Sabino Romero: an Indigenous Leader Who Kept His Eyes on the Prize
March 04, 2015
The Film "Sabino Vive"
Sabino Romero: an Indigenous Leader Who Kept His Eyes on the Prize
by CHRIS GILBERT
Caracas.
The Yukpa chief Sabino Romero should be remembered as having staged a 21st century Indian uprising. Having been chased from their ancestral lands in western Venezuela during the last century, the Yukpas under his leadership managed to recuperate a great part of that territory, taking it back from powerful ranchers. Sabino did this with a scrappy group of followers and (to the lasting shame of many of us) with little outside support, including scant support from the revolutionary government that he consistently identified with.
Eventually this led to the inevitable happening: the chief’s being gunned down by a hit-man in the service of local ranchers. In spite of the complicity of the region’s police forces, the ranchers took a long time to achieve their goal: in 2006 they sponsored several assassination attempts, all of them unsuccessful; in 2008 they arrived at his family house but only succeeded in beating up his 97-year-old father, who died two weeks later; in 2012 three of his fellow Yukpa leaders were killed by the ranchers’ men; on March 3 of 2013 two days before Chávez’s death – a news piece that tended to cover up the story – they fatally shot him.
Much of this is documented in a very good, if low-budget film that Carlos Azpúrua has recently completed. The film is critical in an intelligent way. That is, it shows rather than says what happened, letting people, including the ranchers, speak for themselves. This hands-off approach makes Sabino Vive: las últimas fronteras all the more forceful, since the facts are all there and the conclusions unavoidable, including that the central government has some share of the blame in his death, if only for inaction.
Many people, even those whose perspective is not slanted by interest in the Yukpa’s lands – which are of great strategic and economic value – have a difficult time seeing this issue clearly. Some blame the Yukpa for the attitudes assumed by a few anarchist hotheads who support them. But are they really responsible for all of their supporters? Some say that the Yukpa are inveterate cattle rustlers. But do these indigenous people not have a right (like the wood-gatherers that the young Marx defended on the basis of their “customary rights”) to cull from lands that were originally theirs?
Yukpa chief Sabino Romero.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/04/sabino-romero-an-indigenous-leader-who-kept-his-eyes-on-the-prize/
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