Statement on the preventable deaths of Wichi children

The preventable deaths of Wichi children are a stark warning, highlighting the inhumane conditions to which indigenous populations are subjected.

In recent days, the national mass media in Argentina have reported on the deaths of children from the Wichi communities in Salta due to hunger; that is, causes directly linked to the terrible living conditions in which many indigenous communities in the country live their daily lives.

From the CLACSO Working Group on Education and Interculturality, we wish to express our concern about the conditions of material impoverishment in which the lives of many children in indigenous communities in Argentina take place, especially in those territories where population shifts combined with extractive land use models have degraded the environments and current lands of occupation.

To consider these deaths outside the framework of unequal social relations that lead these families to early death from preventable causes is to avoid putting interculturality in Argentina in its true context.

Interculturalism in many of our countries develops within a framework of profound inequality, entrenched through a historical record that disregards the value of ancestral populations in favor of the history of great men. But it is also perpetuated through the implementation of production models that generate high short-term economic returns but leave behind significant environmental liabilities.

In this context, schools often seek to be havens for envisioning an intercultural future, one in which Indigenous populations are valued and interculturalism becomes a national project. With their daily complexities and all that remains to be done in this area, schools frequently become spaces for highlighting many problems, as well as spaces for collective demands.

The preventable deaths of Wichi children are a stark warning highlighting the inhumane conditions to which indigenous populations are subjected, and we trust that they will be a beacon for the development of protection measures that listen to the fundamental demands that are shouted in the silence of the polling stations.

January 2020
Workgroup CLACSO
Education and interculturality