Around 50 million individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean are among the indigenous peoples, representing some ten percent of the total population.  However, there are no universally accepted figures for the percentage of indigenous people among the population, as estimates and counts vary widely according to each survey’s purpose and method. 

Ninety percent of indigenous peoples live in the Andean countries of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, and in the Central American countries Guatemala and Mexico.  In Bolivia and Guatemala, indigenous peoples are in fact in the majority. Ethnically, linguistically and culturally, most of them belong to the Quechua and Aymara (Andes), the Náhuas (Mexico) or the Maya (Central America). A great many small and extremely varied groups of indigenous people live in the Amazon Basin. About 1 million people of indigenous descent make up 400 ethnic groups there. 

In the absence of any internationally recognised standard definition of membership of an indigenous population group, German Development Cooperation relies on the “Cobo” definition, which is also used by the UN commission on indigenous peoples. Accordingly, indigenous peoples may be described by the following characteristics, although not all of them must apply. 

• Indigenous peoples are directly descended from historic pre-colonial societies. 
• They are a non-dominant part of their current national society.
• They have a special relationship to their hereditary territory and their ethnic identity.
• They are determined to preserve, develop and hand on their cultural uniqueness, their own social institutions and justice systems to future generations.

Indigenous peoples are particularly hard hit by poverty and have significantly less access to public services such as education and health care. Although the rights of indigenous peoples have been widely recognised since the 1970s and are enshrined in constitutions both internationally and nationally, in their actual lives very little has changed.

Among the core problems today are:

• unresolved property rights and inadequate access to land and its use
• insufficient opportunity for self-determination
• inadequate participation in politics and society, or national marginalisation
• disproportionately high poverty and poor living conditions
• unsatisfactory recognition of distinctive cultural and linguistic characteristics in the context of a pluralistic national society.
  

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  Statistic "Estimated share of indigenous peoples in the total population of the Latin American countries”
  de-lateinamerika-statistik-indigene-voelker.pdf, 0.03 MB (German)