historical value a priori. The primitive man
does not have the sense of history, much less that of historical perspective " (...) "Edward Sapir, is convinced
that the oral tradition can be worthy of faith. He maintains, however, that it must be treated with reserve when
it concerns a very distant past." (...) "I. Wilks. For him oral traditions never have historical content. They are
myths created, completely created when situations, especially policies, so request. Their function created
them."lx
Now, what we want to draw attention to is the fact that this particular event, recorded in both
cultures in two different narratives, one from the oral tradition and, the other, from the writing, with
its particular interpretations ends up being for Latin American historiography in general and
Venezuelan in particular "History" in one case, "mythical story" in the other. In this way, despite the
obvious demonstration of the selection, construction and interpretation process carried out by the
Añuu culture, such effort will not be considered in any way as "making history". We have already
said, the story is of the one who writes it, then, "the only way to do history is to write it"lxi. In this
sense, it is possible to understand "that most of the authors argue that oral traditions can not be
considered authentic until they are confirmed and corroborated by archaeological discoveries, or
by linguistic data"lxii, that is, by the validation of "science" (of course, written).
 In this way, the acceptance by contemporary Latin American historiography of this reduction
of constructions and the historical awareness of Amerindian cultures, is consubstantial with the
process of institutionalization of the so-called "scientific discourse" which is related, in turn, to a
process of multiple separations elaborated in the West that are closely linked to the particular forms
of technological knowing and doing of the western society, resulting from the overcoming Judeo-
Christian separation between God, man and nature. It is a relationship in which, when God created
the world, it definitely was no longer God and therefore nothing is sacred. Of such, being that man
is God's creation in his image and likeness, he obtains all of the rights to intervene in the world; that
is, the right to control and dominate the nature. "It is created in this way, as Charles Taylor points
out, an ontological fissure, between reason and the world, a separation that is not present in other
cultures "lxiii, like the Añuu, we would add. It is from this ontological fissure as the founding
relationship that the process of institutionalization of scientific, ethical, juridical-political and
artistic discourses, in that each domain would correspond to a cultural profession; it is the birth of
specialties and specialists. Thus, the moment of the conquest and colonization of America did not
represent only the colonial organization of the world and the beginning of the colonialism in
America but, similarly and simultaneously, it occurs with the colonial economic-political system,
"the colonial constitution of knowledge, of languages, of memory and the imaginary "lxiv.
It is important to emphasize that the process of historical constitution of the different
disciplines in America is produced as a prolongation of the Western academy, in which we can
distinguish two issues that are fundamental to us: first, the assumption, elaborated as a universal
meta-narrative that forces all cultures and peoples to travel from a "primitive", traditional state,
towards modernity. The European industrial society becomes the representative image of the
modern, of the more advanced and towards where all societies, in a "natural" way, have to advance,
because it is the universal norm that signals the future.
On the other hand, and, as a second foundation, this same universality of experience in
European history forces the forms of knowledge created for the interpretation and understanding of
that reality, they become the epistemic corpus for the interpretation and understanding of the rest of
societies. In short, "the categories, concepts and perspectives (...) are converted not only into
universal categories for the analysis of any reality but also in normative propositions that define
what should be for all the peoples of the planet "lxv.
Making "History", in this way, can never correspond to the intellectual effort of the
Amerindian populations because, it is said, they would lack the theoretical-methodological tools
that the "universality of knowledge" developed by the West requires in the validation of such
constructions. Thus, making History becomes alien to the interpretation of facts considered as
historical by a given community, according to their own worldview and language, and, to those who
are considered as determinants in its historical process that becomes an outside elaboration rather,
pretendedly external "scientific" and aseptic to its social implications and to men themselves. The
universalist meta-narrative of Western modernity, acting then as a colonial and imperial knowledge
device, forces the articulation of the totality of peoples and worldviews as part of the same
structure; that is, as part of the colonial/imperial organization of the world. It is not only logical and
universal, but "naturally" given. It is the "normal" form of "being".
"The other forms of being, the other forms of organization of society, the other forms of knowing are
transformed not only into being different, but into lacking, into being archaic, primitive, traditional, and
premodern. They are located at an earlier time in the historical development of the humanity, which within the
imaginary of progress emphasizes its inferiority"lxvi.
This is how the universal vision of history, rooted in the idea of progress, based on that which builds
the scale for the classification and ranking of peoples and cultures and their respective historical
experiences, the process of "naturalization" of social relationships as "human nature" of the liberal-
modern-capitalist society, and, finally, the "natural" and necessary superiority of knowledge that
society produces as both the original owner of the "science" and knowledge above any other
knowledge produced by the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet, constitute the reasons for
foundations of this colonial/*imperial worldview that weigh on history and the rest of the social
sciences.
 Within this universal worldview, the West expresses itself not as a culture but as: "The
Culture", the only one capable of not representing or symbolizing nature, but of moving it as it is
known and understood by the sciences. The others are trapped in their language so they are unable
to differentiate between nature and culture and, therefore, between myth and history. In this sense,
the social sciences and, very particularly, the History in Latin America, has served rather to contrast
our realities with the experience that one has as "normal", that is, with the historical-cultural
experience Western "universal" much more than to know those societies in their own specificities.
Finally, we can not ignore the implications that from the point of view of the justification of
power the coloniality of knowledge implies. First, the denial of the history and historical awareness
of Amerindian cultures as a result of a process of homogenization is articulated and directed from
within and by a centralized space: the State, which is understood as a structure in which the
different interests of found cosmovisions "find" their synthesis, but from the hegemony of the West.
The State thus, at the moment it arises in the independent nations of America, became "the locus
capable of formulating collective goals, valid for all", but in which the vision of the Amerindians
could not count give their past status that was concluded to be outside of history.
As Wallerstein has shown, the social sciences, and, History in particular, became a
fundamental piece in the construction of this project of the organization and control of human life.
Thus, the emergence of the social sciences does not constitute neither an isolated phenomenon nor
an "additive to the frameworks of political organization defined by the nation-state, but as
constitutive of them "lxvii
In this way, all forms of knowledge and ways of knowing elaborated by the social sciences
in general, and History in particular, do not correspond to abstract elaborations based on "rules of
science" but rather, generate consequential practices that result in the reproduction of the Western
worldview about historic knowledge that legitimizes and justifies what the State elaborates as
regulatory policies in reason for the support and reproduction of what they consider their "historical
being". In this case given that the Latin American nation-states were structured and sustained in
what is configured as the coloniality of knowledge they do not turn out to be anything else but the
manifestation of what can be considered as the coloniality of power. In short, all of the historical
discourses from evangelization to globalization, going through modernity, progress and
development, are based on the assumption of the existence of a "superior" and "natural" universal
pattern based on the "universal" and "natural" character of knowledge that has been addressed in
the study and interpretation of the construction of History by others.
However, very much in spite of this denial and pretense to remove it or stuff it under the rug
as embarrassing trash, communities continue to sing-tell stories of the historical cycles that shape
the interpretation of their events and that is why, even today, in the days of yaguasa, there, in "the
place of the mirages", the old ones gather the family to sing the story of e'inmatualee, or the
episode of the death of Nigalee, the boss who with his death left the seeds of resistance sown
forever that emerges like all living things, in every moment in which the "song" is performed with
precision and art. The "Historians" will say that it is only a story, a legend, a myth, that there is no
interpretation of a "historical truth"; in short, they will say everything that the coloniality of
knowledge has taught them; however, and despite this, such is the "doing" of the history of the
Amerindian peoples, it is their History, and, above all, it is the conscience they possess and know
very well how to express in their songs.

Startng for Real3

Reflectone on the conetructon of a point of vie for the Social Sciencee in Latn America

3 Article written to be presented in the seminar: “Problemas metodológicos para el análisis político de América Latina”
organized by Raquel Sosa Elizaga, UNAM-México, 2003.
 "Starting forg Real"
During the Christmas holidays, unable to travel to my country,
practically paralyzed by a general strike called by the
opponents to the regime, I decided to attend a "posada" organized by one of
the Zapatista groups that make life livable in the university. Though the environment was
festive, the subject could not be avoided: Venezuela and the current struggle for power
between two sides, supposedly, radically opposed. Of course, given
my condition, I had to expose some general elements of the policy crisis
and try to identify, what in my opinion, had been raised in this
fierce fight in my country.
After listening to me for a while and with all attention, an older man
there present, of evidently indigenous traits told me something that
seems pertinent to the beginning of these reflections. The old man, after
hearing me talk about how the people in Venezuela were cooking again with firewood, or
how I walked long distances because of the lack of fuel, told me: "Now
that those two have given you the world as at the beginning, if you were
Zapatistas, they would decide to start for real. "

A contnent that doee not fit. An empty contnent.

The crisis that envelops our Latin American countries is evident: a foreign, unpayable debt; poverty
at alarming levels; growing and sustained unemployment; curable diseases and until not long ago
"eradicated" diseases, camped out in the fertile land that provides misery, not only in rural areas, but
also in the most urbanized of our cities; finally, after so many programs, plans and projects of
"development"; after so much money invested in order to overcome the so-called "phase of the
underdevelopment ", we discover ourselves today, halfway through what for many it is the highest
level reached by modernity: globalization, miserably condemned, without any of the promises made
by politicians, governors and by not a few social scientists, come true. They were just that,
promises.
The causes for our current situation of "disaster" are being sought and located depending on
who is dedicated to it, in particular and immanent problems and faults to those euphemistically
called "developing countries". The problem thus, becomes alien to the condition of the capitalist
world system, and on the contrary, tries to locate itself in a kind of original condition of these
countries according to this type of assessment, to a inability to comply with discipline, with the
necessary, natural, historical steps, and successfully demonstrated by the developed countries of the
West in their progress. Such causes go like this, from a precarious or non-existent organization of
production, its non-diversification or its inefficiency, until the existence of an unbalanced
administration and wealth distribution. All this in addition, subordinated or traversed in a perverse
way, by corruption at all levels, and acting, almost as an essential part of our culture; or to put it
better, according to this type of analysis, perhaps, the fundamental cause of our backwardness is
precisely that: our "cultural problem"; it is about of a kind of genetic "tare", the origin of the
structural deformations of our States and their ruling classes, and what makes their policies that are
settled in science unviable. Of last account, our problem is, for many of these scholars, especially
advocates of globalization, the fact that they do not we finish learning, we do not finish entering the
western world, or better, we don't finish westernizing ourselves as it should be, in a total and
integral way, then, only in that way we can, join once and for all, the "wagon" (no matter that is the
last) of the irrepressible and irreversible train of history and modernity.
These conclusions are not accidental or result from chance. They constitute rather and
properly speaking, the logical continuity of the analysis of Latin American reality from the
colonialized vision of our social sciences. According to this, we are not more that the manifestation
of an anachronistic commitment to our "non-being", a condition of "emptiness" inherited since the
conquest and colonizationlxviii, which has historically impeded our fullness; that is, it has thrown us
into a permanent non-contemporaneity, a kind of always being late to things, and in the end, a
strangeness of time. But,
"Although Europeans and Americans are observing and lamenting anachronisms, setbacks and distortions,
Latin Americans themselves do the same, in identical terms, with local variations. Taking as a reference what
happens in Europe and the United States, many affirm and reaffirm the non-contemporaneity in this or that
sphere of society; or on the whole"lxix.
Now, nothing should surprise us that our social scientists coincide in their affirmations with their
colleagues in Europe and North America. The fact is indisputable that the history of Latin America
is based on two articulated processes: the colonial organization of the world and that of modernity.
But, equally true, that "with the beginning of colonialism in America begins not only the colonial
organization of the world but - simultaneously - the colonial constitution of knowledge, language,
memory and imaginary "lxx. In this way, the institutionalization of scientific discourses, academics,
moral theories, jurisprudence, critical discourses and production of art in Latin America, can not be
separated from the process of establishing colonial power in the continent; a process that persisted
and persisted, even after independence and later with the creation of the nation-states of our
republican era to this day. The continuity of colonial thought has been maintained internally, then,
the structuring of these states was done on the basis of their identification with the modern liberal
states that originated in the West, conceived of as the only and natural way by he who descends and
has to retrace all of humanity.
Thus, in spite of the rupture that the independence of America meant with respect to the
colonial/imperial system, this did not imply a break with the world-capitalist system, nor much less,
with the colonial system of thought, inasmuch as it was understood beforehand the construction of
the continent about the existence of a "vacuum" and from a "emptying" of it. That is, as a sustaining
idea of the conquest and colonization, it started from the non-existence or the "non-being" of the
real cultures and live communities of the native peoples, present before the arrival of Europeans to
the continent. The so-called "Indians" only gained historical existence from the European naming,
for whom they did not represent but "living things", susceptible to being domesticated, and thus
incorporated into history, as inferior beings because of their race. The native peoples then, for the
Europeans lacked culture and therefore, they did not possess history and much less, sense of history.
To the existing "emptiness", it was also accompanied, with a "emptying" process, given from; on
the one hand, the homogenization process and atomization of groups and cultures, and on the other,
by the imposition of the subject of domination: the empty I of the conqueror. Both processes are
thus constituted, not only on the basis of all the social construction of America and its institutions,
but even, in the mix with which they would bring together the spiritual character of that society,
especially, in its dominant classes. In this way:
"Two historical processes converged and were associated in the production of said space/time and established
as the fundamental axes of the new pattern of power. On the one hand, the coding of the differences between
conquerors and conquered in the idea of race, that is, a supposedly different biological structure that placed
them in a natural situation of inferiority with respect to the others. On the other hand, the articulation of all
the historical forms of control of the work, its resources and its products, around capital and the world market
"lxxi.
The fact, then, that at the time of the construction of our national States in the nineteenth century
immediately thought of its identification with European models and forms, thus, it has a perfectly
locatable historical reason. Still, the same liberator, Bolívar, at time to interpret the process and the
definition of the foundations of the project Latin American, does not escape the old idea of race and
its historical continuity. He recognizes in the new context that we are not the Spaniards of Europe,
but neither the Indians of America (past); that we are a mixture (present), that will give birth to a
new civilization (future), a new civilizatory structure. Of course, in the execution of the republican
project this approach by Bolívar was definitely canceled in the field of the facts by the Creole
oligarchies, in spite of the fact that the indigenous "presence" was considered already diluted,
definitively dissolved in the waters of the so-called process of miscegenation. The first republican
designs are eminently European and the economic-political and social structures remained intact.
Later, the idea is taken up with greater grandiloquence by Vasconcelos and his concept of "cosmic
race ", where the indigenous are reconsidered, but as a symbolic presence controlled in its
significance; that is, it is converted into an almost iconographic image without the capacity for
practical influence in reality; it is, therefore a decorative presence without political strength, without
vital content in the present, this is the idea on which the mestiza condition of the continent is based.
Thus, the indigenous, in that stellar moment, represented at most the condition of, in some
cases, even a heroic symbol but without the ability to leave the image and frame built for them.
Only in those petrified conditions was it likely to be considered as a presence in the construction
process of new forms of social organization in Latin America. Your status as a "brand" of the past,
definitively concluded and canceled, was corresponding to the general idea of history in which,
such "beings" and cultures were indisputably overcome prehistoric forms. Their effective presence
with their image of poverty and precariousness can only be understood as a "social problem", but
fundamentally, as part of the obstacles that hinder our "free" transit towards progress, towards
contemporaneity; in end, towards modernity and development as pointed out by the West and
faithfully represented by the developed countries of Europe and the United States.
Our non-contemporaneity thus translates into a kind of "resistance", which is akin to our
condition of "non-being" originating in the conquest and colonization, and that the sciences social
networks have been in charge of rationalizing in their continuous task of discovering or finding
anachronistic marks in our historical actions. So for example, when for the modern world the
capitalist economy was a whole world system, or world system such as Wallerstein called it, our
historians, sociologists and economists present Sergio Bagúlxxii with precision, insisting on finding
in our economies feudal or semifeudal traits. In an improper contextual separation that undoubtedly
responded to the firm and rigorous application of the stage-ist conception of history, a notion firmly
learned from the original Eurocentric matrix by our social sciences and their methodologies for the
interpretation of reality. In such a way, then, this reasoning seemed to demonstrate what our social
scientists, even today, continue to affirm and reaffirm as one of the essential reasons for our
"backwardness": the assumptions and anachronisms that keep us from contemporaneity.
Based on that premise and in order to overcome those obstacles, plans and programs have
been designed and put into execution, with which to make developing our incorporation possible;
that is, the full westernization of our ways of life. However, at the end of them, sometimes, the same
social planners and scientists in charge of such plans, end by concluding that,
"Reality does not seem to adapt to ideas, notions, concepts. It does not adapt to the Cartesian coordinates, to
the criteria of positivism, pragmatism, or utilitarianism. Even the ideals of Economic liberalism are evidently
dislocated outside. And those of democracy even more. The more vast and intricate the mirage in which Latin
America manifests, the more the concepts and ideals seem lost "lxxiii.
As we see, it is reality that does not fit into the concepts. In a kind of stubborn mania to be another,
the best ideas and the most successful advances in Europe do not come together. We are lost in our
labyrinth. So, the supposed strange behavior of the American reality is decontextualized from the
general functioning of the capitalist world system, sustained in the process of permanent
accumulation, incessant and insatiable, only possible, from the exploitation and submission of the
economies of the peripheral countries, which in this way, will never reach to obtain the "prizes"
with which The West encourages us to search for this increasingly distant and unattainable phase of
development, that hope with which we dream, with which we aspire to become part of of the "first
world" and definitely, in de facto and de jure members of modern society. But, to our disgrace, the
opposite of our dream always occurs. What is truly terrible, is that both the general population of
our continent, but very especially our social scientists end up in truth believing that nothing in us
functions as we should because of the "historical aberration" that we supposedly are, all because of
that "vacuum", which definitely condemns us to non-contemporaneity.

The Vacuum of Science

One is fully convinced then, and above all, in agreement with what is considered knowledge above
all knowledge: science. To overcome this "evident chaos" that is our "non-being", the process of our
westernization must be definitive, then, is the only and natural solution and way for our
incorporation into the "natural" course of history. This has meant a process of homogenization of
the diverse, the liquidation of the differences and the construction of a story in correspondence, or
better, capable of inserting itself as a chapter more, the only history of the world, universal history
for others: that of the West. In the realm of the concrete, this also translates into the design of a
political-economic system corresponding to the unique, natural, world system: that of liberal
capitalism and its political expression: representative democracy. The political-economic system
that also has the "virtue" of being promised as perfectible; that is, capable of generating the
mechanisms, via science, of "correcting" their own deviations, those that could be produced, in the
process of its concretion in reality. Therefore, it is a system capable of "providing" the hope of a
"gradual improvement", systematic, by stages of the backwardness of its nature that is the constant
good impulse towards progress.
In other words to make it more explicit, the liberal capitalist system has been presented as
unique, universal and natural, and such principles have been sustained and legitimized, from the
institutionalization of science as the only valid discourse and knowledge. Science in its work of
rationalizing the discourse of politics has been placed above any other knowledge in the process of
interpreting reality. It is responsible for permanently reviewing reality in order to specify and
determine the "objective" way with all the imperfections or deviations, possible to be presented, in
the "natural" development of the political-economic system in its historical action; all of which, in
turn will "correct" and maintain permanent progress, in its system of perfectibility or as Wallerstein
points out:
"His credo was: as we move towards a truer understanding of the real world, we also move towards a better
governance of the real society, and, consequently, towards a better realization of human potential. Social
science as a way of building knowledge was not only based on that premise, it was proposed as the safest
method to perform rational inquiry "lxxiv.
The character of science is subject to the condition in which it produces the origin of how to know.
It is a question that we must see from two edges of the same context; in part the separation between
science and philosophy, and second, science as a daughter of capitalism. Indeed, the birth of science
was an essential break with the philosophy, in as much the connection of this last one with the
metaphysical speculation that supposedly distances it from empirical reality. In addition to the
emergence of science, likewise, it is closely linked to the need and ideas of "winning", "dominating"
and the "control" of nature by man. This issue in turn corresponds to the ontological separation
between man and nature, between reason and the world. Thus, the foundations of science
established from Bacon, going through Descartes and coming to Newton are rooted in this essential
separation. In this sense,
"The ontological rupture between reason and the world means that the world is no longer a significant order,
it is expressly dead. Understanding the world is no longer a matter of being in tune with the cosmos, as it was
for classical Greek thinkers ... The world became what it is by the citizens of the modern world, a de-
spiritualized mechanism that can be captured by the concepts and representations constructed by reason "lxxv.
In this way, the construction of knowledge, capable of extracting from nature the "true" and the
"useful" became a fundamental and unique task for science. For this, its actions about the world
should be devoid of any connection with the ethical, as long as it is "stripped" of all metaphysical
speculation, which remained as the sole object of the philosophy. The relationship between the
"true" and "useful" with the "good" and the "beautiful" remained definitely split and placed in fields
completely disconnected from each other, differentiated as they correspond to different knowledge.
For science, the precision of the "true" and the creation of the "useful" constituted its reason for
existence, and thus became superior knowledge in as much as knowledge applied to the generation
of material social welfare. Also, for scientific rationality, the determination of "good" and
"beautiful" are totally heuristically indemonstrable notions. Therefore, such elements of which its
existence is not flatly denied, but its usefulness and truth will remain relegated to the knowledge
and study of philosophical speculation.
On the other hand, this same split becomes base-impulse for the scientific inquiry on the one
hand, the search for dominion and control of nature supposes the accuracy of the "truth" of its
operation for its intervention. Intervention on the other hand must make possible the creation of the
"useful" or extract the "useful" from that same nature. All this in a continuous, increasingly
accelerated, technical and technologically more sophisticated process. The technical-scientific
production in this way, becomes an essential element in the process of production of new material
goods that enter the market, and thus in capital accumulation, at the same time as the capitalist
development becomes the basic support or stimulus of scientific research based on the continuity of
this same accumulation process through technification and the reduction of production costs. In
other words, capitalism, powered by the processes that science generates, becomes the great
protective mother of the development of science. In such a way that "it is necessary that capitalism
was first so that technological innovation can become central, and not the other way around (...).
modern science is the daughter of capitalism and has always depended on it "lxxvi.
On the other hand, the "validity" of the rational scientific vision of the world, was granted by
the very constitutive conditions of science and confirmed by the reproduction of the system itself.
Thus, the definition of science as "strictly disinterested" and empirical; whose essential task was to
seek and elaborate only the "true", the truths for others, universal discoverer of the "simple rules"
underlying the functioning of reality whose phenomena is supposedly recurrent. Finally, by
assigning to science the role of discoverer of "efficient causes and not of final causes"lxxvii; all of this
taken together constructs science as empty speech, to the same extent that she believes acting on the
"emptiness" of the world, and very particularly, about the "vacuum" of the Latin American world.
The search for distancing (in the language of science), with respect to reality in order to
reach the goal of "objectivity", ideological disinterest and asepsis, produce at least two expressions
that highlight what we call the "Vacuum of science".
In the first place, an expression that we will call "internal" and that has to do with the
certainty of human perfectibility on the condition of manipulating social relations, a manipulation
that was made from scientific rationality, understood as a positive virtue and as the only possibility
of well-being in the here and now. This concrete field will generate a growing distance between the
products of the science of society. Above all, any ethical statement about that same society in its
manipulation of any idea of value referred to the human begins to lose meaning in virtue of this
vacuum in which scientific knowledge is constituted. Secondly in an indissoluble relationship with
the first, there is an "external" expression of science as a dissociated language of real life, and
therefore, of real living men, women and communities. Science and the scientific become a deeply
specialized (and manipulative) knowledge to the point that it is constituted not only in a language
but also in a community totally separated from society. Their representatives or members, scientists,
are the only real and capable subjects competent to "rationally" think, orient and guide reality in
their own terms and language. In this way, the validation of the knowledge of science is on the one
hand, of the "scientific community" itself, but on the other, by the political sector represented in
capitalist societies and even in those of the so-called real socialism, by the State, but fundamentally,
by the forces of capital.
In this sense, the real society is not only alien to the knowledge of science and its creations,
it is declared incompetent to validate it, because in addition to being a language particularly alien to
it; this one (society), is permanently traversed by their own relationships that are fundamentally
political, ideological, cultural and ethical. All of which, are not more than the set of elements of
science, historically and by virtue of its genetic link with capital, it has been undressed according to
the search for the "true" and the "useful". In other words, the pretension of the language of science
to stand outside or above the reality of relationships between men, and whose quality is eminently
political though supposedly "empty" of such a condition especially for its effects, that such a
definition or separation makes it precisely the source of legitimacy, reproduction and empowerment
of the dominant political power. That is then responsible for justifying and legitimizing by
rationalizing the political action of power. These two aspects, taken as the essence of scientific work
and knowledge express the condition of its emptiness. One knows that it occurs by itself, distanced
from men and their consequences. It is an irresponsible knowledge that we could say without fear of
being wrong, that Western science and the scientist constitute the maximum expression of the
"empty self of the conqueror",
"It is about the philosophical (scientific), juridical and even theological constitution of the modern"soul", of
the "interiority" of the Self as a rational principle of alien domination and alienating any real life forms, exiled
 from the community and nature while at the same time, opposed to them as a principle of control and
domination, that is, as a colonizing principle in the broadest sense "lxxviii,
with which the history of modernity has been rationalized, and of course, a large part of the history
of our continent.
The scientific activity and science are understood thus, by themselves and for themselves.
The link between this knowledge and economic development or social welfare (the kind highly
"sold" in our countries not only by the countries of the "center", but by our "scientists"), are not
necessarily linked, given the alien character that the social or political reality has for science; that is,
by the "emptying" of the content of "reality" of that which is scientific and its doing; moreso in our
countries. This is so, because as Mario Bunge rightly points out: "for the advancement of science it
is enough that some nations do it "lxxix. Moreover, the "health of science" depends much more on the
quality of its production that of the "massive development" of it, that is, of its popularization; so,
"instead of trying to maximize scientific development we should aspire to increase its quality, which
is always possible without increasing the scientific staff"lxxx.
In short, the idea on which we have been led to found our hopes in America Latina and in
the so-called "Third World", and according to which, only the domain of science and technology
would impel us to contemporaneity, modernity and, therefore, to development, falls into the vacuum
that constitutes science itself, in the sense that it exists outside of our needs and conveniences,
responds only to the international system to which belongs to the world-capitalist system, and on
which it works, according to its rationality, justification and perpetuation.

