Quechua in Peru. Maria Grazia Montagnari/Flickr. Creative Commons.
European colonial projects depended on the racialisation of native populations to maintain their economies of plunder. The belief that indigenous peoples were inherently unable to enjoy the same rights as colonists undergirded colonial civil society and legitimised, in contemporary eyes, brutal exploitation and even genocide. Europeans from Juan de Matienzo in the sixteenth century to Mario Vargas Llosa more recently have furthermore argued that these costs were worth paying, as European colonialism brought with it enlightened civilisation. The ends, they have said, justified the means.
Troubling echoes of this mentality are still apparent today, namely in the Peruvian government’s approach to indigenous land rights. The current neoliberal project centres on the concept of market rule: governments must alter all goods and services so they can be traded in the global marketplace. In highland Peru, new laws enabled the marketisation of indigenous lands, explicitly promoting dispossession as the most efficient outcome and therein improving the wellbeing of all. “This model of smallholders without technology is a vicious circle of extreme poverty”, explained Peru’s president Alan García in 2007. “We must encourage medium-sized property, the middle class of farmers who know how to obtain resources, seek out markets and create formal jobs”.
