Higher Ground

Like the Irish before them, the indigenous Bolivians have found the fight to free themselves from enslavement by a colonial aristocracy does not end with the establishment of a democratic state, nor with international recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Freedom, they have found, is a condition of relationships that must constantly be fought for–in the streets, the media, and the institutions of power. When one stops fighting, one starts losing freedoms gained in earlier battles.

Now that the aristocracies of the world have banded together to impose their will on the rest of us through the UN World Bank, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund, the autonomies gained by indigenous peoples like the Aymara and the Irish serve as a beach head in the global war of liberation. Those who fight for democracy, human rights, or environmental sanity in other venues, must now seek the higher ground of solidarity, or perish under the globalization tsunami.

Those who choose to remain slaves can suffer the consequences.