Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has consolidated itself in a new, long-term cycle of accumulation, fluctuating between crises and periods of peak activity, but constantly expanding its areas of influence. In Latin America, the preeminence of foreign capital has promoted the re-primarization of economies and a deepening of dependency relations (Katz, 2019). In this context, the borders between North and South are porous, suggesting that the "Southern countries" have become central to the development, expansion, and existence of global capitalism, giving rise to questions that no longer seek to define the "South" a priori, but rather propose to elucidate the constitutive relationship of global processes, with their articulations and antagonisms.

From this perspective, the issue of indigenous autonomies and territorial struggles takes on central importance for understanding the historical processes that have unfolded within each region of Latin America, and their connection to global dynamics. Over the last 40 years, various processes have taken place, such as the great indigenous mobilization of 1992 in protest against and resistance to the commemoration of 500 years of colonial conquest; the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas since January 1994; the indigenous mobilizations and constituent processes that, since 2000, have been led by indigenous actors in Bolivia and Ecuador, resulting in the incorporation of indigenous autonomy into the constitutions of both countries; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007; and indigenous mobilizations for processes of territorial and sociocultural recovery, land surveys, historical reparations, among others. Among a large number of events, these are processes and ways in which indigenous autonomies have been claimed, demanded, disputed, built and defended throughout Latin America.

Our Working Group has sought to problematize autonomous processes in order to understand how these movements, which we consider innovative strategies of resistance and re-existence, unfold. In our studies and debates, we incorporate topics such as organizational processes in response to state repression and the criminalization of Indigenous rights defenders, as seen in countries like Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Colombia; but also the forms of de facto social construction in rebellion, as has occurred in Mexico; and state transformations in Ecuador and Bolivia (García Guerreiro and Monasterio Mercado, 2022; Torres Velázquez et al., 2024; Lao Sánchez and Alkmin, 2025, among others). This has raised questions about the limits of rights recognition, its deficient implementation, and the reemergence of colonial, racist, patriarchal, and class structures that still underlie governmental practices and current social orders. In this sense, the struggles of the peoples have shown that they include long-range, cumulative and overlapping processes, which incorporate and renew the meanings of existence and the relationship with space and thus formulate new territorialization strategies based on tradition and the past, present conflicts and the imagined future (Hurtado and Porto-Gonçalves, 2022).

The treatment of these issues extends beyond the academic sphere, which is why the Working Group's work is carried out dialogically and in conjunction with Indigenous peoples, communities, and organizations from different regions of Latin America. Based on the diversity of experiences, collaborative work, and on-the-ground engagements, we find that, through collective organization and daily resistance, Indigenous peoples construct strategies that challenge hegemonic development models and state institutions, albeit not without contradictions and complexities that must be carefully analyzed and problematized. "Autonomy is so that the State and the world recognize our way of life?" resonates in these territories (García Guerreiro et al., 2022, p. 67). It could be argued that the existence of every Indigenous people today constitutes an act of rebellion; that being here, today, and now, after 533 years of colonialism, embodies the will of a people who struggle to be and to remain. From this, the future horizon points to the construction of opportunities that make emancipation and decolonization possible under conditions of equity, freedom and dignity in the same territories.

However, in recent years, environmental degradation in Latin America has continued to worsen due to the destruction of biodiversity in its territories. This directly impacts the dignity of life for its people. The region possesses 24% of the world's terrestrial ecoregions, 18% of its marine ecoregions, and a third of the planet's freshwater reserves. All of this not only sustains the region but also provides substantial support for planetary stability in an invisible way; that is, these are natural resources that "the world uses but does not acknowledge" (Giglo et al., 2024). The problem is that extractive activities and the expansion of the agricultural frontier remain central to the development model, which continues to be based on "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2003). In fact, this has deepened, despite the incorporation of new adjectives such as "sustainable," "green," or "green." and of climate change mitigation narratives, which are still anthropocentric and contain an economic matrix (Gudynas and Carpio Benalcázar, 2024).

In this context, the struggles for self-determination and autonomy processes throughout Latin America take on vital planetary importance, as they share the potential and the challenge of transforming these processes of environmental deterioration and degradation, as well as dismantling the deepening of violence. These proposals and processes manifest disputes that are subject to tense processes of negotiation, pressure, and/or siege, involving external factors such as governments, political parties, military forces, extractive transnational corporations, NGOs, and other actors, but also endogenous phenomena that 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 faces multiple obstacles, limits, and boundaries, even though in some cases they have achieved recognition from the State and/or the incorporation and mainstreaming of their collective rights.

