"While I talk to you, they arrive": Rethinking human rights and legitimate differences from mapuche perspectives

Abstract

From a legal perspective, the last three decades can be seen as marking a substantial advance in the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples. Beyond divergences in their scope and inconsistencies in their effective fulfillment by different nation-states, these rights make room for the expression of "legitimate differences" that, until now, have been blocked.However, certain indigenous claims in particular seem to be seen as a problem that is difficult to solve, due to the way in which the differentiated rights that frame them would apparently conflict with other rights considered universal. In these cases, then, the "differences" invoked lose all legitimacy, being discredited and subordinated to other legal values.This article does not examine the conflicts associated with these claims from the perspective of the Philosophy of Law or that of Political Philosophy, but from an ethnographic analysis that seeks to account for how what certain Mapuche claims are putting into crisis is the very idea of "legitimate differences" with which their rights are addressed. On this basis, it argues that a broadening of the idea of human rights would suffice to create frameworks that allow disagreements to be processed, without resorting to clauses that obliterate them asymmetrically, by programmatically subordinating differentiated rights to universal rights.