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Among the key influences shaping the quality of democracy in Latin America today are the recent political mobilization and formal incorporation of indigenous peoples. In countries where such peoples make up a large share or even a majority of the populace, their legal and political incorporation into the state signifies a major power shift and the weakening of institutions that had been built to exclude them. Where indigenous peoples constitute a smaller share of the electorate, their recent inclusion denotes a more generalized opening of the political system to excluded and vulnerable sectors of society.
The political incorporation of indigenous movements and parties helps in diverse ways to improve democratic quality. Yet this incorporation also challenges fragile and stressed liberaldemocratic regimes and generates social and institutional conflicts whose full implications remain uncertain. Anthropological and journalistic accounts of indigenous peoples' rising political power often present rosy visions of a multicultural utopia, whereas conservatives (of the global North and South) often sketch a dire scenario of racial confrontation, political apartheid, and state dismemberment. The actual and potential impact of this phenomenon most likely lies somewhere between these two accounts.
Indigenous peoples today form about 11 percent of Latin America's total population of 540 million.1 High concentrations of indigenous cultures are located in the centers of the great preColumbian civilizations the Aztec and Mayan empires in southern Mexico and Central America, and the Incan empire, which extended at its height from what is today northern Colombia south into Chile along the Andes Mountains. Although precise figures can be difficult to determine with certainty,2 it is generally agreed that indigenous peoples form statistical majorities in Bolivia and Guatemala, and amount to significant minorities in Peru, Ecuador, Belize, Honduras, and Mexico (see Table).
The majority of indigenous peoples today are bilingual, speaking at least one indigenous language as well as Spanish or another European language. For example, Mexico's 2000 census defines indigenous individuals as those speaking an indigenous language, but 60 percent of these individuals also speak Spanish.3 Rates of Europeanlanguage acquisition are higher among men, who tend to have more years of schooling than women and are likely to have more interaction with the nonindigenous through military service and employment. The rise of indigenous social movements in the last...