Indigenous Autonomies in Latin America in the Face of Contemporary Capitalism: Overview,Perspectives and Dilemmas,Part 1

Introduction

Indigenous autonomies, as a set of diverse organizational practices that can be understood in relation to long and heterogeneous traditions of resistance, burst into prominence in the Latin American panorama at the turn of the century as a response to the political economic transformations of the continent that exacerbated exploitation, territorial dispossession and inequality. While it is true that in the 1990s it was possible to frame the plurality of autonomies within certain, fairly clear types of organization with specific tendencies, current modalities and practices have diversified to the point of hindering attempts at classification. This is due to the multiple responses these experiences have been forced to innovate in order to keep up with the new dynamics of capitalism, as well as the variations in the political-cultural forms that have emerged in the region during the past 20 years. This article seeks to provide elements with which to assess the current state of indigenous autonomies. This introduction presents the themes that are developed in this and the following issue of Latin American Perspectives (July and September 2024).

Indigenous Autonomies During The Current Phase Of Capitalism

Indigenous autonomy, in all its expressions and practices, has become a fundamental pillar in the resistance to contemporary capitalism across Latin America. Its diversity of conceptual premises and political strategies to contend with the consequences of extractivism and maintain alternative ways of life have inspired extensive theoretical and political debates. In this introduction we will address three fundamental aspects of this topic. First, we intend to focus on autonomy and, specifically, on the autonomous projects created by indigenous peoples as a response to the consequences of contemporary capitalism. Secondly, we will present a brief genealogy of the concept of autonomy and its variants across current debates. Our third segment will examine the fundamental tensions and dilemmas faced by indigenous autonomy projects, and this topic will be explored in depth by addressing the concrete examples of Zapatista autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico, the experiences of the Cherán community in the Mexican state of Michoacán, and those of the Mapuche movement in Wallmapu, ¹ Chile.

Autonomy As Resistance To Contemporary Capitalism

The breadth of experiences and models of indigenous autonomy in the Latin American region has attracted increasing attention among both academic and activist circles (González et al., 2010; 2021; López Flores and García Guerreiro, 2018; Makaran, López, and Wahren, 2019; Hopkins and Pineda, 2021). While the concept of indigenous autonomy can be seen as a historical continuation of indigenous struggles dating back to colonial times (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010), recent decades have witnessed an evident new boom in claims for autonomy, as well as projects driven by a multiplicity of indigenous peoples (Stahler-Sholk, 2021).

One of the triggers behind this upsurge is the current phase of global capitalism in its neoliberal form and the escalation of what is known as “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2015), a process meant to solve the problems of this capitalist phase that were particularly aggravated by the “great recession” of 2008 (Robinson, 2021). The ongoing contradictions of contemporary capitalism have been explained from different perspectives. On the one hand, there are those mainstream analysts who see it as a possible accident caused by a rise in financial interest rates and a mismatch in the presumed harmony of the rules of economic competition, which would normally tend toward stabilization (Greenspan, 2008). Others have observed its effects on a national scale while trying to explain its consequences in a single country such as, for example, the United States (Kliman, 2012). Yet other analysts have focused on the lack of public supervision of financial institutions, the banking system and balance sheets, a process that will inevitably and eventually trigger a financial crisis that could nevertheless be resolved via a strengthening of regulatory mechanisms (Krugman, 2009).

However, the reality of capitalism in 21st century Latin America cannot be understood as arising from a single cause. It can also not be understood by using one-dimensional frameworks when more relevant approaches analyze the continent’s role in the globalized structure of the capitalist system, while taking into consideration the accumulation of inequalities as well as the dynamics of plunder inscribed within the colonial and dependent history of Latin America in relation to the countries of the global North. Thus, what has unfolded in Latin America is a crisis that is structural in nature (Robinson, 2021). It is an essential and intrinsic part of the internal contradictions that allow for the expanded reproduction of global capitalism but that, in the global South, cannot be expressed as a mere “financial problem” that can be solved using formal mechanisms. Rather, this crisis must be addressed via an intensified, low-cost extraction of natural resources that enable the accumulation of capital assets in the countries of the global North. This dynamic is facilitated by the colonial and neocolonial condition to which Latin America has long been subjected which has made available to capitalist transnational corporations a racial hierarchy of cheap labor and extensive territories declared “unproductive.” These lands can be used for private benefit while yielding high profitability margins, all under the spurious justifications of “national development” and “economic modernization.”

This increased demand for raw materials to feed accumulation on a global scale and solve the structural contradictions of capitalism has driven transnational corporations into an aggressive expansion of their extractivist activities inside the territorial space of many Latin American states, leading to a re-primarization of their economic structures (Svampa, 2015). The result has been an escalation of dispossession in the territories of indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, with a corresponding diversification of resistance strategies and indigenous mobilization (Farthing and Fabricant, 2018).

