Indigenous Peoples Have a Lot Riding on Chile’s New Constitution

In June, Chile’s Constitutional Convention was seated, culminating a process that began with spontaneous protests in late 2019 and soon crystallized into demands for an overhaul to the country’s social model and rewriting Chile’s constitution, which dates back to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. 

As central protagonists in the protest movement that led to the successful constitutional referendum in October 2020, Chile’s Indigenous peoples have sought to make sure that the new constitution drafted by the convention includes formal recognition of their status, as well as a designation of Chile as a plurinational state. Both demands grow out of the deep and complex relationship between the Chilean state and the country’s Indigenous peoples. 

That relationship has been historically marked by mistrust, given the state’s failure to comply with past agreements and promises made to Indigenous peoples as well as a lack of mutual understanding between them. The tendency of Chilean governments in recent decades to frame public policy with regard to Indigenous peoples as exclusively issues of poverty and development has contributed to this mistrust. Moreover, state interaction with Indigenous peoples has also taken place through the prism of public security, rather than political dialogue with respect for and recognition of Indigenous peoples’ collective human rights, which have been recognized in international treaties and other instruments ratified by Chile. The most paradigmatic evidence of this omission is the absence of any constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples and their collective rights.

Indigenous peoples have lived throughout Chile since time immemorial. The Chilean state has legally recognized the Aymara, Atacameño, Quechua, Diaguita, Chango, Kolla, Rapa Nui, Mapuche, Kawéskar and Yagán peoples. The latest available data from the 2017 Census indicate that just under 2.2 million people, or 12.8 percent of Chile’s population, consider themselves to belong to an Indigenous or native people. Of them, the Mapuche are the most numerous, representing 79.8 percent.

But the Chilean Constitution makes no mention of these peoples and their relationship to the Chilean state. Since its independence from Spanish colonial rule in the early 19th century, Chile’s nation-building process has embraced a monocultural and homogeneous national identity based on its European colonial heritage, while denying its brownness and Indigenous roots. The triumphant narrative of the colonial and postcolonial era told a story of a nation made up of a single people, while confining anything and everything Indigenous to the margins of the state and the folk tales of an ancestral past. 

Subsequent relations between the Chilean state and the Indigenous peoples who have ancestrally inhabited the national territory have been characterized by exclusion, territorial dispossession, invisibility and discrimination, all of which serve to mark a boundary with the rest of the population. Although the particular case of each Indigenous people varies, they share enough important aspects to make for a common understanding of both their unjust treatment at the hands of the state and their demands for redressing those grievances. These common grievances grow out of state policies in Indigenous territories that confined Indigenous peoples to small spaces without access to natural resources, while handing over Indigenous land to individuals and corporate interests. These policies were central to the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, and they have not been adequately addressed by successive administrations since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship and the return of democracy in 1990.

The protests and social crisis that began in October 2019, known in Chile as the “social outbreak,” highlighted the situation of extreme inequality in the country and underscored the urgent need to make structural and institutional changes to Chile’s social model. The Mapuche, or wenüfoye, flag figured prominently in the massive demonstrations that took place, flying as a symbol of the demand for greater dignity and a new social contract for Chile. The face of Camilo Catrillanca—a young Mapuche man murdered in November 2018 by Carabineros, the Chilean police force, while he was driving home on a tractor through his community—also became a symbol of injustice and police abuse. Catrillanca’s death and a subsequent attempted cover-up caused widespread public outrage, leading to the arrests of four of the police officers involved in the shooting.

The new constitution could be a first step toward recognition, not only of Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective rights, but also the diversity and plurality of the peoples that make up Chile.

Recent opinion polls have reaffirmed that a rise in Indigenous political consciousness helped popularize the demand for a new, plurinational constitution, solidifying the recognition among the broader population of the existence of a conflict and the need to repair the historical grievances of the Indigenous peoples, especially regarding constitutional recognition as well as territorial and cultural demands. 

The Constitutional Convention that emerged from the 2019 protests is now tasked with drafting that new, plurinational charter. It is made up of 155 constituents, including 17 representatives of the Indigenous peoples, who were elected through a reserved seat system. Getting Congress to approve these reserved seats was not easy, revealing ignorance about Indigenous governance institutions and the persistence of racism in some political sectors in Chile. This initially indicated similar difficulties may be ahead for securing the constitutional recognition Indigenous peoples seek, as well as for the formal designation of Chile as a plurinational state. 

However, there have recently been more promising signs. In its first session in early July, the convention chose Elisa Loncon, a Mapuche woman, to preside over it. Subsequently, a “plurinational principle” was established for each of the convention’s commissions, in which Indigenous representation is required.

Alongside these advances, however, Mapuche social protest has increased in recent months and years, with more communities engaging in territorial recoveries, or the reoccupation of Indigenous land that has been expropriated, primarily by the logging and agricultural industries. In addition, new Indigenous organizations have emerged that advocate for and use violence as a tool to fight against the state and forestry companies, in the pursuit of Mapuche autonomy. Many of these organizations have demonstrated against the Constitutional Convention, considering it an institutional space that does not represent their interests and demands. For its part, the government has responded with an excessive and disproportionate use of force, making extensive use of the Pinochet-era Antiterrorist Law against members of the Mapuche people, despite international condemnations.

This securitized approach had resulted in numerous complaints of excessive and disproportionate use of force by the police against the Mapuche. These include accusations of torture and mistreatment, shootings and attacks—sometimes fatal—of youth and children, and communities exposed to daily violence. Currently, residents of the southern Wallmapu region, the Mapuche’s ancestral homeland, live in an environment of persistent violence carried out by Carabineros, but also by nonstate groups, both Mapuche and those allied with the forestry and agricultural companies active in the area. The use of fires by Mapuche groups to target forestry companies, for instance, also affects individuals and Mapuche communities. 

Among the hopes placed in the Constitutional Convention is the possibility that a new political dialogue might emerge that will stop the violence in Wallmapu. The recognition of all Indigenous peoples in Chile, and their right to self-determination and territorial autonomy, are fundamental aspirations of Indigenous peoples. The new constitution could be a first step toward reparation for past harms and recognition, not only of Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective rights, as enumerated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but also the diversity and plurality of the peoples that make up Chile. 

Racism and the brutal, still-open wounds of Chile’s colonial legacy make the prospect of reconciliation seem distant at times. Nevertheless, the ongoing process to draft a new constitution is a unique opportunity to put an end to the marginalization, invisibility and abuse of Indigenous peoples in Chile, and usher in a new era marked by the recognition of their rights. Perhaps for the first time in Chile’s history, all of its peoples will be able to sit at the same table, under equal conditions and with the same capacity for political agency, in order to rethink and build the plural Chile of the future.

Antonia Rivas is a Chilean lawyer with a doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology. She has worked on Indigenous rights issues as a consultant for United Nations organizations, Indigenous communities and public institutions. Currently, she is an assistant researcher at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR) and an adviser to the Constitutional Convention.