Pope Salutes Indigenous Peoples : Religion: Visiting Mayan ruins, he urges industrial nations to broaden assistance to native groups.

Preaching from a colonial monastery built on the ruins of a Mayan pyramid, Pope John Paul II on Wednesday issued a rousing defense of the rights, identity--and pride--of indigenous peoples “from the Alaska peninsula to Tierra del Fuego.”

Speaking on the eve of his return to the United States for the first time in six years, the 73-year-old pontiff appealed to the world’s industrial nations to broaden their aid to native communities among the world’s poor majority.

John Paul’s abiding preoccupation with the growing and volatile gap between a rich, consumerist North and a poor, needy South is certain to loom large at his meeting with President Clinton in Denver this afternoon.

“From Izamal, a cornerstone of the glorious Maya culture, I want to issue an appeal to the developed societies so that, overcoming economic systems exclusively bent to profit, they may seek real and effective solutions to the grave problems that affect broad segments of the continent’s population,” John Paul said.

He had come to the Yucatan, he said, to “embrace all communities, ethnic groups and indigenous peoples of America--from the Alaska peninsula to Tierra del Fuego.”

About 3,000 representatives of indigenous groups of the Americas gathered here to meet with the Pope at a 16th-Century Franciscan sanctuary erected atop a Mayan temple to the sun god. By the Vatican’s count, there are 52 million native peoples in Latin America--26 million in Mexico alone.

“Unfortunately, it must be noted that the richness of your cultures has not been duly appreciated. Neither have their rights been respected as peoples and as communities,” John Paul said. “Sin has also cast its shadow on America in the destruction of not a few of your artistic and cultural creations, and in the violence of which you have so often been the object.”

In a 28-minute speech under a merciless tropical sun that wilted his retinue, John Paul singled out some of those communities by name: Guarani, Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, Mixtec. And some farther north as well: Apache, Inuit.

“The church contemplates your authentic values with love and hope,” he said.

The speech was one that John Paul had intended to give last October as part of a three-stop trip marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World. Still recovering last fall from bowel surgery, the Pope ended up only going to the Dominican Republic.

En route to World Youth Day celebrations in Denver, John Paul had stopped in Jamaica on this trip to address Afro-Americans, and he came here to Yucatan to offer his support to Native Americans whose societies were decimated by the Spanish conquest.

Pain runs deep among the descendants of the Mayans who live today in Yucatan. In a blunt welcoming speech, Primitivo Cuxin, a 49-year-old father of nine who farms about two hours from Izamal, pulled no punches.

“They say that you have helped your country to be free and that you help many others to live as they like,” Cuxin said, addressing the Pope with the familiar Spanish pronoun, “ tu .”

“I think today is a good day for you to help us; to say that we have the right to live tranquilly, to earn our bread, to have our children, to work our fields, to speak our language and to wear our own kind of clothes. You can help us to understand that we have the right to be different because we are equal,” the Mayan farmer told the Pope.

Speaking in Spanish from a shaded platform to a patient, parboiled crowd that waited four hours for his arrival, John Paul promised help.

“I know the difficulties of your current situation and I assure you that the church, like a solicitous mother, accompanies and supports you in your legitimate aspirations and just demands,” he said.

Wednesday’s brief papal stop in Mexico included a meeting with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and a huge outdoor Mass in the Yucatan capital of Merida.

John Paul leaves Merida this morning directly for Denver, where he is due at 2:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m. PDT). The meeting with Clinton a little over an hour later at Regis University is the Pope’s first order of U.S. business.

In Denver, excitement began to build as tens of thousands of young people arrived in town, pouring into downtown streets, scooping up souvenirs and meeting new friends from more than 70 nations. At sundown, a Mass held in the shadow of the state Capitol building attracted an estimated 100,000.

Times religion writer Larry B. Stammer, in Denver, contributed to this report.