As we have been pointing out in the Working Group, the struggle for autonomy has occupied a central place in the international debate on the collective rights of indigenous peoples over the last 30 years, with greater visibility in Latin America following several key moments and historical milestones. These include the great indigenous mobilization of 1992, a demonstration of rejection and resistance to the “celebration” of the 500th anniversary of colonial conquest; the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas since January 1994; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 1997; and the indigenous mobilizations and constituent processes that, since 2000, have been led by indigenous actors in Bolivia and Ecuador, achieving the incorporation of the concept of indigenous autonomy and the recognition of plurinational states in the constitutions of both countries in 2009 and 2008, respectively. These are some of the many facts, processes and ways in which indigenous autonomies have been claimed, demanded, disputed, built and defended throughout Latin America. 

In several regions of Latin America, in the face of government repression, autonomous processes represent a mechanism for developing resistance strategies, as is the case in Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Colombia; forms of social construction in rebellion, de facto, as in the case of the Zapatistas in Mexico; or from the transformation of the State, as in the case of the indigenous movement in Ecuador and Bolivia, which despite the formal constitutional recognition of indigenous autonomies, continue to dispute political and territorial rights and "real" autonomy, which would help to visualize the limitations of the new state formulations.

In this context, the issue of Indigenous autonomy has gained relevance, whether at the level of general demands, in the specific demands and proposals of Indigenous movements and organizations, or in the debates and processes related to the reform and/or “refounding of the State in Latin America” (Santos, 2010). Based on the diversity of existing experiences, we find that, through collective organization and everyday resistance, Indigenous autonomy processes represent a strategy for confronting the dominant ideologies and hegemonic frameworks that legitimize, naturalize, and perpetuate the relations of domination, subordination, and exclusion of Indigenous peoples. Even Indigenous populations that have migrated to cities, who may maintain connections with their communities of origin, or who recreate certain aspects of their way of life in urban spaces, open up possibilities for exercising autonomy through the struggle for self-determination and the defense of their cultural rights. Thus, the idea of ​​autonomy has been renewed and assumed not only as discourse, but as a daily practice and construction of political and territorial action and organization, of sociocultural identity, of critical sense, of potential societal alternative or as a modality of socio-territorial resistance and defense of collective rights as peoples.

It could be argued that the very existence of every Indigenous people today constitutes an act of rebellion; that being here, today, and now, after 500 years of colonialism, embodies the will of a people struggling to exist and endure. Alongside this resistance, organizational forms are emerging that reclaim Indigenous thought and community practices, enabling the development of innovative alternatives that redefine sociopolitical and economic relationships at all levels (from the family and community to the regional level, and even in their interactions with states and other social actors). This, in turn, fosters the creation of opportunities that make emancipation and decolonization possible under conditions of equity, freedom, and dignity within their own territories.

The struggles for self-determination and the autonomous processes throughout Latin America assume vital importance as they constitute, in turn, territorial resistances and r-existences (Porto Gonçalves, 2010) against the advance throughout the continent of development models in which extractivist or neo-extractivist logics prevail, within the framework of what Maristella Svampa (2013) calls the “commodities consensus”, characterized by the deepening of a dynamic of territorial dispossession and of nature (common goods) through the exploitation of hydrocarbons, megamining, or the expansion of the agricultural and forestry frontier through agribusiness, which mainly affect those territories traditionally occupied by peasant and indigenous communities. We found that the extractivist development model updates not only the dynamics of capitalist dispossession, but also the relations of coloniality, denying the specificity of territories and populations and their ways of life, recreating relations of subordination and exploitation.

It is important to note that the struggles in defense of Indigenous rights are primarily fought in the territories they have ancestrally inhabited and which hold great significance for them. This dimension is central to the nature of the disputes that predominate in this century. The territories of Indigenous peoples—usually reservoirs of biodiversity and numerous natural resources—become coveted by capital that seeks to exploit and commodify them, disregarding the existence of vast populations and other ways of life that have coexisted and related harmoniously with nature throughout the centuries. These operations can only generate greater pressure on the communities and their territories, as well as increasing marginalization and the threat of the definitive loss of their identities and ways of life.

The conditions presented by so-called “predatory capitalism” in Latin American countries, at the cost of irreversible damage to nature and the dispossession of populations from their territories, violating their rights, are in constant conflict with the possibility of developing a dignified life or “good living/living well” as alternative visions stemming from community-based worldviews. These worldviews encompass ancestral knowledge and alternative ways of understanding the relationship with nature, the cosmos, life, and shared existence. In this sense, today's Indigenous movements fight against “projects of death” that threaten life, the planet, and Mother Earth as our common home, in order to open new epistemic, intellectual, and societal possibilities. Therefore, it is a critical and intellectual choice to explore the proposals and processes derived from movements fighting for autonomy, which, through their everyday practices, could be producing alternatives for societal and socio-environmental decolonization. 

These proposals and processes reveal, among other aspects, ongoing conflicts between the State and Indigenous peoples (and Indigenous movements) where the respect for or realization of collective and historical territorial rights, as well as the defense of collective identity and their own culture, appear to be at stake. These aspects are subject to tense processes of negotiation, pressure, and/or harassment involving external factors dependent on governments, political parties, military forces, extractive transnational corporations, NGOs, and other actors, but also on endogenous phenomena, which sometimes represent contradictions and limitations within the Indigenous movements themselves. Thus, the struggle of Indigenous peoples for their right to political self-governance and territorial self-determination—and even ontological and epistemic self-determination—faces multiple obstacles, limitations, and resistance, even though in some cases they have achieved recognition from the State and/or the incorporation and mainstreaming of their collective rights.