The Working Group's work includes an analysis of the conditions presented by so-called "dispossessive capitalism" in Latin American countries, a description of the irreversible damage to nature and the violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples on a regional scale. It also incorporates everyday processes, insofar as these conditions clash with the possibility of developing a dignified life or "good living/living well" as alternative visions stemming from community-based worldviews. In this sense, we attempt to document, analyze, understand, and problematize how contemporary Indigenous movements struggle to confront "projects of death" that threaten life and Mother Earth as our common home, in order to open new possibilities for thought and society. Therefore, exploring the proposals and processes derived from movements fighting for autonomy—which, from their everyday experiences, could be producing alternatives for societal and socio-environmental decolonization—is a critical, proactive, and intellectual approach.

In the prologue to one of the GT's books, Araceli Burguete argues that, as the second decade of the 21st century draws to a close, a distinctive feature of the autonomy struggles of the Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (Latin America) is the struggle to give meaning to the concept itself. This struggle arises from the creative emergence of the subjects themselves, who use their struggles to define autonomy within a framework of their own struggles, grounded in an autonomous grammar, within a context of diverse processes traversing the continent. The debate surrounding political and territorial autonomies has thus opened up, particularly in Latin America, a fertile field of theoretical discussion and political praxis regarding social, political, territorial, and productive alternatives, drawing on countless local experiences that have emerged from the "subsoil of politics" (Tapia, 2008). Autonomy processes appear to primarily challenge capitalism as a form of human organization and nation-states themselves as modes of organizing the political life of society (López Bárcenas, 2008; López and Rivas, 2011; Zibechi, 2008). Faced with multi-sited emergences of autonomy, it is proposed to reformulate the univocal approach and, rather than analytically considering "autonomy" in the singular, reflect on "autonomies" in the plural, since one characteristic of these is the differentiated way in which they are constructed.

Thus, Indigenous autonomies emerge from multiple sources, with diverse manifestations. The expansion and consolidation of the autonomy approach is a constitutive part of most Indigenous struggles in Latin America, due to the articulating role it acquires 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, and of the society/nature relationship that differs from that proposed by capitalism, patriarchy, and coloniality, and this is why they become, in many cases, a threat to the system (Ceceña, 2008). Autonomies are not merely a declaration, nor do they represent an ideological objective, but rather they are linked to difference: Indigenous peoples exercise autonomy to protect their culture, their worldview, and their world as something distinct from the hegemonic world (Zibechi, 2008). Along these lines, territorial control would be the primary foundation upon which autonomy is built. This is because autonomy is not a concession from the State, but rather a constant and ongoing conquest and exercise by Indigenous social actors who need to protect and strengthen their unique characteristics and differences from hegemonic societies in order to continue existing as a people. From this perspective, autonomy would be a kind of trilogy of territory, self-government, and self-determination (Zibechi, 2008), all of which are inseparable aspects.

Our Working Group was born in 2013 out of 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, and exchange among different researchers, in an interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue, the Working Group—which in 2019 we renamed "Indigenous Peoples, Autonomy, and Collective Rights"—aims to renew and update the questions in order to continue analyzing the role of Indigenous autonomy processes and their influence on broader social and political processes. This is because they represent an inspiration for other social struggles or a challenge to the persistence of sociopolitical and territorial relations of exclusion and/or denial, and the power structures and practices of domination that sustain them. Thus, with 12 years of collective experience, 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 areas, 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, indicated by the peoples, that fulfill the aspirations expressed in international instruments in areas of production of goods and services, food sovereignty, customary or own law, self-government, justice, health, education, habitat, communication, culture, ancestral knowledge and relationship with nature.

Furthermore, reflection on current processes for defending collective rights highlights the need to consider the actions of nation-states as relevant actors in the struggle for and recognition of Indigenous peoples. Public policies oriented in this direction present a varied and complex scenario throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, 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 them (Gutiérrez Luna et al., 2025).

In this regard, we have observed that one of the main mechanisms enshrined in Latin American constitutions and legislation as a means of recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples—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 through the simulation of the right to consultation, without seeking the dialogical construction of equitable agreements (Cruz 2025). Visualizing these situations, as well as discerning these mechanisms, is crucial for understanding 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, their connections to and influence on social mobilizations in general, 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.