Interview With Nilo Cayuquo

Abstract

Nilo Cayuqueo, a Mapuche Indian from Argentina, is a coordinator of the Consejo Indio de Sud América (CISA), a communications center headquartered in Lima, Peru, representing native peoples from ten South American countries. He has been an active participant in international treaty conferences, including a U.N. nongovernmental organization conference held in Geneva during the autumn of 1981.

The collective of coordinating editors of Latin American Perspectives spent part of an afternoon this past spring talking with Cayuqueo. As in the following interview, discussion ranged from specific indigenous struggles to the general strategies of indigenismo and especially the relation of Marxism and class struggle to the indigenista movement.

The following interview was made by Zoltán Grossman, a Wisconsin environmental activist, who was an international organizer for the 1980 Black Hills Survival Gathering. The interview was conducted June 10, 1981, at the Seventh International Indian Treaty Conference at White Earth, Minnesota. Translating at the interview was Jo Tucker of the Guatemala News and Information Bureau in Berkeley, California.