MEXICO CITY – Latin America’s estimated 60 million indigenous peoples are on the move, from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego – but in dramatically distinct directions.
While Mexico’s profoundly Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation launches a vehement anti-electoral campaign, disusing the political class, eschewing power, and seeking to build autonomous alliances down below, Eva Morales, a 46-year-old acculturated Quechua Indian farm leader, will take power from the top when he is sworn in as the first Indian president of majority-Indian Bolivia.
Morales, recently snapped wearing his ratty old alpaca sweater during an audience with the king of Spain (to the enormous disdain of fashion-conscious diplomats everywhere), has also been photographed whispering in Fidel Castro’s ear, conducting an entourage of women leaders of his cocalero (coca-growers) federation wearing polleras (Indian skirts) through the streets of old Havana, and nuzzling Venezuela’s Hugo Ch?