Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nevers”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Summary of Discussion Discussant: Mac Chapin Although we all saw a good deal about Central Amer- ica on television and in the newspapers during the 1980s, interest in the region has been eclipsed in recent years by events in Eastem Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and so forth. Central America is a rela- tively tiny area; it has less than 5 percent of the land surface of the United States and about one-tenth of its population. One of the big differences between this part of the world and the other regions that we have been discussing is that we are not going to find sepa- ratist indigenous groups in Latin America. Certainly, in Central America, there are no Indian groups that are going to attack the central govemments. I want to talk about the indigenous people who are, aside from a few isolated groups in Central America, virtually invisible. The region’s indigenous peoples are located primarily in two regions, the Guatemalan highlands and the coastal regions adjacent the Carib- bean Sea. Both locations are classic areas of refuge. Mayan Indians speaking 22 different languages inhabit the densely populated Guatemalan highlands. Numbering approximately 4.5 million people, they compose half the country’s population and half "the indigenous population of Central America. Virtually all the other Indians of the region are found stretched along the Caribbean coast between the southern por- tion of Toledo district in Belize and Panama. At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, most of the 6 million Indians then living in Central America were located in population centers along the Pacific side of the region where there were much better soils, a more hospitable climate, and less rainfall. After the Span- iards arrived, approximately 80 percent of the popula- tion was killed off largely through diseases; demographically, the Indians are just now starting to recover. Many of the region’s Indian populations, who were not either assimilated or exterminated, moved to areas where the Spanish had no interest. Some groups moved to the highlands of Guatemala-—where they did not even send priests for several centuries--and others migrated toward the Atlantic coast jungles. The region has three countries of some importance from an ethnic standpoint: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The largest concentrations of Indians in Latin America are found in the Guatemalan high- lands. The hatred between the country’s Latinos and Mayan Indians is palpable. This intense ethnic hatred, which has grown over time, was most recently mani- fested in the extremely bloody civil war that reached intensity in the mid-1970s and that lasted until about 1983. During that period 100,000 Indians were killed. Scorched earth policies were practiced by a number of Guatemalan leaders. It was a war of extermination. The Guatemalan Govemment used the military against the ethnic population. The situation in El Salvador is similar to that in Guate- mala. El Salvador currently has an Indian population of about 500,000. Over the centuries, there have been a series of attempts to eliminate the Indian popula- tions. In the 1880s the last communal territories were abolished by decree and the Indians were displaced. The last ethnic war in El Salvador was in 1932 when, within the space of about a week, the military marched out and killed about 35,000 Indians. It con- sciously searched out people who were dressed like Indians, who looked like Indians, and who spoke an Indian language. There have been no ethnic conflicts in El Salvador since that time. The conflict has really shifted; the rural poor have become the surrogates for the ethnic population. An extension of the same battle, it is essentially over land and resources. During the 1980s the target was principally peasants—in contrast to the Indians, who were organized. During the Nicaraguan civil war, the Mosquito Indi- ans who inhabit the Atlantic coast region with its for- estry and offshore marine resources were forcibly relocated. Since the end of the war they have returned to their homes but have been in the middle of attempts by multinationals to cut down the coastal forests. ________———-——Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.