For a point of vie of the eocial eciencee from Latn America

So far, we have tried to follow the course of Wallerstein's approach in his criticism of science in
general and social sciences in particular. Criticism that leads to the supposed extreme of
"unthinking", which likewise, seems to be valid. However, our pretension is to force the bar a bit
more, in the sense of exerting more "unthinking" proposed by the author. We do it, not by mere
radical or extremist encouragement but because we are convinced that from Latin America this this
is more than necessary, it is vital, insofar as the reflections, entirely valid of Wallerstein were, they
are made from the same original center of science. This is not questionable per se, but this is equally
acceptable and even "natural" within the process of developing the science in the West; that
criticism overcoming traditions and the appearance of vanguards, is understood by the West as part
of that old idea of overcoming stages in the line of history towards progress. But for us, from
America Latina, Wallerstein's criticisms put us in the dilemma of sticking to their proposals while
waiting or following them in their results, which would not be anything other than rearrangement
that this "unthinking" produces the same that the West would; or on the contrary, be able to
generate, at least, its "own" point of view of science.
Now, this last approach has an initial difficulty, its deployment depends on the ability to
break through the resistance that has been generated through the long history of the coloniality of
knowledge in Latin America. We have to locate its origin, necessarily, in the ignorance and denial of
knowledge and the negation of the knowledge created prior to the conquest. In the idea of
"emptiness" and in the process of "emptying" everything that could settle our difference in the
perception of the world, of our worldview, and of course, our possible point of view about knowing
the world and the knowledge of our reality. We have been overcome with the meta-narrative of the
alleged universality and natural condition that lead to modernity and by which all peoples and
cultures of the planet are "naturally" governed, it is also an extraordinary weight that we would to
get rid of if we want to take flight.
In this sense, we can not overlook that the structure and infrastructure of the Latin American
knowledge has been created based on the fact that the meta-narrative was established as unique and
natural. This constitutes a mechanism of knowledge that exiles any other possibility or different
way of thinking and being. That is to say, it's about
"A form of organization and being in society is transformed through this colonizer of knowledge device in the
"normal" way of the human being and society. The other forms of being, the other forms of organization and
 being of society, the other forms of knowledge, are transformed not only in different, but into lacking, in
archaic, primitive, traditional, premodern. They are located at an earlier time in the historical development of
humanity, which in the imaginary of progress emphasizes its inferiority"lxxxi.
Overcoming this meta-narrative to build your own point of view is almost a process of conversion,
in the most secular of the sense of the term. It implies starting by recognizing the "vacuum" of the
science with which we have believed would fill the "emptiness" that we have believed to have; or
better, the "vacuum" that has configured us as "non-being". This supposes, in first instance, the
deinstitutionalization of knowledge to understand it as a process in which the learning and
recognition of those knowledges that until now we have been belittled and cataloged via social
science as "folklore", "animism", "mythical thought", "magic", "exotic", etc., etc. This is not easy,
"History has left us five centuries of colonial domination. One of the inheritances of which we must get rid of
inexcusably and as soon as possible, it is the distortion with which we see our own reality when perceiving it
through the sieve of the cultural prejudices proper of the uninterrupted colonizer's ideology" lxxxii.
Deinstitutionalizing knowledge implies on the one hand, beginning to understand, that there
is no separation between the elements that are present in the world, man among them which means,
that there are no relations between subjects and objects and therefore, the search for knowledge and
knowledge itself occurs if and only if the subjects are grasped in the same relationship. This leads
us to the need to resolve the rupture between science and philosophy from which science in the
West departs. All of the knowledge it produces in a speculative relationship is a thought generated
in the relation between subjects. This relationship is also generated both by the need for knowledge
and by the hope that its emergence occurs among men. In such a way, then, no knowledge is
generated individually or by pure individual consent, but by its close links with the problems, needs
and hopes of the real society. If this is possible, it must necessarily lead us to solve three issues that
to us seem to happen as a consequence.
The first thing is the de-powering of knowledge. The fact that the process of knowing is
produced free of all traditional institutions and from a relationship between subjects that are
understood, provokes, necessarily, the liquidation of every position of dominion and subjection
between the elements that participate in the process of knowing. The resulting knowledge as well, is
in any case, the domain of such elements that thus become aware of both the problematic question
as well as of the solutions to which they arrive together. So, already it is not the "scientist" that
poses problems about reality, from his particularity and individuality; problems on which they
elaborate causal hypotheses and their possible manifest solutions in categories and concepts with
which, subsequently, obliges reality to corroborate. It is about the scientific community to which it
belongs and validates them as such.
Knowledge without power is nothing other than the de-scientification of knowledge. Such
is the second consequence to which we must refer. What validates knowledge is not the closed
language of a particular community that emerges from the social setting and is constituted in power.
From our point of view, with the deinstitutionalization of knowledge the search for knowledge is
returned to the same problem solving process that is essential to the whole of society. This is done
in such a way that science and the search for and production of knowledge is generated in that
context and, therefore, its validation will come given by the acquisition and control by the social
group of the proposed solutions from science. In this way, the language of science ceases to be
other, alien to that of the society, but must correspond to the worldview present in the language of
that society that generates its knowledge. That is, the language of science becomes part of the
worldview of society and, therefore, supports that thought, that vision of the world. All of which is
nothing other than the pluralization of knowledge, which constitutes our third consequence.
The rupture of the relationship between science and power, forces one to recognize and learn
the contribution of the everyday in the search for solutions to the problems of reality, that liquidates
the individuation. It is replaced by a collective and plural action of participants in the process of
knowing. What does not equate to the disappearance of the individual, but to their integration in the
real collective and its problems. This pluralization implies the ability to see reality from all possible
perspectives, from the plurality of cosmovisions, and above all, to see in reality that which is
invisible to us even though it is present and that until now, certainly, we can not see given the
perspective of monist vision that we assume and with through which we have been configured in
our "vacuum". Since that perspective, only science is able to find the "truth", and that "truth",
"...does not tolerate competitors. There is only one truth. So, of course, it is also affirmed that being is unique
and indivisible, and that from it all things are derived, because it is the beginning of everything. Likewise,
political and social philosophy are developed according to the guidelines of the same monism, with exclusion
of the plurality of political-social systems "lxxxiii.
In other words, it is about the liquidation of monism in science and on the other hand, the
pluralization of its perspectives and its participants. It does not imply and has to nothing see, with
the "massification of science" or its loss of rigor. It is about something essential.
Pluralize refers to the opening towards multiple worldviews, perspectives and possibilities
of solution to the same real problem. At the same time, it implies an active and equally multiple
participation of those elements, which until now and of according to the concept of Western science
are only objects, and therefore, incapable of providing perspective to their solutions.
In short, the de-institutionalization of science and knowledge implies decentering it. To
move the fitting that until now it has had for us and transfer it towards one that has to see what we
really are: not the vacuum, but simply non-Western "others". This recognition can not be assumed
as a simple contrast, but as a worldview. That is to say, it is not about denying to deny the West, but
about understanding its presence and perspective of vision as a simple perspective, in the search for
our own point of view.
This implies the abandonment of the perspective from which until now, we have understood,
and that it is not another, that the West has given us as unique and as "ours", but that in reality it
makes us incomprehensible, because it shows us as dichotomized, split, as for the West all things
are by nature: dichotomous, divided, dualized: science / philosophy, body / soul, reason / nature,
civilization / barbarism, backwardness / progress; in short, the dialectical scaffolding on which the
West has configured his vision of the world has to be considered by us as just that: the Western view
of the world. When it is assumed by us as natural and unique, this deepens the coloniality of our
thinking while our body resists and rejects it, making our own vision of the world confusing and
incomprehensible. To construct our point of view is to make the condition of ourselves visible and
solid. It is about recognizing ourselves as a non-Western "we".
To break the duality and splitting of knowledge, supposes its totalization, or as Wallerstein
calls it, his holistic understanding. In effect, the dichotomies, in truth, do not exist. The analysis of
the West is nothing more than the division of the object into its parts, knowing that such a
separation is impossible except on the basis of the death of the object in its operation and action.
This principle of analysis is one of the considerations Wallerstein includes when talking about the
crisis of the sciences and it is what has led him and other Western scientists to raise the need to un-
think them.
For us Latin Americans, it is, in any case, the recovery of our unity. The unity of us.
Knowing is indivisible from our thinking; that is, from our worldview, of our worldview or way of
philosophizing, that obviously, "Is opposed to the conception of man dichotomized in body and
soul,a thinking thing and extensive thing, those that they command and those who are sent, both by
their nature"lxxxiv.
Finally, reviewing everything up to here exposed as an organismic whole, we say that such
an approach is what could be considered as the poetification of knowledge. Understanding it as a
poetic condition, that which amplifies the meanings of what has been said, of the evident, that
which pluralizes the possibilities of comprehension and interpretation, what gives meaning and
what until that moment was only believed to be an inert body without meaning; in short, that which
vivifies all the relations between man and nature, between man and things. To poetize knowledge is
to gather in an indivisible whole the useful and true with the good and the beautiful, with which,
science recovers its human side, and makes science an artistic condition.
There we have our utopia, in the strictest sense of project that has to propel us to the search
for the possible. Its reality or realization only depends, in principle, on us being able to read what is
happening, even when that of "giving oneself"lxxxv, seems in this moment not to be what determines
the political, social and cultural direction of our countries. But there it is, "giving oneself" is a
matter of which, as the old man said in our first lines, we decide to see each other and to really start.
Second Part
The etruggle in and for territory.
The Way of the Communitee
Coemovieion ae a eapon for the defenee of territory
The term globalization, despite the frequency with which it is used at all levels, tends to be
imprecise given the multiplicity of meanings or uses. From students of the social sciences to the
people's common uses of the word, it is applied to what appears as an expression of many ideas and
sometimes of none. These range from the meaning that shows it as the most elevated and
contemporary stage of development of world capitalism to that which defines it as the spectacular
moment in which the world (happily?) has finally become a unique global village, reducing almost
completely and in an illusory way, the cultural differences of all the peoples of the planet as long as,
as Macluhan points out, not only foreign markets are invaded with goods, but complete cultures are
invaded and intervened with packages complete of information, entertainment and ideas that tend to
model their forms of life.
In any case, the multiple significant implications to which the term of globalization have led
us to the risk of emptying it of its deepest political and ideological content above all, we must not
lose sight of the fact that, "In the context of world of business the idea of globalization is not simply
an analytical notion, it is a notion of an ideological nature that expresses a certain orientation
towards the future"lxxxvi. Perhaps one of its more extended and analyzed meanings is, precisely, the
one that connects globalization with a new kind of spatiality; a planetary spatiality that has intended
to postulate it not only as the end of history but also of geography. "The idea that we are already in
a satellite civilization immediately creates the feeling of living in a world where geography came to
an end"lxxxvii. It seems to be the most widespread illusion of the phenomenon. However, the above is
only a mirage in the world map which, we must understand not only as a representation of physical
space but in its human and cultural dimension, this idea in the strict ideological sense is intended to
be installed as a unique vision by nature.
Now, we believe it is necessary to confront globalization understood as that "Global
economy" in which companies and financial institutions operate transnationally, eliminating
national borders and incorporating regions and places formerly alien or cataloged as "traditional"
spaces into the world market. All this, from the decomposition of the production processes in which
the operations are located in different points of the world geography, but interconnected to the
transnationals. In this meaning, our interest is to demonstrate the possibility of seeing and analyzing
globalization from the perspective of its status as a geo-strategy of domination that is contextualized
in the different dependent countries and, particularly in Latin America, through the implementation
of economic projects and neoliberal policies, aimed at safeguarding and guarantee in the long term,
the hegemonic interests of the world economic powers and, in the Latin American and Venezuelan
case in particular, the North American power.
But, because this experience of globalized capitalist development tends to produce a break
in those "traditional" spaces, such as had never happened before, confrontational response does not
arise from the national states but from the communities of the places in rupture. Well, it's generally
about spaces rich in raw materials, energy: oil, gas, coal; already of biodiversity or large reservoirs
of water; territories ancestrally occupied by native indigenous populations, which thus become local
communities in the fight against globalization, not only in defense of their territories, but
fundamentally and in essence, of their societal forms and worldview radically opposed to the model
hegemonic of the neoliberal geo-strategy.
This geo-strategy of neoliberalism has implied changes from the point of view policy within
the national states, which range from the adequacy of order until the elaboration of new
constitutional frameworks, as well as the necessary territorial reorganization, which constitutes a
key factor to provide free access to transnational capitals to the regions and places supposedly
incorporated into the "developing". Such legal-political-territorial changes have been disseminated
as necessary and unavoidable, if the dependent States intend to integrate "Harmonically" to the
globalizing process which is suggested as equivalent to a sustained economic growth, apparently, is
only possible to achieve through the investments from the financial centers of globalization, and all
this is done to appear as the only possible way, not only by a "natural" condition of one's own
current capitalism, but because of the lack of political-economic alternatives that are oppose the
neoliberal recipe imposed by the "strange dictatorship" of financial entities, International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank, etc.
This has become so pervasive that even the recent electoral victories of parties and
characters linked to the Latin American "left" have not managed to turn this course and such
triumphs seem to be responding more to the political rearrangement for the application of the
neoliberal geo-strategy in the midst of political exhaustion and definitive bankruptcy of traditional
forces of power in our countries rather than the emergence of a true anti-imperialist project from the
national states.
It is in this context that the indigenous and peasant populations, owners of the territories and
places of interest to big capital, are those who from the defense of their localities and spaces, not
only in the sustenance and persistence of their particulars economies, but above all, by virtue of the
vision they have about them; of somehow delineating from the resistance, that alternative in the
eyes of many appears as nonexistent. It is to this confrontation of visions that we will essentially
refer.
Globalization as a neoliberal geo-strategy based in hegemony clearly presents a process of
recolonization or renovation. It deepens the bonds of dependence between our nations with respect
to the big capitals in the world and particularly in regards to Latin America bound in North
American imperialism. Faced with this reality, the argument recurrently wielded by some "leftist"
Latin American forces is supported by the version of certain social scientists. The argument is: the
impossibility of facing this neoliberal geo-strategy because of an intrinsic vulnerability of our
countries that, at most, make it only possible to walk the path of integration to the globalization in
the "best conditions" possible to be negotiated, which is equivalent to the conditions allowed by the
same world political-economic power factors. In the face of these positions that border on
claudication, are the Indigenous peoples, minority, excluded, historically denied, considered
backward and politically incapacitated by "pre-historic" or at least "pre-modern", are those people
who against all assumptions begin to confront globalization in a direct way, not only in defense of
their last territories but, fundamentally, from their worldviews on which they sustain their tenacious
resistance.
In short, our proposal is directed towards the consideration of the possibility of alternatives
for Latin America from the perspective of places, understood as representative of a non-Western and
therefore non-capitalist vision, in which the Indigenous peoples, from their worldviews, have
something transcendental to say.
"Put another way, through a reaffirmation of place, non-capitalism and local culture are opposed to the
domination of space, capital and modernity, which are central to the discourse of the globalization, this must
result in theories that make viable the possibilities to re-conceive and rebuild the world from a perspective of
place-based practice"lxxxviii