To the extent that the neoliberal governments that have predominated in Latin America since the 1980s become partners or intermediaries of transnational corporations, the conflicts between indigenous peoples, the national state, and global capital have sharpened. The wave of murders targeting public defenders of lands and territory, particularly indigenous activists and especially women, attests to the new modality of necropolitics and militarized accumulation (Robinson, 2021; Azamar Alonso and Rodríguez Wallenius, 2021) where, in some cases, a state of exception prevails that either runs parallel to or is integrated into the national state (Fuentes Díaz, 2012). The territorial displacement of indigenous communities mixes with migration and with clashes over territories involving the de facto powers of organized crime in a conflictive process of territorial reconfiguration. In this context, indigenous peoples, whose territorial roots are closely related to their ethnicity and collective ways of existence, have been looking for ways to resist the socio-environmental impacts of megaprojects and defend modes of production and social reproduction that are not totally subsumed by capital. To this end, if they organize themselves into rebel or self-defense groups in response to the exhaustion of state capacity to address their needs, whether as indigenous people or peasants, they are, in turn, confronted with counterinsurgent methods employed by private corporations, public security agencies, and/or the various forms of violence employed by “neoliberal multicriminalism” (Speed, 2016; Smolski and Lorenzen, 2021).

These conflicts bring to the fore the fundamental character of the nation-state, established through the violence and primitive accumulation of colonialism and stretching into contemporary times under the new phase of capitalist dispossession (Navarro Trujillo, 2021; Barbosa, 2022; Martínez Navarrete, 2022). Some governments in the region have tried to escape such questioning via institutional reforms that formally recognize the state as a plurinational entity, but always within the limits of what Hale (2005) has ironically labeled as the “indio permitido”—the “authorized Indian” within the scheme of “multicultural neoliberalism.” At the political-ideological level, the neoliberal model assimilates and erases the collective and self-defined identity of indigenous peoples, relying on the fictitious image of individual equality between citizens (that is, that of the nation-state built under European or mestizo hegemony).

In another variant of this pattern, the crisis of representation across the liberal democracies of the region, which is characterized by the highest income inequality in the world (a contradiction intensified by the neoliberal policies implemented from the 1980s onwards), paved the way for the “pink tide” of progressive governments belonging to the electoral left at the beginning of the 21st century (Ellner, 2019). The preferred economic model of these governments has been a type of developmentalism fundamentally based on extractive industries that export to global markets while espousing a greater degree of nationalization or a higher margin of profit capture by the state, channeling a portion of these surpluses to redistributive social projects. Critics of this model have termed it “neo-extractivism” (Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014), arguing that the old Washington Consensus of the neoliberal model was changed to a new “commodities consensus” (Svampa, 2015) without fundamentally disrupting the vertical power structures already existing at both the national and global levels (Webber, 2017). Its defenders see the model as a form of “resource nationalism” (Ellner, 2021) that allows for the possibility of negotiating an expansion in the overall share of power and resources in the hands of the popular sectors.

Extractivism, whether in its neoliberal variant or as arbitrated by progressive governments, constantly comes into conflict with indigenous movements that seek autonomy across different modalities. Faced with an environmental crisis of global dimensions, capitalist rationale promotes the commodification of nature in a way that privatizes and concentrates profits while socializing costs and erasing collective spaces (Composto and Navarro, 2014). The worldviews of certain indigenous groups and the militants in their causes, on the other hand, value or have reappraised the concept of the commons through worldviews such as buen vivir, sumak kawsay or sumaq amaña in Andean traditions, kume mögen in Wallmapu or lekil kuxlejal among the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. Although these concepts are far from homogeneous or essentialist, they contrast to models that conceive the earth as a mere commodity and its inhabitants as interchangeable elements of labor. Thus, various autonomy projects advocate a concept of territory that encompasses the relational space between the physical, nature itself, the community, and the historical and cultural roots of a people tied to their place of origin.

These oppositions place indigenous autonomy projects at the forefront of resistance movements against the consequences of contemporary capitalism in Latin America. However, their conceptions of autonomy are as varied as the strategies of resistance adopted by each group as they adapt and innovate along the way.

Indigenous Autonomies: A Possible Genealogy

The concept of autonomy has intellectual precedents in different Marxist currents (including open or autonomist Marxism) as well as in anarchist-libertarian thought. Oliveira and Modonesi (2024) suggest a useful conceptual classification for reflecting on the various autonomous practices of indigenous peoples. They posit five possible roots for this concept: autonomy understood as negation, as independence, as emancipation, as counter-power (and as popular power), and as communality.

