Letter of the Law: Comparing Indigenous Autonomy in Plurinational Colombia and Bolivia

In the aftermath of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s, much of Latin America was in the midst of a crisis. Faced with increasing popular discontent about rampant economic and racial inequality, governments across the region encountered unprecedented challenges to their legitimacy. Excluded for centuries from processes of political contestation, many Indigenous and Afro-Latin communities found themselves subject to cycles of impoverishment, isolation, and predation. Appearing in tandem with these systems of exclusion was mestizaje, the independence-era racial doctrine that allowed for the simultaneous praise of theoretical diversity for the sake of national unity and the quotidian discrimination against nonwhites on account of their perceived barbarism. Using the language of mestizaje to cloak political discourse in multiculturalism, policymakers in the 20th century promoted the whitening of their national image. After facing mass popular uprisings against the racial status quo, countries from Bolivia to Ecuador to Colombia made concerted efforts to excise mestizaje thought from their legal systems in the 1990s and 2000s. In its place, they instituted plurinationalism, a constitutional principle that recognizes the distinct cultural and economic traditions of ethnic minorities and devolves power to certain communities to protect those heritages. Part of those reforms is the right to administer the land on which the communities reside, which often possesses abundant natural resources. In the years since plurinational constitutions were drafted, though, questions about the implementation of autonomy for minority communities remain. In this thesis, I investigate the factors that enable rural Indigenous communities to defend themselves from incursions into their territory by the state, extractive corporations, and guerillas. I utilize a case study approach, selecting two Indigenous communities each from Colombia and Bolivia, two of the countries with the most robust foundations for plurinational execution. My methodology uses deforestation levels as a proxy for the success of these defensive maneuvers, setting a baseline for the robustness of the country’s plurinational reforms. I then call on research from anthropology, political science, and economics to understand the complex processes of politicization, power, and identity that surround the conflict in each case study. I find that both the Colombian and Bolivian examples provide important insights into the strengths of plurinational legal systems, but are vulnerable to political and economic threats. The resulting unpredictability allows only the Indigenous communities with high political unity and connections to national-level advocacy organizations to actively overcome the administrative hurdles put between them and autonomous recognition. In order to make plurinational autonomy more accessible to more Indigenous communities, plurinational constitutions require supportive legal scaffolding, robust state protections against corporate and illicit interests, and powerful Indigenous political organizations. This thesis will contribute to existing literature by extending analysis beyond a single community, drawing comparisons between the Colombian and Bolivian cases to understand how future plurinational reforms can be implemented to protect autonomous Indigenous enclaves from outside threats.

Keywords: Indigenous peoples > Legal status, laws, etc.
Latin America
Indigenous peoples > Government relations
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Thesis
Advisor: Jensen Erik