At sunrise he took a small boat and armed men to shore and planted a royal standard. With a solemn oath he took possession of the territory for the king and queen of Spain. Natives emerged from the trees and watched from a distance, puzzled. It was 1492.

More than five centuries later the anniversary of that event resounds with an ominous clang. Millions of people in central and South America lament that encounter in the Bahamas as the beginning of their ancestors' annihilation.

The indigenous inhabitants lost everything to the invaders: gold, land, freedom, culture, until there was almost nothing left. Disease and slaughter wiped most of them out. "It was a calamity," said Mark Horton, an archaeologist and Columbus expert at the University of Bristol.

Now, however, a counter-attack is under way. After centuries as underdogs, indigenous people are rising up - peacefully - to seize political power and assert their heritage.

The so-called pink tide of leftwing governments has surged on the back of indigenous movements intent on dismantling the region's eurocentric legacy - starting with Columbus.

Across the Andes the explorer once feted as a hero by the Europeanised elite is having his story rewritten, his statue toppled and his name turned to mud. Leading the assault is Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez.

"They taught us to admire Christopher Columbus," he said during a recent televised address, his tone incredulous, while flicking through a 1970s school textbook. "In Europe they still speak of the 'discovery' of America and want us to celebrate the day."

Instead Mr Chávez has renamed October 12 "indigenous resistance day" and mounted a campaign against colonial residue. Textbooks are to be revised under a curriculum that will stress the opposition to Spanish conquest as doomed but heroic.

This week the president, who boasts of having an indigenous grandmother, renamed the cable car system which soars over Caracas, the capital, as Warairarepano, which means big mountain in an indigenous coastal tongue.

"For Chávez this is a natural cause because of his philosophy about the mistreatment of the downtrodden and the need for redress," said Larry Birns, of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs thinktank.

City authorities confirmed this week that a bronze Columbus statue which activists toppled from a Caracas plaza three years ago will remain under wraps. Repairs were almost complete but it would not return to its plinth because the site had been renamed: Avenue Columbus is now Avenue Indigenous Resistance. The statue is expected to go to a museum.

In contrast, a statue of María Lionza, a legendary indigenous queen who is the subject of a thriving cult, has been prominently restored. Last night thousands of devotees made their way to the holy mountain of Sorte for an annual festival which honours her and an indigenous chief and black slave killed by the Spanish.

Rehabilitated

Scholars tend to assign Columbus a walk-on part in history as the one who opened the New World door but had little role in the bloody aftermath. "He was part of a process that was inevitable, of Europe coming into contact with the wider world," said Dr Horton. "It's mistaken to see him as a totem of the bad guys. He actually wasn't too bad."

It has been a rollercoaster reputation. A dispute with Spain's king and queen landed Columbus in chains and disgrace. The Victorians rehabilitated him as an inspiration for their own explorers, a valiant image which largely endures in the west. Spain hopes DNA analysis will prove he came from Castille, while Italy hopes to confirm he was Genoese.

The 500th anniversary in 1992 prompted debate in the US about whether he should be recast as a villain but the controversy petered out, leaving the navigator a bruised but still revered figure. US schoolchildren get the day off on what remains Columbus Day.

In South America, however, radical leftwing governments in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela are busy overturning what they see as his legacy: centuries of domination by Spaniards and their descendants, pale-skinned elites who continued oppressing darker compatriots even after the continent gained independence.

"Even now they conceive us as animals, as dogs. That has got to change, which is what we are fighting for - to be recognised as equal citizens with equal rights," said Wilber Flores, a congressman and president of Bolivia's indigenous parliament.

In Venezuela Mr Chávez enshrined indigenous rights in a new constitution and made the country's 35 tribes visible through state-funded TV stations which broadcast from regions barely known to city-dwellers.

In Ecuador President Rafael Correa, who often wears traditional dress and speaks in Quechua, has rallied indigenous voters behind his effort to "reinvent" the country along socialist lines.

President Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and Bolivia's first indigenous leader, has also fused indigenous rights with a socialist agenda hostile to Washington. He regards the US as the latest manifestation of a predatory colonialism that started in 1492. Last month it voted against a United Nations declaration on indigenous rights.

Rapacious

Mr Morales has accused the US of raiding Bolivia's natural resources and persecuting coca farmers as cocaine producers when in fact they are cultivating a plant that has had other, innocent, uses since the Incas.

He will mark the anniversary of Columbus's landing with a visit to the coca growing region of Chapare, which is playing host to a summit of indigenous people from across Latin America.

In an interview with the Guardian the Bolivian leader suggested the rapacious intruders who crossed an ocean thirsting for riches, and those who later invented capitalism, should have been studying, not conquering, the natives.

"Indigenous communities know how to live in harmony with mother earth and that is the difference between us and Europe and the United States."