Obviously, these visions are not mutually exclusive; however, the genealogy proposed by Oliveira and Modonesi does provide us with a starting point to consider the multiple strategies and practices of indigenous autonomies in Latin America. Rather than insisting on a single model, we might think of a polysemic concept that nurtures indigenous autonomies as a variegated condition (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2018)—that is, as a heterogeneous process intersected by different political interests and productive initiatives, as well as by a multiplicity of organizational forms across different historical times. This is to say that practices of indigenous autonomy are not static and can, in certain contexts, express a clear and high degree of opposition to the state and capital while, in others, they constrain their displays of insubordination to focus on mediation and strategic negotiations that will either provide protection or achieve specific goals.

Dilemmas Inherent To Autonomy Projects

The tensions inherent to autonomy projects are real, but the debates around them have developed enough to overcome false binaries that were previously proposed. One of these false binaries is that between de jure and de facto autonomy. Some projects have managed to negotiate with the state and obtain spaces of independence for regional self-government led by indigenous leaders, as is the case of the Autonomous Regions in Nicaragua (Díaz-Polanco, 1991). A similar concept can be seen in the case of the Plurinational Autonomous Regions (Regiones Autónomas Pluriétnicas, RAP) claimed by groups such as the National Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy (Asamblea Nacional Indígena por la Autonomía, ANIPA) in Chiapas, Mexico. These efforts have strengthened the political capabilities of some indigenous groups, and their territorial definition can help overcome ethnic fragmentation in order to present a united front against the constituted powers. On the other hand, this approach runs the risk of promoting caciquismos and settling for a mere administrative decentralization that accepts and reproduces the existing structures of the hegemonic state. At the other end of the continuum, we have the example of the Zapatistas, whose vision of resistance includes the rejection of state programs and resources. However, in reality, the dichotomy is not absolute. The de facto autonomy practiced by the Zapatistas also has points of contact with the state. These include, for example, the negotiation of the San Andrés Accords on autonomy and indigenous culture signed in 1996, as well as the support for the (symbolic) candidacy of the Nahua indigenous woman María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (“Marichuy”) for the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico.

This binomial also becomes more complex when the direct actions of the groups that exercise de facto autonomy result in changes in the political, legal and institutional framework. An example would be the reforms that recognize the right to indigenous self-government under the concept of usos y costumbres (uses and customs), a space taken advantage of by the autonomy movement in Cherán, in the Mexican state of Michoacán. In other cases, the mobilizations and extra-institutional actions of indigenous groups generated political alliances that allowed indigenous groups to enter the power structures of the state in an unprecedented manner, with all the corresponding tensions and contradictions, as was the case in Ecuador (Becker, 2008) and Bolivia (Copa, Kennemore, and López, 2018; Bautista Durán, 2019). This also occurred in Chile with the proposal for a new Constitution, put forth by multiple political parties with representation reserved for 10 indigenous groups in the Convention (a process that ultimately failed after the rejection of the new text during the September 2022 referendum). ²

The recourse to legal mechanisms by indigenous groups in their struggle to resist the onslaught of the state and transnational extractivism is a very specific aspect of this dilemma (Bravo Espinosa, 2019). Colonial ideologies historically espoused the right to define the status of indigenous peoples, to the point of erasing them under the idea that their territories were terra nullius (nobody’s land, unoccupied territory.) Movements continue to debate whether the legal systems of states that stand as heirs to colonial structures, with their individual concepts of citizen rights as “granted” by the state, can be expanded to encompass other/indigenous epistemologies (Santos, 2009) that contemplate juridical pluralism. In political terms, the “judicialization of politics” (Sieder, 2020) risks leaving power in the hands of intermediaries, displacing the community toward institutional spaces and, once there, reproducing the same hierarchies that autonomies seek to break. On the other hand, the strategic use of the legal framework without renouncing mobilization from below can be a way to exploit the cracks and diversify the repertoires of struggle (Hale, 2020; Zibechi, 2021).

Conceptions of autonomy that emphasize the production of the collective subject, the process of communal daily life (the commons) in autonomous spaces, and the reconfiguration of indigenous identity as a weapon of resistance also come with tensions. Mariana Mora (2021) has noted a shift in the focus of indigenous autonomies in Mexico from the propositional to the defensive, a shift forced by the escalation of the violence to which indigenous peoples are subjected, both in structural (territorial dispossession, racism, environmental destruction) and physical (disappearances, murders, femicide) terms. Citing members of the Indigenous Governing Council (Consejo Indígena de Gobierno, formed in 2016 in Mexico by the National Indigenous Congress or Congreso Nacional Indígena) who have characterized this onslaught as a “war against life,” Mora argues that indigenous peoples have been forced to turn from “the exercise of autonomy as a series of actions that directly challenge the state to demand fundamental transformations, to a series of measures meant to protect collective life-existence” (2021: 507). However, this turn does not necessarily represent a dichotomy within autonomy projects insofar as the process of organizing defensive action strengthens collective identity along the way. In this sense, it can be conceived within the framework of what Modonesi characterizes as independence: that is, the creation of spaces for the construction of an alternative society.

