Browsing by Author "Mattiace, Shannan"

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    Indigenous autonomy and Latin American state security in contexts of criminal violence: the cases of Cauca in Colombia and Guerrero in Mexico
    (2023) Mattiace, Shannan; Alberti Chesta, Carla Andrea
    Scholars writing on Indigenous autonomy in the Americas have focused mainly on social movement demands and on the implementation of laws that enshrine autonomy rights. The motives of state officials in enacting de jure legislation on autonomy have received less scholarly attention. In this research note, we examine the Cauca region of southwestern Colombia and the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both regions have similar percentages of Indigenous populations and have experienced high levels of violence and insecurity related to organized criminal groups (OCGs) in recent decades. Territorial autonomy was granted to Indigenous peoples in the 1991 Colombian constitution, while only weak Indigenous autonomy rights were laid out in the 2001 amendments to the Mexican constitution, leaving autonomy to be legislated by sub-national states. We suggest that state security motives may help explain variation in outcomes between these two cases and that more attention needs to be paid to Indigenous autonomy in the context of narco wars and criminal violence. Increasingly these wars are being played out in rural areas throughout Latin America where Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples reside.
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    State Responses to Autonomy Demands: Indigenous Movements and Regional Threats in Bolivia and Ecuador
    (2023) Alberti, Carla; Mattiace, Shannan
    In this paper, we examine the political factors that explain state responses to demands for indigenous territorial autonomy in Ecuador and Bolivia. Specifically, we aim to explain why the 2009 Bolivian constitution limited indigenous territorial autonomy to the departmental level, not allowing indigenous peoples to establish autonomous regions that lay beyond a single departmental jurisdiction, whereas the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution allows indigenous jurisdictions to exceed provincial boundaries. We argue that, in Bolivia, a strong conservative autonomy movement led by the country's eastern departments forced state officials to negotiate with regional elites, thus limiting the window of opportunity for indigenous movements and their allies to demand territorial autonomy. In the absence of a strong territorialized threat in Ecuador, indigenous movements and their allies had larger windows of opportunity to press their claims for territorial autonomy. This study contributes to comparative research on how states have simultaneously affirmed and limited indigenous autonomy.