Chile

In a major win for Chileans, one of the two corporations behind the HidroAysén mega-dam project has announced it will indefinitely suspend plans to continue with the project in the Aysen region of Chilean Patagonia, reported the Nationa

Mapunzugun is a language isolate spoken in Chile and Argentina by the Mapuche people. On February 21, 2012 in Temuco, the capital of Araucanía Region in Chile, several Mapuche organizations and communities organized a first regional march in support of the Mapunzugun language.

Chilean forces continue to target peaceful Rapa Nui individuals, including unarmed women and children occupying their ancestral land. Over the past five months, Rapa Nui clan members have been peacefully reclaiming their ancestral territories. There is now overwhelming military force on the island.  

The most recent eviction was carried out on February 6, 2011 by Chilean armed forces.

On December 3, 2010 armed Chilean troops equipped with riot gear opened fire on unarmed Rapanui civilians refusing to be evicted from ancestral lands. The police started shooting pellet guns and tear gassing at the Rapanui people who for months now have been reoccupying their lands. 

Chile's president, Sebastian Pinera, announced during the country's bicentenary celebration that he would spend $4 billion for development in southern Araucania, which is where most Mapuche live, and that he would open talks with Mapuche leaders on land rights issues and other concerns. The announcement comes as 34 Mapuche activists are conducting a hunger strike in prison to protest their being jailed on charges of terrorism.

Like the rugged landscape that it covers, the Araucaria araucana tree is a fixture in the traditions and culture of the Mapuche people of the Andean foothills in central Chile and southwest Argentina (see page __ for more on the Mapuche). Known by the local people as pewen and by English speakers as the “monkey-puzzle” tree, the Araucaria araucana is native to Chile and is the country’s national tree.

Indigenous people in Chile’s Huasco Valley have held onto their land and their identity for 4,000 years despite conquerors, dictators, and a dominant culture that didn’t recognize their existence.

Since the 1980s, the Chilean government, hoping to bring the country into the global market, has dramatically increased development. This strategy, first initiated under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, has been adopted by the country’s subsequent democratic governments, which have signed free-trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the United States, the European Union, Korea, and China. Most of the foreign investment has been made in the extraction of natural resources in the north and south of Chile.

During the first United Nations International Decade on the World’s Indigenous People (1995-2004), there were a number of positive developments for the world’s indigenous peoples. Many countries adopted legislation concerning land, resources, culture, language, education, justice, intellectual property rights, and in some instances, legal pluralism, autonomy, and self-governance. In 1989, just before the decade began, the International Labor Organization adopted Convention #169 on indigenous and tribal peoples, and since 1996 the U.N.

In Andean countries, widespread protests over violations of traditional rights have resulted in
creative reform proposals to secure indigenous water rights and water system management.

For Rosa Guamán, indigenous leader in the Licto district in Ecuador, as for most campesinos and indígenas in the Andean countries and in Latin America, water rights express more than just the access to a crucial resource.

Chile’s treatment of indigenous peoples and forests is a warning that all is not well with the free market.

When pressed for evidence that free market globalization can work to create a better world, most advocates point to Chile as the Latin American model of neoliberalism and its economic prescriptions—privatization, free markets, export-led growth and deregulation.

Since the days of the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Chile has been implementing these policies, applying the strategies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and more recently the

Indigenous Activists Tell Cultural Survival What The Decade Meant To Them

The impact of the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People has been positive in the sense of using the international instruments and mechanisms of the United Nations to bring the struggle of the Rapa Nui people to the international community.

Anachronistic and divisive colonial and post-colonial policies, senseless destructive nuclear testing and hazardous waste dumping, over-exploitation of natural resources, the threat of global warming and island inundation - these are so

The World Commission on Dams' Process

CANADA

China's "New Dominion"

Despite a growing movement for independence, the plight of the Uighurs of western China has received little attention. One of many ethnic groups struggling for autonomy under Chinese rule. the Uighurs, live in poverty, while China exploits their resource-rich land.

The region is officially called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Province, but that name is misleading. In Chinese, Zinjiang means "new dominion," yet China first conquered the area in the Third Century, BC.

Carmen Pereira de Noe is president of the Center for Indigenous Women of Beni (CMIB), part of the Indigenous Organization of the Beni Region (CPIB). Beni is located in the northeast of Bolivia.

Culture Shock: The misleading term "culture contact" doesn't begin to. express the dramatic effects of changes brought by outsiders

The shock of "contact" has taken many forms, initially, at least, to indigenous people just the physical presence of outsiders was shocking.