Within the Marxist-autonomist current, Holloway (2009) affirms that negative autonomy is a “no,” a rejection voiced in the context of a rupture with the unbearable current conditions generated by capitalism, which some have characterized as a civilizational crisis (Millán, 2013; Lander, 2020) and is unlike the positive autonomy he associates with the mere restructuring of capitalism. From this point of view, the autonomy granted by the institutional transformations of some progressive governments in the region will always be contained within the constrictive rationale of the state.

Holloway maintains that negative autonomy is essentially the beginning of the open construction of anti-capitalist alternatives, and that it must therefore be anti-identitarian insofar as it eschews adherence to a predetermined identity (it might reject, for example, the orthodoxy of one-dimensional class determinism). As we will see in the upcoming section, the process of collective identity formation for indigenous peoples has been a fundamental element in the creation of autonomies and escapes the “positive/negative” dichotomy proposed by Holloway. Thus, indigenous autonomies are not governed by a clear opposition between negative and positive autonomy: the collective subjectivities that emerge in the spaces where the system is contested generate a positive diversity of alternatives and possible futures. As Burguete Cal y Mayor (2018) rightly argues, the polysemy (multiple roots and signifiers) of the concept of autonomy makes it possible to “imagine ways to overcome the antithetical binary between ‘allowed autonomies’ and autonomies of resistance—that is, ‘variegated autonomies’” (19).

While subjective collective identities are key to autonomous resistance, Holloway’s “anti-identity” can be understood as a rejection of the idea of a one-dimensional, essential and static indigenous identity. Negative autonomy, which resists the identity imposed by hegemonic (colonial and neoliberal) norms, goes hand in hand with a concept of positive autonomy that is not predetermined by a fixed identity. Identities are adapted not only according to contextual needs, but as a process that is unstable over time (López Caballero, 2021) and connected by the multiple intersections of class, gender, and ethnic identity. The claim for autonomy can be based, for example, on identities that combine indigenous and peasant subjectivities, into multifaceted anti-capitalist struggles (Rosset and Barbosa, 2021). Many indigenous women construct anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist collective identities in their daily processes of communal organization to face the various forms of violence they are subject to (Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo, 2008; Hernández Castillo, 2010; Federici, 2020). These identities are not necessarily transformed into dynamics of resistance “on the margins” or “outside” the fabric of domination but rather contest its expressions. Some studies have argued that the subjective experience of extractivist territorial dispossession, mediated by gender, can be interpreted as a patriarchal logic that is inscribed on the corporal existence of women while violating their common goods (García-Torres et al., 2020; Cortés-Cortés and Zapata-Martelo, 2022). In the next section, we will consider the autonomous processes of construction of collective identities and new subjectivities, focusing on some emblematic cases.

The Plurality Of Indigenous Autonomies

The resurgence of traditions of resistance and multiple forms of ethnic reinvention by indigenous peoples have proved powerful weapons to confront capitalist dispossession. One aspect of this opposition is the mobilization around demands for the recognition of anti-colonial epistemologies that create new ground for new concepts such as the rights of nature, the refoundation of the state based on plurinationality (this has very different variants in each country), and forms of legal pluralism (Bravo Espinosa, 2019) that endorse the self-government of indigenous peoples according to their customary law. On an international level, the recognition of rights specifically linked to the collective identity of peoples is a major victory of indigenous groups. It is formally expressed in the International Labor Organization’s Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO Convention 169, which came into effect in 1991) and in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. Both of these stipulate the need to obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” (FPIC) when it comes to any kind of territorial use in lands belonging to indigenous peoples (for example, regarding proposals for extractive industry megaprojects).

Autonomy strategies that instrumentalize indigenous identity to obtain the state’s recognition of their rights can be a double-edged sword, since this entails a reciprocal recognition of the state’s legitimacy. The use of these legal strategies by some autonomy movements has led to an entire industry of anthropological expertise (Hale, 2020) that entails risks of co-optation and dilemmas related to the identity, “authenticity,” and representativeness of peoples. These dilemmas are reflected in the contradictory consequences that emerge from the “consultations” that, while appearing to comply with the international obligations of FPIC, are in fact promoted with extractivist goals, such as the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) in Bolivia (Delgado, 2017) and several megaprojects in Mexico during the presidential term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador ³ (Gasparello, 2020; Aguilar and Yásnaya, 2021; Azamar Alonso and Rodríguez Wallenius, 2021; Durán Matute and Moreno, 2021). In any case, internal sectors of these same governments have warned about the limits of continuing to bet on a model of economic re-primarization to finance needs of the masses.

