Indigenous Peoples in Chile: Contesting Violence, Building New Meanings for Rights and Democracy (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This study examines the conflict between indigenous rights and the exploitation of land in Chile. The conflict is displayed through a public discourse about the recognition of the indigenous people on the one hand, and the application of the anti-terrorist law against the indigenous people on the other. The anti-terrorist law is currently applied to the indigenous group, the Mapuches, in southern Chile, which makes this issue particularly acute. The role of the international community and the international laws surrounding this issue thus play a part in the conclusions made by the author, together with minority rights and the concepts of sovereignty and terrorism. The case is further placed within the world-economy through the concepts of World System Theory by Immanuel Wallerstein.
International human rights are often invoked for their universal claims to human dignity. But the conventional discourse on human rights is not necessarily inclusive of worldviews that differ from its liberal framework, and is thus limited in terms of the practical benefits all people can gain from it. This limitation has been problematic in the creation of a meaningful indigenous human rights discourse, as indigenous peoples' cosmologies do not coincide with that of the West. In this thesis, I argue that utilizing a multiple worlds approach can reform the conventional human rights discourse. By analyzing the areas of commonality between the Andean cosmovision and the conventional human rights discourse, I propose a reconceptualized transformative vision of human rights that is more authentic to and inclusive of the agency of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous Peoples in Chile: The Quest to become a Constitutional Entity
Studies in Law, Politics and Society, 2011
... JORGE CONTESSE 34 Page 17. Felipe Larraı´n gives the same argument the state ought not to determine which cultures are to be preserved (2003, p. 91). This is a plausible claim.13 In a liberal democracy, moreover, this stands as a compelling statement. ...
Although the universal human rights paradigm has been problematic for women and indigenous peoples , both groups have made advances by framing their demands within a human rights perspective. Indigenous women, however, have frequently found themselves marginalized by women's movements and indigenous movements alike, particularly when they make demands for rights as indigenous women—not just as members of one group or the other. This article takes the case of Mapuche women in Chile to examine the politics of gender and human rights for indigenous women. Their efforts to articulate their concerns, vis-à-vis Mapuche men, nonindigenous women, and the state, have entailed assertions of their own version of women's rights, one that responds specifically to their reality as Mapuche women.
2010
In 1990, Chile made a successful transition from the authoritarian dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1973 to a democratically elected government. The authoritarian regime was characterized by massive and systemic practices of human rights abuses, and it left an official toll of 5,000 deaths, about 2000 of which constitute "detained and disappeared people", and an additional 27,000 people who have been officially recognized as victims of torture. These figures do not take into account the unknown numbers of Chilean exiles, or those who were internally displaced or who lost their jobs due to their suspected political affiliations. The human cost of the military regime has continued to be one of the most enduring issues confronting the postauthoritarian Chilean nation. This thesis builds on the work of critical researchers who locate the Chilean authoritarian regime in the transnational politics of the Cold War and their effect in implementing neo-liberalism in Chile. This literature demonstrates that terror was a constitutive, rather than an incidental, element of neo-liberal governmentality: governmentality that inscribed itself on Chilean bodies through terror practices and that remains unscathed through the transition to democracy. With that premise in mind I explore, through a historical analysis of major conjunctures in the history of human rights debates in Chile, how the post-authoritarian nation accounts for the human rights I owe financial support for this project to the Canadian International Development Research Centre and to the Oficina de Coperación Internacional of the Government of Chile.
The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism
The 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause–indeed, a common language of human rights–in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns–while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights–both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.
The Chilean elite’s point of view on indigenous peoples
In Chile, recognition of the country’s indigenous peoples is generally approached from the victims’ point of view, drawing attention to the social, economic, and legal situation of historically excluded communities. Although this is a legitimate approach, this paper proposes another perspective: looking at how the influential members of the elite perceive indigenous peoples and the construction of a plurinational democracy. Recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights depends to a large extent on their relations with other groups and, in particular, on the strategies deployed by the most powerful minorities. In order to ascertain the opinion of those directly concerned with the “Mapuche issue”, we focused on businesspeople with investments in mining, forestry, salmon farming, and the electricity industry, as well as the country’s business associations. Similarly, we paid special attention to political authorities, private-sector and religious leaders, judges, judicial authorities, and government officials from the Araucanía Region. Apart from identifying differences among members of the elite based on their political affiliations, this paper reveals a generalized awareness of discrimination but a widespread reluctance to find concrete solutions.
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2015
The 1970s and 1980s meant an ethnic politicization of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, until this moment defined largely as a class-based movement of indigenous peasants. The indigenous organizations started to conceptualize indigenous peoples as nationalities with their own economic, social, cultural and legal structures and therefore with the right to autonomy and self-determination. Based on this conceptualization, the movement developed demands for a pluralist reform of state and society in order to install a plurinational state with wide degrees of autonomy and participation for indigenous nationalities. A part of those demands was the double strategy to fight for legal pluralism while already installing it at the local level. Even if some degrees of legal pluralism have been recognized in Ecuador since the mid-1990s, in practice, the local de facto practice prevails until today. Another central part of the demand for plurinationality is the representation of indigenous peoples in the legislative organs of the state, developing since their first appearance in the 1940s in a complex way. This article will analyze the development of right-based demands within the discourse of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the visions of the implied state-reform and the organizational and political background and implication they have. Based on an analysis of the central texts of the indigenous organizations, conceptualizations of rights and laws and their appropriation within an autonomist discourse and a local practice will be highlighted.
2018
This paper explores the tensions generated in Chilean politics by Mapuche responses to the promotion of development and the protection of indigenous rights since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990. Working within the norm diffusion model, the present paper will analyze the concept “Indigenous Development” existing at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and its incorporation into government policy for the period 2008-2011, considering its interaction with the national political context. The first section analyzes the transformation of the United Nations position on indigenous peoples, then characterizes the notion of indigenous development and the norm diffusion model. We then analyze government reports to the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review, International Labor Organization, and the United National Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to identify the advances. We conclude with a discussion of the tensions present in Chile