EL ALTO, Bolivia — Above the rocky bowl of La Paz, this vast township of brick and adobe homes stretches across a dry plain. This is where the Aymara Indians of western Bolivia come to live and work when their farms can no longer feed them.
For the past week, the hardscrabble order of El Alto gave way to a fervor of rebellion. Armed with the traditional weapons of the Aymara people -- sticks, slingshots and muscle -- its residents fought the army, built barricades and derailed a train, cutting off and shutting down the capital below them.
"We are not going to allow ourselves to be pushed around anymore," said Bernaldo Castillo Mollo, a 37-year-old Aymara bricklayer and jack-of-all-trades who was shot in the foot during the protests. "So that our children have a better life than us, we are willing to die."
The Indian-led movement that brought down Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada last week was only the most recent and startling expression of a growing militancy and political assertiveness among the native peoples of the Americas.
In Ecuador and in Guatemala, indigenous leaders arguably wield more influence in local and national affairs than in any time since the Spanish conquest. And in Chile and Mexico, resistance to the changes brought by the global economy are helping to feed a renaissance of indigenous organizations.
"Everyone thought that globalization would wipe out local identities and cultures," said Alejandro Herrera, a professor at the University of the Frontier in Temuco, in south-central Chile.
"Instead, the opposite has happened. People are embracing their indigenous identities against these outside threats."
In recent years, the Mapuche villages around Temuco have been the site of a smoldering, low-tech war against corporate tree farming that has landed a handful of Mapuche Indian leaders in prison on charges of burning logging trucks.
Similarly, Bolivia's plan to export the country's natural gas reserves through a pipeline to be built by a multinational consortium helped coalesce Indian resentment against a government dominated by politicians of European descent.
Castillo Mollo, the wounded bricklayer, has only a fifth-grade education. Until he moved to El Alto in 1986, he worked the land, growing potatoes and other crops. But like many other residents of El Alto, he is well-steeped in the anti-globalization rhetoric that has swept through Latin America.
