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indigenous

The Lady of the Lake Vs the Black Lagoon

From Etiqueta Negra

When an unstoppable mining giant meets an immovable peasant woman: how the Peruvian arm of Denver’s Newmont Mining ground to a halt when it came face to face with Maxima Acuna. From Etiqueta Verde’s Joseph Zarate, an extraordinary profile of a woman and her attachment to her land; a place whose beauty and abundance must be destroyed to dig up a few grains of the yellow metal that lies beneath it:

One morning in January 2015, with the objective of building a foundation for a house, Maxima Acuna Atalaya was chipping rock from a hillside with the hard, sure chops of a lumberjack.

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In Bolivia, Chola Pride as Cultural Ground Shifts

From El Pais Semanal

The caste hierarchy that long dominated Bolivian cultural and political life–Spanish-Europeans at the top, Aymara and Quechua native Americans at the bottom—is eroding, with the election of Aymara coca farmer Evo Morales to the presidency only the most visible symptom. In El Pais Semanal, Liliana Colanzi examines the intricate ethnic and gender politics of a changing Bolivia by way of the colorful skirts worn by native Aymara women:

“My son’s father scorned me. He said I was worthless because I wore pants.”

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The Man Who Chose the Forest, and Died For It

From Etiqueta Negra

One day, Peruvian electrician Edwin Chota abruptly abandoned the life of the city, and the various children he had failed to raise, for the jungle and for an indigenous tribe whom he adopted as his own. For over a decade he lived under death threats for denouncing illegal logging on his lands. His pleas for protection were ignored. In the end, the timber traffickers murdered him.

Those who knew him said that Edwin Chota had a wide, exaggerated and contagious smile, with a prominent gap where a front tooth was missing.

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