All over Latin America, and especially in the Andes, a political awakening is emboldening Indians who have lived mostly as second-class citizens since the Spanish conquest.

Much of it is the result of better education and communication, especially as the Internet allows native leaders in far-flung villages to share ideas and strategies across international boundaries.

But much is born of necessity: Latin American nations are embarking on an unprecedented resource hunt, moving in on land that Indians consider their own - and whose pristineness is key to their survival.

"The Indian movement has arisen because the government doesn't respect our territories, our resources, our Amazon," says Romulo Acachu, president of the Shuar people, flanked by warriors carrying wooden spears and with black war paint smeared on their faces.

In September, the Shuar put up barbed-wire roadblocks on highway bridges in Ecuador's southeastern jungles to protest legislation that would allow mines on Indian lands without their prior consent, and put water under state control. On Sept. 30, an Indian schoolteacher was killed in a battle with riot police.

"If there are 1,000 dead, they will be good deaths," says another Shuar leader, Rafael Pandam.

The Shuar won, at least this round.

A week after the killing, President Rafael Correa received about 100 Indian leaders at the presidential palace and agreed to reconsider the laws. Correa had earlier called the Indians "infantile" for their insistence on being consulted over mining concessions. But he did not need to be reminded that natives - a third of the population - helped topple Ecuadorean governments in 2000 and 2005.

Indians make up one in 10 of Latin America's half-billion inhabitants. In some parts of the Andes and Guatemala, they are far more numerous.

Yet they remain much poorer and less educated than the general population. About 80 percent live on less than $2 a day - a poverty rate double that of the general population, according to the World Bank - while some 40 percent lack access to health care.

The threats to Indian land have grown in recent years. With shrinking global oil reserves and growing demands for minerals and timber, oil and mining concerns are joining loggers in encroaching on traditional Indian lands.

"Indians have been progressively losing control and ownership of natural resources on their lands," says Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a prominent Mexican sociologist who spent most of the last decade as the United Nations' chief advocate for Indians. "The situation isn't very encouraging."

Hence the revolt rippling up and down the Andes.

In Peru, south of the Shuar's lands, the government has divided more than 70 percent of the Amazon into oil-exploration blocks and has begun selling concessions. Fearing contamination of their hunting and fishing grounds, Indians last year began mounting sporadic road and river blockades.

On June 5, riot police opened fire on Indians at a road blockade outside the town of Bagua, where jungle meets Andean foothills. At least 33 people were killed, most of them police. The Indians were unapologetic for resisting.

"Almost everything we have comes from the jungle," says one of the protesters, a wiry elementary-school teacher from the Awajun tribe named Gabriel Apikai. "The leaves, and wood and vines with which we build our homes. The water from the streams. The animals we eat. That is why we are so worried."

Nowhere is Indian power so evident as Bolivia, which elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2006. Morales dissolved the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and Original Peoples, calling it racist in a country where more than three in five people are aboriginals.

In February, voters approved a constitution that creates a "plurinational" state and accords Bolivia's natives sovereign status. Timeworn models of aboriginal government, community justice, and even traditional healing are now legally on equal footing with modern law and science.

In the capital of La Paz, cholitas - Indian women in traditional bowler hats and embroidered shawls - now regularly anchor TV newscasts. "Miss Cholita" beauty pageants are in vogue, and native hip-hop stars headline at nightclubs.

At the presidential palace, Morales - a former Aymara coca farmer who knew hunger as a child - makes a point of lunching periodically with the lowliest of palace guards. Morales is ensuring that profits from natural gas and mineral extraction are distributed equitably and that water - whose privatization in the city of Cochabamba spurred an uprising in 2000 - is never again privatized. He is also pushing to make electrical utilities public.

Morales has founded three indigenous universities, formalized quotas for Indians in the military, and created a special school for aspiring diplomats with native backgrounds.

"There is no way to return to the past," says Waskar Ari, an Aymara who changed his name to Juan in the 1970s so he would be accepted to a private high school in La Paz. Now a University of Nebraska professor, Ari likens his country's "rebirth" to the casting off of apartheid on another continent two decades ago.

"Finally," he says proudly, "Bolivia is no longer the South Africa of Latin America."