Peru’s Indians are repressed with more efficiency than blacks ever were in South Africa

In The Spectator of 21 March a column by Toby Young caught my eye. Discussing the pros and cons of selective schools, Toby found it hard to reach an emphatic conclusion; and for what it’s worth I find it hard too — but, then again, what do I know? It was his international comparisons that engaged me. It was not the point he was trying to make, but Toby quoted a statistic which speaks volumes about the continuing oppression of the indigenous peoples of South America.

In educational attainment tests, Peru has the world’s worst ‘variance’ explicable by the children’s backgrounds, or so the OECD have found. ‘Variance’ means departure from the average. Translated into layman’s language, the finding therefore means that if you examine the educational attainment of Peruvian schoolchildren, you’ll find their success or failure more reliably linked to their background than anywhere else in the world.

Behind those faceless numbers a human face does hover, and a ghostly one. It’s the immediately recognisable physiognomy, the rich brown skin, the prominent cheekbones, the impenetrable dark eyes and the magnificent long nose with the giveaway bump near the top, of the South American Indian.

I’m uncomfortable with that word ‘Indian’ and I suppose we could say ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ South Americans but that would enrage more people. Never say ‘Indios’ in South American Spanish, though: it’s considered insulting. ‘Do you take me for an Indian?’ means ‘Do you take me for a fool?’ Across the continent, if you want to be polite, you say ‘campesinos’ which means ‘peasants’ and is considered less insulting. Apart from Paraguay it is in the Andean countries — Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador — that the concentration of indigenous peoples is highest: in Peru just below 40 per cent (but more again are mestizos), in Bolivia some 60 per cent.