Indigenous Resistance and the Law

Abstract

The indigenous peoples of Colombia have used various forms of resistance to attempt to change their identities and appropriate their lands. Over time the emphasis has shifted from law and legal titles to marches and land occupations to armed resistance and back again to the law. The legal liberalism that emerged with the 1991 Constitution in Colombia led to the demobilization of the indigenous movement of the time as marches and land occupations were abandoned in favor of lawsuits that identified violations of rights. Success in the courts did not result in any change in the government’s policies or its model of development. As the focus shifted from the local to the national level, indigenous peoples’ problems on the ground remained unresolved. In recent years, however, local organizations have rediscovered old forms of resistance and use the law as just one tool among many for protecting their rights. Los indígenas colombianos han empleado diversas estrategias de resistencia en sus intentos por cambiar su identidad y conservar sus tierras. Lo que en un principio se manifestó como apelaciones a la ley y títulos legales dio, posteriormente, lugar a marchas, ocupación de tierras y resistencia armada, para eventualmente volver a la ley. El liberalismo legal producto de la Constitución de 1991 llevó a la desmovilización del movimiento indígena y las marchas y ocupaciones fueron sustituidas por demandas legales en torno a violación de derechos. Los éxitos obtenidos en la corte, sin embargo, no alteraron la política gubernamental o el modelo de desarrollo. Conforme la atención pasó de los niveles locales al entorno nacional, los problemas indígenas continuaron sin resolución alguna. Recientemente, algunas organizaciones locales han redescubierto antiguas formas de resistencia y utilizan la ley como una herramienta más para proteger sus derechos.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.