There is not an absolute dichotomy between strategies of negotiating or not with the constituted authorities. As we will see later, since 2011 the Purépecha of Cherán, a municipality in the central-western part of the Mexican state of Michoacán, have employed a mixed strategy of reaffirming their indigenous identity, asserting their legal rights to self-government, and taking direct action to win an important autonomous space (Colin et al., 2017; Martínez Navarrete, 2021). The Zapatistas in Chiapas employed a strategy of de facto autonomy in confrontation with the state in a geographically more isolated area, but simultaneously engaged in negotiations with the government and signed the San Andrés Accords in 1996. The negotiations reached an impasse when the state insisted on defining indigenous peoples as “objects of public interest” instead of subjects of rights, and on limiting their right to self-government to bodies subordinated to official institutions; this betrayal was concretized in the federal indigenous law approved with the support of all political parties in 2001, but roundly rejected by various indigenous peoples. However, it is important to note that, throughout the negotiations, the Zapatistas did not cease to exercise their de facto autonomy through practices that consolidated their new political subjectivity.

Beyond indigenous identity as a strategic instrument or goal of autonomy, we can consider identity as a process that is built and developed collectively in the daily life of the autonomous community. Through the struggle itself, peoples generate a new subjectivity (Navarro Trujillo, 2013) that is both a collective identity as well as a weapon of resistance they can use with, against, or outside the instances of the state and according to their own strategic criteria. In this process, the space they build and occupy represents a new communal reality (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2017), the cradle of resistance and popular power (Espinosa Damián and Meza Velarde, 2019; Hopkins and Pineda, 2021). It does not necessarily take place within a contiguous physical territory, since autonomy can be exercised in various rural, urban, and even global spaces in the form of solidarity networks. Next, we will examine the experiences of the Zapatista movement following the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; the autonomous practices of the Purépecha community in Cherán in the Mexican state of Michoacán since 2011; and the struggle in Wallmapu (Zibechi and Martínez Navarrete, 2020; Nahuelpán et al., 2021), a traditional territory of the Mapuche people that in recent years has found itself confronting the Chilean state and the forestry industry.

The Zapatista Experience

The Zapatista rebellion of January 1, 1994 has become emblematic among autonomy struggles, serving as an inspiration for many liberation movements. The initial armed uprising in a region of the Mexican Republic as marginalized as the state of Chiapas originally included the participation of indigenous people of various ethnic groups (mainly Maya). However, it quickly became a social movement focused on emancipatory autonomy. It won broad support among civil society because, although the direct subjects were indigenous people from Chiapas, their battle cry of “¡Ya basta!” or “Enough is enough!” encompassed an inclusive “we” and a rejection of neoliberal capitalism (symbolized at the time by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into effect on the day of the uprising) and the ways in which it threatened to extinguish the communal spaces of society.

The construction of de facto autonomy in Zapatista territory evolved from the creation of self-government structures consisting of communities that choose their authorities via assemblies (free of political parties), Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipalities (Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas, MAREZ), and Caracoles that cover the territory of several autonomous municipalities and are governed by Good Government Councils (Juntas de Buen Gobierno, JBG; González Casanova, 2007). The members of these bodies fulfill their obligations without receiving any salary, serve for short, rotating periods, with norms for accountability to the community and the revocability of their mandates. In this way, the experience and lessons brought about by autonomous self-government are socialized and a horizontal structure is preserved, avoiding the hierarchies associated with the formation of a political class in official governments. A portion of the territory recovered from landowners by the Zapatista social base is assigned to collective production, so that the process of distributing the tasks and deciding on the use of surpluses is carried out in participatory assemblies that strengthen the sense of collective identity and communal commitment (Stahler-Sholk, 2015). These autonomous communities replaced the civil servants of official schools and clinics with education and health promoters who are selected and guided by the communities themselves to provide their services according to an established communal rationale. In this way, the school and the community end up being inseparable, part of a process that forges the “militant capital” of the new generations (Baronnet, 2012). Likewise, Zapatista justice is managed in a way that is accessible to the community, employs the local indigenous languages, entails no cost to the parties, and follows the principles of reparation instead of punishment.

The inclusive, horizontal, and participatory practices developed within the Zapatista autonomy project have laid the foundations for an ethics of alternative and anti-capitalist social relations (Baronnet, Mora Bayo, and Stahler-Sholk, 2011). They are nourished by the indigenous concept of lekil kuxlejal (which is similar to the notion of buen vivir), but instead of reproducing a static or essentialized tradition, they incorporate anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal practices and modalities (Harvey, 2016; Mora, 2017). This is a new imaginary of another possible society (Cerda García, 2011).