The legal chaine of globalizaton

Throughout the period from the end of World War II to 1973, the ideas of economic
liberalism were in a terrible state because, as a result of the war, the need to restore European
markets forced the development of economic strategies in that the participation or intervention of
the States was decisive. The problem for The United States was clear, being at that time the country
with the greatest wealth accumulated in the world, it could not give vent to its entire production
capacity of goods without first lifting from their ashes the European countries defeated by the war.
"The dilemma was obvious: the richest country in the world could not sell because its main market
could not buy "lxxxix.
On the other hand, the reconstruction was also determined by the ghost of world
communism. The United States resorted to a strategy on two fronts: militarily, resolved through the
formation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and through the Marshall Plan. It was
necessary that in both directions the Allied States of the United States were economically strong.
That is to say, for the famous economic miracles of Germany and Japan, there was a deep, sustained
and well planned state intervention.
In this economic policy the State was seen as a generator of investment and social welfare. It
was developed similarly in the dominated, dependent countries that in some cases were colonies
still existing at that moment. In Latin America and other countries of the so-called periphery this
was the time of the substitution of imports, the construction of industrial devices that are
technologically dependent, but that also induced the respective States to grant political action and
economic freedoms that made public investment possible. That translated into constitutions, legal
frameworks and a whole legal-political institutionality as well as other mirages of sovereignty that
despite their weak condition, have ended up becoming today, true and contradictory obstacles to the
purposes of neoliberal globalization geo-strategy.
It was especially so in the eighties that the production of the rebound of economic liberalism
that has come to be called neo-liberalism, that ended the Fordist stage of accumulation and the so-
called welfare state Keynesian of the postwar period. It took figure of decalogue in the Washington
Consensus where conditions demanded for the global economic reordering in the so-called stage of
globalization. Of the ten conditions there are four essentials to mention, they are: 1) Liberalization
of the internal markets; 2) The normative flexibility of the States; 3) The privatization of industries
considered as basic by the nation states dependent on the previous historical context and 4) The
territorial or geo-economic reordering of our countries, depending on access to resource-rich spaces,
to the capitals and the world market. Such conditions come in open contradiction with the process
of normative, legal, political and ideological construction to which the dependent governments of
Latin America countries and the Third World in general, dedicated long decades of effort to make
appear as the path to "development" and to the "economic independence".
In such a way, then, the process of globalization implies the elimination of many elements
and factors of political power of nation States, so that one of the conditions it imposes on dependent
countries more immediately and with profound effects within them is the process of adaptation and
restructuring of the internal juridical-political framework, in function of which its reform makes
possible the free flow of transnational capital, guarantees the high rates of return to which it aspires
and; finally, total security to your investments.
This process of legal-political and institutional adaptation has been applied in a sustained
way in Latin America as a "Subordinated reintegration of Latin American countries in globalization
(...) decided by the growing adoption of the policies of the Washington Consensus, incipiently at the
beginning of the 1970s and 1980s in Chile and Argentina, and in an open and accelerated way in
Mexico and Bolivia 1988 to 1994. Brazil, Peru and the Central American countries adopted it from
1994 to 1998 "xc.
This globalizing reinsertion takes place in several ways, not only through bilateral
agreements, conventions and protocols with constitutional force; but also, to through free trade
agreements (FTA, FTAA), development projects and investment in infrastructure (IIRSA), the
restructuring of the judicial system even, in some cases, in countries in open political crisis, through
the convocation of Constituent Assemblies (Colombia in 1991 and Venezuela in 1998), the drafting
of new constitutions for the purposes of globalization were definitive determinants in their finally
approved formulations.
Such purposes have to do with the breakdown of popular commitments acquired previously
by nation states; dismantling or diminishing the nationalist and developmentalist institutions;
weakening of sovereignty to the point that allows the intervention of capital in the industries up to
that time considered as basic or strategic for the States, as well as the reduction to the maximum of
the regulator role thereof; adjustment of legal frameworks of labor according to the so-called labor
flexibility, destruction of previous social security systemsr directing them to the intervention and
control of international financial capital; reordering of the territories, redefining the concept or legal
category granted to certain spaces (National Parks, Ecological Reserve Areas, etc.), for its opening
to large capitals. In short, all of the institutional scaffolding of the national states was reformulated
to make them susceptible to control by the global power factors and their capitals, or as Lucio
Oliver himself points out:
"This is a modification that goes further: it strengthens the character of unilateral dominance of capital. In
abstract terms, it is a change in the relation to capital in favor of capitalists; in concrete social terms the
dissipation of the relatively inclusive regulator of the National State "90
In the case of Venezuela, by the end of the eighties, in the middle of the negotiations of the external
debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Commission for State Reform was created.
This became responsible for preparing the general restructuring project in function of the
requirements of the Fund. The reform was an integral part of a set of strictly economic and fiscal
measures that this institution determined for the economies of the so-called "countries in crisis".
The application of economic adjustments ended up producing the social outbreak of February 27,
1989, most commonly called "The Caracazo", which generated the deepening of a political crisis
and that led, later, to the destitution of the then president Carlos Andrés Pérez. At no time have both
the legal-political adjustments to the State that were imposed by the IMF as well as the economic-
financial program detained the "Bolivarian revolution", on the contrary, it drove deeper into the
bosom of the "revolution".
It was not until 1999, after the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez when the convocation of
the National Constituent Assembly was held as a fulfillment of one of the electoral slogans most
proclaimed by the then candidate. The character derived though not originating from this call, was
not only due to the way in which it was done through the constituted powers, but the fund itself
would be clearly expressed in its statute number eight, that clearly stated that the new constitution
"respected and assumed as part of it, all the international agreements and agreements previously
signed by the Venezuelan State"xci.
In this way, agreements such as the protocol on shippingxcii and the fight against drug
trafficking signed by the then President Rafael Caldera, through which, US Navy vessels can stop
any ship in Venezuelan territorial waters suspected of transporting drugs undisputedly constitutes a
flagrant violation of national sovereignty, it was thus constitutionally recognized nothing less than
by the Constitution elaborated by the " Bolivarian Revolution." In such a way, then, it is evident that
from its own convocation, the constituent process of 1999 in Venezuela was determined by
international factors of capital and more particularly, by the American imperialist power.
The globalizational character of the legal-political framework in the current Venezuelan
national constitution, despite the "nationalist" rhetoric of its promoters, is possible to identify if we
analyze some of its most relevant articles. Despite the fact that Article 2 of the Constitution
establishes that "Venezuela constitutes a Democratic and Social State of Law and Justice ...", the
constitutional doctrine invoked by this means that the Venezuelan State must regulate the economy
and assume the satisfaction of the social rights of the population; plus, such a principle is left open
to the possibility of its privatization.
In chapter V of title III of the same Constitution, the rights recognized by the Venezuelan
State are grouped, including the right to health, social security and education, these are defined as
Public Services (articles 84, 85, 86 and 102). This definition of the indicated social rights as public
services must be analyzed in light of what is established in article 113 of the magna carta, a rule that
refers to economic rights, and according to which:
"When it comes to exploitation of natural resources owned by the nation or the provision of services of a
public nature with exclusivity or without it, the State may grant concessions ..."xciii
That is, the 1999 Constitution permits the privatization of public services of such important
social rights as health, education and social security. In addition, it allows the privatization of the
exploitation of the natural resources of the nationxciv. What without a doubt constitutes an obvious
setback in social rights and in the social security conquests achieved by workers in past periods.
Above all, it is an express fulfillment of the aspirations of the big capital transnational financial
system to intervene in social security through the cost effectiveness of business.
On the other hand, when reviewing the content of articles 302 and 304 of the current
constitutional text, referred to as the "oil activity and other industries, farms, services and goods of
public interest and of strategic nature", that take advantage of the waters in the public domain,
equally established, that oil exploitation and any other exploitation or public service of a strategic
nature, as well as the use of water can be privatized through the figure of the concession. But as to
give greater guarantees to globalization intervening without risks in the strategic industry of the
Venezuelan state, the transitory provision eighteenth of the constitutional text leaves clearly
established that:
"The law will establish that civil servants of the public administration and the judges called or called to know
and decide disputes related to the matters referred to in Article 113 of this Constitution, observe, as a priority
and exclusionary matter, the principles defined therein and refrain from applying, any disposition susceptible
of generating effects contary to them ".xcv
From what it is possible to clearly infer privatization of the exploitation of the natural resources of
the nation and the provision of public services (social rights), even of a strategic nature, has a
preponderance over any other economic, social, political, historical, or legal consideration.xcvi
Despite the provisions of Article 302 in that the State reserves for reasons of national convenience
the oil activity and other industries, holdings and services of public interest and strategic nature, this
can not be invoked to prevent the application of constitutional Article 113 that allows the
privatization of the aforementioned economic activities. On the contrary, civil servants and judges
are ordered (what violates jurisdictional autonomy) to know and decide controversies relating to the
matters referred to in Article 113, which apply on a priority basis excluding the guidelines
contained in said norm and refrain from applying any provision liable to generate effects contrary to
themxcvii. In other words, those contrary to the interests of the transnational mining and oil
companies which in Venezuela are mostly North American.
In regard to Article 113 and the eighteenth transitory provision of the 1999 Constitution, it is
mandatory to conclude that the current Magna Carta does not produce a legal-institutional structure
that guarantees the exercise of social rights by the population fundamental to it, and that, on the
contrary, it creates a solid legal structure to implement the neoliberal and anti-national economic
model.
Within this legal-institutional structure we must add articles 299 and 303, which reaffirm
and leave no doubt about the neoliberal nature of the Bolivarian constitution, thus, the first of these
norms consecrates nothing less than the free market as a governing principle of the economic
regime of the Republic of Venezuela. Article 303 establishes that the subsidiary companies of
Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) can be sold to national or foreign private capital. They can
also be sold all companies that have been incorporated or are constituted as a result of the
development of the business of our oil company.
We must emphasize that the indicated privatization is part of a whole process of
recolonization of the Venezuelan nation through control of its spaces of energy, strategic raw
materials or large reservoirs of water. This has materialized much more in oil and gas, through the
granting of concessions for the exploration and exploitation of said natural resources such as the
Orinoco Delta Platform (Gas) and the Tomoporo in the Lake of Maracaibo. They were handed over
in a 50 year concession to Chevron-Texaco. It is estimated that they can produce about 300
thousand barrels per day of extra-light oil, which in itself speaks to the strategic nature that the State
Venezuelan should have this deposit. Today it is in the hands of the American company that,
presumably, is linked to President Bush's family. As a corollary of this singular delivery we must
add the recent Uribe-Chávez pact, through a company was created made up of ECOPETROL
(Colombia), PDVSA (Venezuela) and, again, Chevron-Texaco (United States) for the construction
of a Colombo-Venezuelan gas pipeline towards the Panama Canal, as an expedited and safe way to
guarantee supply directly to the United States.
All of the above is perfectly legalized and favored by a legal-institutional framework that in
the jargon of the government constitutes, nothing less than the legal-political structure of the
"Bolivarian revolution"; so in the present, any legal claim for nullifying these concessions and
agreements against the strategic interests of the Venezuelan nation, would have no legal force in the
face of Article 113 and the eighteenth transitory provision of the constitutional text of 1999. It is
shown thus, that the response given by the 1999 National Constituent Assembly to the political
crisis was suggested by neoliberal strategies, restoring the liberal state of right and returning to the
market economy. It is totally contradictory that a Republic that is constituted as a Social State of
Rights and Justice that assumes the responsibility of the satisfaction of the social rights of its
population; at the same time and in the same constitutional document, allows the sale to private
capital of its main economic activity from which it obtains the dividends to meet its related
obligations with social rights. Consequently, the Chávez Constitution claims that defining the
Republic as a Social State of Law and Justice, is nothing more than a constitutional facade, a mere
proclamation of principles, in other words: meaningless words.
Finally, we can not close this aside without mentioning a very important aspect of this new
Venezuelan constitutional framework that has to do with the section devoted to the indigenous
communities. Certainly, the 1999 Constitution consecrates a whole chapter to the aboriginal
minorities that in Venezuela constitute about 30 totally differentiated peoples and cultures. Publicly
this chapter became one of the arguments that the"intellectuals of the left"
in Latin America have defended more boldly to show the constitutional text as "the most advanced
of the continent" or, the one that has been raised as a flag to try to demonstrate the veracity of the
"revolutionary" condition of a government that, deep down and despite its discourse, does not
represent anything but the highest interests of globalization and, most especially, we will see later,
against the indigenous peoples.
A brief review of this "dedication" seems to show that there has not been in any way, a
substantial change in the way in which the national State has always considered and defined the
indigenous peoples of the country. So for example, in the repealed constitution of 1961 the
indigenous communities and peoples were legally subject to what were called zones of special
regime; expressly, "until their total integration into the Venezuelan nation is produced," that is to say
that until its disintegration of distinct peoples and cultures would take place, the entire structure and
power of the State and, especially, its educational apparatus, as well as other political and economic
instances would function as a whole de-civilizational systemxcviii, directed to provoke such a process
of integration-disintegration of cultures, or rather, to disappear civilizations.
This approach corresponded to the positivist vision of the liberal state, which is well
expressed by Diaz Polanco,
"The early and repeated concern in some cases reaches the rank of political obsession, by the "incomplete" or
"inauthentic" character of the nation itself, given the persistence of ethnic groups. And secondly, as a corollary
of the above, the eager search for formulas that allow "complete" or "integrated" societies whose fabric is
socio-culturally heterogeneous, is the observation of such heterogeneity as a stigma, as a defect of the nation
that must be overcome "xcix,
and arrive in that way to modernity and development, which for that matter seems to mean the same
thing.
The 1999 constitution does not seem to improve the definition much in spite of the extensive
preamble in which it is said to recognize cultural, idiomatic and customs differences. It is clarified
almost immediately with a particular emphasis that it is not about people as such or, at least, not
with the political and territorial rights that the concept "people" generates. In its absence that the
new constitution only recognizes such communities and groups the right to a habitat.
This point is crucial, not only in regard to the violation and dispossession of the political
rights of indigenous peoples and their autonomy, which is saying a lot; but such constitutional
provision and its conceptual orientation is closely linked to other demands of the neoliberal geo-
strategy of globalization. This refers to the the need for transnational capital to territorially or geo-
economically reorder the country in terms of the "liberalization" of spaces and territories previously
protected by Venezuelan legislation. This makes possible intervention into those regions rich in raw
materials, energy and biodiversity that, by the way, in Venezuela and other countries in Latin
America, correspond almost entirely to the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples.
In this way, when resorting to the concept of habitat vs. territory, the Constitution of 1999
reiterates the positivist vision but still worsens the legal status of the indigenous peoples in relation
to the previous constitution, because, although it is true that this only granted the possibility of
citizenship by virtue of its integration-cultural disintegration, it is also true that their legal status was
subject to their spaces of special regime, which generated a series of legal figures such as those of
National Parks, Zones of Ecological Reserves or Indigenous Reserve Areas, which in some way,
prevented or at least hindered any direct intervention into them, either from their own national State
or foreign companies. On the contrary, the concept of habitat, proper to biology and, according to
which, every living being lives, by virtue of a space that is conducive to it or that makes its
biological life possible from the most microscopic larvae to the largest of the predators possess and
live in a determined habitat; but it is the case, that among all species, only men possess territory in
its broadest sense: vital, geographical, symbolic and political. It is only men and peoples or cultures
that socially build, generate and possess political rights and, consequently, territorial rights. So, the
concept of habitat thus applied, evidently calls into question the human condition of the Venezuelan
indigenous people while denying their political and territorial rights outright.
To conclude this point we can say that, in effect, the constitution approved in 1999 in
Venezuela, despite being proclaimed as the legal-political and ideological framework of the so-
called "Bolivarian revolution", possesses some of the main paradigms of the neoliberal model and
thought, such as: 1) the free market as its economic principle; 2) the privatization of the exploitation
of natural resources and strategies of the national, public or state companies and public services;
and 3) the possibility of privatization of spaces rich in biodiversity, energy resources or water
reserves through a territorial rearrangement tailored to the intervention of the great amounts of
capital, what is said by the way, would strip their last territories of their ancestral inhabitants:
indigenous peoples, whose unique societal forms and vision of the world resists in open
contradiction to the globalizing and neoliberal model.

Territorial reorganizaton, aaee of development and communitee in etruggle

We have been pointing out that neoliberal globalization encourages and pressures the disappearance
of, or at least, the extreme weakening of the concept of sovereignty. Throughout the post-World War
II period it accompanied the Wilson and Roosevelt doctrines of the "self-determination of peoples"
and optimism and faith in "national development". Now, in the present, the idea of national
sovereignty seems to overshadow and hinder the freedom of movement to which capital and
transnational companies aspire and demand as an absolute guarantee to their investments. At first,
this pressure on sovereignty came to be confused with a possible disappearance of the state in the
future or its intervention in the disclosure and imposition of new economic processes. However, the
dynamics of the events have left it increasingly clear that for the implementation and development
of neoliberal policies in the context of our societies, the state is the only structure capable of
executing it effectively over the whole society. Hence, as Wallersteinc seems to demonstrate very
well, even though it is essential for liberal ideology to maintain the state outside of economic life as
much as possible and, in general, to minimize its role, not less true is the fact that being the
defenders of the individual and their rights against the state, the liberals push and are pushed in the
direction of suffrage and the democratic state; so, as a consequence of that, the state becomes the
main agent of all reforms. In other words, liberal ideology has always had an immense need for
state services to promote and implement their own program. In this sense, the vision about a
possible disappearance of the state by the action of neoliberal globalization is completely false.
What has certainly come about in the weakening of the state by insisting on flexibility; of one of its
essential precepts that in previous historical periods, was assumed as its foundation and non-
delegable task: the defense of national sovereignty as an essential element in the search for
independent economic-political development. Thus, there is no doubt that globalization develops
pressure mechanisms that impose conditions to the dependent economies and national states in
order that these, not only change or reformulate their legal and institutional frameworks for the
benefit of the free market, but that such reformulations are going to have a peculiar incidence in the
geo-economy and the territory; vital to sovereignty. The intervention, occupation and even
possession (expressed in exclusive management) on the part of transnational corporations can take
place in territorial spaces rich in natural resources. All of which points towards a kind of
recolonization or renewal of a colonial condition that during the period of optimism for national
development was believed to have been overcome. However, the difference is that the current
recolonization is political and legally accepted, adopted and even promoted by the national states
themselves that they suffer it and thus accept it, as a unique and inevitable path in the context of
globalization.
It is not possible to separate the actions of transnationals and global financial power,
particularly in Latin America, of what constitutes a geo-strategy of domination and imperialist
hegemony. It is very true that,
"Historically, the plundering of natural resources and the exploitation of Latin American peoples as the
foundation of capital accumulation has been a nodal point in Hemispheric imperial geopolitics, just to
mention the Spanish colonies or the Pax Americana "ci.
Or paraphrasing the speech of a former US president, "what is good for American companies is
good for the United States." This way, the dividing line between the interests of financial capital,
transnationals and, the geostrategic interest of the United States as a hegemonic power over these
particular Latin American territories is practically indiscernible. If for the the first is about succulent
businesses as well as the enhancement of their accumulation of capital, for the second one expresses
"the American geo-economic and geopolitical projection, in particular about "their" immediate zone
(...) has revealed increasingly exploitative schemes that will allow the hemisphere to be aligned
with the imperial needs of the first decades of the 21st century "cii.
Put another way, for the United States it is a geostrategic need to own and control those
spaces that are in "their" area of influence constitutes the most biodiversity content, energy
resources such as oil, gas or coal and, above all, the largest freshwater reserves on the planet.
These spaces and territories in Latin America are well defined and delimited in the
imperialist geo-strategy, which can also be specified through the programs of development that for
each of them the interests of globalization and imperialism have come imposing with force in the
last two decades. They are:
1.- The Mesoamerican corridor on which they advance through the so-called Plan Puebla-Panama
2.- The Chocó region in Colombia, perhaps, the region with the highest rainfall in the planet and
with immense possibilities for an interoceanic channel.
3.- The Amazon with all that it represents in water, energy and water resources biodiversity and that
includes Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay.
4.- The Orinoco River basin in Venezuela, with one of the largest reserves proven heavy oil and
natural gas, as well as immense water reserves and possibilities of hydroelectric energy, besides
being a waterway capable of joining the region of the eastern plains of Colombia and northern
Brazil in an almost natural way, with the Atlantic Ocean.

The alignment of these spaces to the geostrategic needs of domination imperialist and globalized
capitalist accumulation has been implemented through regional integration programs through the
so-called development corridors, consisting in the location of a set of infrastructures that make
possible the interconnection of spaces and, of course, the exploitation of their resources. So, it's
coming, proposing and, in some cases, progress has been made in the construction of waterways,
land, railways and road corridors for the flow of goods and premium materials extracted from those
territories. Likewise, brokers require lines of energy and telecommunications that complete its
structure, taking physical body in the geographic space imperialist expansion. It is, in short, as Gian
Carlo Delgado Ramos points out, "the most efficient figure -in capitalist terms- for the territorial
occupation (territorial rearrangement) are the transport and trade of goods by land and water,
development of industry and large-scale agriculture, the stimulation of tourism-inspired
multinational areas, etc."ciii.
The opening of these places to privatization for the benefit of the large capital and, therefore,
the geo-strategy of North American domination on the continent, requires in the first instance, legal-
political and institutional changes referred to expressly to the legal status of the land, as well as the
global reorganization of the States and their territories, which within the countries involved has
been welcomed as the mandatory and "necessary" territorial reorganization, an initial step to access
the program of development corridors and, of course, their financing. Such is the priority condition
that the World Bank (main financing entity of these programs) imposes on countries that are the
objects of investment: the obligation to build a legal structure for such spaces and territories,
instituting what they call "regulatory framework of management" and that, "refers to all those
measures that have to be taken to homogenize the legal and operational guidelines for access to
such and such resources (of course, under the argument that it is prerequisite necessary to execute
its "conservation", its "sustainable use", etc.) "civ. Said another way, the world financial entity forces
the state to reorder the territory to favor its insertion in the desired spaces; they press for a
"regulatory management framework" that allows to leave under its exclusive control such spaces
that subsequently transfer to very "select actors", generally, NGOs under their protection and
financing such as Conservation International, who, once they have consolidated control of space,
opens the way for transnational companies who in turn are responsible for the management and
usufruct of the resources of the place subject to exploitation, be these energetic, biodiversity,
hydroelectric, minerals, etc. Finally, it is worth adding that, the financing of these development
corridors is done through loans that the World Bank and other entities such as: the World Bank, the
Inter-American Development Bank, the Andean Development Corporation, grant to the national
states, which is to say, that these vital spaces of our geography not only are delivered for the
capitalist accumulation through globalization and geopolitical control and geostrategic imperialist,
but also we must pay with interest for our own dispossession.
The presentation and justification of the development corridors by the different Latin
American governments and their technicians coincide completely, despite the ideological signs that
supposedly differentiate them. So for example, the arguments used by Vicente Fox's government of
change in Mexico in defense of the Puebla-Panama Plan are almost identical (not to say they are the
same), to those used by the Bolivarian "revolution" of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to defend his
Axes of Development, and that they are nothing else than the corridors corresponding to Venezuela
as part of the Integration Infrastructure World Bank program Regional for South America (IIRSA).
The development corridors are the way, according to its local defenders, that will allow our
countries the desired "competitive" integration or, its incorporation in "the best possible conditions"
to the process of globalization that is considered, in fact, as unstoppable and inevitable. For this, it
is the obligation of the states to produce the so-called territorial reorganization, which is justified by
the supposed pursuit in achieving the following objectives:
1.- Eliminate the historical imbalances of our geo-economies.
2.- Reduce the abnormalities in the population or demographic distribution.
3.- To optimize the use and usufruct of the resources of the country in function of achieving
mythical competitiveness in the context of the global free market.
4.- But, above all, the total modernization of the country through the incorporation of the globalized
economic process, of spaces conceived as marginal or traditional and in which survive forms of
production considered as pre-capitalist, which it could very well represent the end of capitalist de-
ruralization and the disappearance of last indigenous populations and their cultures in our countries,
which can not be called in another way than ethnocide in the broadest sense.
Now, with regard to Venezuela, the presentation of the reordering plan the territorial
management carried out by the government and its technicianscv is based on the premises specified
previously, but standing out among them, the following: first, the northern coastal region as the one
with the highest population concentration (60%), while the region of the llanero center, the west and
the south are practically depopulated: empty. Second, being that the northern coast is the most
populated it is at the same time more devoid of exploitable resources. On the contrary, the southern
regions (basin from the Orinoco and the Venezuelan Amazon) and western regions (Lake Maracaibo
basin and Sierra de Perijá) which have: 90% of water resources; 95% of the potential hydroelectric;
80% of the forest potential; 50% of soils with agricultural potential; besides an immense mining and
hydrocarbon potential.
In order to overcome what they consider a true imbalance that depends upon taking
advantage of the aforementioned potentials, the government of the "revolution" proposes what its
technicians call "unconcentrated decentralization" what for them means "the exploitation, through
the decentralization of the potentialities of the country to achieve a balanced and sustainable
distribution of productive activities, investments and the population"cvi.
In this sense and fully coinciding with the North American geostrategic interests of the
economic power of globalization, the "revolution" proposes the economic structuring of
development corridors as a program, to which their country managers, as a novelty, call "axes of
development". Those policies integrate and encompass the entire territory in question: the Eastern
Hub, which would cover the space and existing resources in the Anzoategui, Monagas, Sucre, Delta
Amacuro states and part of Bolívar state with international oil, gas, mining and tourism projects.
The majority of the territory was already granted in concession to North American transnationals
(and as if to "break" with unipolarity, China has entered the scene). A second is the denominated
Orinoco-Apure axis is of greater importance because of all of the resources involved. This would
integrate into the global market all the biodiversity of the Venezuelan Amazon, the north of Brazil,
the eastern plains of Colombia and part of Ecuador to through the interconnection of hydro-roads
joined to the Orinoco River and through it, to the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the Western Axis covers
the entire Lake Basin of Maracaibo and is connected to the Orinoco-Apure axis by the Sierra de
Perijá on both sides of the Colombian-Venezuelan border and part of the Venezuelan Andes, with
petroleum, petrochemical and coal projects.
Now, without extending this section too far, we believe it is necessary to offer some
historical considerations of the current Venezuelan socioeconomic configuration. Well, certainly, at
the time of the conquest and colonization of Venezuelan territory in the sixteenth century, the
northern coastal region was populated by countless indigenous nations, most belonging to the
Arawako and Caribbean linguistic branches. One of the main arguments of the conquest was the
supposed lack of real communitiescvii in these territories; however, we know that it was due to the
effects of European action that most of them in the northern Venezuelan coastal territory
disappeared completely. It was a genocide of incalculable proportions; the survivors were pushed
southward, most of whom would end integrating definitively to the existing populations and
cultures there. Such way, which was in the coastal northern territories where the colonial economy
settled, based primarily on cocoa production and cane plantations in their enormous valleys, and in
a fairly fluid trade through the main ports of Guaira and Puerto Cabello. This northern coastal
configuration of the colonial economy remained even after independence and the emergence of the
republic in the nineteenth century. In any case, the south and the far west were always considered
inhospitable regions, lacking real economic interest; especially because it constitutes the space of
Indians that were never defeated during the conquest.
It was not until the early twentieth century, following the outbreak of the Sumaquecviii in
Lake Maracaibo when the maelstrom search for oil occurs, converting the national territory in a
large grid for the exploration and exploitation of transnational corporations. However, in spite of the
beginning of the oil era and the radical change suffered by the Venezuelan economy, the centralist
nature of the state, a direct beneficiary from the royalties of the exploitation, changed nothing in the
configuration of colonial inheritance, essentially in regards to its orientation. It was the reproduction
of an internal colonialism that stripped the indigenous populations of their territories and resources
to for the benefit of the national state. It took place as a consequence, a new stage in indigenous
resistance and confrontation against the ambition of national and foreign targets. It can be said that
in a period of more than half a century from 1900 to 1963 (the date when the Barí Indians were
"pacified" in the Sierra de Perijá), that the indigenous peoples of western Venezuela lose about 70%
of their ancestral territories, those that they had managed to preserve even after the conquest and
Spanish-Germanic colonization.
On the other hand, in the 50s, the advance in the exploitation of iron ore in Bolivar State
moved the confrontation towards the south of the country. This time it was the Piaroa, Pemón,
Akawayo, Kariña, Arawako and Warao people who had to resist against the transnational Orinoco
Mining and Betelhein Steel Companies(both North American) supported by the Venezuelan state.
However, it is at the end of the sixties when the then President Rafael Caldera launched an
economic program that he called, very colonially, "The Conquest of the South", that was nothing
other than the first version of the Orinoco-Apure Axis project that were driven by transnational iron
companies beginning in the previous decade. By that time, the companies needed to raise the water
levels of the Orinoco. This required the closure of some of the river delta pipes on their way out to
sea, which would allow the direct entry of large-scale vessels for the direct transport of iron ore,
thus reducing costs, since it would eliminate small national vessels that until then were driving the
iron through the river to the Atlantic Ocean.
The closure of the Mánamo pipecix in 1967 represented the loss of thousands of hectares of
land that were once productive. Some land was lost due to the acidification of soils; others due to
permanent flooding and others by desertification, and all of them constituted the territorial space of
the Warao Indians, who were forced to migrate to the deep jungle. There is no accurate data about
it, but it has been conservatively calculated that about 3 thousand Waraos died between 1967 and
1975. Of the survivors, a good part wander around the city of Caracas today as beggars and others
live similarly in the east of the country.
A new stage of development of the Orinoco-Apure Axis came about immediately after,
driven by the 1973 discovery of an important uranium deposit in northern Brazil bordering with
Venezuela in the Yanomami Indians' territory. From that moment, the project acquired new
dimensions, with the same transnational companies: Orinoco Mining and Betelhein Steel on the
Venezuelan side were responsible for financing and directing the resource studies as well as the
projection of its extraction and use.
The idea of the axes or corridors of development is nothing new in Venezuela as well as
imperialists plundering our resources in direct confrontation with our indigenous peoples in defense
of their territories. However, it is in the present when in a more complete and forceful way that
larger dimensions of space and resources are intended to be exploited; including the Indigenous
people involved in what could very well be their last battle for life.
The issue is that the rationale for this program, then as now, comes as mutatis mutandi, the
same rationale used by the colonialist vision across the continent: 1) it is necessary to take
advantage of the extraordinary resources present in those spaces for the "benefit" of the nation state;
2) such spaces are practically depopulated or empty; 3) in any case, the populations that exist there
constitute minorities that not only because of their number do they lack significant national political
weight, but because their forms of life and economic culture constitute the representation of a
precapitalism and an abominable premodernity to the times imposed by globalization. Today, as it is
stated in the economic program of the current government, there is now a risk of definitively
exterminating the Venezuelan indigenous peoples. What is intended is an intervention with all of the
strength of capital in the totality of its spaces and territories for which, a whole legal-political
structure makes the intervention possible and "legal". In fact, the execution of the corridors or axes
of development has been progressing steadily, even and in spite of the fact that the measurement and
establishment of the habitats of indigenous peoples has been carried out as indicated in the
transitory provisions of the 1999 Constitution, which by the way, imposed a maximum of two years
for compliance with this constitutional mandate. On the contrary, the national government has been
making decisions without any consultation of indigenous territories, which has granted concessions
to transnational companies for their forestry and mining exploitation both in the west and in the
south of the country.
 Indeed,
in the
Sierra de
Perijá
region to
the west,
mining

