At the beginning of 1995, they were talking in the congress about the statute of territorial classification. There was a proposal of transforming the reserves into ETIs (indigenous territorial entities by its initials in Spanish), much more autonomous. If the entity has the size of a municipality, the municipality would enter to be part of the entity; if it has the size of a department, then the indigenous county was created. This latter could be created by ETIs in different departments but they should have a common departmental frontier.
The time passed and the proposal disappeared from newspapers, amid the tide of the 8000, of Samper, Botero and all their tricks(e36). The last thing that I heard was on the indigenous groups complained about not being well represented in congress, where Fals Borda was their spokesman. The discrimination is always there and it is usually very subtle, mainly in the labyrinths of power. They are still treated like smaller than age; represented by a well-known type, as if the indigenous groups could not represent their selves alone.
That in congress, where everybody look at them. In distant territories worse things happen, and in a lot. A case among a million: In a corregimiento of Isana River, to the only mestizo in the whole territory was named as corregidor. The population's other 99%, indigenous all of them, they wasn't found them very worthy of that position. Suddenly it can be thinked that it happened like in Bogotá, where people chose the only Lithuanian that they knew, tired of traps and robberies from their locals. But the corregidors are not usually named by popular consent, they are pointed out by finger like an inspector or a judge. People didn't make the most minimum claim. Some officials reminded to the legal representatives that worths more than a claim. They only listened in silence.
It is common in the regions that it doesn't feel the most minimum advance in comparison with previous decades. One state official, who worked in the election days, she told me that she hated just to remember it. "Here they catch people by the arm and they point them with the finger for whom they have to vote". A very serious but quite believable accusation. There is not a reliable statistical data, not even on population and its growth, because those in charge of the last census didn't arrive until several communities. The students were called to take charge, but when there are political and economic interests mediating, things are not easy. From this arises the stunting cypher of 98.8% of indigenous population. As if the colonists didn't exist, they had not almost taken all the Guaviare riversides and the Inírida surroundings, and as if the same Inírida was all native!
The representatives to the chamber are happy with the electoral data that put them in their positions. A real election, made in conscience, would probably put in their place an evangelical leader, perhaps indigenous, but I guess that not. The ethnic shame attacking the same ones from Bogotá, it is a political endemia in Guainía.
The two indigenous deputies chosen in the previous period, they were bought very easily. The governor invited them to a dinner in his house and they changed opinion; then another political leader made the same thing and they changed opinion again. "They didn't want but the silver" a lady tucano from Zona Indígena neighborhood told me. It was as if they were not there and even worse. One of the oldest deputies told me that they were present in the assemblies, they sat down and they kept silent. They were not felt amid the votings. They were pieces, not representatives. In the Inírida council there are two of them and it seems that they chose them exactly for not being quiet. Both are members of CRIGUA (Guainía Native Regional Council) and they have attended indigenous leaders' from the whole country meetings in Vaupés. Luis Troya, an anthropologist that works with them, told me that it scared him how they returned of those meetings, hostile with colonists. An opinion from my exaggerated point of view, but at least a symptom that this time they won't sit down to approve everything.
NOTE
| e36 | Please see note e19. Ý |