Commonwealth and Foreign
SOUTH AMERICA'S INDIANS
By SYBIL VINCENT
" WHAT are you going to do about your Indian problem?" Interview a South American statesman and this is the one question he hopes you will not ask. In Buenos Aires or Rio you may forget it. Mixed with the millions of emigrants from every part of Europe who have settled in the Argentine and Brazil the Indians are not so very noticeable. But anywhere on the West Coast the Indian problem is the first thing you think about. In Peru, Ecuador, Chile or the republics of the interior for some- thing like four hundred years a handful of whites have completely dominated the huge masses of Indians among whom they dwell, by a mixture of cruelty and semi-starvation. Now Mexico and Spain have shown more intelligent South Americans that the ruling classes are not always omniscient even in a Spanish-speaking country.
" We must become more modern and democratic "—an Ecuadorian minister was speaking—" but how on earth are we to go about it ? Ninety per cent. of our population is Indian. Practically all of them are illiterate. Even if it were possible to reach them by word of mouth, there would be no way of getting ideas over to them. They are so completely apart from us."
That briefly is the problem South Americans are just beginning to wake up to and it is giving them sleepless nights. The minister might also have mentioned that as well as the lack of any real contact between the Indians and the white ruling classes the hacendados, the big landowners, are so powerful that it is impossible to enforce laws passed to improve conditions. Officially freemen, the Indians who work on their estates are, in reality, complete serfs. They are never paid a straight living wage. Instead, in return for a miserable adobe hut, enough land to graze a few goats or, a lank-sided cow or two and possibly grow a few square yards of maize, not only the man of the family, but his wife and children down to three-year-olds, must work as often as required on the hacendado's estate. On these working days, the family for its united effort receives a wage varying from twopence to fourpence or even, in certain more developed districts, sixpence a day.
If the hacendado does not think that they are earning their magnificent wages, they are beaten. Officially they are free to seek other employment, but they buy their stores through the hacendado, or in some way get into debt and can never hope to leave. They are so much a fixture that, when an estate is sold, so much is added for each human head on the place in the manner of cattle or sheep. Hacen- dados claim that under a freer system the Indians would only work long enough each week to keep body and soul together and then refuse to do another stroke. Certainly centuries of ill-treatment and semi-starvation have broken many of them morally and physically. Still in the isolated mountain villages on the little-used Andean route from Colombia where the Indians often own their land they wen: a very different hard-working type. Then also a German farmer who pays a straight living wage, letting the peons live in their own villages, is finding it a great success in the centre of the serf system near Rio Bamba.
Ecuador is a comparatively small, poor, backward country. In prosperous Peru, or up-to-date Chile, wages and con- ditions are rather better but the system is much the same. Chile, for instance, has a fine set of labour laws on paper. Foreign firms have to observe them, but there are usually ways for a Chilian employer to escape. The Araucanians, the tall warlike Chilian Indians who were never really conquered by the Spaniards, are a far more virile type than the small, squat, easily dominated Incas further north. But in the working-class goarters of Valparaiso or Santiago you see as much misery as anywhere else on the West Coast.
Statesmen can't or won't fight vested interests but they are definitely getting scared about the future. Senor Paez, dictator of Ecuador, sees Communist agitators in every wood-pile. Just before I got to Quito there had been a mild one-day revolution. The Calderon regiment had mutinied, the typical sort of thing which occurs when the army puts in a dictator and some of them regret their choice. But the Communists were blamed and punished. Still Senor Paez is liberal for a South American dictator. He recently announced that in order to benefit the Indians he was going to enforce the law that prevented them from voting. This is far from the nonsense it sounds. Voters must be literate. In Ecuador, like other republics, this officially practically disenfranchises the Indians. If a big hacendado wants extra votes for a special candidate he can always get round the regulation. Too uneducated to know what they are doing, or easily bribed, the Indians give him perhaps three hundred votes instead of one.
General Benavides, president in name, but complete dictator in fact of Peru, is far more drastic in his attempts to stamp out Communism. He has more reason to feel nervous. The Aprista, the Peruvian Popular Front, have as one of their principal aims the development of an Indian nationalism. They are extremely well organised and powerful and would have won the last election, if General Benavides had not stopped it as soon as he saw they were winning. That was two years ago ; he has not allowed another election since. His predecessor carried on a nice little three days' war with bombs and aeroplanes in which three thousand people were killed when the Apristas got control of Trujillo. In Chile last March I saw the Popular Front kept from power solely by bribery—a fortnight's wages for every vote for the Right.
The stage seems all set for the West Coast of South America as the next storm centre of the world. If you think the segregation of the negro in the States is breeding trouble or the same thing in the past is responsible for the situation in India, then something is bound to happen. Unless you have been to South America, you don't know what real segregation means. But how far have the Apristas or the. Chilian Popular Front been really able to organise the Indians ? How much do they resent their conditions? After some time in Indian villages and small towns in different parts of the Andes I have no more idea than the day I arrived. You have not the faintest glimpse of what is going on behind those expressionless faces as they very politely answer a question, or go quietly about their work. You note that they never make the least attempt to copy European dress or customs. The men still wear the tradi- tional pigtail. They jog-trot for miles up hill with un- believable weights on their backs—a wardrobe or a trunk for instance—while their arms are so weak that you must help them lift a medium-sized suitcase. But except for superficial things of this sort you might be flying over the Andes for all you understand about them.
There is something beyond oriental inscrutability about their impassive faces. When I met a Japanese in an Indian village he seemed like a temperamental Neapolitan among a gathering of dour Scottish elders. They are very far from primitive savages, yet one day when we descended to a valley hot enough for a little colony of negroes who had returned to something approaching an African jungle life, those coal-black half savages, descendants of slaves, seemed like long lost brothers to whom one could really talk. Above all they laughed. You never hear an Indian laugh any more than you hear their children crv.
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