The Constitutional Mirage: Conservative Reaction and Racism in Chile

As it has been recognized by the academic literature, participate or not in institutional spaces is a recurrent dilemma for social movements (Jasper 2006; Abers y von Bülow 2011, Tarrow 2021). The rich history of the Mapuche movement shows the use of different collective action repertoires in both these political arenas (Foerster y Montecino 1988; Tricot y Bidegain 2020).

In this work we propose to study an experience that became an inflexion point of mapuche political participation: this is the Constitutional Convention that worked between 2021 and 2022 in Chile. On one hand it represented the highest point of participation in the institutional political arena of the mapuche people in the las decades. On the other, the counter campaign to the project, the rejection in the plebiscite and the explanations argued to understand these results, as well as the characteristics of the new process, express a strong conservative backlash towards indigenous peoples.

We ask ourselves for the costs, individual and collective of participating in this experience. The distance between the hope on the convention and the post referendum reality. The rejection has represented a double punishment for the mapuche movement: the denial of their demands, but also being reduce to a minimum expression in the new (also failed) constitutional process. From a theoretical perspective, it looks to give input on the academic discussion around institutional participation of social movements through the study of this case that shows the costs of this option.

This article is based on previous information and following up the mapuche historical and current institutional political participation done for more than a decade by the authors. We also will do interviews with relevant actors’ part of the process as well as the use of media analysis to characterize the recent evolution of these phenomena in Chile.