The Zapatista model of autonomy does not seek to impose itself as a vanguard, but it has notably inspired other processes of “ethnic rearticulation” among other indigenous peoples of Mexico and Latin America who seek to gain autonomy in the face of contemporary capitalist depredation (Bastos, 2021; Carmona Motolinia and Tetreault, 2021). The Zapatistas have created open spaces through meetings without a fixed agenda, from the Intergalactic Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism (Encuentro Intergaláctico por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo) in 1996 to various gatherings of women from around the world, and the CompArte and ConCiencia solidarity festivals in 2016 and 2017. ⁴ They have also engaged in other creative efforts of communication and liaison with other struggling peoples. These include the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle (Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona) and The Other Campaign (La Otra Campaña) of 2005-06, or the sessions of the Zapatista School (Escuelita Zapatista) that began in 2013 when activists from around the world were invited to take part in educational stays with Zapatista families, and the Zapatista tour of Europe in 2021. Then, in a series of communications issued between October and December 2023, the Zapatistas announced substantial reforms in both their self-government structures and their vision of land tenure. In a restructuring that takes another step towards the decentralization of authority, the MAREZ and the JBG disappeared, replaced by a Local Autonomous Government (Gobierno Autónomo Local, GAL) at the communal level and Zapatista Autonomous Government Collectives (Colectivos de Gobiernos Autónomos Zapatistas, CGAZ) that can convene regional assemblies when necessary. At the same time, they announced the abolition of property in the lands they had recovered, declaring them “non-property” or for “common work” for Zapatistas or “non-Zapatista brothers and sisters” depending on agreements to be negotiated by people, region, or zone. They explained that this restructuring responded, on the one hand, to a defensive rationale in a context of increasing aggression, and on the other, to a proactive rectification of undesirable top-down tendencies that had emerged within the previously existing structures of self-government. ⁵ These initiatives attest to a vision of autonomy as an open process. An invitation to participate “from below and toward the left,” as the Zapatistas themselves put it, in emancipatory struggles of various modalities defined by the collective subjects themselves, positioned against what they call the “capitalist hydra” (EZLN, 2016).

The Experience Of Cherán K’eri

Also in Mexico, though in the state of Michoacán, the Purépecha community of Cherán rose up in 2011: they were fighting against the dispossession of their common goods, which had been carried out by drug cartels for more than five years, and began a movement of self-government, sovereignty and protection of their territory that lasts until today. This type of indigenous autonomy maintains a relationship with the state based on the locality’s direct claim to the budget assigned to indigenous municipalities. With its almost 18,000 inhabitants, who are concentrated in the urban area of the municipal seat, adjacent to extensive forests of pine and oak, for decades a large part of the Purépecha indigenous population has been involved in the flow of labor migration to the United States. Many have lost their mother tongue. In the 21st century, however, the specific circumstances of the usurpation of their commons by capitalist groups and organized crime (cartels and allied groups) motivated them to reclaim their identity and indigenous rights (Mora, 2021), innovating their own model of autonomy. In this way, Cherán succeeded in contesting an interstitial space in the Mexican political scenario that, in addition to influencing constitutional change, opened an unexplored route for indigenous autonomies and has consolidated itself as an experience that, although it enjoys state recognition, has forged its own political, economic and cultural path—a path based on the reconstitution and protection of its territory (Colin et al., 2017; Martínez Navarrete, 2021; Gasparello, 2021).

As in much of Latin America, the process of capitalist appropriation of Cherán’s resources intensified during the 20th century and became a fundamental precondition for understanding its development as an antagonistic experience. During the second half of the last century, the avocado business emerged in Michoacán and soon became known as the “green gold” due to its high profitability in the global market, mainly in the United States. During more than three decades of commercial growth, the avocado business attracted dubious organizations linked to the major capital interests of Michoacan’s agricultural sphere. It even attracted gangs who had historically focused on the trafficking of narcotics and other goods, and they began operating to create the necessary territorial conditions for their expansion.

Such convergences exacerbated during the neoliberal era. State deregulation and the privatization of Michoacán’s agriculture via the Mexican agrarian counter-reform of 1991 (disguised as a “reform” of Article 27 of the Constitution, it eliminated the protection of the collective property of the ejidos and communal property), in addition to the already extensive presence of organized crime in some states, nurtured an alliance between the avocado sector and drug trafficking. The talamonte, or traditional local logger who worked only to provide for residential demand and had historically subsisted in the Purépecha Plateau in a deep state of precariousness, found new criminal employers. Criminal groups began paying talamontes to deforest the common woodlands and force changes in land use to expand avocado groves. As neoliberalism flourished, clandestine sawmills proliferated throughout the Purépecha Plateau; they produced illegal timber and undertook timber laundering, forming the basis of a criminal complex that would operate in the region with impunity for decades to come.

