Crónica de una etnia anunciada: nuevas perspectivas de investigación a diez años de vigencia de la ley indígena en San Pedro de Atacama

Chile's Indigenous Law set a three-year deadline to carry out the regularization of individual, community and patrimonial lands of Atacameño property: 10 have passed and these territorial rights have been neither respected, nor implemented. Meanwhile, mining companies operating in the area have easily obtained diverse types of government land grants, sales and rentals from which the latter profits, as well as from compensations for the rights of passage that mining imposes on `fiscal' land. The unevenness of this proprietorial race between indigenous people, the State and mining companies, is reflected in that the Andean communities of Chile's second region have been unable to make their territorial rights effective. This essay describes how, like in other Latin American countries, the politics that consist in delaying the implementation of indigenous peoples' territorial rights until their negation allow other economic and political agents to expand their spheres of influence without limits; and this, on lands that, in Chile at least, would otherwise benefit from the added legal protection of the Indigenous Law. We consider reasons why ethnic and municipal authorities and officials have neither objected to this delay, nor formally complained about the administrative and juridical reduction of the properties in the process of being regularized. The case leads us to formulate new research questions about the modes and cycles of territorialization and differentiation in the Atacama, including those of the Stat