Venezuelan Warao communities framed a cholera epidemic as genocide to challenge stigmatization

Evidence

In other cases, however, populations constructed as racial, national, or sexual minorities themselves expand the notion of genocide in order to embrace the forms of oppression they face, Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs (1997) document a cholera epidemic that killed some 500 people in a rain forest region in eastern Venezuela. Public health officials classified most of the people who were infected by and died from cholera as “Warao,” that is, members of an etnia, an “indigenous ethnic group.” In combating the threat to the legitimacy of public health institutions posed by alarmingly high rates of mortality, officials often characterized “indigenous culture” as the key “risk factor” in shaping patterns of morbidity and mortality. Many members of communities in which cases were concentrated cited national and transnational patterns of land expropriation and environmental degradation in charging that the epidemic constituted an act of genocide. This rhetoric provided them with a means of challenging stigmatizing images, regaining a sense of agency, and calling attention to the conditions in which they were living (in which infant mortality stands at 36 percent in some areas). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 277

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece’s theme of public-health officials using cultural labels to manage legitimacy and blame shifting — here ‘indigenous culture’ is framed as a risk factor.
• SEED: An essay angle: how subaltern groups strategically adopt accusatory categories (genocide) not as legal claims but as rhetoric reclaiming agency against official stigmatizing narratives.
• XREF: connects to: Indigenous and Chicana women frame toxic contamination as systematic genocide — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 233