Map N ° 1 Source: Development Corporation of Zulia-Corpozulia-Maracaibo, 2001.

The demarcation of indigenous territories are our approximations.

concessions have been grantedcx, in Barí, Yukpa and Wayuu peoples' territories (See Map N ° 1),
with the objective that coal extraction can pass from the current 6 billion metric tons, produced in
the Guasare mines (Wasaalee-Wayuu territory in the northernmost region of the Sierra), to 36
billion metric tons in the coming years, for which part of the of the existing mines in the whole
extension of that branch of the Andes in western Venezuela will be used.
To make matters worse, to this wild exploitation that is intended to be carried out through
"open pit mines"cxi, we must add other ecocidal and ethnocidal projects no less important and
already agreed upon by the government and that are part of the total set of Western axis. These have
to do with the installation of the Venezuelan-Colombo gas pipeline for safe supply to the United
States, as well as the construction of the "Puerto de Aguas Profundas" (previously called Puerto
América), through which it is intended to remove all the coal production extracted from the Sierra
de Perijá on both sides of the border. This project to create a port of embarkation, due to its
locationcxii (See Map N ° 2) and dimensions, it goes directed directly against the Añúu people. Its
location will eliminate in a definitive way, the last fishing banks of which this culture has lived
ancestrally.
On the other hand and at the same time, the so-called Eje Oriental and Eje Orinoco-Apure,

Figure 1:Fuente. Ministerio de Planificación. Cordiplan. Presentación en Powerpoint. http://venezuela.gov.ve

they also advance through the provision of decrees such as 3100cxiii Forest-Mining Decree of
President Chávez on September 7, 2004, through which he intends to deliver to the transnationals of
the sector, nothing less than 62% of the lands of the Sierra of Imataca for its forestry exploitation
and 12% of it for mining exploitation; that is, 74% of the lands inhabited by the Pemón, Piaroa,
Akawayo, Arawako and Warao have been officially destined for the development of projects that
are an essential part of the imperialist agenda of the corridors and that, necessarily, point towards
the liquidation of these and other ethnic groups, then, despite the discourse of the government and
the transnational corporations about the emptiness of real communities in the region is important
that it is known, that 70% of the country's Indigenous population lives in that area (See maps N ° 3
and 4) , and that it is the indigenous population that has sustained it millennially with a harmonious
agricultural production, in a space whose soils are cultivable once every two years; in such a way
that an overexploitation of these lands would destroy almost immediately. Therefore, faced with the
vision of the vacuum that both the government and transnational corporations seek to impose on
these territories, we must insist on the presence and resistance of their indigenous peoples, who now
more than ever face this, their final battle in defense of their lands and worldviews.
In short, for the neoliberal geo-strategy of globalization, as well as for the geopolitics of
North American domination and recolonization in Latin America, both in implementation through
programs such as the Puebla-Panama Plan and the Infrastructure of South American Regional
Integration (IIRSA), Venezuela has been assigned the task of providing fundamental spaces; which,
in turn, have defined its role in this context as place of mining-energy extraction. It is also a way out
for the resources coming from other regions and countries, such as: the Colombian eastern plains,
the north of Brazil and other areas of the South American Amazon. It is through the Orinoco basins
and Lake Maracaibo that resources flow towards the Atlantic Ocean and, of course, all vessels are
directed northward. The dramatic aspect of all is that this policy of imperialist looting and
destruction constitutes the epicenter of the fundamental political-economic actions that the
government calls "revolution"; in other words, the "Bolivarian revolution" supports this economic
"transformation" plan, a policy based on the hegemonic policy of US imperialism and world
capitalism for Venezuela and Latin America; yes, all wrapped up and packaged in the most "radical"
of anti-imperialist languages, applauded and supported (We want to think that due to ignorance and
not for convenience). The most remarkable intellectual thinking of the Latin American left supports
this. So in this fight, it seems, the Venezuelan indigenous communities in particular, and Latin
American in general, are practically alone in the defense of their last spaces and ways of life.

The path of the communitee. In conclueion.

A couple of years ago, in the context of the electoral triumphs of Lula in Brazil and Lucio Gutiérrez
in Ecuador, the corridors of the UNAM were covered by posters in which, graphically, showed the
images of Chávez, Lula, Lucio Gutiérrez and, completing the picture: Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas. The
legend of it was pretty suggestive, then, aimed to point towards what could be understood as an
inevitable process: "The future of the left in Latin America." It was deduced, that for the left, the
Mexican Institution was represented by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. The election
victories of the abovementioned characters suggested almost automatically, not only a future victory
for the PRD's potential candidate for the 2006 elections, but also it showed, at last, the inexorable
and vertiginous "triumph" of left thinking in the entire continent of the Americas. This idea seems to
excite people even more, after the subsequent election victories of Kirchner in Argentina and, more
recently, Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay. However, days or months after the appearance of the
aforementioned poster (I do not remember precisely), Subcomandante Marcos, in an edition of
Rebeldía magazine, against the grain, wrote something more or less like this (quote from memory):
"When it seems that many paths emerge as different, it turns out that they all lead to the same
destination." Marcos was referring at that time to the fact that in the discourse of both the
institutional left and some traditional forces of power in Latin America (who in search or support of
power, pretend to propose supposed "safe roads" to social justice) pointed towards freedom and
democratic participation not only within the institutional framework of their respective States, but
was also framed and responding to neoliberal globalization. According to its interpretation and
appearance such is an irreversible reality of which we should only know how to adapt.
The coincidence between the institutional left and traditional conservative forces of power is
explicable to the extent that both ideologies link the possibility of change to a fundamental liberal
principle: rationality. The difference in any case, manifests itself in that, for some, the change must
be retained as long as possible, while for the others, reforms can move forward smoothly if and only
if, these are maintained within the framework of a rationality expressed in a gradual process. In this
sense, both agree that the adjustment of our countries to globalization only requires, among other
things: 1) "intelligence" in technical terms; 2) this supposes a scientific knowledge of reality; 3) an
administrative efficiency that allows less dispersion and leakage of resources possible; something
like a "bureaucratic honesty" in function of "trickling down" in the social distribution of income,
especially towards classes of the most disadvantaged social groups who, and above all, 4) like all,
"the population" has to make sacrifices, mainly by freeing the state of pressures, then, this requires
disengaging commitments in order to offer an open field to "Investors", uniquely able to generate
companies, jobs and economic growth. In the future, and only in the future, such growth (if
maintained in a sustainable way) will make it then possible to attend, gradually, to social demands.
Meanwhile, the state must abandon "populism" and the population must abandon "paternalism".
Now, the words of Marcos are impertinent (they bothered people exceedingly on both sides
of the politcal spectrum) because they dared to put with all precision, a finger into the sore
(especially because now I think I remember that, who spoke was not Marcos but Durito) of the
mirage. This mirage of institutional democracy and globalization; partly real and partly
manufactured by the same forces of which we talked about likewise, has sometimes been
reluctantly accepted and, at times, even sponsored by international economic and political power.
This is a fact that seems to have not been (or has not wanted to be) sufficiently understood by a
certain intellectuality that, as we will see, has preferred to disqualify any approach in the direction
towards which Marcos points out. Above all it disqualifies the autonomous communities in
rebellion in Chiapas and other communities in struggle in Latin America, justifying in this way and,
even with overflowing optimism, such a configuration.
Let's try to clarify this confrontation of opinions about one of the most emblematic Latin
American theorists and that for us summarizes without a doubt what seems to be the opinion of a
good part of the organic intellectuality of the continent. What is involved is the advance along the
path of "possible" reforms in the context of the aforementioned electoral victories despite the fact
that the intellectuals have come to recognize that they have essentially no weight in a possible
change of direction in the trajectory of the economic model that our countries follow according to
the established itinerary of beforehand by the factors of global power. Thus, the analysis presented
by Atilio Boróncxiv is singular. This renowned author, when starkly addressing the government
action in their respective countries of Lula, Chávez or Kirchner, the way in which each of them has
given continuity to the executions of neoliberal policies as well as agreements and programs that, of
course, are aimed at benefiting the transnationals and imperialism to the extent that, for example,
Lula goes on to say that he is, "one of the best representatives and executors of neoliberal policies
in Latin America", and reaffirms, "it is not because I say that, it saidt and demonstrated as an
example the concert of Davos."
The continuity of this economic course has been politically guaranteed by Lula to global
power among other measures, through the appointment of Henrique Meirelles in the Presidency of
the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Meirelles strongly denounces Borón and is a recognized "pirate"
linked to international financial entities, and continues, "Lula not only appoints a recognized pirate
as President of the Central Bank of Brazil to conduct of Brazilian finances, but also gives him
political immunity by including him as a permanent member of the presidential cabinet". Finally,
Borón finishes his speech with this pearl: "All these governments are not even reformist, they are
simply neoliberals covered by a garment and language."
In spite of all the above, when trying to answer his question about what is the path to follow
for Latin America, the answer for the theorist above is that, even in the midst of the evident
neoliberal subjection of these governments, we must continue along this path, trying to "achieve
certain reforms through which we can obtain some progress until the objective and subjective
conditions are so given as to move to another level in the struggle", because, in his opinion, the
social irruptions of recent years in Latin America have not counted on such conditions so the way
forward at this time is the one Chávez has been traveling in Venezuela, with "small reforms" and
"certain achievements" such as the literacy plan and the control of changes, "with which he
managed to hit the capitalists", Wow!
Entering into consideration, Borón should not be surprised by Lula's attitude. He does not
respond to a particular weakness of the Brazilian president. It has to do with something much
deeper that we will try to explain from the Venezuelan case. So, we can say that during the first part
of the Rafael Caldera'scxv presidency one of the great public debates was posed by the dilemma in
giving or not, continuity to the package of monetarist measures evidently rejected by the population
and that had already cost Carlos Andrés Pérez, a popular uprising, two coup attempts and a political
impeachment that finally had him ousted from presidency. However, this struggle did not last long,
because in a short time, the road to the reaffirmation of the commitments with the IMF ended up
being imposed. It was said that advised "rationality", otherwise it would only a "vacuum" that
would lead to anarchy as was expressed in the popular revolt of February 27, 1989.
To get us into "reason" the Movement to Socialism was commissioned through Theodore
Petkof who from that moment would be in charge of all negotiations with the international financial
institution. It was the case that within the agreement and as guarantee in the fulfillment of the steps
and actions required by the IMF, Dr. Maritza Izaguirre was named the official of the Inter-American
Development Bank as Minister of Economy. President Caldera himself was forced to wait until the
civil servant was discharged of her functions in the IDB in Washington, so that this she would deign
to take her place in the cabinet. It was evident that as a trusted employee, her role was to monitor
the faithful compliance with the agreements and guarantee the interests of the international creditors
of the Venezuelan state.
But the question is that after the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez, by giving continuity to
the agreements, not only sustains the aforementioned official as his Minister of Economics for a
couple of years, but even today, after six years of "revolution", she is maintained as a senior
member of the board of directors of the Development Corporation of Guayana. This is the state
agency in charge of administration and driving nothing less than the program of the Eastern Axis
and Orinoco-Apure Axis. Although to be honest we must give her the benefit of the doubt in the
event of a radical conversion in which the official changes the interests of the IDB for those of the
popular classes and the indigenous people that will be affected by the development of the axes. This
is within the same possibilities as it is for someone to hit the first prize of the lottery but with no
intention of appearing as a disbelieving atheist. Sincerely, we do not believe in possibility of this
level of political conversion.
In general, it is almost certain that if we conduct a brief review of the members the cabinet,
especially the economic minister in each of the governments outlined in our old poster as the
"future of the left", we will find ourselves with the same reality. They told us, this is not due to a
personal and even political weakness of the characters. It is the same as how it does not sound fair
to question Lula for placing a "pirate" in the BCB without doing the same with Chávez, Gutiérrez or
Kirchner and surely, soon, with Tabaré Vásquez (the same Borón predicted it in his speech). We
must see this as a component of the very process of globalization, according to which, global power
is possible to negotiate in part, including a good part of what corresponds to the political and to the
political leadership of the states as such. This also has an explanation that we are not going to study
here; neoliberal globalization does not argue nor is it willing to negotiate outside of the terms of
what has to do with the economic process and its itinerary, so to speak, such is the heart of its
existence and that is not negotiable.
On the other hand, within the "rise" of the institutionalized left in a large part of the
governments of the South American states, it is not possible to disconnect it from the breakdown of
traditional political power forces in the region, which at the same time are closely linked to the
failure of developmentalism. The end of faith in development has come as part of the liberal
ideology in the late 70s was dragged within itself in a kind of free fall away from the traditional
Latin American power forces and major defenders of this faith. These, in terms of political parties in
each of our countries had their own name. In Venezuela: Acción Democrática and Partido
Socialcristiano (COPEI); in Colombia: Liberal Party and Conservative Party; in Peru: the APRA;
the Southern Cone: Peronism and military dictatorships; in Mexico: Party of the Institutional
Revolution (PRI), to mention just a few. It was these forces that internally and throughout the
twentieth century were responsible for implementing and defending the package of liberal ideology
and the dependent capitalist economy. Their arguments were: politically: representative democracy
or military dictatorship while being politically aligned to the United States and, economically: de-
ruralization, modernization and as a logical consequence and national development.
The APRA dies with Alan García in Peru; in Venezuela, Democratic Action implodes with
the defenestration of Carlos Andrés Pérez and, immediately after that, the Social Christian is
liquidated by its own founder Rafael Caldera; military dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay became
unsustainable and began the process of irreversible transition like that in Argentina, where, a short
time later, Peronism is liquidated by Menem with its own settlement. In short, all of these political
forces tend to disappear as the economic crisis deepens and the neoliberal package reveals itself
more ruthless. Now, the bankruptcy of the traditional forces of power has not involved, necessarily,
its replacement by truly independent political projects and transformers. On the contrary, the so-
called institutional left or how Marcos defines it: "the left hand of the right", has become the most
suitable replacement according to the Lampedusian principle of "changing everything so that
nothing changes."
But let's go back to Borón's ideas, especially when it comes to the impossibility of move
away from the path imposed by global power. Such impossibility, he explains, is due to the
vulnerability of our economies as well as the military disadvantage compared to the American
imperialism and, moreover, the lack of objective and subjective conditions for our peoples to
advance to higher levels of struggle. As a result, he is convinced that the only way we have left is to
advance as much as possible within this framework, very much in spite of the concessions to which
the context is gaining time and space, particularly in the search for partnerships of integration
among the South American countries currently governed by progressive political forces. This,
according to him, is justly reasonable. For us, it is exactly what the mathematical language defines
as a paradox; that is, we can not stop giving concessions to imperialism because we are vulnerable
in order to to buy time and space with small reforms. However, the concessions that we grant, for
nothing as despicable as we have seen throughout this work, deepen our vulnerability, so in the end,
they end up swallowing our little ones completely through reforms and achievements; thus, the time
and space supposedly gained, ends up becoming a slippery slope that we never finish climbing.
On the other hand, this reasoning has to do with a fundamental aspect in the definition of the
path to follow; namely, faith in the state as an instrument for the transformation of society. This is
an important point for liberal ideology. It is equally assumed by the Marxist-Leninist ideology as
the path of socialist revolution. In this sense, when questioning some statements by Marcos, Borón
asks:
"This historic project to create a new society begs the question, can you do it without a strategic
device as important as the State? And if so: Why is the EZLN still waiting for the enactment of
legislation that grants full autonomy to indigenous communities if the Zapatista transformation
strategy "from below" has an impressive degree of legitimacy? Is not this a practical recognition that,
despite the anti-statist rhetoric, the nation-state continues to be a crucial component of contemporary
capitalism?"cxvi
Now we come to the heart of the matter: how do we build a path of liberation for the peoples
of Latin America? From where? And finally, who build it? It is evident that for Borón, such a path
follows the trajectory already traced by the Leninist tradition: capture the power of the State in
order to subsequently make transformations. The justification of this old postulate nowadays, we
infer, is to situate the process in such a way that it breaks with the traditional forces of power. In this
particular juncture several Latin American countries have placed representatives of the left
institutional structure in government, so that it is possible to structure a block of States to confront
the imperialism. However, this view has two fallacies. The first is that, as we have shown and
Borón himself certifies, the arrival of progressive forces to the government has in no way broken
with the structural economic model. On the contrary, they have taken up this model, as in the
Venezuelan case, as constituent of the republic itself; that is, it has been constitutionally ratified
with all of the consequences that this entails. Second, although it is true that in this moment the
American economy is not at its best and, on the contrary, seems to be heading to a deep crisis, part
of their salvation is precisely in the control and domination of the resources that Latin America
provides, for which, the deepening the dependence of the Latin American nation-states is an
essential part in the definition of its geo-strategy and geopolitics towards the continent.
Unquestionably, the start-up of such a geo-strategy is not without contradictions within the states;
but until now, despite these contradictions (for example, the almost impossible signing of the FTAA
in 2005 as foreseen by its promoters or, the continuous clashes with the language of Chávez),
American policy has been advancing such control of resources, and it has achieved this with the
participation and support of national governments. In such a way, it is naive (to say the least), to
think that nation-states can get away from the commitments and agenda that, even in the midst of its
current weakness, the American imperialism imposes. This has to do with the control of the spaces
where the resources they require are present. This is where the resistance movements come into
action and, above all, define within the action its own paths "from below" in the communities, not
the states.
Returning to the reference to Borón, we must say in his defense that this was expressed
when the constitution of the Caracoles and the Boards of Good Government had not yet become the
new step in the process of construction "from below" of autonomy by the communities in rebellion.
However, the fact that in a recent presentation he demonstrated support to the immediate
impossibility of another path than what was supposedly proposed by the government forces of the
so-called institutional left, shows that the author can not detach himself from his faith in the state as
the only entity for transformation. This question, that in his experience, the Zapatista communities
in rebellion deny day by day with definitions and real political constructions constituting
themselves in spite of the fear of many people and the incomprehension of others as a point of
reference for the struggles of indigenous peoples in particular and the Latin American popular
movement in general.
Finally, it is equally true that political conditions are not even in America Latina, and much
less those of the indigenous or local communities in their struggle for life. This can be explained
through cases in which a powerful indigenous movement with the strength of mobilization does not
translate into a corresponding political project, which has made possible that movements like those
of Bolivia and Ecuador, after shaking the traditional forces of power in their countries end up
surrendering power to those same forces. What it shows is, and in this we agree with Borón, that
despite their power to mobilize people, indigenous movements such as those of Ecuador or Bolivia,
lack a political vision of their own as well as the willingness to build a resistance from below and
against all the risks. As is said in the Zapatista version, a good part of the indigenous brothers of
Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and the rest of the continent continue reading their
own liberation in the words of others (read states, parties, professional politicians, indigenistas and
intellectuals of the left); that is, they have not seen deep in their hearts the words of the original
peoples. It is the only way to find the true word, that takes us out of shame and throws us into the
fight, in dignity and autonomy. It must also be said that the failure and confusion of the movements
of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and Ecuador is the co-responsibility that the vision that is
imposed as "rational" and according to which, an autonomous transformation "from below" is not
possible, or, outside of the institutionality created by the nation-state and that theorists like Borón
enjoy so much.
In this sense, the case of Ecuador is emblematic. The victory of Lucio Gutiérrez, who
incidentally is not the point of focus for portraits or posters, was greeted by many of these theorists
as another victory of the Latin American advance of the left. The indigenous movement represented
by CONAIE had shown more than once its strength against the policies of the IMF, to the point of
contributing to the fall of no less than three governments that were unable to implement such
policies because of the overwhelming indigenous and popular pressure. Thus, the arrival of Lucio
Gutiérrez was considered as the beginning of a process in which, both social theorists and the
indigenous movement itself figure into their representation, much more, after Gutierrez included
members of CONAIE into his cabinet.
The results are well known: when none of the representatives of the forces traditional power
in Ecuador could implement the measures imposed by global power, Gutiérrez imposes them and as
if that were not enough with the support of elements of CONAIE. The organization has ended up,
conveniently for imperialism, undermined, divided and momentarily without the force of previous
years. We could point to the same process in the case of Venezuela. For example, when Rafael
Caldera could not impose the 1850 Decree in the indigenous lands of Imataca, the "revolution" was
applied through a new decree that was supported by our new indigenous deputies. As we have seen,
in the old poster in UNAM we were shown the ways of the new Latin American left, there is
nothing left, there is very little. The words of Marcos, although they displease many, are
dramatically corroborated.
In short, the neoliberal globalization process in Latin America directly confronts local
communities; in this confrontation nation-states become negotiators and even interlocutors for
transnational interests. They may do so in the name of the "social change" and even "revolution",
that the political and economic future of the continent will depend to a large extent, if not
fundamentally. The path that the communities themselves take in the struggle will have to include
abandoning the illusions that currently seem to lead us. The upcoming battles "will be political
battles, but not necessarily at the state level. In fact, due precisely to the process of de-
legitimization of the states, many of these battles (perhaps all) will take place at more local levels
"cxvii. This will be where indigenous and peasant communities will provide a fundamental
contribution of political philosophy for the transformation and construction of our future societies
and, in this sense, the Zapatista path is and will be a crucial reference for waging the new
continental struggles. Without a doubt, this way is difficult, but as our old guerrillero Argimiro
Gabaldón very well said: "the path is hard, but it is the path. "

