Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, dated October 1995, contains the proceedings of a conference on ethnic conflict held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored it. Academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials presented papers on ethnic and territorial conflict in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. They also discussed what these conflicts mean for US policy. The document contains no UFO material.
“Cairo”1 page
C00123268 Summary of Discussion did not even send priests for several centuries-and others migrated tovard the Atlantic coast jungles. Discussant: Mac Chapin The region has three countries of some importance from an ethnic standpoint: Guatemala, El Salvador, Although we all saw a good deal about Central Amer- and Nicaragua. The largest concentrations of Indians ica on television and in the newspapers during the in Latin America are found in the G3uatemnalan high- 1980s, interest in the region has been eclipsed in lands. The hatred between the country's Latinos and recent years by events in Eastern Europe, Russia, the Mayan Indians is palpable. This intense ethnic hatred, Middle East, and so forth. Central America is a rela- which has grown over time, was most recently mani- tively tiny area; it has less than 5 percent of the land fested in the extremely bloody civil war that reached surface of the United States and about one-tenth of its intensity in the mid-1970s and that lasted until about population. One of the big differences between this 1983. DIring that period 100,000 Indians were killed. part of the world and the other regions that we have Scorched earth policies were practiced by a number of been discussing is that we are not going to find sepa- Guatemalan leaders. It was a war of extermination. ratist indigenous groups in Latin America. Certainly, The Guatemalan Government used the military in Central America, there are no Indian groups that are against the ethnic population. going to attack the central governments. . The situation in El Salvador is similar to that in Guate- 1 want to talk about the indigenous people who are, mala. El Salvador currently has an Indian population aside from a few isolated groups in Central America, of about 500,000. Over the centuries, there have been virtually invisible. The region's indigenous peoples a series of attempts to eliminate the Indian popula- are located primarily in two regions, the Guatemalan tions. In the 1880s the last communal territories were highlands and the coastal regions adjacent the Carib- abolished by decree and the Indians were displaced. bean Sea. Both locations are classic areas of refuge. The last ethnic war in El Salvador was in 1932 when, Mayan Indians speaking 22 different languages within the space of about a week, the military inhabit the densely populated Guatemalan highlands. marched out and killed about 35,000 It con- Numbering approximately 4.5 million people, they sciously searched out people who were dressed like compose half the country's population and half the Indians, who looked like Indians, and who spoke an indigenous population of Central America. Virtually Indian language. There have been no ethnic conflicts all the other Indians of the region are found stretched in El Salvador since that time. The conflict has really along the Caribbean coast between the southern por- shifted; the rural poor have become the surrogates for f Toledo district in Belize and P-anama. the ethnic population. An extension of the same battle, tion of it is essentially over land and resources. During the At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, most of the 1980s the target was principally peasants-in contrast 6 million Indians then living in Central America were to the Indians, who were organized. located in population centers along the Pacific side of the region where there were much better soils, a more During the Nicaraguan civil war, the Mosquito Indi- hospitable climate, and less rainfall. After the Span- ans who inhabit the Atlantic coast region with its for- iards arrived, approximately 80 percent of the popula- estry and offshore marine resources were forcibly tion was killed off largely through diseases; relocated. Since the end of the war they have returned demographically, the Indians are just now starting to to their homes but have beenin the middle of attempts recover. by multinationals to cut down the coastal forests.. 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 96
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.