To understand the land issue, therefore, it is necessary to look at it from the perspective of indigenous peoples, who increasingly project themselves on the international stage as nations or nationalities, claiming for their peoples the right to self-determination and autonomy under international law. Past notions of indigenous communities as tools of elite manipulation, objects of state policy, or barriers to national integration and economic development are challenged today by the evident autonomy and sophistication of Indian movements. An understanding of Indian aspirations, values, and traditions is necessary to understanding how ethnicity and political change could interact in the next decade and the extent to which interethnic conflict might be manifested in violent confrontation. It is also important to distinguish among the various political tendencies within Indian movements. It is equally important to understand how differences in ideology have divided Indian communities in most countries of the hemisphere.
Indigenous peoples remain exceedingly diverse.
Additional problems, however, have developed in the last decades as a result of security policies that do not fully address the complex relations at the local level between indigenous peoples, the military, guerrillas, drug traffickers, and economic elites. They are also more likely to resolve the problems at hand. For instance, the Peruvian military did not begin to make headway against the Shining Path until it realized that Peruvian campesinos were just as eager to root out the guerrillas. Second, as the studies of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil demonstrate, the rise in Indian political mobilization in the 1970s can be traced to increasing pressure on Indian lands during that period. In Colombia and Brazil, this rise can be traced to efforts to eliminate legal regimes protecting communal land and other special ethnic rights.