500 Years of Indigenous Resistance, 2nd Edition

GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistance

between Ecuador and Peru in 1941... In Brazil...87 Indian groups

were wiped out in the first half of the 20th century from contact

with expanding colonial frontiers—especially rubber and mining

in the northwest, cattle in the northeast, agriculture in the south

and east, and from road building throughout all regions.^42

While policies of forced assimilation were occasionally articulated, mil-
itary and paramilitary forces were to remain an essential part of con-
trolling Native communities and opening up territories to exploitation.
The most violent manifestation of this repression came in El Salvador
in 1932, where as many as 30,000 people, primarily Indian peasants,
were massacred following an uprising against the military dictatorship
that took power the year prior. While the massacres were carried out
under the guise of “anti-communism”, U.S. and Canadian naval ves-
sels stood offshore, and U.S. Marines in Nicaragua were put on alert.
However, as the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations later testified before
Congress, “it was found unnecessary for the U.S. ...and British forces
to land, as the Salvadorian government had the situation in hand.”^43
During the same period in Colombia, the Indian leader Quintin Lame
helped initiate struggles for land and developed an Indigenous philoso-
phy of resistance; in the early 1980s, his legacy would live on in the In-
dian guerrilla group “Commando Quintin Lame”. Gonzalo Sanchez was
another leader who helped organize the Supreme Council of Indians in
Natagaima, Colombia, in 1920.
After World War II, significant changes in the world capitalist econ-
omy would see increased penetration of the Amazon and other low-
land forest regions in South America. In the post-War period, the U.S.
emerged in a dominant position in the world economy and would sub-
sequently move to open up markets for economic expansion. In Western
Europe and Japan, as part of the Marshall Plan, some $30 billion in loans
and aid was pumped into the economies to rebuild these countries as
U.S. markets and, not insignificantly, as a base of containment against the
USSR (military alliances were also created through NATO and SEATO,
positioned against the East Bloc).

42. Andrew Gray, op. cit., pg. 8.


43. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: The U.S. and Latin America,
    Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1987, pg. 44.