An indigenous Constitution?

It is commonplace that conservative sectors and even not so much, such as some “progressives”, refer to the inclusion of indigenous rights in the draft of the new Constitution as the result of a negative influence on the Republic by the Indigenous Peoples. They remind me of the colonialist admonitions of the Church for the wild spirituality of the natives, speakers of foreign languages ​​and practitioners of primitive customs. The Crown and the Church agreed on the need to “evangelize” the infidels regardless of the means, be it through violence or the cross, or both.

With the passage of time, and after two centuries of war with the Mapuche “natives”, Spain understood that it was time for conciliation and, through important Parliaments, came to understand that peace had the price of a great agreement and this translated into in various treaties where the Mapuche people were recognized as a Nation and their territories from the Bío Bío to the south were considered “sovereign”.

With the arrival of the Republic, the resident Spaniards, Creoles and mestizos, priests and bishops and the nascent “liberator” army gave themselves –finally, and already freed from the “Spanish yoke”– to the construction of the national State of Chile, and in the first constitutional regulation of 1811 they simply ignored the existence of indigenous people as representatives of native peoples and prior to the nascent State, and they were forever excluded from the legal system, until the Pinochet Constitution reformed in 2005. Forever. “We are all Chileans”, he said to himself, “there are no other peoples in a territory that is unique and indivisible. Only one language is spoken here”, and until a few years ago only one religion, Catholicism, was compulsory.

After the war of “Pacification of La Araucanía” (a euphemism, by the way), their time has come for the indigenous peoples and Mapuche in particular. Their ancestral lands were confiscated and they were assigned ghettos (reductions). The constitutions, from 1823 to today, literally ignored their existence. To this day, Chile and Uruguay are the only countries that hold the sad precedent that for these nations indigenous people do not exist constitutionally. And the State endorsed multiple expressions of abuse, violence, discrimination and racism, with the aim of “integrating” the Mapuche, even if it was by force, to turn them into pure “Chileans”. Pinochet, in 1979, issued Decree Law 2,568 and shamelessly declared: “Indigenous lands will no longer be called indigenous and their inhabitants indigenous.” There is no other law or norm in our brown America where the rulers have dared to do so much: declare the non-existence of the indigenous condition by decree.

The Mapuche people have stoically resisted these attacks. Finally, in 2004, the Historical Truth Commission and New Treatment with Indigenous Peoples (PPII) recognized before the country the enormous and extensive injustices committed in Chile with the endorsement, omission and/or complicity and direct action of the State against indigenous peoples, and formulated more than 100 recommendations, among others, the constitutional recognition of their rights, territorial autonomy, their language, tradition and customs, their traditional organization, their culture and spirituality and above all their status as First Nations and/or o Native Peoples prior to the State. This, in the year 2004. That is to say, 15 years before the social explosion and 18 years before the next referendum to approve a new Constitution, plurinational and intercultural, with constitutional recognition of their rights. What was already proposed to the country in 2004.

As we are governed by an iron Constitution inherited from the military dictatorship, with slight reforms in substance and with organic laws of perpetual mooring, the recommendations of the Truth and New Treatment Commission were ignored and there was not enough political will to address them. . The social explosion of October 18, 2019 had to occur to open wide the doors that today allow us to visualize a better destiny for indigenous peoples, who after 212 years of exclusion will be included in the new Constitution.

Why weren’t the members of the Historical Truth and New Treatment Commission treated as extremists, indigenists, etc., in 2004? Because its recommendations, despite the justice of its recognition of the responsibilities of the State, were not going to be viable in the dominant political system. But now, when that viability has been built in a Constitutional Convention, mandated by the Chilean people, and the conservative world observes with extreme anxiety (hence its virulence) that all the changes that it stopped for decades, by blood and fire with the dictatorship and then with a political, economic and electoral system that allowed them to keep a limited democracy under control, such modifications are going to take place and the indigenous peoples go hand in hand with these new processes that will be opened, they then insist on developing again, and as they always do it when their interests are at stake, an intense campaign to smear the Convention and its constituents, and they are putting the indigenous peoples at the head of an invented institutional catastrophe, pointing to a true legal apocalypse and little less than warning the imminence of a social revolution of “unsuspected consequences” by declaring Chile as a plurinational and intercultural state and their territorial autonomy and their rights as ancestral peoples.

Chaos is coming! they exclaim. The Indians hijacked the Convention! We are facing an indigenous Constitution! The most sordid have pointed out that territorial autonomy will separate the regions and that Chileans will have to get a passport to enter La Araucanía, etc. Funny or not, the new nicknames for the indigenous people –they missed the mark! They want more privileges than the Chileans!– even the outburst –let them leave Chile!…– are all expressions that account for something sadly more painful: that Chile being a nation with a high level of social and cultural development, a member of the club of OECD countries (no less), with Nobel Prize winners for Literature who tour the world with their works (where the indigenous people are better treated), part of its population (particularly conservative) insists on remaining anchored in the 19th century and nostalgic for a colonial culture.

The draft of the new Constitution comes to be a great effort to decolonize our culture and to make clear what Chile has always been: multinational, diverse, intercultural, nurtured by cultures that give it a unique meaning. As Cardinal Silva Henríquez once said: We are all Chile, really, but we are also different and among all we must offer mutual respect.

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An indigenous Constitution?