Back in April, indigenous people in Ilave, on the shores of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru, lynched the town's mayor after accusing him of corruption, leaving the area in turmoil ever since.

That same month, across the Andes in Brazil, a dozen indigenous people in the Amazon massacred 29 miners who were believed to be illegally extracting diamonds from their land.

Next door in Bolivia, tens of thousands of indigenous protesters took to the streets last October to protest the government's energy policy, ultimately forcing the president to resign. They also killed a mayor for alleged corruption. And to the north in Ecuador, indigenous groups are asking the UN to step in to avoid bloodshed in an escalating conflict that they say is being stoked by the president.

Across South America, some of the region's 55 million indigenous people have been making noise lately - sometimes violently - fighting against abject poverty, inequality, and scant political representation in. While the problems vary from country to country, they reflect the difficulties facing indigenous movements here as they attempt to translate gains made over the past decade into lasting political victories.

"The challenge of the indigenous movement is to understand what it means to have political power, what we can do with it," says Tarcila Rivera, a Peruvian indigenous leader and chair of the Fourth International Meeting of Indigenous Women, held recently in Peru.

The indigenous movement in Bolivia, for example, has been unable to coalesce around an individual leader or common agenda. While the two main indigenous parties were able to elect more than 30 lawmakers to the 130-member House of Representatives two years ago, they were on opposite sides of the aisle over Sunday's referendum on the future of the country's vast natural gas reserves. The referendum asked voters whether Bolivia should allow private energy companies to continue exporting its natural gas.

Evo Morales, a native Aymara and former coca grower who leads the Movement to Socialism (MAS), campaigned in favor of the referendum, while former Rep. Felipe Quispe, also an Aymara, and his Pachakutik Indigenous Movement called on voters to boycott the vote and demanded nationalization of the energy sector.

The government's plan, which includes export of the country's 55 trillion cubic feet of gas, won by a large margin, even in the heavily Aymara highlands around the capital where Mr. Quispe and his party are based. Despite losing by margins as great as 9 to 1 on one of the five questions in the referendum, Quispe told the Bolivian media that the fight was not over.

Quispe preaches a blend of Marxism and indigenous nationalism, calling on his followers to reestablish the Aymara nation that existed before the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century. It is by far the most radical approach of the different indigenous movements in the region. Mr. Morales, though also a leftist, is looking to build a more traditional political base ahead of the 2007 presidential elections.

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