Alonso Barros van Hövell tot Westerflier (Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile)
The Practical Declaration: Ius et Praxis amongst Atacama Desert communities
Popular justice sought and sometimes achieved by Atacama Desert communities today, builds on a mix of repertoires that combines both formal and customary normative aspects with respect to land, territories and natural resources, referring to Chilean Human Rights laws, Convention 169 of the ILO and the UN International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This paper explores the intercultural practicalities, assymetries and discriminations enabled by Chilean legal discourse, examining a set of landmark cases in which the author worked as a lawyer in representation of Northern Chile’s Indigenous Peoples and their ius et praxis with respect to water and land disputes against the biggest extractive concerns in the world, with consequences on both, the livelihoods, litigiousness and collective self-representations of the first, and on the Social Responsibility discourses deployed by the latter.