Corporate etatee and pranizaton of the policy

Policiee of counterineurgency and indigenoue territorial etruggle in Venezuela
Let's walk alone
Sometimes I think for the indigenous peoples
we wait for a man
that everything can,
that knows everything,
that helps resolve
all of our problems.
But that man, who can do everything
and knows everything,
will never come:
because he lives in us,
is found in us,
walks with us,
Start to wake up, start walking.
Natalio Hernández, Nahua Poet

"For the ones above, the calendar is made of

the past, to keep it there, Power fills it with
statues, celebrations, museums, tributes, parades. All
with the aim of exorcising that past, that is, to
keep it in the space of what it was and will not be.
For those below, the calendar is something to come.
It is not a pile of leaves dislodged by boredom
and despair. It is something for which
to get prepared. For those above, the calendar is celebrated, in
the one below it is built. In the calendar of those above
it is rejoiced, in the one below it is fought. In the calendar
from above the story is manipulated, in the one below it
is made(...) So it will be, until another calendar
is written where it should be written, that is, from below."
This, at some point, was said to the Sub-Marcos
by Don Durito of La Lacandona.
aüri aku aipa eiran mmokarü
(Fromg ourg wayg ofg seeiing theg world)

It is possible to say that, within the philosophy of the Añuu people, there are two principles
that they define their way of seeing and relating to the world. These principles express the
perspective from which, thousands of years ago, they configured their territoriality to the time of the
territorialized the waters of Lake Maracaibo, the banks of its surrounding rivers and the Laguna de
Sinamaica where, up to the present, they resist and re-exist as a people. This is about two of the
foundations of their worldview that, daily, the Añuu exercise and manifest in a cosmo-experience
survival that corresponds to it. These principles are: a.- everything that is present in the world is
because it has taken the action of emerging in our presence. The emergence implies, therefore, that
what is present in the world is shown as alive. In other words, for the Añuu: everything lives. b.- the
life of everything present in the world is expressed through its particular doing and it is with this
doing with which we relate; therefore, plants, animals, rivers, jungles, people and all visible and
invisible beings have a doing that is their own; everything lives in and for its doing and this doing
will always be complementary to the doing of others. This is why only through our relationship
with those things, can we know and say that we know what emerges alive in front of us and we can
say that we know and re-know the world.
In this sense, every event that occurs before us is the result of an emergence that has been
revealed by a doing that has been incubated in an invisible background that, likewise, is part of the
history of the event itself. Thus, to understand history in its occurrence, a dialogue is necessary with
the making of everything that emerges as a manifestation of their presence in front of us. This
means that the facts have their own words and it is with them that they speak to us. Thus, we only
understand history in its doing when we are able to understand the words of the facts, that is, to
dialogue with the emergent. In this way, history is not in any way made by some of the characters
involved in the events (the heroes who love to highlight Western thinking), but rather the event's
making with respect to the peoples. On the contrary, for the Añuu (we think that for most people
indigenous people of the continent), heroes as centers of history do not exist, that is, the history has
little to do with the person or the word of the "protagonists" but rather, with their own words of
doing the facts in their occurrence, then, only the words of doing the facts make visible to us the
non-obvious background that has incubated them.
It will be from this perspective that we will try to expose what we are saying the
making/doing of political reality is as it comes from the mouths of state-governments towards all
the indigenous peoples of Venezuela and Latin America, especially, in terms of their territorial
fights and for the defense of their territorialities. In this sense, in the first part we will analyze what
the words of the doing of most recent events in which this struggle has emerged with greater force
and forcefulness. In the second part we will try to demonstrate what is in the background that
explains the true making/doing of the facts that have emerged to finally try to specify what begins to
fecundate in the background and that, we are convinced, for a long time here and there throughout
the continent, is struggling to emerge definitively as word and action of the peoples.

aeintkarü apüreeru a e. Ani aye eiña a.

(What is in front of us are the facts here)

We recently had the opportunity to listen to brother Oscar Olivera in Mexico City, one of the main
leaders of the so-called Water War and recognized spokesman of the social struggles of Bolivia. In
his presentation, Olivera accurately narrated everything that happened during the march of the
TIPNIS communities towards La Paz: the bloody repression of which they were victims caused by
the official gendarmerie and conflict groups that were financed and nurtured by the government. He
also joyously described the multitudinous and popular reception of the protesters in the capital that,
without doubt, forced President Evo Morales to back down in his purpose and decree a law that
ensured the protection and defense of the TIPNIS. Everyone celebrated.
However, the celebration of what was a true popular victory was very short. Fueled by the
MAS cocaleros (their political support base) and guided by the "Reasonable" words of their vice
president; while above all, pressured by the corporation Brazilian promoter of the project, the
president "came to his senses" and, through a new decree of law that overruled the first decree using
all of the resources of the power of the State-government (purchase of consciences through gifts in
money or species, division of communities, violent actions carried out by their groups of shock,
etc.). Evo Morales "defeated" the Indian rebels of the TIPNIS in a "consultation" totally controlled
by the government. At this point, it is necessary to say that brother Olivera's voice broke and
uncontainable tears told us about his pain and his rage.
To a large part of the audience Olivera's story sounded incredible. To them, his parametric
mentality of "reasonable left"cxviii resulted inconceivable that Evo Morales, the first "indigenous"
president of a Latin American state could stand (as that the PRI) the purchase of consciences to
divide the communities and use of shock forces willing to violently contain the struggle of the
communities. Such disbelief is certainly quite understandable given that such actions, it is supposed,
do not correspond to the duty to be a government of "left" and, much less, to an "indigenous"
government. However, President Morales' actions must be understood as the continuity of the
original form of political action of the States possessed against the insurgency of the dispossessed;
that is, what the "Indigenous" President did was nothing but apply part of a very old manual of
counterinsurgency that, if we are going to see, no government-state in Latin America is alien and,
on the contrary, it is possible to observe its application with the same regularity and strength in
countries whose governments are designated or declared "Right" as in countries where governments
consider themselves "progressive", "left" and, still, "revolutionaries".
For example, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has managed to design and systematically
execute an entire counterinsurgency policy directed against the indigenous peoples and their main
organizations: CONAIE and ECUARUNARI. This has been possible not only because of the
political mistakes made by the leadership of some of these organizations, but above all, through the
execution of actions that range from the division provoked through the incorporation of elements of
the organizations of indigenous people to orbit the government while persecuting, criminalizing and
imprisoning rebel leaders of the same indigenous, union and peasant organizations. It is determined
to put an end to them. In fact, it is possible to say that unlike the previous right-wing governments
that sought to contain the indigenous peoples and their organizations, for the good of the
corporations and the world market, in the field of the counterinsurgency the Correa government has
achieved remarkable success in Ecuador.
This could be a statement equally applicable to the case of Brazil's Lula Da Silva and its
continuity: Dilma Rouseff. There, the ethnocidal actions carried out directly by the state-
government add to the genocidal silence the actions exercised by others to definitively liquidate the
indigenous peoples. Thus, it is not only the state-government that directly drives this war. The
state-government also knows how to maintain silence when the others: landowners and
transnational corporations become "Annoyed" by the uncomfortable presence and re-existence of
Indians in exploitable areas. They have been able to publicly declare their war against the
communities. Both Lula (before) as the Rouseff (today) are representatives of the state-government,
categorically they have known to maintain silence and, for that reason, they do nothing to stop
them. This was why the Guarani-Kaiowás brothers came to pose the action of a collective suicide
after the ruling of a State Court Federal Government that decided to expel them from their territory
for the benefit of a Corporation. They were determined to die and be buried in their lands, just as
they had buried their ancestors over millennia: its their territory.
For our part, in Venezuela, we can say that since 1999, when the government of Lieutenant
Colonel Hugo Chávez emerged with a call to "socialism of the 21st century", we have suffered the
same violations of the rights of the peoples and the same silences before the same crimes. In their
application of the counterinsurgency manual, they have managed to combine the use of so-called
social programs (Missions) that have almost liquidated the insurgent social movement (indigenous,
peasant, workers, urban slum dwellers, etc.), therefore, most of them have been co-opted to the
bureaucratic structures controlled by the Government-State, with the persecution, criminalization
and selective repression of insurgent rebels from those same sectors and movements.
Thus, from the initial submission of the Pemón Indians in the Gran Sabana when they faced
the construction of a power line through Bolívar state (Venezuela) to Boa Vista in Brazil, for which
the government of the nascent "revolution" used persuasive action of "justice" applied by the
Supreme Court. The division provoked communities to struggle through the contribution of
economic resources to the deliberative use of military repression against rebel communities that had
dared to cut, hacksaw in hand, the large iron structures of the power lines which produced a number
of imprisoned indigenous leaders, a pair of dead leaders and the definitive defeat of the Pemon
communities. This began the definitive inauguration of the electric lines by President Chávez in a
solemn ceremony which he knew how to accompany, nothing less than the president of Brazil
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the father of the only "victorious" revolution in Latin America:
Fidel Castro.
However, to this example we must necessarily add the murder (via snipers) of union leaders
and peasants like those of the labor leader Argenis Vásquez, Secretary General of the Workers'
Union of Mitsubishi in the east of the country, who was killed by "unknown" assassins in the
context of the discussion of the collective bargaining agreement and the demands of the company to
the state-government of favorable conditions to be able continue operating in the country. Needless
to say, the murder of Argenis is still a police "mystery", such as that of some 140 worker and
peasant leaders for whom, until now, no suspect has been identified. There have been arrests since
the government of the "revolution" has never felt the need to denounce the persecution of the
indigenous leader Yukpa Sabino Romero to whom we have witnessed, incidentally, the
systematically murder of his family and his people (so far they have murdered his father, one of his
sons-in-law, two of his nephews and at least three of his fighting companions). It is no secret that
Sabino has become the stone in the shoe for both the landowners of Machiques de Perijá, and for
the state-government in its policy of minimizing and silencing the territorial struggle of all the
indigenous peoples of the country. According to the constitutional mandate of 1999 the State was
obliged to demarcate indigenous peoples' territories in a period no longer than two years after the
Constitution was approved. Over a decade after this constitutional resolution, the demarcated lands
do not reach 10% of the total estimated and those already demarcated and delivered have been
challenged judicially by some communities. Faced with this flagrant constitutional violation by the
State, the entire indigenous leadership has been Sabino and his Yukpa community of Chaktapa who
are the only ones that insisted on establishing, in fact, the territorial demarcation for its people. That
is why both landowners (as direct enemies) and the state-government have tried for different ways
contain their rebellion.
Thus, after the murder of his elderly father (José Romero) for whom Sabino blames a
landowner but as far as we know does not weigh in any investigation, tried to murder him at the
hands of his own Yukpa brothers by a mounted provocation that ended with several injured and a
pair of dead people in the same town. Subsequently, family members and comrades in the struggle
are killed by "unknown" elements in what were undoubtedly true executions that the local press
(especially the newspaper "La Verdad") cited government sources as "settling accounts for
differences in the distribution of a cattle stolen by the people of Sabino". In short, despite the
slander, the snipers and the violence of the state against him, Sabino does not falter. Recently he
was joined by his community to recover his land, this time, he was shot at by the landowners but
also by the Bolivarian Army, resulting in some injuries, including his own daughter, and from that
moment to this day, Sabino has denounced it, he has become a persecuted politician in the
mountains of Perijá.

Counterineurgency Policiee in Latn America Today: Corporate Statee and Pranizaton of the
politce.

Of the corporate etatee

Now, we know very well that as Raúl Zibechi rightly points out: "The ruling classes do not have an
unlimited range of options to defeat the rebels, to such an extent that again and again they go to the
same common places: that mixture of negotiation with concessions and repression or genocide, to
soften and disorient your class enemies until the final thrust. From the depths of time, those from
above have come to different forms of these two complementary tactics, with advantageous results
for their interests" (Zibechi, 2010: 19).
In this way, despite the supposed ideological differences that could distinguish the political
actions of the right-wing or left-wing governments or progressive governments Latin America, it is
possible to observe from Mexico to Chile the application of these incessant tactics with an
astonishing regularity on the part of governments in their relations with communities. For example,
in Chile the government creates the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) to,
supposedly, give an adequate and definitive answer to the territorial struggle of the Mapuche
people. However, the actual action of the Corporation is directed to produce division within the
Mapuche struggle beginning by imposing the obligation to constitute the so-called "legal
communities"cxix. The communities that they accept submit themselves to the institutionality that the
State establishes so that they can receive their territorial demands. These legal communities can be
formed of up to a minimum of ten (10) members and receive titled land individually. On the other
hand, the Conadi can deliver land outside the traditional territories, which has caused forced
displacements preventing this. In addition, the territorial reconstruction above all frees up spaces
immediately arranged for exploitation by corporations. So, on the one hand the State converts the
land into client currency with which it breaks insurgent movements and uses the dominated (as
happened) as witnesses against the Mapuche communities rebels who, on the other hand, receive
the full weight of repression, the application of the anti-terrorist law and genocide of their women,
the elderly and children.
In Colombia, despite the peace talks between the government and the guerrillas of the
FARC, military and paramilitary operations in regions such as the territories of the Embera people
and the Afro-Colombian communities of Chocó continue to provoke displacement, hunger and
death. The same can be said of the Cauca region affecting peoples such as the Nasa and the Awa;
until the paramilitary operations and the Colombian Guajira State with the Wayuu generating the
displacement of indigenous communities while freeing spaces for the exploitation of resources and
the construction of the necessary infrastructures for such exploitations.
In Mexico, the government of Felipe Calderón is determined to confiscate some 200,000
hectares of the territory of the indigenous M'phaa in the state of Guerrero precisely, in the region of
the CRAC and its rebel Community Autonomous Police. Such confiscation is intended in the name
of defending the biosphere and militarizing it from the supposed war against drug trafficking. The
same militarization is carried out in Chiapas, where the federal government (in the hands of the
PAN) joins forces with the state government (in the hands of the PRD) to grant spaces to non-
Zapatista indigenous communities in lands liberated by the Zapatistas after the 1994 uprising and
occupied by their own communities. The intention is obvious, it is intended to provoke a
confrontation between the indigenous communities in order to justify the direct military
intervention of the State government Mexican against the Zapatista autonomous communities.
Finally, in the Bolivarian "revolution" of Venezuela the panorama is not different; on the
contrary, it seems identical in its actions and purposes. So, to contain the outcry of indigenous
communities, trade unions, peasants, artisanal miners and urban poor people the government brings,
again and again, the so-called "Missions" used as true "cyanide candies", as the repressive club of
the forces police and military. This action is always sustained in the hackneyed speech that any
protest against President Chávez can open the door of the return to power to the fascist right and
pitiyanqui.
Something like that was what government officials and some of their relatives said to the
Bari community of Boksi to contain their protest when they had blocked the passage of the
Machiques-Colón highway while demanding the freedom of one of their brothers that was made
prisoner in a false positive anti-drug orchestrated by some elements of the Armed Forces: Do not
protest, they said, do not say that they will not vote, because, if Chávez loses there will be no more
missions for you and your brother will never get out of jail, just wait for Chavez to win again. In
effect, the Bari abandoned their protest, Chavez won again but the Bari brother is still in prison,
only now he was sentenced to 15 years in prison while the military soldiers involved in the false
positive are freely unpunished.
For their part, the Yukpas have demonstrated their willingness to die for their lands. The
government responds to them with repression, as in the last confrontation of the Chaktapa
community. On the other hand, it immediately offers some peculiar concession. In this sense,
Sabino denounced that from the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples they have offered him money and,
more recently, the construction of a House of Knowledge for their community. In other words:
Territorial demarcation no. Territory, no. If they want, we will build them a Cultural Center,
designed by nothing less than Fruto Vivas, the best architect of Venezuela who, consciously or
unconsciously, lends himself to the gamecxx. In any case, the non-demarcation of indigenous
territory allows all those spaces to be available for the purposes of corporate interests that later on,
we will decipher. In conclusion, this brief review of the facts shows us that the state-governments
act as real corporations next to the large corporations as they fight against communities and
indigenous peoples, peasants, blacks and the dispossessed urban peoples through counterinsurgency
policies that at all costs seek contain, paralyze, subdue and eliminate the anti-systemic insurgency.
This strategic purpose begins with flattery, the purchase of consciences, the cooptation of
community union and peasant leaders; but also, of prestigious intellectuals; until the use of
repressive violence that starts by making struggles and fighters invisible in the media (which the
government-government controls 90% and that, for that matter of the indigenous territorial struggle,
gets the support of the remaining 10% with the support of media which, of course, are equally anti-
indigenous), criminalization, judicialization and, finally, the direct repressive action with the police,
military and, as we will see in the next section, paramilitaries.
In any case, our Latin American nation states can not continue to be interpreted in the classic
sense of the definition of origin after the Second War World, but, should be considered from the
word of their doing that, as far as we see, national corporate apparatuses associated with
transnational corporations are in the context of a process of re-colonization of the world that implies
for us in the first instance, the territorial re-ordering of the continent. That is, the idea of takeover of
state power for social transformation can not continue to guide the revolutionary struggle of the
communities; inasmuch as the new model of domination has displaced its axis of the domain from a
political center to the axis of the economic domain, particularly financial; in such a way that, in this
stage of recolonization the so-called progressive or left-wing governments have been necessary to
sustain governance by using: 1) A false stay of the Cold War speech that has made possible the
application of all counterinsurgent concepts, plans and programs designed by the World Bank
naturalized by the supposed anti-imperialist discourse of the new Latin American power holders; 2)
Contain the insurgency of all anti-systemic movements that are always dangerous in the context of
paradigmatic and historical changes. Few will believe the word of Obama referring to the change
(not to change) of the new course of coloniality but, surely, everyone will believe Daniel Ortega and
above all Chávez. In the context of recolonization in the exercise of the Latin American
governments they are allowed to speak of anti-imperialism since, after all, the economic sustenance
for the permanence of such governments is based on their close financial relationship with
transnational corporations that ultimately guide and direct the course of action of the State
governments-national corporations.

b.- Of the Pranization of the policy

On the other hand, it is a fact that throughout the continent there is a connection between elements
of the State governments and the common organized gangster. Their power is executed such that, in
some cases, their forces seem to replace the regular forces in the exercise of state violence. Thus,
the cases of Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela are emblematic.
In the Venezuelan case, we believe that it is possible to put together a list of cases that allow
us to see this phenomenon in its gradual development and in its intensity of action and its
implications for the social movement in general and for the indigenous struggle in particular, since
it deals with the use of non-regular forces for counterinsurgency action; but we we will be satisfied
with mentioning two that seem strong enough for us explain what we are calling: the pranization of
politics. The first occurred in the state of Bolívar, in the south of the country. There the government
pushed the Misión Piar, which consisted of a training program for the conversion of artisanal miners
in agricultural producers, as well as financial support and provision of spaces for production that
would eventually make it possible to abandon their exploitation of gold in the region of La Paragua,
achieving, in this way, protect the Ecosystem from the effects of mining. However, the conversion
program was not executed as planned, the resources allocated for such purposes ended up lost in the
bureaucratic swarm of government (not to mention corruption). In addition, the government gives
concessions to a Russian corporation for the exploitation of gold in the same region that was
previously mined by miners, many of which belong to the Pemón and Ye'kuana peoples.
Once the Mision Piar was exposed as a farce, the artisanal miners return to spaces that the
Russian corporation is already prepared to occupy and exploit. Of course, the confrontation is
immediate. The indigenous Pemon and artisanal miners surprised and detained a group of military
personnel illegally exploiting gold on their land and demanded the presence of the Minister of
Defense to deliver them back. Almost immediately overcome, this impasse was never explained
publicly by the authorities, the miners were attacked by a dozen assassins that arrived in the region
from the capital. In these events a mining leader dies but equally all or almost all of the assassins
perish. The Minister of the Interior and Justice declares that it is an internal confrontation between
miners but they deny him immediately and they denounce that it was a confrontation between them
and irregular forces sent "by who knows who" to assassinate their leadership and terrorize the
rebels.
The second event was the riot of the prisoners of the Prison of La Planta in the city of
Caracas, where, for several days, the prisoners led by the so-called pranes clashed with the National
Guard to prevent their transfer to other prisons. With this action the pranes not only demonstrated
the firepower they possess and the control they exert over prisons, but the political power that they
have managed to develop through linkages to elements of State structures. From jail, they not only
direct the operations of distribution and trafficking of drugs in city neighborhoods, the collection of
vaccine or extortion for protection especially to merchants and even taxi drivers, kidnapping, but
also of hired killers and even to provide armed forces for action intimidation policy.
In short, the pranes of the Prison of La Planta not only forced the prison minister to find a
euphemism to address them: negative leaders, the minister calls them, who, on that occasion,
achieved freedom for an indeterminate amount of their "Luceros", to be transferred to the prisons
that they determined with their coffers and armaments intact. The most important thing was that this
negotiation was carried out in a direct way, said by by President Chavez himself on a national
television chain, who, he said, personally called the prison's Pran telephone to broker the
agreement. This presidential concession has never been achieved by any labor union, professional
guild and, much less, for any indigenous people, nor for their social strength or for the justice of
their claims.

