SOUTH AMERICA'S INDIANS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have read with some surprise Sybil Vincent's article " South America's Indians," which appeared on page 843 of your issue of November 12th, 1937. To couple Chile's name with the Indian problem of Ecuador and Peru denotes a complete ignorance of Chile in general and of Chilean Indians in particular. Indians in Chile are not complete serfs, they are not beaten, they are not a fixture on any estate and they do not jog-trot for miles up hill with unbelievable weights on their backs. If these are the conditions prevailing in other South American States, one can only deplore them, but to mislead the readers of The Spectator into the belief that they also prevail in Chile, where only 8o,0oo Indians exist out of a total population of 4,800,000, seems to indicate that Sybil Vincent's sojourn in Chile could have been more profitable.
It is a compressed inaccuracy to state that Chile has a fine set of labour laws on paper ; that only foreign firms have to observe them ; and that there are usually ways for a Chilean employer to escape. While I daresay there may be ways and means to get round a law, open alike to foreign and local firms, an exception of the latter does not necessarily imply that all local employers are shaped from the same mould.
Sybil Vincent's reference to the Popular Front shows but a limited knowledge of Chilean politics, unfathomable as they may appear to an outsider.
Sybil Vincent failed to mention why the Peruvian Govern- ment carried on a three days' war with bombs and aeroplanes in Trujillo. Women and children were cruelly and atrociously massacred by a group of communists, only parallel to the massacres by the sepoys during the Indian Mutiny in Meerut, Delhi, Cawnpore and Lucknow. Or does Sybil Vincent con- demn men like Campbell, Nicholson, Outram, Havelock, &c., for giving no quarter during the Indian- Mutiny ?—I am,
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