In Cherán, this criminal complex consisted of drug trafficking groups as well as various municipal bodies such as the police force, political parties and local authorities. With their complicity, dozens of loggers entered and between 2007 and 2011 devastated around 10,000 hectares of communal forest. By 2011, this complex dominated every aspect of life in the municipality, to the point of establishing curfews and protection rackets that forced local merchants to make regular payments to carry out many of their economic activities.

However, these dynamics reached a point of no return on April 15, 2011. A group of community members decided to arrest the loggers and expel the drug traffickers, the municipal president, political parties and the police, initiating a self-imposed siege that, over the ensuing months, led to the autonomy process currently in place.

Part of the indigenous autonomy of Cherán is reaffirmed in the work carried out in its internal spaces of economic and political sovereignty. The communal government structure, where activities coordinators meet, the neighborhood assemblies and the fogatas or bonfires (grassroots instances of community discussion and resolution organized by each street in the town) are part of these spaces that derive their full meaning when they interconnect with the economic initiatives relaunched after 2011. These initiatives, along with the income from the capitalist market, provide an important part of the material support for the people of Cherán. In addition to traditional activities such as agriculture and the collection of forest resin, the communal nursery, the resin factory, the sawmill and the concrete block factory are communal enterprises that allow, through the mobilization of living labor, the incorporation of men and women into the productive fabric of the municipality as well as the generation of resources and products used across the different spaces of communal life.

The Experience Of Autonomy In Wallmapu

The territorially based autonomy movement ⁶ in Wallmapu, unlike the aforementioned experiences, never directed its political energies toward an explicit negotiation with the state. Although, following its birth during the 1990s, a fraction of those involved chose to follow an institutional path, the territorial (“rupturist”) current focused directly on the recovery of their ancestral lands. By then, these had been reduced by about 95% given the expansion of the forestry industry in southern Chile (Zibechi and Martínez Navarrete, 2020; Martínez Navarrete, 2021; Nahuelpán et al., 2021, 2022). ⁷

The long history of dispossession in Mapuche territory began in full force during the second half of the 19th century with the so-called “Pacification of Araucanía.” This involved the colonial and military occupation of what had, until then, been sovereign Mapuche lands as well as the appropriation of wealth, territorial confinement, and forced annexation to the Republic of Chile in a variant of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006). This process produced a condition of subordination that was only moderately reversed during the Popular Unity government (1970-1973) and then exacerbated during the military dictatorship (1973-1989), which increased dispossession and land-grabbing across Mapuche territory by the major national families who gradually sold these properties to forestry corporations at very low prices. Thus, private forest property was established across Wallmapu and the material contraction of the Mapuche communities intensified, a phenomenon that led to the current territorial conflicts.

The territorially-based Mapuche autonomist movement reclaims a long tradition of weychan (struggle); that is, a broad set of resistance practices beginning with the war against Spanish colonization in defense of indigenous sovereignty from the 16th century onwards. It was not until the aforementioned Pacification of Araucanía that this tradition suffered a severe setback, when Mapuche forces were defeated by the Chilean military. After a century, the struggle was recently revitalized in the territorial recoveries promoted by organizations and communities following the rationale of territorial autonomy. The sabotage of installations of forestry capital and its infrastructure, Mapuche occupation of thousands of hectares of the regional latifundia, and territorial mobilization, among other activities, are part of the practice of weychan (struggle) as a tradition with a definite, current purpose: the eviction of large transnational corporations from Wallmapu, as well as the dissolution of the colonial latifundia that persist. Both are minimum conditions to sustain the communal reproduction of Mapuche families and other poor Chilean families who have been received in the recovered lands.

The forms of territorial autonomy exercised by the Mapuche movement under the weychan tradition have now come into direct conflict not only with the forestry industry and latifundia, but also with the plurinational aspirations promoted by various indigenous sectors of the constituent process and other allies of Gabriel Boric’s government, which came to power in March 2022. The analysis of the organizations and communities that participate in the autonomist movement, as expressed in various public statements, confronts this new “progressive” scenario on at least three relevant points: firstly, they criticize the plurinational proposals because these lack a social basis or support for processes of territorial recovery. Secondly, because the proposals ignore the real magnitude of the territorial dispossession of the Mapuche and the expansion of large corporations in Mapuche territory, with the Constitutional Convention (established by the plebiscite of October 2020) and the government seeking to restrict their solution of the territorial problem only to formally recognized lands and not to all dispossessed lands. Finally, they critique these plurinational aspirations because the state has failed to acknowledge as political prisoners the more than forty Mapuche imprisoned as a result of territorial conflicts.

Conclusions

The structural contradiction of capitalism exists on a global scale which it seeks to alleviate in Latin America via an intensification of the process of accumulation by dispossession, which serves to produce capital assets that over-accumulate in the global North at low costs. This has enabled the expansion of neo-extractivism into indigenous territories, a process embedded in a colonial continuum with its consequent pro-autonomy responses.