aeinta anapüi: What ie in the background

As it is possible to observe in this brief review, counterinsurgency policies against the

peoples are the same, the differences can be found in that some governments are more blatant than
others but, ultimately, the purposes are the same. Where is the bottom? Why not execute the
demarcation once and for all of the territorial identity of indigenous peoples in Venezuela? To
understand the answers to these questions it is necessary to make a brief historical recount. Let's
see: At the beginning of the 70s the stage of industrial capitalism had been surpassed. This was
expressed in the convergence between industrial capital and financial capital at a world scale. Thus,
the territorial division of labor went beyond the boundaries of the States which, until then, had been
necessary to fulfill an important role in the recomposition of capitalism after the Second World War,
through of the Marshall Plan and the policy of the so-called welfare state that they established; for a
global territorial reordering through a directed "decolonization"cxxi that forced the creation of new
States recognized as such but dependent politically and economically from the centers of political
and economic power. Thus, the States would be responsible for promoting public policies and
economic development investments that would allow its populations to obtain the necessary income
for the acquisition of goods. Hence the policy of import substitution that, allowed to install
industrial parks, especially assembly, which at the same time granted dependent countries the
fiction of entering the path of "development", generated in all these countries a displacement of the
rural population towards the center urban areas, generating a "reserve army" of very cheap labor,
but fattening in a sustained way the cities while leaving large rural spaces under the power of the
agroindustry. This, in turn, made possible the objective of incorporating into the "free market" large
territories and populations (consumers) for the acquisition of the goods that industrial capitalism,
particularly the United States, was able to produce.
However, at the beginning of the 70s the reality of capitalism showed that this postwar
period and, with it, came the end of the welfare state. Said another way, the post-war welfare state
stage implied a territorial division of the work and its consubstantial social division of labor; once
this stage has been overcome and new stage of development of world capitalism, a new territorial
division of labor began to establish through what is known as the Neoliberal stage.
It is necessary to point out that the fiction of sovereignty and autonomy of the nation states
made possible the emergence of social and political movements that, in the terms politicians
established by the same State, managed to achieve political triumphs that, in extraordinary cases
such as Chile, had managed to seize the power of the government. However, the new neoliberal
stage implied a substantial loss of importance of the industry and the consubstantial loss of
relevance of the working class, and the financial capital for which, the relative sovereignties of the
nation-states should become so flexible that, the social relations of production were now framed in
the context of an equally flexible employment relationship.
Precisely, the so-called neoliberal stage was established in Latin America with the overthrow
of Salvador Allende in Chile and the application of economic adjustments in all the countries of the
continent. These economic adjustments implied, among other things, a new constitutional and legal
framework, as well as a new territorial reordering for all countries, which would make possible the
intervention and free control of financial capital and corporations, of territorial spaces hitherto
untouched, little intervened and, in some cases, protected by laws and regulations generated during
the stage of industrial capitalism and import substitution throughout the continent.
This works, among other things, to free territories for the benefit of intervention and control
of the global financial capital and its corporations. This, in turn, has involved a new relationship
between national states and corporations and, of course, between the Member State's governments
and the inhabitants of the territories required in the context of a new territorial division of labor in
Latin America. From there, then, the process of changes and constitutional reforms promoted
throughout the continent during the 80s and 90s, the last of which was the Constitution of
Venezuela of 1999. New legal frameworks for the new stage of the capitalism in which concepts
such as sovereignty, should be relativized to such an extent, that its significance becomes
insignificant.
However, the new territorial division of labor can not be established without entering into
strong contradiction with the original populations of the territories. Most of the countries of South
America are made up of indigenous peoples, peasants, blacks and other rural populations that, until
then, had been considered as disappeared or totally integrated to the so-called national cultures.
Thus, the territorial reorganization tailored to the demands of financial capital and the corporations
has been confronted across the continent by the iron-fisted peoples and communities that, with their
struggles in defense of their territories, are constituted into new social subjects that, obligatorily,
have to be considered as protagonists in the new Latin American political-economic context.
This is, then, the context that requires the conversion of nation states into corporations but
also, the obligation to recognize the existence of peoples and communities so far denied as such in
the previous stage. Thus, the territorial reorganization, that is, the new territorial division of labor in
America Latina, goes through the "formal" recognition of the existence of indigenous peoples,
blacks and peasants. This has been done by all the new constitutions, from Bolivia to Venezuela;
from Brazil to Chile. It does not matter, then, the supposed ideological imprint of the power hold of
government in each of the States, because, in any case, what it is about is offering the political legal
floor to the new stage of coloniality and to produce new relations of coloniality between the state-
governments and the populations destined to be displaced and dispossessed of their territories.
 In short, the new political legal order on which all the corporate states in Latin America,
respond to economic programs and the new territorial division of labor corresponding to such large-
scale corporate programs and global financial capital. For the achievement of this purpose with the
minor possible social trauma, that is, without the risk of a true social break always present in crisis,
transnational capital has had to liquidate old relationships and establish some new ones. Thus, for
example, the negotiated exit of Pinochet (in Chile), or the defenestration of Carlos Andrés Pérez (in
Venezuela) or Alan García (in Peru), form part of the adjustment process that, among other outputs,
had the appearance of a Fujimori in the Peru or of a Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, as part of the new
political fabric for the new coloniality. In any case, it was clear to the corporations that the old
discourse of the cold war, of a supposed ideological confrontation between socialism and capitalism
was still convenient for the establishment of the continuity of coloniality in America Latina that, in
the economic field, is expressed in the great integration programs transnational economic activities
contained in the so-called Puebla-Panama Plan and the Infrastructural Integration of the South
American Region (IIRSA).

a.- What is the IIRSA?

The neoliberal stage of capitalism is directed; on the one hand, to global energy control by
part of the corporations but also, of the sources of water and biodiversity, sources essential to the
new scientific-technological processes that, supposedly, up to now retained paradigmatic energetic
change.
Thus, if in the stage of the development fiction of import substitution, imperialism allowed
and still stimulated trade integration initiatives from the states, such as, for example, the Andean
Community of Nations (CAN), among others, throughout the continent the new stage of the
predominance of financial capital imposes a new vision of the processes of commercial integration.
In this sense, financial capital played cards showing the continent's social and political movements
only the ace represented by the Free Trade Agreements that were immediately rejected by all the
communities and movements of the left of the different countries. However, under their sleeve,
corporations, big financial capital and imperialism, always knew how to play with the new state
governments of the continent. The ace of integration programs through regional infrastructure
allowed them on the one hand, to dodge the direct confrontation with the populations while, the
infrastructure projects are directly driven by the states, national governments, and, on the other,
control and direct intervention in the territorial spaces full of energy resources and biodiversity that
ensure the future of capitalist growth and, of course, the future political control of the new
imperialist and colonial stage throughout the continent Latin American.
In this way, then, through the constitutional reforms, the new stage was naturalized
imperialism and the new coloniality in each of the Latin American countries, at the same time that
corporations and imperialism guaranteed the material sources of surplus value and of being able to
avoid, as far as possible, their direct confrontation with the communities. In this sense, the
governments held by the so-called "left" forces or "Progressives" (especially in Venezuela), not only
served as slaughterers to the stage of the developmentalist fiction and its political representatives,
but in its configuration as corporate states that have skillfully led the counterinsurgency process
against antisystemic social movements. This was done either through cooptation (through
integration programs to new government structures created with that purpose and that, many times,
are in charge for their promotion and imposition to the interior of the social movements in elements
of struggle in which the communities have deposited your confidence); but also, causing its
invisibility through the use of means of communication (almost totally in their power), or, finally,
liquidating them physically (ethnogenocide), when the rebellion becomes uncontrollable, for which,
he makes precise use of the pranization of the policy and firepower of its irregular forces with
which they negotiate in a pragmatic and operational way.
In other words, world financial capital (the true owner of the economy and determinant of
the new conjuncture of world political power), does not represent any inconvenience to surrender
local political control of state governments to supposedly anti-imperialist political forces. The
method that they use to ensure the relinquishing of of sovereignty is to enter the process of
corporate conversion of their states and of their governments. As long as their interest is totally
directed towards controlling economic dominance of specific territorial spaces and leaving political
control over the remaining territory to the political forces in control of the state government, they
call themselves "left" (Venezuela case) or "right" (Colombia case, for example). The strategic
economic objective of financial capital and the new imperialist phase, ends up uniting for the same
purpose the ideologically confronted assumptions, "left" s and "right" -wing governments in Latin
America.
It is within this framework that the political significance of programs such as the Plan
Puebla-Panama (for Central America) and the IIRSA program (for South America) should be
understood. These are programs in which the emphasis of domination and political control is
determined for specific territorial spaces and not the control and domination of national states.
Financial capital is no longer interested in the the total domination of the Member States but rather,
the control of particular territorial spaces within national states. In other words, imperialist
corporations assume the exploitation and the surplus value generated by the exploitation of specific
territories while the new corporate state and its government (whether from the "right" or from
"left"), corresponds to the policies of social containment of the communities in resistance and
receive part of the utility of the exploitation for its perpetuation of the power of the state-
government within the terms of the new coloniality. In this sense, the IIRSA program (like the
Puebla-Panama Plan for Central America), must be understood, not just as a program corresponding
to the new economic stage of world capitalism, that is, how the concentration of financial capital
acting as political-economic domination in specific territorial spaces, but as a material basis of
support of the imperialist capital and the political adaptation of the nation states.
That is why, despite the anti-imperialist speeches of the leaders of the Latin American "left"
states or progressive governments (they call themselves Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Lula Da Silva
or Hugo Chávez), all fit their internal political action in the context of the same program: that of
corporations, which for South America has been defined by the IIRSA.

But, what is, in short, the IIRSA?

As the name implies, it is a program for the construction of infrastructures that make possible the
material integration of all of the countries of South America through the foundation of large
international roads, huge hydro-paths along the main South American rivers that make possible its
navigation by medium and large draft boats; large dams for the generation of energy; important
electrical and fiber optic cables to guarantee telecommunications; railways and deep-water ports. In
short, all those infrastructural projects necessary for the exploitation, extraction and transport of
biodiversity, energy and natural resources present in specific territorial spaces in the South
American continent.
 The Program is structured on the basis of axes in which the interconnection of regions to

through communication channels that make possible the mobilization of investments and the
transfer of goods and products. So, for example, in the Andean Hub is the interconnection road from
Caracas to Bolivia through two large roads that extend along the Andean countries, as shown in
Map No. 4.
In this sense, the following axes have been defined: Andean axis, axis of the Guyanese
Shield, Amazonas Hub, Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Hub, Central Interoceanic Hub, Capricorn Hub,
Mercosur-Chile Hub, Andean-South Axis, Paraná-Paraguay Waterway Axis, South Axis (See Map
No. two). The definition of such is not in any way hazardous, but responds to the prospecting of
natural resources, energy, minerals, water, biodiversity, etc., present in the same; as well as the
certain possibilities of being interconnected through the proper infrastructure (Map No. 5).

IIRSA: Axes of Integration and Development

The IIRSA Program has been defined based on what its promoters establish as seven basic
principles, namely:
1) Open regionalism: South America is considered an integrated geo-economic space while
reducing internal barriers to trade and bottlenecks in infrastructure, regional regulation and
operation systems, for which it has been established as an entire commercial opening, which makes
it possible to not only identify the productive sectors of high global competitiveness but their
extraction, exploitation and marketing in the world market. Open regionalism is, then, the principle
that supports the intervention of territorial spaces to which, until very recently, the public policies of
the national states were not enough.
2) Axes of Integration and Development: In accordance with the geo-economic vision of the region,
a minimum standard of transport infrastructure services should be established, energy and
telecommunications in order to support the specific productive activities of each fringe or
Integration and Development Hub. This implies the development of businesses and productive
chains with large economies of scale. The infrastructure must facilitate the access to areas of high
productive potential that are currently isolated or underutilized. It is a redefinition of an old colonial
concept: the concept of empty, which justified the European invasion of indigenous territories
throughout the continent, insofar as they were isolated, empty or occupied by entities without
knowledge of weapons, the written word, without religion, in short, void of culture.
3) Economic, social, environmental and political-institutional sustainability: Sustainability over
time is established according to four elements: (i) efficiency and competitiveness in productive
processes; (ii) by the visible impact of growth that is supposed to have an impact on the quality of
life of the populations; (iii) by the supposed rational use of natural resources and conservation of
ecological heritage; and, (iv) for the various public agents (the States) and private agents (the
Corporations) of society can and want to contribute to the process of development and integration.
4) Increase in Value-Added Production: Development and regional integration should not simply
produce more than what we have traditionally produced, but rather, improve with innovation and
generation of knowledge. Therefore, our economies must be reoriented to form productive chains in
sectors of high global market competition (the world market), capitalizing on the various
comparative advantages. It is about large projects on a world scale in which the local economies of
the inhabitants of the territories have no place for their minimum condition and traditional lives to
intervene.
5) Information Technologies: involves the total transformation of the concepts of distance and space
(and, of course, territory and sovereignty), in order to overcome geographical and operational
barriers. It is a transformation that should be applied not only to productive activities systems of the
region but also to the general functioning of society, including education systems, the provision of
public and government services, and the organization of civil society; that is, new legal and
institutional frameworks that naturalize the intervention of the territories and oblige the peoples to
accept such intervention and dispossession.
6) Normative Convergence: all countries must comply with the legal-political requirements that
make viable investments in regional infrastructure, this implies a necessary convergence of visions
and programs between countries beyond what is specifically related to infrastructure. The program
is supposed to be above any particular geopolitical interest or differences in visions and ideologies
of national governments. What homogenizes them, and makes them converge in the same
exploitation plan is what is considered the global territory of the IIRSA.
7) Public-Private Coordination: finally, all of this requires precise coordination and a shared
leadership between the state governments and the private business sector (the corporations), which
includes the promotion of strategic public-private partnerships (joint ventures) in an adequate
regulatory environment for meaningful participation of the private sector. Shared leadership is
understood as development as a shared responsibility between governments and national and
transnational employers.

As is to be appreciated, the IIRSA is configured as the concrete Program for the execution of a
continental recolonization project, no longer on the part of a country's determined empire, such as
the first European colonization in the territory of Abya Yala, but of large corporations without a
place, that is, of the large transnational financial capital that operates without face or place,
planetarily. On the other hand, based on the acceptance and promotion of the IIRSA Program by all
states and governments throughout the South American continent, their vision and mission goes
beyond the continent and therefore, should be understood from that perspective. That is, the end of
the fiction of the developmentalist period and the beginning of neoliberal globalization in Latin
America turns national states into apparatuses at the service of the new colonization or
recolonization of the continent.
In the end, the acceptance and promotion of IIRSA throughout the continent turns out to be a
forceful imperialist victory while it is nothing more than the concretion in the space of the Free
Trade Agreement. All peoples confront this threat until we celebrate its defeat. Our state
governments (of the "right" or "left") agreed to our direct execution through the IIRSA. If you want
to defeat someone, show him a false enemy so that he will wear out in a fight that will prevent him
to see you as your real and truly terrible enemy.

b. IIRSA and territorial struggle in South America.

While it is true that the first popular uprising against the establishment of neoliberal policies on the
continent was the Caracas rebellion on February 27, 1989, it is no less certain is that such a
rebellion occurred without the political consciousness of the peoplecxxii about the real enemy that
they were confronting with their lives. This was due to the absence of a leadership that had political
clarity about the historical juncture and, much less, the need to organize with strategic vision that
battle. In this sense, it explains how, just a couple of months ago, the population had voted
massively for the president who is currently confronted with rage, and second, because the
revolutionary movements (read, the guerrilla of the 60s and 70s), were totally disarticulated (not to
say defeated).
This rebellion was followed by the march for the land and dignity of Bolivia and Ecuador
but also, as true innovators, by the Zapatista uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) by the Mayan Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, 1994. The significance of this uprising was not
only given by it being an armed uprising, nor because it was a totally indigenous guerrilla, not even
because they proclaimed a statement never heard in the revolutionary struggles of the continent:
Everything for everyone, nothing for us! Its enormous continental significance that continues to this
day is given by the fact that the uprising occurred exactly in the moment when the Mexican
President Salinas de Gortari signed the Free Trade Agreement of the North American countries
(NAFTA, in its acronym in English). Before the agreement of coloniality the Zapatistas responded
with the reterritorialization of their spaces, building, not without the cost of lives, persecution and
iron resistance, a proper and true government in the broadest sense, that is, of the communities.
Likewise, the Pemón struggle against the Venezuela-Brazil power line was the First
confrontation of the Venezuelan indigenous peoples against an IIRSA project in defense of their
territories. Regrettably, they were defeated, not just for being a minority faced with an imperialist
monster, but above all, because in the context of the fight against the figure of Chávez there
emerged the possibility of producing a change in relations between the state and indigenous peoples
that would lead to the elimination (such was his electoral promise of the moment) of the project. As
we have seen, the Pemones and the political forces that trusted in the Chavista project could not
have been more wrong. Chávez knew how to divert the Pemon territorial struggle and that of all
indigenous peoples in exchange for small attention to immediate needs of the communities at the
same time that the IIRSA was nationalizing his "revolutionary and socialist" government program.
Later, in April 2000, the so-called Water War in Cochabamba, Bolivia was, together with the
previous march for the land and the dignity of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, represented at the
time the two largest mobilizations that ended with the removal of several presidents in Ecuador and
Bolivia, and promoted the political career of Rafael Correa and Evo Morales in the respective
countries. They came into the presidency boosted by the hope of social transformation that above
all, indigenous peoples put in their hands. Today, Correa's pro IIRSA policies with new laws that
open the indigenous Amazon territorial spaces for mining exploitation in Ecuador, or the defense of
Evo Morales of the project of the the TIPNIS highway, once again shows the impossibility of a
reterritorialization of the peoples against the imperialist project from the structures of the States
governments and, much less, leaving their struggle in the hands of someone that was elected.
Thus, both the Bolivian and Ecuadorian indigenous peoples have to return to the road that
they themselves began to trace with the Water War and the March for the Earth and Dignity; since,
at that moment of the struggle, they exposed the true enemy: the big corporations that together with
the national government want to achieve a new model of coloniality that makes possible the
continuity of its existence against the existence of the peoples.
In Venezuela, the IIRSA has managed to acquire a letter of naturalization, with a certificate
of "socialist" and "revolutionary" identity. At the beginning of the first period of the Chávez
presidency, his economy minister Jorge Giordani presented the path for economic development
within the Bolivarian project that was synthesized in what he called: The Development Axes of the
Bolivarian Revolution. This was namely, the East Axis, constituted by oil and gas exploitation
projects and a deepwater port located at the end of Sucre state that depended on the transfer of
resources (miners and oil tankers). These were extracted from the region that constitutes the second
of its axes: the Orinoco, which involves the construction of waterways, railways and river ports that
interconnect the exploitations of mining, oil and biodiversity resources of the Amazon of northern
Brazil, the eastern plains of Colombia and the Venezuelan Amazon. Finally, there is the Western
Axis, formed by the totality of the Sierra de Perijá and the Lake Maracaibo basin, and, whose
essential projects are represented by coal mining, coltan present in the Sierra, as well as the
transportation of gas, oil and coal from both sides of the Sierra (Venezuela and Colombia), through
the improvement of existing ports in the Lake of Maracaibo and the construction of a new
deepwater port in the peninsula of the Guajira.
All this is what has been offered to us as the way forward, to become a "Great energetic
power" that is the "heart of the Fatherland Plan". This singular "Patriotic" plan has led to the
formation of joint ventures between the national government and the largest corporations for the
exploitation of these spaces in the east, south and west of the country. In other cases, there was the
transfer of direct concessions to transnational mining companies for the exploitation of coal, coltan
and gold in the Bolívar state in the south and in the Sierra de Perijá in the West. But, above all,
given that the development of this "great Fatherland Plan" is located in fundamentally indigenous
territorial spaces, the reordering the territorial demarcation of the indigenous territorial spaces has
been totally redefined by the "Bolivarian revolution" according to the interests of these exploitation
projects.
In such a way that, the demarcation of indigenous "lands and habitats" constitutionally
established since 1999, has been nothing more than an opium dream for the indigenous peoples and
a justification for the Chavez government for the liquidation of the indigenous territorial struggle in
Venezuela. It is also important to note that the "Great Fatherland Plan" and the development axes
represent the continuity of the colonial model imposed by the Europeans in the sixteenth century, in
which, the idea of emptiness is determinant. Thus, in its justification of the program, the "socialist"
minister Giordani states that (more words, less words), Venezuela is a country whose population
distribution is totally anomalous, then, in its northern fringe 60% of the population is located when
in its place only 10% of the water and natural resources to guarantee the existence of such a high
population.
On the contrary, it is in the region of the southern border strip where 60% of the resources
are found while only about 10% of the country's total population lives in it. These are empty
geographic spaces or spaces whose population can be subject to displacement by virtue of its little
or no contribution to national economic growth in so far as these are traditional economies of
community self-sustainability which, for that reason, can not be placed above the interests of the
state that represents the majority of the population (See Maps 5, 6 and 7).
 Not for nothing, in a statement made through a national television network, precisely, from
the indigenous territory of Bolívar state and, especially directed to the indigenous towns peoples,
President Chavez ruled the territorial demarcation of indigenous peoples outside the context of the
"Great Fatherland Plan" as impossible. That is, it was outside the IIRSA, their projects and interests
that are closely associated with the future of the "socialist" state government in Venezuela.
That is why, after more than a decade since the Constitution was enacted which, in one of its

most immediate provisions, established the obligatory nature of the Venezuelan territorial
reorganization that supposedly supported the demarcation of territorial rights for indigenous
peoples, this process can be cataloged without fear, as a territorial dispossession that has nothing to
envy to the one made by the crown Spanish during the conquest and colonization of the sixteenth
century. It deals not only with the ignorance and invisibility of indigenous peoples as an empty
concept, but the adaptation of the nation state to the new configuration of the world capitalism that
requires it as a corporate state. Thus, indigenous peoples of Venezuela are in a position in which
they may decide, at all risk, to start the autonomous reterritorialization of their spaces (which
implies the generation of self-governments with their own political agenda and calendar), or they
will fall on the ramp created by the imperialism, the global financial capital concretely applied by
the nation states represented by those who exercise their government, who promise salvation that
they will only reach with their death and disappearance, something like that, like paradise after the
death.
All Venezuelan indigenous peoples have been suffering throughout European colonial
history and republican internal coloniality, as a gradual and incessant loss of territories. When the
Bolivarian Constitution established its recognition of communities with language, traditions,
religion and their own space, they could not do less than celebrate the opium dream that was
proposed to them. However, deep down, it was about the new stage of territorial dispossession and
the definitive sentence of cultural disappearance. This time it was still supported by a good part of
its own members who had now become Ministers, Deputies, or leaders of Communal Councils
established by the government party and that replaced their autonomous forms of political
organization. At this stage, the territorial reordering only involved the determination of spaces for
the exploitation of resources, in strategies negotiated between the state governments and the
imperialist corporations. The indigenous peoples (some of them to be more precise), according to
the concept colonial vacuum revitalized by the "great Fatherland Plan" of the "Bolivarian
Revolution", then must settle for the demarcation of small plots of land that will end up enclosing
them in small "habitats" to condemn them to a sure cultural and physical disappearance. (See Maps
No. 7 and 8).

