Native Americans

The Native American population of Latin America is estimated at 26.3 million, of whom 24 million live in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Generally classified as campesinos (peasants) by the governments of the countries in which they live, the vast majority live in extreme poverty in remote rural areas where they eke out a living from the land. Native American campesinos make up 60 per cent of the total population of Bolivia and Guatemala. In all of Latin America, only Uruguay has no remaining indigenous population. In addition, the majority of Latin Americans are mestizos of mixed Native American and European descent: Native Americans and mestizos together make up an estimated 85 per cent of the populations of Mexico, Bolivia, Panama, and Peru, 90 per cent of that of Ecuador, and an even greater percentage in Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, and Paraguay. Only Argentina is notably European in racial constitution. Modern Latin America is therefore considerably indebted to its Native American heritage, and the history of most Latin American states is essentially the recent history of Latin Native Americans.

Only 1.5 per cent of the total Native American population of Latin America is designated as tribal, unsurprisingly as most important pre-Columbian Latin American cultures were constituted as states or other units larger than tribes. These exist mainly in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Many of the tribal groups live in the remote jungle environment of the Amazon Basin, where they subsist by hunting, fishing, and gathering manioc and other roots. Current Brazilian expansion into the Amazon, however, threatens the physical and cultural survival of the indigenous Amazon peoples, as diseases brought by outsiders decimate the indigenous populations, and mineral exploration and road construction destroy tribal territories.

The largest unacculturated Brazilian group today is the Yanomamo, numbering over 16,000 people, for whom the government plans to create a park for their protection. Anthropologists estimate, however, that the Yanomamo would need at least 6.4 million hectares (16 million acres) in order to continue their traditional lifestyle.

The total indigenous population of Latin America includes slightly more than 400 different Native American groups, with their own languages or dialects. Like the Native Americans of North America, they live in vast extremes of climate and conditions, ranging from the Amazon jungle to the heights of the Andes, where one group, on Lake Titicaca, subsists on artificial islands of floating reeds.

Native American and mestizo populations, frequently poor and often barred from the highest echelons of Latin American government and society, have sometimes fostered political radicalism. Liberation theology, which grew up in Latin America, attempted a compromise between the Roman Catholicism prevalent in these communities and the revolutionary Communism that offered the chief promise of bettering their social and economic situation. Peru's notorious terrorist movement, the Shining Path, was able to propagate itself partly by combining its interpretation of Maoism with the traditional beliefs of the mestizo and Native American peasantry. Governments have consequently persecuted these populations which are seen as centres of subversion. However, in June 2001 Alejandro Toledo made history when he won Peru’s presidential election, the first Peruvian of Native American descent to do so.