A Situational Analysis of Indigenous People’s Participation in the Chilean Constitutional Process

Abstract

The historical relationship between Indigenous people and the Chilean state has been distant, complex, and frankly contentious. Since the colonial period, this relationship has gone through different stages and slowly transformed to include Indigenous actors in formal political spaces in relevant entities, such as the Constitutional Convention, during the 2020-2023 constitutional process. The constitutional process was a novel situation which presented an opportunity for the Chilean State to address some of the historical demands of Indigenous people. This situation, where Indigenous groups accessed a formal political space to participate in the constitutional development to rule the country, turned into an opportunity to examine varied social relations that occur when Indigenous groups enter the formal political arena in Chile. This manuscript-based thesis uses situational analysis to explore the relationships across an array of human elements and discourses during the constitutional process vis-à-vis the political participation of Indigenous people and the recognition of their rights. In my analysis of the constitutional process, I found that the participation of Indigenous people was characterized by the simultaneous promise of greater political involvement and barriers to fully realizing it. The situation included competing discourses regarding the plurinational state as a proposed political model to recognize Indigenous people’s constitutional rights. These discourses were often animated by the potential implications of the model for citizens’ livelihoods and the state organization. Based on the complex sociopolitical dynamics involving Indigenous people in Chile’s constitutional process, this research has various empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to Latin American politics, education and situational analysis.