In the prologue to the latest book by the Working Group, Araceli Burguete argues that, as the second decade of the 21st century draws to a close, a distinctive feature of the autonomy struggles of Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala (Latin America) is the struggle to define the concept of autonomy. This struggle arises from the creative expression of Indigenous subjects who use their struggles to interpret it within a framework of autonomous grammar, amidst a diversity of processes across the continent. This openness, which led to a polyphony of conceptualization, occurred at a particular juncture, as “autonomy” ceased to be a merely legal notion and became situated within the realm of social movements (Burguete, 2018). As is well known, this concept emerged in the 1980s and began to be discussed in the field of law, encompassing human rights, international law, and domestic law. Subsequently, it has been studied extensively from the field of social movements and, more recently, from the perspectives of “societal movements” (Tapia, 2008).

The debate surrounding political and territorial autonomies has thus opened up, particularly in Latin America, a fertile field of theoretical and political discussion on social, political, territorial, and productive alternatives arising from countless local experiences emerging from the “subsoil of politics” (Tapia, 2008). These autonomous processes seem to primarily challenge capitalism as a form of human organization and nation-states themselves as modes of organizing the political life of society (Zibechi, 2008). Faced with multi-sited emergencies of autonomy, it is proposed to reformulate the univocal approach and, rather than analytically thinking about “autonomy” in the singular, to reflect on “autonomies” in the plural, since a characteristic of these is the differentiated way in which they are constructed, according to the context of each reality and the subjects who champion and lead them.

Thus, Indigenous autonomy emerges from multiple sources, with diverse manifestations. Each one reflects the specific cultural context from which it arises, its multicolored and polymorphic nature being some of the main characteristics of contemporary Indigenous autonomies. The expansion and consolidation of the autonomy approach is a constitutive part of most Indigenous struggles in Latin America, due to the unifying role it plays in its two manifestations: autonomy as an end and autonomy as a process in contemporary Indigenous struggles (Burguete, 2010). The political processes of autonomy construction developed by Indigenous peoples today imply a conception of the world, of life in society, of nature, and of the society/nature relationship that differs from that proposed by capitalism. These processes also entail a substantial difference in terms of the organization of ways of life, and for this reason, they become, in many cases, a threat to the system (Ceceña, 2008). Autonomy is not merely a declaration, nor does it represent an ideological objective; rather, it is intrinsically linked to difference. Indigenous peoples need autonomy to protect their culture, their worldview, and their world as distinct from the hegemonic world (Zibechi, 2008). In this sense, territorial control is the primary foundation upon which autonomy is built. This is because autonomy is not a concession from the State, but a conquest by the Indigenous social actors who need to protect and strengthen their distinctiveness in order to continue existing as a people. From this perspective, autonomy becomes a kind of trilogy of territory, self-government, and self-determination (Zibechi, 2008), all of which are inseparable aspects.

The Working Group “Indigenous Peoples in the Struggle for Autonomy” (later renamed the Working Group “Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy Processes”), which has been working and exchanging ideas collectively since 2013 with the support of CLACSO, arose from the need to reflect on the importance of Indigenous struggles for autonomy in Latin America. Continuing this line of collective work and the processes of research, reflection, discussion, and exchange among different researchers in an interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue, this Working Group, which we now call “Indigenous Peoples, Autonomy, and Collective Rights,” aims to renew and update the questions raised in order to further analyze the role of Indigenous autonomy processes and their influence on broader social and political processes. This influence stems from their role as an inspiration for other social struggles or as a challenge to the persistence of certain sociopolitical and territorial relations of exclusion and/or denial, as well as the power structures and practices of domination that underpin them. Likewise, the group intends to continue investigating and supporting the autonomous processes of indigenous peoples, as well as the demands for their recognition and exercise of their collective rights by the States, whether it involves their restructuring or refounding, in order to understand the possibilities and ways in which indigenous peoples and their struggles for autonomy can be a seed for building societal systems alternative to the dominant and hegemonic order.

Complementary to the approach to the autonomous dimension, the analysis of the levels, dimensions and limits of the exercise of collective rights by indigenous peoples, as well as the capacities and resources available to indigenous organizations, allows for a more precise understanding of the possibilities of generating their own policies in areas of production of goods and services, food sovereignty, justice, health, education, habitat, communication, culture and relationship with nature.

Furthermore, reflection on current processes for defending collective rights highlights the need to consider the actions of nation-states as key actors in the struggle for and recognition of Indigenous peoples. Public policies oriented in this direction present a varied and complex landscape throughout Latin America, although shortcomings persist in characterizing needs and deficiencies in implementation. Given the explicit contradiction inherent in the choice of Latin American governments to maintain an extractive economic model, and the resulting violation of rights for Indigenous populations inhabiting disputed territories, we deem it necessary to conduct a comparative and in-depth analysis of the scope of national and international legal frameworks and their concrete implementation in the countries of the region, as well as the state plans, projects, and lines of work that target these communities.

In this regard, we have observed that one of the main mechanisms enshrined in Latin American constitutions and legislation as a means of recognizing Indigenous rights—namely, the implementation of prior, free, and informed consultations regarding plans that affect community territories—has, in some cases, become a spurious validation of projects with a high negative impact on populations and territories; a “permit” for plunder. Visualizing these situations and understanding these mechanisms are crucial for us in addressing the current challenges Indigenous peoples face in realizing their main demands.

In short, the Working Group “Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies, and Collective Rights” aims, as a pluralistic academic collective, to study, contribute to, and support, from critical perspectives of thought and action, the practices of struggle for Indigenous autonomy, as well as their daily realities and horizons of possibility, in different national contexts and from a Latin American perspective. It also seeks to identify and reflect on the challenges for the social sciences in understanding the place that Indigenous peoples and Indigenous movements occupy today within the anti-systemic movements that have arisen with the modern/colonial/patriarchal world system and capitalism as the dominant civilizational order.