Map No. 8. Indigenous Peoples and their territories in Venezuela.

Thus, after 12 years the government of the "Great Homeland" has only demarcated (according to its
own figures), some 905,582 hectares, "benefiting"cxxiii some 34 indigenous communities belonging
to about 6 of the 34 native indigenous peoples in Venezuela. Said another way, it is a territorial
demarcation consciously executed as a policy of counterinsurgency against indigenous peoples and
as a policy of surrender and against the sovereignty of Venezuela as a republic.
Map No. 9. Lands granted to indigenous peoples. Report 2005-2007125.

In short, the indigenous territorial struggle in Venezuela and the entire continent, is not only a
struggle of resistance for the space that makes them what they are, but also constitutes the true
civilizational confrontation between the new coloniality and the possibility of reconstitute our Latin
American nations from another perspective, that is, from another philosophy, another thought and,
therefore, from another form of social organization and operation. Such a perspective is not only
difficult to understand by the subjected peoples themselves, but also, by the critical forces that, in
their reflection, refuse to abandon the state-centered colonial roots that prevent them from accepting
the possibility of a protagonist role of the indigenous, black and peasant philosophies that have
always been considered "incapable" of providing their own thinking to a corporate project that
encompasses all of us who are working towards a better life.

Aeinta jara atta eirawa: What remains to be seen.

Story:
On one occasion, we traveled to the Sierra de Perijá to visit the Barí community of Karañakaëg and,
very particularly Benito Askerayá. We thought this visit was important because we had information
about the possibility of a corporation starting work for the exploitation of a lot of coal located
exactly in the territory of the community. We knew that the MAICCA had sold its concession to a
Chilean consortium that immediately wanted to begin exploitation. So, with this disturbing news we
arrived at the community that, as always, we found calm and dedicated to their daily tasks.
Immediately, we commented to Benito and his colleagues about the information, the risk it implied
and the need to Prepare a course of action to confront it. But, to our surprise, Benito and the other
Bari despite listening attentively to our alarm, did not show any concern, on the contrary, with
astonishing tranquility only agreed to our words without referring to our proposals for action.
During a break in the meeting, I approached Benito to tell him that we did not understand how they
could be so calm when they found out what was happening. Benito answered me:
- When you came along the road, did you see the river well?
- Yes.
- You noticed that there are parts of the edges that the leaves cover.
- Yes, the river is barely visible.
- Well, that's how we Bari are. When everyone thinks we're calm, it's because we walk like the river
under the leaves.
Certainly, a couple of months later, the Bari of Karañakaëg and other neighboring communities,
arrested the men of the mining company, captured their boss, their tools, appliances, radio-
transmission antenna, GPS and ended up expelling them from their territory in such a strong action,
that the Chilean company definitively withdrew from the place, abandoning the concession forever.
For the indigenous struggle against the plans of the "great Homeland" to develop "energy",
this Barí experience is singularly important because the indigenous people know that what is on the
table is their definitive permanence and existence as culturally different peoples. However, it is
necessary to point out that one thing is the consciousness about the historical circumstance and
quite another to convert awareness into corresponding actions. One side about is what ideas are
incubated and another, very different, is about what is to be seen.
Perhaps, one of the false theorems that has done the most damage to the thinking of the left
is that which, schematically, indicates the historical evolution of socialism as a kind of arrow that
moves inexorably towards the change of society. Nothing is more false, then, a thing that is cooked
in the oven of the story and another what is to be seen outside the oven. Hence, to think that the
current conjuncture of the crisis of capitalism signals its end can be, not only naive, but mortal for
the peoples in struggle. In fact, we are convinced that the correct thing is to think that the current
crisis of capitalism is part of the process of its passage to a new configuration of itself, which
certainly does not stop be traumatic and risky for their permanence. In this sense, big capital has
awareness of that risk and, for that reason, is dedicated to changing the physiognomy of its counter-
insurgency policies, since the crisis generates the emergence of subjects who could at a certain
moment deepen the struggle towards a truly anti-systemic path. Said in the words of Raúl Zibechi:
"Although it is going through a deep structural crisis, capitalism will last as long as those from below delay in
finding sustainable alternatives, that is, capable of self-reproduction. No system disappears until another is
born capable of replacing it; one that is trained to comply more efficiently with the functions that the system
can not continue to perform. For this simple reason, endorsed by all of the transitions in history, is that the
elites are determined to prevent the birth, growth and expansion of non-capitalist forms of life, capable of
overcoming the inevitable initial isolation to grow, until one day it becomes a system. In this function, social
policies play a relevant, irreplaceable role. With the excuse to alleviate poverty, seek the dissolution of non-
capitalist practices and spaces in the that they happen, to subject them to state practices. The best way is not to
do it with violence, which tends to mutate them into resistant organisms, but subject them gently, administering
- as antidotes - social relations similar to those that gave life to those non-capitalist practices. " (Zibechi, 2010:
11)
In this sense, we can say without fear, that after the great uprisings against neoliberal policies
throughout Latin America, that were able to tear down governments and force political reforms in
all national states, only the Zapatista movement of the Mayans of Chiapas, has followed the path of
consolidating self-government in autonomously re-territorialized spaces. Like the Zapatistas, there
are few indigenous movements, peasants, blacks or rural or urban communities who have
successfully resisted this "inevitable initial isolation". On the contrary, most of them have
succumbed to the illusions created (as social policies executed by "popular governments"), by
capitalism itself in this stage of globalization. We must see the efforts that politically and militarily,
the Mexican elites (from the PAN, the PRI and the PRD) have performed over the last 18 years to
break the struggle for the autonomy of the Zapatista Mayans of Chiapas, their leadership politics
gathered in the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee, and its EZLN (Zapatista Army of
National Liberation), and force them to mediate their struggle through the state-government
mechanisms.
Story:
One morning, a Zapatista community was awakened by a unique call for all members to participate
in a general assembly to be held in the meeting space. The assembly of people was organized in a
large circle in the center of which was a compañero who, it was known, held a position as an
authority within the community. From his tone and the gestures of the participants, it was
understood that for some reason the compañero was being subjected to a true judgment by his
community. After a huge cacophony in which everyone spoke almost at the same time, without
cession to the parliamentary right of speech, the assembly was falling silent. After a brief moment
of silence, a member of the assembly gave a brief speech and, immediately, the compañero who had
remained at the center of the assembly, pulled out of bag a small wad of bills that before all, began
to tear one by one. Later, he was taken to a truck in which several bags of food were placed and
accompanied by several men from the community, the court left for the town nearby. Then, another
compañero informed and clarified everything that happened to those who had witnessed the event
without understanding: the compañero, a member of the community authorities, had been judged
for having accepted from the municipal government (a town hall in the hands of the PRD), food
bags and cash that the municipality granted in supposed solidarity to favor the Zapatista indigenous
people, who certainly suffered from many needs. However, this collective decision to restart this
original and autonomous guerrilla path, led them to condemn one of their members, otherwise
elected by them as an authority, even beyond their good intentions towards the community. He tried,
then, to sustain, even in the worst of isolation and need, an autonomous and different path from the
one that the government intends to establish as the only unique and natural possible way.
The spirit and consequences of this rebellious decision, unfortunately, are not found in most
of the indigenous organizations of the continent, and much less, in the indigenous organizations of
Venezuela. On the contrary, there are many who seek to justify the submission of indigenous
organizations to the social policies of the state government (they always did it at the time of the so-
called 4th Republic, but also now in the 5th republic of Chávez). It's about the political elites
("right" and "left") that seek to redirect anti-systemic movements towards the reason of the system.
In recent years, in the period of the so-called Bolivarian "revolution" we have been accused, almost
in a contemptuous accusatory tone, of being anarchists. By pointing to us is as if we should be
ashamed of what we are because of its infamous name. However, we have understood these
indications when they come from sectors that really do not know the contributions of the anarchists
that have strenghthened social struggles around the world. This is seen as unacceptable when it
comes from intellectuals who, knowing the history of anarchism, use it to disqualify the struggle for
the autonomy of the people. These accusations are not free or fortuitous. They respond essentially to
the counterinsurgency policy developed by the Chavista state government and its elites, in order to
contain any process of autonomous construction not attached to government policies whose claim
has been an adaptation to the reconfiguration of imperialist coloniality in Venezuela and the
continent.
Thus, it will not be easy to generate the conditions for it to emerge on the surface of the
political struggle which is certainly incubating throughout the continent. This is what Hugo
Zemelman calls "giving himself"cxxiv to the interior of a reality that, not necessarily, ends up being
given, since in the same circumstances it can converge and certainly divert the movements and
redirect them towards the current of their former domination. This is why many members of those
elites who now accuse us, usually end up on the other side, they come to naturalize in themselves
the counterinsurgency policies from their state-centrism and consciously or unconsciously, they
have contributed to development against the autonomous initiatives of the communities.
In any case, we must be clear that the current historical moment is transcendental, not only
for the indigenous continental movement, but also, for peasants, black peoples, those without land,
the homeless, the rural and urban displaced, the unemployed, the outsourced, in short, for all those
necessarily excluded from the new stage of the capitalist globalization and recolonization and its
corresponding internal coloniality in Latin America.
However, these risks can be perfectly interpreted in their broadest dimension from three
principles that the state-centric elites do not tire of promoting; namely: a.- The separation of space
and time as distanced categories. For Western thought and science, the conceptual separation
between space and time is an inheritance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. From his conceptual
separation emerged the disciplines, equally separated, of geography, dedicated to accounting for the
phenomena of space and nature, and, history, as a narrative account of events. For that, the
historical events linked to the struggle between the different social classes in terms of achieving
their own well-being are separated from the territorial spaces occupied by the same classes in
struggle. This means, that for Western thought (including its most critical version of Marxism-
Leninism), class struggle as the engine of history must not imply, necessarily, that the space where
it happens, that is to say, the struggle for power is not necessarily Kantian and territorial. This
conceptual separation between space and time is not only abstract, but has its sense of practical
political application, especially for the struggle of state-centered intellectual elites; that is, the
temporal relativization of the transformation processes, which is equivalent to saying and to
demanding patience from social movements. To not demand more than what temporarily the new
state government can really give in the context of its "game of power" with the imperialist forces;
otherwise, it could force a radical "anarchic" rupture of the time of the "revolutionary" process.
I hope that the irony is understood. Certainly, there are no real processes of transformation
whose origin results from a calculated periodization. This is well known by the intellectual elites of
the Chavez government; however, they insist on it covering their fallacy, extracting, not precisely
from Marx to which they swear loyalty, but from the bottom of the Kantian philosophy the
justification of a supposed periodicity of the processes of revolutionary transformation.
"Wait. Everything will come in time", say the advisory elites and Chavez says continually to
the hopeful population. In this way, not only the new state government, but from the supposed
naturalness of time separated from space communities enter the path marked by capitalism as a
system as natural as the weather. Thus, in spite of the more than Marxist "pimp" Dietrich (Diosdado
dixit), the government of Chávez and his intellectual elite is Kantian, which is in light of his speech,
a whole aberration.
But the separation of time and space, in addition, has allowed the intellectual elite of new
government state to transfer the territorial struggle of indigenous peoples towards other instances;
for example, the racial one. In this way, Sabino's struggle for the Yukpa territories in the Sierra de
Perijá, for example, does not constitute, according to them, a confrontation between indigenous
communities against the imperialist plans contained in the IIRSA, but that it is a unique
confrontation between "racist landowners" against the Indians exclusively for their race. In no way
do we intend to deny the racist condition of a large part of the landowners and even of the non-
indigenous population of the Perijá region; however, awarding the yukpa confrontation for their
territories to a racial issue leaves intentionally on the outside to the government that, by the way,
constitutionally (still accepted by the racist landowners), is bound to demarcate the territories
indigenous people throughout the country, as has happened in all the countries of the continent. This
is just a Kantian way of getting the government out of its undeniable links with the imperialist
proposal of territorial domination through the IIRSA.
On the other hand, separating time from space allows you to build agendas and calendars
totally outside the context of the territorial struggle. Thus, the struggles and aspirations of the
communities by their specific local territorial spaces, generally are off the agenda and their
implementation schedule is always postponed. This, unfortunately, has been happening throughout
the history of Latin American social movements until now, where, with the exception of the
Zapatista movement in Chiapas, set their own agenda and calendar of struggle. Zapatista movement
is an exception and not the rule; therefore, what is involved is to convert the Zapatista experience
into a rule of the Latin American social movements in general, and Venezuelan in particular, in the
sense of understanding that the struggle agenda of those from below must correspond to their own
and autonomous interpretation of time in its concrete space, and, of that autonomous interpretation
to impose on the top of the calendar an agenda of confrontation.
The reemphasizing of the calendar and the agenda imposed by those from above (those of
the state government and its opponents) distracts communities in proper struggles for power from
focusing on those in power. Right now, given the disappearance of Chávez from power within the
State government, more than one social movement begins to move the agenda and the calendar that
those above impose (those that favor and oppose chavismo), by making special use of the media as
a marked destination and that we all must necessarily transit.
With this we do not mean that the conjuncture is unknown, but that our action in it must
come from our own agenda and our own calendar of struggle. Thus, before the very probable
retirement of Chávez from the government (announced by himself in televised testament), the
question is not in who replaces him, nor when, but how from our agenda and our own calendar we
must deepen the fight for the indigenous people's territories by assuming the governance of our own
territories. Just like the workers of the salt flats in Sucre have taken over the governance of the
company this resistance must also be extended territorially towards the space where the Chávez
state government has negotiated the construction of a deepwater port as part of the IIRSA.
In short, it is about when, once and for all, we autonomously assume the sovereignty of our
struggles in our spaces. In other words, it is about the territorialization of our historical time, which
means nothing other than taking the decision to be autonomous in our thinking and in our doing as
the only possible way to liberate our communities, as a people, as a nation.

b.- The philosophy of the lesser evil.

Chained to the intentional separation of time and space, the "philosophy" of the lesser evil is
naturalized through power by the elites and imposed on the rest of society; in such a way that, the
exploited: indigenous, peasants, workers, the unemployed and others have had to settle for what has
been granted, that, its reality is in itself a lesser evil. This principle of conformity (and conformism)
has become a theory policy that our elites have disseminated in the hearts and minds of a dominated
people, to such a point, that we always end up accepting what is really unacceptable on account that
it is a lesser evil at the risk of entering a confrontation instability, that is, we are threatened with the
possibility of a greater evil.
Thus, for example, from the "philosophy" of the lesser evil we are commonly told: between
Arias Cárdenas and Pablo Pérez, vote for Arias, because he is a traitor able to agree with
landowners and sectors linked to coal transnational corporations and the Port project of deep waters
in the Guajira, but he is the lesser evil, in front of the greater evil that represents Pablo Pérez,
representative of Manuel Rosales and the imperialist right. They publish a whole justification that is
joined with parrot saliva, nothing less than Sabino Romero with Chávez and Arias Cárdenas in the
same project of world peace. Only in the reality of the facts of that peculiar project of peace, it is
only Sabino and his community that have lost people in the struggle. Chavez has had no problems
in the transnationals exploiting indigenous territories. Arias will only have to manage the rent
corresponding to the government with loyalty to the leader of our singular revolution.
But all of this is possible because, from the perspective of the state government and its
elites, the territory as space has nothing to do with time; but also, this relationship is converted into
an economic and political agenda that is naturalized. Much of the social movements (not to say
everything) enter into that agenda and yield again and again under the interpretation of this struggle
from the enthroned "philosophy" of the lesser evil. In this way, we have come not only to acting
within the agenda and calendar imposed by those above, but accepting as natural the lesser evil that
they grant us with a such condescension that it erases even his condition of correctness. This turns
the lesser evil into a gift for which we have to pay and, in addition, we must thank the president and
his acolytes of the state government. It is assumed that there is no other way than world capitalism.
Everything that the commander president does in the state government allows us to forgive him our
lives and give us a little more time of existence. This kind of guilty feeling within the that the
Venezuelan social movement has been inoculated during the last decade. In addition, sweetened by
the exploitation of a religiosity that certainly assimilates "Philosophy" of the lesser evil with the
phrase of common sense: "There is no harm that does come because of the good".
Ultimately, the separation of time and space and its consequent "philosophy" of lesser evil,
as never before has been part of the actions to support the execution of the government's
counterinsurgency policy for the submission of the communities. In this sense, the struggle for
territories requires an indigenous movement able to assume its autonomy as an expression of the
exercise of self-government in its spaces; for which it must be equally capable of promoting the
alliance between equals along with the other exploited peoples: peasants, workers, unemployed,
marginalized urban, etc. To resist, they have to territorialize the struggle in the construction of
another society, one based on philosophy of the good life that will never be a lesser evil, but the
exercise of the fullness of human existence

c.- The manifest destiny.

This third principle is an old argument used by imperialism for the justification of its colonial
imposition and acceptance for a supposed impossibility of the fight against the current of history on
the part of the subjugated populations. This principle was always been assumed by nation states in
their developmental stage against of rural populations (indigenous and peasant) to persuade their
acceptance of territorial dispossession in favor of industrial capital and agro-industry. It was from
the time of the struggle of state against the plantation and the concretion of that struggle in an
Agrarian Reform that, while freeing spaces for the new territorial distribution of the work,
paralyzed the continental struggle for land in the context of a generalized Revolutionary war in the
1960s. It was about what the administration of John F. Kennedy called the "allowed revolution"
instrumented and carried forward by an ad hoc apparatus known as the Alliance for Progress.
It is not surprising that political forces on the left assume principles and concepts from the
imperial centers of power. In Latin America, the history of the coloniality of power cannot be
separated from the history of the coloniality of knowledge, since the coloniality of power requires
the sustenance of a subjectivity created by the coloniality of knowledge. All of the concepts that
support colonial power and coloniality are theoretical constructions elaborated in institutions
created (especially university education) or channeled for such purposes. They also propose, as
expressions of an unappealable scientific method, to function as a counselor of the course to
inexorably follow.
However, it is really interesting to see how the idea of manifest destiny, fought by the left
movements with particular force in the 60s, it becomes today the most important principle on which
the actions of the state governments are based in the hands of the "left" in Latin America. That is
why we can listen to the most important intellectuals of the so-called "critical thinking", proclaim
phrases such as: "it is impossible to build socialism without knowing the presence and strength of
world capitalism"; or, "our revolution must advance in stages in which the negotiation with
imperialism is part of the process." In short, even in the case of the process of building socialism,
the fate of the communities is already written.
Characters like Rafael Correa (educated in a North American University) are yet even
further away. They catalog the pretensions of the indigenous movement as a childish refusal of
mining exploitation in their territories as does Chávez when he communicates to the indigenous
peoples of Bolívar and Amazonas regions, that "he can not give them the lands of the Amazon (as if
they were really his and were in his pocket to be distributed). That would deny the possibility to
Venezuela's unstoppable development as an energy producing power. He stopped short of saying, as
a manifest destiny and imposed by the corporations. In order to not dwell further on this point, the
separation of time and space (of Kantian philosophy) not only leads the social movement to the
religious acceptance of the lesser evil as an alternative, but as the manifest destiny written by the
gods of corporations and applied by their "Popes" at the head of the governments states as true
representatives of the God of capital on earth.
Ama eiña oota Aeinta jara atta eirawa
(How to make sprout what remains to be seen?)

To explain this, our last point, we hope this relationship will serve us: Among the añú, when fishing,
the crew of their small boats must be shaped in a twined way like the fingers of a hand. So, the
thumb is the aeinkai (the driver), that is, the one who has the spirit, the heart of the boat and takes it
to the place indicated by the index finger that, in its condition of Kacheekai (the one that listen), is
in charge of submerging in the waters of the Lake, and to detect with his thin ear the voice of the
schools of fish to indicate their species, position and distance so that, finally, the remaining three:
medium, ring finger and little finger act as a network at the time of ookotiwin jou'üyükan (cut the
waters to emerge the fish). As we see, it's all about a collective effort in which each member of the
crew acts together, and, therefore, impossible from any individual action that separates it from the
social hand of which it is part. In this way, fishing will always be successful and beneficial. There is
no possibility for anyone to act on their own since each action requires the coordinated participation
of each of its members.
With this we want to establish as a fundamental principle to achieve the emergence of what
remains to be seen, the need for a collective vision of all of our actions, in such way that,
definitively, in consideration of illuminated characters or predestined people we send them
definitively to the dimension to which they correspond: the field of the manifest imperialist destiny
they represent. Thus, in contrast to the principles of the coloniality of power and knowledge,
described above, the autonomous construction of our liberation path demands that we understand
and exercise the following principles:

A. When a finger of our hand is hit, our whole hand suffers.

One of the conditions that the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge have
established as an unobjectionable question to achieve knowing reality and action requires separation
of the parts from the whole. Thus, the fact of dividing the whole from its elements guarantees,
according to their perception, their knowledge and, therefore, its manipulation. However, we
know that from the perspective and experience of the indigenous, peasant and black communities,
that this separation is impossible, at the risk of uprooting and alienating the entire culture from its
space and its historical time. With this we want to establish as a starting point for a kind of doing
that makes possible the emergence of what the current historical moment poses to all indigenous
peoples, the need to link our struggles into one: re-territorialization and defense of our particular
and linked territorialities.
In such a way that, in the struggle of the Mapuches, for example, although historical and
geographically particular, nothing differs from the struggle of the Bari or Yukpas of Venezuela. But
also, it is not at all different and can not be separated from the struggle of the workers of the Salinas
de Sucre in eastern Venezuela, or the Nasa, Awa and Embera in Colombia; in short, we are all being
attacked by one and the same enemy: the international financial capital and its corporations in direct
alliance with the national state governments and their circumstantial political representatives (of the
"left" or "right"). In this sense, it is urgent to create mechanisms that allow our hands act
immediately when one of our fingers is being hit by these enemies.

b. When a finger of our hand moves our whole hand is mobilized.