The concept of indigenous autonomy has diversified since its resurgence at the end of the 20th century, and its current strongly polysemic character defies static or uniform definitions. Rather, each experience draws on different genealogies in its variegated praxis, sometimes operating clearly against the authority of the state and, at other times, employing various modalities of negotiation with constituted powers. These differing ways of engaging can be complementary to the diverse forms of indigenous autonomy. In practice, however, indigenous autonomy constitutes a substantive and plural response to the consequences of the current phase of capitalism in Latin America. Decades of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, in addition to the persistence of colonial practices, have led to a wide-ranging unfolding of autonomous experiences that combine diverse tactics and strategies to put forth viable alternatives for a dignified life.

In the context of global capitalism and its current phase of accumulation by dispossession, autonomies do not easily fit into the false dichotomies between models that negotiate with and accommodate to the political-legal institutions of the state on the one hand, and, on the other, those that are completely separated from it. Rather, the experiences of the Zapatistas, Cherán, and the Mapuche movement attest to a diversity of strategic and non-homogeneous conceptions and practices that, taken together, place indigenous peoples at the forefront of resistance movements. The very process of organizing themselves to defend their territory and commons leads to new collective subjectivities that challenge the logic of global capitalism.

Contents Of The Issue

The articles included in Part 1 of this double issue highlight different key aspects of autonomies presented in three sections, each touching on a subtheme. First and following this introduction, Oliveira and Modonesi’s contribution, “Independence and Emancipation: Latin American Theorizing on the Concept of Autonomy,” examines the Latin American literature to create a genealogy and theoretical and conceptual typology on the topic. Among the currents it identifies are autonomist Marxism and Italian operaismo (workerism), as well as indigenous thinkers who have addressed the concepts of the commons and communality. Oliveira and Modonesi classify theories according to their focus on autonomy as either negation, independence, counter-power/popular power, emancipation, or community. They place autonomies in the context of the anti-neoliberal struggles of recent decades, marked by new repertoires of action from below and, specifically, that of indigenous irruption as symbolized by the Zapatista uprising of 1994. Next, Márquez Duarte offers a classification of the neoliberal states of Abya Yala (America), according to how their reforms extend a certain degree of recognition or representation to indigenous peoples with corresponding mechanisms for exercising self-determination. His analysis suggests the limitations of a state-centric focus and the relevance of emancipatory practices from below.

A second block focuses on autonomy from the perspective of the historical formation of identities and worldviews (cosmovisions) arising from indigenous peoples and peasants. Kim’s article examines the Escuela-Ayllu of Warisata, an indigenous education project in Bolivia in the 1930s and 40s. Kim argues that this project became a political space of communal democracy, participation and reciprocity both in education and agrarian relations that undermined the rural order structured by internal colonialism while laying the foundations for rural struggle during the Bolivian revolution of 1952. Benítez and Bicalho examine the origins of the Brazilian Indigenous Movement (Movimiento Indígena Brasileiro, MIB) in a series of Assemblies of Indigenous Chiefs convened by missionaries during the 1970s. These gave rise to an imaginary of struggle, self-recognition, and resistance against official policies of dehumanization and invisibility. The authors delve into the archives to reveal the driving force behind a powerful shift in indigenous opposition to developmentalism and authoritarianism. Similarly, Rosset and Barbosa (2021) inscribe autonomous struggles in the social and political context of the region. Their article looks at the intersection of ethnic/indigenous and class/peasant identities to explain the range of conceptualizations and struggle strategies for autonomy in the region.

The third section addresses the implications of regional thought and practice for problematizing the concept of development. García-Arias and Cuestas-Caza make use of anticolonial thought and pluriversal perspectives to consider the possibility of an intercultural, decolonial and ecological Buen Vivir (BV-IDE). They argue that this alternative, autonomous vision destabilizes the hegemonic power of the neoliberal, neo-developmentalist, and neocolonial model. Copeland examines the case of the movement for the defense of territory (DT) in Guatemala following the 1996 peace accords and focuses on the relationship between the indigenous-ontopolitical critique of development and peasant demands for alternative development. The author believes that, despite the tension between these visions, there is the potential to forge a strategy of territorial autonomy based on radical agrarian justice and food sovereignty to confront neoliberal extractivism.

Part 2 (coming September 2024) addresses three additional subthemes: the tensions between autonomy projects and state attempts to condition them, the formation of new political subjects in the struggle for land and territory, and concrete case studies of resistance mobilizations against capitalist megaprojects. As a whole, this collection in two thematic issues testifies to the rich diversity of theories, concepts, practices and processes of autonomy that, taken together, present a clear affirmation of the multiple alternatives to the hegemonic model that capitalism seeks to impose throughout the Latin American region.