Indigenous peoples have no future under the neoliberal system, because it doesn't respect their traditional self-government (usos y costumbres) and seeks to eliminate their ethnic identity, said the Bishop Emeritus of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, who brokered the dialogue with the Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. He said that the salvation of the West is in the indigenous world, which poses a communitarian alternative to the individualist ethic which threatens contemporary societies. Ruiz was speaking at a conference at the Universidad Iberoamericana's Puebla campus. (La Jornada, March 14)

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