In this order, we must be able to attend immediately to the signaling of our Kacheekai, at the time
and place where it occurs. That is, every community that decides to territorialize their struggle is
constituted in that particular moment in our Kacheekai and, therefore, mobilizes us all in her
defense, since she is at the same time, the defense of the territorialization of each and every one of
our struggles. This is so, because, we must understand that despite the spatial-temporal particularity
that each struggle has, none of them, in the context of imperialist globalization, it can be sustained
without the aid of a struggle of all.
c. When our hand fishes, it shares everything with the other hands.
All of the above does not refer to anything other than the political decision to build our autonomy.
However, autonomy is a construction that is not only linked to political decisions but, equally,
economic decisions. The need to build resistance from and for ourselves therefore, is fundamental
for us to build the alliance between equals and, on these bases establish the course of our alliances
with all possible allies, and not the other way round. Thus, the alliance between equals begins with
those connections that are established from the struggles themselves and according to our own
interpretation of the historical conjuncture. In other words, we join in principle with all those who
are part of the same hand that we are: indigenous, peasants, blacks, landless peasants, unemployed,
homeless and all of the deprived and outsourced local, national and continental peoples. We join
with all our equals and it is with them that we must, in the first place, be able to weave the networks
of our autonomy.

d. Our hand is there to build and caress dreams, but also to slap away nightmares.
At the same time that we territorialize our struggles, that is, our resistance, from the autonomous
decision to establish in our spaces the time of our own government, we must prepare to defend such
decisions and actions. We must build all those possible and necessary forms of organization to
defend our autonomy.
The oldest Añú (araurakan, paraa añunkan) say that at the moment when the cacique Nigalee
organized the contingents to fight against the Spaniards who had snatched from the añú his most
appreciated product: the salt, he said to the assembly, something like this: Api wookota Nükü
enemigakarü, wakaanipeichi keeta aeini jaña ama wannü. That is: For us to say the word enemy we
had to name them as our disease.
For the Añú, as for many indigenous peoples, the existence of everything that is present in
the world is defined by its complementarity with the others, therefore, the relationships between all
things are framed in a harmony that only provides peace. Vouchsafe to say, war is never sought but
through agreement, such is the dream that is caressed while building life. However, as happened
with Nigalee, at the moment when the nightmare comes with the imposition of submission to pain,
humiliation or denial, the dreamer is forced to shake away his dream, awaken and violently erase
the images of the disturbing nightmare. What we intend to say is that, every people has the right to
build their dream of society in peace, but also, they must be prepared to defend with life that peace
that with their collective hands they have designed and built.

Final coda.
To conclude, what we have tried to establish with this already long essay is that some elements that
we consider essential for sparking the movement indigenous peoples and society in Venezuela
comes from another perspective of vision and interpretation of our national reality in the continental
context. Therefore, everything here written is totally debatable. However, the events that generally
move faster than our interpretations, although they seem to impose a rhythm of decisions, should in
no way separate us from the purpose of achieving this perspective that we propose and on which we
have been arguing.
Thus, in spite of and, precisely, in order to find ourselves in the conjuncture of an almost
unstoppable confrontation between government forces and their traditional opponents for control of
the state, we must think from our excluded third-person perspective of the in that context.
Therefore, instead of entering the whirlpool that sooner rather than later will end in a pact that
ensures governability for the continuity of fundamentally economic programs in Venezuela and the
continent, the indigenous movement must deepen their organization while taking initiative in the
struggle for their territories.
To do this, we must be able to unite that struggle with that of all social movements that
decide to act from the perspective of the excluded third: peasants without land, outsourced workers,
the unemployed, homeless people, in short, all those willing to build their autonomy in their spaces
of struggle. In such a way that, given the ungovernability that comes from the government, our
response should be to mobilize not in function of either of the two sides in conflict, but in terms of
establishing our own governance in our own territories. It is to this decision, not free of high risk, to
which we have been calling for some time the path of communities. This is the path to which, in a
twined manner like the fingers of one hand, we are calling to travel. A hand is never alone if its
doing is true, you need the other, all of the others to build that way.
i Translator's note: in the original text is written “Empezar de a de a veras” which is a typo- the original chapter name
is Empezar de a de veras.
ii Translator's note: the original is cosmovivencia
iii "E'inmatualee": "the heart of the land from which we emerged". Mythical place of origin of the Añuu and that
corresponds to the space / time in which the waters of the heavens are joined and separated, according to the author José
Ángel Quintero Weir.
iv Translator's note: PAC is the Spanish acronym for the Proyecto de Aceleración del Crecimiento
v The record of the ecocidal and ethnocidal disaster of Caño Mánamo was dramatically exposed in the documentary
film of the same name, made by the filmmaker Carlos Azpurua. National Cinematheque. Caracas, 1975.
vi The Yukpa (Karibes), together with the Barí (Chibchas), Japreria (Karibe), Wayuu and Añuu (Arawak), make up the
indigenous population of Zulia State, Venezuela, and are part of the 36 ethnic groups of the indigenous population of the
country.
vii ARROM, José Juan (1992): Las primeras imágenes opuestas y el debate sobre la dignidad del indio .En: De
Palabra y Obra en el Nuevo Mundo. 1.- Imágenes interétnicas. Miguel León Portilla (Compilador). Siglo XXI
de España, p. 68
viii ARROM, Ibid, p 71-72
ix SUBIRATS, Eduardo (1994): El Continente Vacío. Colección Teoría. Siglo XXI Editores, México, p. 30
x SALAZAR BONDY, August (1968): ¿Existe una Filosofía en nuestra América?. Siglo XXI. 11ª. Edición
México 1988, p. 37
xi BONFIL BATALLA, Guillermo (1991): Pensar nuestra cultura. Alianza Editorial. Colección Estudios, 4ta.
Reimpresión 1997. México, p. 14
xii ZEA, Leopoldo (1969): La Filosofía americana como filosofía sin más. Siglo XXI Editores. 18va. Edición
corregida. México, 1989.
xiii LANDER, Edgardo. Ibid, p. 18-19
xiv QUIJANO, Anibal (2000): Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. En: Colonialidad del
saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. UNESCO/FACES, U. C. V. Caracas, p. 294
xv LANDER, E. Ibid, p. 29
xvi Ibid, p. 30-31
xvii QUIJANO, Anibal: Cited work, p. 319
xviii LENKERSDORF, Carlos: Filosofar en clave Tojolabal. Miguel Angel Porrúa Editor. México, p.9
xix The indigenous cultures considered correspond to the original peoples of the Lake Basin of Maracaibo, Zulia State,
Venezuela, for being those of which we have more information and domain. However, our approaches are extensive to
the indigenous cultures of America.
xx LENKERSDORF, Carlos (1999): Los Hombres Verdaderos: voces y testimonios Tojolabales. Siglo XXI
Editores, México, p. 13
xxi "E'inmatualee": "the heart of the land from which we emerged". The mythical place of origin of
the Añuu that it corresponds to the space/time in which the waters of the heavens unite and separate.
xxii LENKERSDORF, Carlos: Cited work, p. 12
xxiii Ibid.
xxiv LENKERSDORF, Carlos, Cited work, p.101
xxv Carta al consejo 500 años de resistencia indígena. 1 de febrero de 1994. EZLN. Documentos y
Comunicados, p. 119
xxvi Añuu, also known as paraujanos, are the original inhabitants of Lake Maracaibo. They belong
to the great Arawak family and make up, together with the Wayuu, Bari, Yukpa and Járeria, the
population native of the Zulia state to the west of Venezuela. They are the millenarian inhabitants of
the coasts of the lake of Maracaibo as well as the banks of some tributaries of the same lake. They
live in the so-called palafitos (houses nestled in the water) and are mainly dedicated to fishing,
collecting marine shells, the production of salt and, very scarcely, hunting. Their language is the
añunnükü, which they fight for keep alive despite the ethnocidal intervention of which they have
been victims since the conquest and colonization to this day.
xxvii Niklas Luhman (1996), Confianza. Anthropos, Barcelona, p. 5
xxviii Carlos Lenkersdorf (1998), Cosmovisiones. UNAM, México.
xxix H.G. Gadamer, Verdad y Método.
xxx Carlos Lenkersdorf (1998). Los hombres verdaderos. Siglo XXI Editores. México, p. 24
xxxi Edward Sapir, La lengua. Fondo de Cultura Económica. México, p.
xxxii C. Lenkersdorf (1998:16)
xxxiii C. Lenkersdorf (2002): Tojolabal para principiantes. Plaza y Valdes Editores. México, p. 181
xxxiv Clifford Geertz (1994), Conocimiento local . Barcelona, p. 93-94
xxxv Peter Winch (1994), Comprender una cultura primitiva. Barcelona, p. 20
xxxvi N. Luhman (1996:43)
xxxvii Yaguasa (Anas americana; Anas discors Linné), pato silvestre que en grandes bandas migratorias proceden
del Canadá, de donde huyen al invierno y se llegan a las zonas cálidas de eneales y manglares tanto en la
región de Gran Eneal como en la Ciénaga de Los Olivitos en la región norte del Estado Zulia
xxxviii The Añuu, together with the Wayuu (Arawak); bari (chibchas); yukpa (caribes) and japreria
(caribes) constitute the indigenous population of Zulia State in western Venezuela. They are palatial
inhabitants of the banks of Lake Maracaibo and some rivers in the basin. They are fundamentally
fishermen and gatherers, sparsely hunters. According to the chronicles, the shape of their houses,
stuck in the water, caused imagination of the first conquerors the distorted image of the European
Venice, a pejorative image that induced the name of Venezuela.
xxxix “einmatualee”. In the Añuu language, “the heart of the land where we are from”.
xl BONFIL BATALLA, Guillermo (2002): Historias que no son todavía historia . En: “Historia para qué?.
Siglo XXI Editores, México. 1ª. Edición 1980. 19na Edición , p. 229
xli LENKERSDORF, Carlos (1988): Cosmovisiones.Conceptos. Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias
en Ciencias y Humanidades. UNAM, México, p. 13
xlii In 1528, as payment of the debt that the Spanish crown had with the German bankers of the
house of the Welser, they received in the so-called Capitulations of that year, the domains that
covered the territory of the now called Zulia state that, for the colonial administration, did not
belong to the General Captaincy of Venezuela, but to the Viceroyalty of New Granada and, which
was to be governed and administered by the Governor of Santa Marta. No governor was able to
exercise control over this region, two of which tried but they were liquidated by the hardened
Wayuu during their trip. So, because of the need to liquidate the debt to the German bankers, and
the impossibility of exercising governance over that territory, the Spanish kings decided to
surrender the territory so that during a set period, the Welsers would draw as much wealth as
possible.
xliii MEDINA HERNANDEZ, Andrés (1980): “La Educación bilingue y bicultural, un comentario”. En
Indigenismo y lingu.stica. Documentos del foro “La política del lenguaje en México”. UNAM, p. 41
xliv BONFIL BATALLA, Guillermo: Cited work p. 229
xlv BONFIL BATALLA, G. Cited work, p. 230
xlvi LANDER, Edgardo (2000): La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, perspectivas
latinoamericanas. Unesco/FACES UCV. Caracas, p. 19
xlvii SIMON, Fray Pedro (1992): Noticias historiales de Venezuela. III Tomos. Colección Ayacucho. Caracas, p.
409
xlviii Bernal Díaz del Castillo, citado por E. Dussell en: 1492: el encubrimiento del otro. Hacia el origen del mito
de la Modernidad. Biblioteca indígena. Colección Pensamiento crítico. Vice-Presidencia del Estado
Plurinacional de Bolivia. Dirección de Participación ciudadana. La Paz, 2008
xlix LIENHARD, Martin (1989): La Voz y su huella: Escritura y conflicto étnico-social en América Latina
(1492-1988). Casa de las Américas. La Habana, p. 28 (los paréntesis son nuestros)
l CARR, Edward H. (1961): ¿Qué es la Historia? . Conferencias “George Macauly Trevelyan”. Universidad
de Cambridge. Enero-Marzo de 1961. Biblioteca Breve Planeta/Seix Barral. México, p. 30
li LIENHARD, Martin. Obra citada, p. 29
lii “outí”: “he that emerges there”; “he that emerges on the other side”. One that is capable of relating with the "other
wordl", the world of the dead or of the "non-living".
liii SIMON, Fray Pedro: Cited work, p. 423
liv Ibid, p. 423
lv Ibíd, p. 426
lvi Ibíd, p. 426
lvii PORTELLI, Alejandro (1993): “El tiempo de mi vida: las funciones del tiempo en la Historia Oral” . En:
“Historia Oral”. Jorge Aceves Lozano (compilador). Instituto Mora, México. Primera reimpresión 1997,
p.195
lviii ESPINO RELUCÉ, Gonzalo: “La Literatura oral o la literatura de tradición oral” . Editorial Abya Yala.
Serie Plurimenor, p. 41
lix BONFIL BATALLA, G. Cited work, p 234
lx VANSINA, Jan: La tradición oral. Colección Labor. Editorial Labora S.A. Barcelona, España, p. 20-24
lxi CARR, E.H.: Cited work, p. 30
lxii VANSINA, Jan , Cited work, p. 15
lxiii LANDER, Edgardo (2000): Cited work, p. 17
lxiv LANDER, E.: Cited work, p. 18-19
lxv Ibid, p. 30-31
lxvi Ibid. p 31
lxvii CASTRO-GÓMEZ, Santiago (2000): “Ciencias sociales, violencia epistémica y el problema de la
invención del otro”. En: La Colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Unesco/Faces UCV.
Caracas, p.204
lxviii SUBIRATS, Eduardo (1993): El continente vacío . Colección Teoría. Siglo XXI Editores, México.
lxix IANNI, Octavio (1993): “El laberinto latinoamericano”. En: Hacia nuevos modelos de relaciones
interculturales. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (Compilador). Pensar la Cultura. CONACULTA. México, p. 239
lxx LANDER, Edgardo (2000): “Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocentrismo”. En: La colonialidad
del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. UNESCO/FACES. Universidad
Central de Venezuela. Caracas, p. 18-19
lxxi QUIJANO, Anibal (2000): “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”. En: “La
colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Edgardo Lander
(Compilador). UNESCO/FACES. Universidad Central de Venezuela. Caracas, p. 282
lxxii BAGU, Sergio: Economía de la sociedad colonial. Ensayo de historia comparada. Siglo XXI Editores,
México.
lxxiii IANNI, Octavio (1993): Cited work, p. 241
lxxiv WALLERSTEIN, Inmanuel (2001): “Conocer el mundo. Saber el mundo” . El fin de lo aprendido. Una
ciencia social para el siglo XXI. UNAM. Siglo XXI Editores, México, p. 157
lxxv J. Berting, cited by Lander. Cited work, p. 16
lxxvi WALLERSTEIN, Inmanuel. Cited work, p. 160
lxxvii Ibid, p. 161
lxxviii SUBIRATS, Eduardo: Obra citada, p. 27. Los paréntesis son nuestros.
lxxix BUNGE, Mario: Tres políticas de desarrollo científico. Impreso por computación. P 252.
lxxx Ibídem, p. 253.
lxxxi LANDER, Edgardo: Obra citada, p. 31
lxxxii BONFIL BATALLA, Guillermo (1991): Pensar nuestra cultura . Alianza Editorial. Colección Estudios.
4ta. Reimpresión 1997. México, p. 12-13
lxxxiii LENKERSDORF, Carlos (2001): Filosofar en clave Tojolabal. Miguel Angel Porrúa Editor. México, p. 88
lxxxiv LENKERSDORF, Carlos: Obra citada, p. 57
lxxxv ZEMELMAN, Hugo (1989): De la Historia a la política. Universidad de las Naciones Unidas. Siglo XXI
Editores. México.
lxxxvi A. Guerra-Ramos 2002:15-16
lxxxvii Ibid p. 18
lxxxviii A. Escovar (2000:158)
lxxxix A. Guerra-Ramos p. 66
xc L. Oliver, Transformaçoes do Estado e da sociedade civil na América Latina , en: América Latina:
Transformaçoes económicas e políticas, p. 254. (La traducción es nuestra).
xci Bases para la convocatoria a la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente de 1999.
xcii De hecho, la demanda de nulidad de este protocolo firmado entre los gobiernos de Venezuela y los Estados
Unidos, introducida por los abogados Luis Britto García y Fermín Toro Jiménez, fue declarada nula por el
actual (¿Bolivariano?)Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, al igual que otras cuatro demandas introducidas por los
mismos juristas contra acuerdos internacionales violatorios de la soberanía y reconocidos por el gobierno de
Chávez. Todas ellas fueron recogidas en el libro: Las Cadenas jurídicas de la Globalización , Maracaibo,
Congreso Cultural Cabimas 2000
xciii Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Edición de la Secretaría de la Presidencia de la
República. Caracas, 2000
xciv Comisión Jurídico-Política del Partido de la Revolución Venezolana PRV-Tercer Camino. Caracas, 2004
xcv Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela. De las Disposiciones Transitorias.
xcvi Comisión Jurídico-Política del PRV-Tercer camino
xcvii Ibid
xcviii R. Jaulin 1973:
xcix H. Díaz Polanco, 1991: 17
c I. Wallerstein, Después del liberalismo, Siglo XXI, México 1996, p. 84 y ss.
ci G.C. Delgado Ramos, Geopolítica imperial y recursos naturales, Revista Memoria N° 171, mayo 2003,
México, p. 35.
cii Ibid p.35
ciii G.C. Delgado Ramos, IIRSA y la ecología política del agua sudamericana .
civ Ibid
cv Hacia un desarrollo sostenible para Venezuela. Presentación en Powerpoint. http://www.venezuela.gov.ve
cvi Ibid
cvii Para mayor profundización en el concepto de vacío durante la conquista, ver E. Subirats: El continente
va cío, Siglo XXI, México, 2002
cviii Zumaque 1, nombre del primer pozo petrolero en el Lago de Maracaibo, estado Zulia.
cix El registro del desastre ecocida y etnocida del Caño Mánamo fue dramáticamente expuesto en el
documental cinematográfico del mismo nombre, realizado por el cineasta Carlos Azpurua. Cinemateca
Nacional. Caracas, 1975.
cx One of the achievements that the current government shows as part of its economic "efficiency"
is having "Expedited" the procedures for the mining transnationals, so that if in the past they had to
obtain a series of permits to finally access the exploitation concession, at present and product of the
"ingenious" effectiveness of Alí Rodríguez (former guerrilla fighter of the Armed Forces of
National Liberation-PRV-FALN), then Minister of Energy and Mines, the procedures were reduced
to what he called in banking terminology: a "unique ticket office", with the intention of stimulating
investments and the globalized possession of indigenous territories.
cxi An open-pit mine does not consist of anything other than the use of powerful explosives that
when detonated open an immense pit that uncovers the coal mine, but at the same time destroys in a
violent and definitive way, hundreds or thousands of hectares of forest and non-recoverable
vegetation layer, but natural processes in a time not less than 4 centuries. For more about open pit
mines and their harmful effects, see: Roberto Maestas and Bruce Johansen, Wasi'chu: the genocide
of the first Americans, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1982.
cxii By the way, calling it Puerto de Aguas Profundas is an almost cynical euphemism, because this
step is of water so shallow that at times of low tide, it comes to communicate both coasts, so in a
time It was estimated to build an alternative road to the bridge over Lake Maracaibo. The location
of the Port will need to dredge in such a dimension that its effects will be decisive in the
disappearance of species that use the area for reproduction.
cxiii Alarma en Imataca, Documento de la Sociedad de Amigos de la Sierra de Imataca, Caracas, Octubre 2004
cxiv The quotes we show correspond to our transcript of the intervention of Atilio Borón during
theInternational Colloquium “Latin America: history, challenges and challenges”, organized by the
Postgraduate in Studies Latin Americans of the National Autonomous University of Mexico-
UNAM, February 14-17, 2005
cxv Incidentally, Rafael Caldera arrives for the second time at the Miraflores Palace, after breaking
with his own party (Social Christian), launching its candidacy as "independent" and only supported
by what called "El Chiripero", which included all the groups of the institutional left and whose
sector most strong was the Movement to Socialism of Teodoro Petkoff and Pompeyo Marquez,
same forces that later and in their opportunity, they would join the candidacy of Chavez.
cxvi A. Borón, “Filosofía Política marxista”, Ed. Cortez/CLACSO. Sao Paulo-Buenos Aires, marzo 2003 (la
traducción del portugués es nuestra).
cxvii I. Wallerstein, Después del liberalismo, p. 268
cxviii We call "reasonable left" all those (groups, parties and personalities) that declare critics but
always willing to "reason" or "enter or make reason", well, always defined as far from any
radicalization of the expectations and struggles of the dispossessed already that, for them, all
radicalization invokes disarray.
cxix In Venezuela, these are the so-called Communal Councils that the government has imposed on
the indigenous people as interlocutors forcing communities to replace their own forms of
organization and of political representation.
cxx It is fair to say, in honor of the truth, that the architect Fruto Vivas threw down the
aforementioned project after meeting Sabino, then, he raised the possibility that instead of spending
that money on building a House of Culture that, by the way, has never existed as part of the Yukpa
culture, the government will allocate that money to pay the property to the landowners and give
them once and for all their land Already sanitized. However, another architectural project seems to
have replaced the first rejected.
cxxi The negotiated "liberation" of colonies allowed the establishment of new states as an
expression of the opening of new markets from small Caribbean islands like Trinidad-Tobago to
large territories and huge populations like India. Thus, the great territorial dispute that had led to the
powers to two great wars and millions of dead.
cxxii We say this, contrary to the current official discourse (of the State-government), which aims to
assimilate and to endorse the event to Chavez as "revolutionary" and to his movement as a
generator of that rebellion, with more interest in the heroic meaning of a people who threw
themselves to die in the streets of Caracas, than in the dead that occurred; not for nothing, even
though the Inter-American Court of Justice condemned to the Venezuelan State for those deaths, the
Chavez government never complied with the ruling of the Court, which is like saying: "I'm
interested in your dead just to get up on them."
cxxiii This is the verb used in the "revolutionary" government report to refer to what they consider a
"Great" achievement of social justice, however, it is fair to say that the same verb: "benefit" is also
applied to refer to the slaughter of livestock for human consumption.
cxxiv H. Zemelman, Knowledge and social sciences. Some lessons on epistemological problems.
Reflections Collection. University of Mexico City, Mexico, 2003.