We, the 80 million Native peoples of the Americas have, since the European con-quest 500 years ago, never had the right to govern ourselves.  Democracy has not existed, and in most countries Native people are seen as a justifiably exploitable group of inferior second class citizens.  The impunity that Native women face across the region is at the heart of much of today's crisis of mass sexual exploitation & slavery.

In Mayan Guatemala, for example, there had never been even one decade, between 1522 and 1992, without a massacre. 

Over 50,000 mostly Mayan women were murdered (out of a total of 200,000 such victims), and most Mayan girls were raped, by government forces in Guatemala during the 1970's and 1980s 'civil' war, with U.S. military support.

I personally know victims of this genocide, and I worked actively to stop it during the 1970's and 1980's.

The wife of one of the perpetrators (who now traffics in women and underage girls from Guatemala to the U.S.), told me that her husband, a former member of the presidential guard [which doubled as the government death squad], said to her:

(This murder's grand-father, a white land-owner, would go out and 'shoot a few Mayans' in the village at the edge of his ranch lands when-ever he got mad and wanted to let off some steam.  Such is the power of impunity in racist Guatemala.)

Unlike the cases of mass-rape and murder in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, no World Court ever took action in the case of the 1980's genocide in Guatemala, and nobody ever went to jail, as if these Native lives were explicitly less human and thus not deserving of justice.

The current crisis of femicide in Guatemala, which claimed more than 500 female lives in 2005 (which murders are rarely investigated), is a direct outgrowth of the government's past use of femicide and mass-rape as tools of state terrorism aimed at preventing the Mayan majority from exercising their political rights.

Guatemala's population is 60% Mayan.

Bolivian Teens rescued from prostitution.

Bolivia is even more heavily indigenous than Guatemala.  Although Bolivia has avoided genocidal massacres, labor and social protesters, such as those in the Christmas Massacre in 1996, and the Cochabamba Water Revolt in 1998-2003, have routinely been killed in confrontations with authorities. 

Like Guatemala, Bolivia has not allowed the Indigenous majority to rule for over 400 years.

About 85% of Bolivia is of Native ancestry, with 55% being purely Aymara or Quechua, descendents of the empire of the Inca.  Bolivians deserve self determination, and their democratic process has provided that, finally, to them.

President Morales is joined in his unique status by his neighbor, Peru's president, Quechua tribal member Alejandro Toledo, who describes himself as the first Native president in the Americas in last 500 years.

We encourage President Morales to accelerate Bolivia's efforts to expand opportunities for women and girls, and to remove machismo, sexual exploitation and trafficking as dangers to women's lives.  Campesino liberation must mean women & girl's liberation too.

We fully expect that, despite disagreements with President Morales' views, the Western Powers will respect democracy and Native political self determination. 

We will not tolerate violations of our basic human rights of self determination and human dignity!  Five hundred years of disenfranchise-ment, racial genocide and femicide is enough!

- Chuck Goolsby

Dec. 25 - Jan. 1, 2005