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White smoke came out in the Mixed Commission that defined the situation of the seats reserved for native peoples in the Constitutional Convention. By 9 votes in favor and 1 abstention, the formula with which an agreement was reached is 17 quotas, within the 155 conventional constituents. Meanwhile, the seat for Afro-descendants will be defined in a separate vote in the Chamber.
The one who abstained was the DC, Matías Walker, who argued saying that he is not “willing to validate a formula that excludes the Afro-descendant people of the North on International Human Rights Day.” From the Government, the Undersecretary of Social Services, Sebastián Villarreal, listed a series of difficulties for the incorporation of Afro-descendants, such as the “absence of identification of voters” and their quality of “tribal people” and not original.
Social organizations accuse discrimination for this decision to put Afro-descendants separately. This is what Marta Salgado, president of the NGO Oro Negro and member of the Political Technical Committee, who in conversation with The counter, said that “it has been taught that the majority of Chileans come from European genes and it is not like that. In Chile there is 4% of African blood running through the veins of several of those who live in our country.”
“For us this is terrible, because it is not a defeat, but we see that there is a lot of blindness, ignorance, discrimination, racism and we will have to continue fighting against that as a country, because people are not educated in diversity and that. it’s dangerous, “he added.
According to his account, the problem that began to exclude the Afro-descendant tribal people occurred when the Social Peace agreement and the development of a New Constitution of November 15, 2019 were signed, because “it leaves out the indigenous peoples and the Afro-descendant tribal people Chilean. Everything starts from there because this was put together by the political parties and then afterwards the bulletin is made to integrate the disabled, women and independent people. And they leave us out again in this bulletin. “
“There we began to make incidents, lobbies, and they began to talk about the people and several senators, both from the opposition and from the ruling party, presented indications to enter the Chilean Afro-descendant tribal people. In Arica our senator José Durana (UDI) and José Miguel Insulza (PS), and in the south Carolina Goic (DC). There were three or four indications that expressly named us, “he explains.
“Here the issue of voting was happening, and when it comes to the Mixed Commission it becomes very perverse for us because there we are already realizing that we could say that there is an ‘ignorance’ because history has never been taught in Chile. There is a lot of discrimination, racism and xenophobia “, sentence.
For Salgado, there is a clear responsible for this separation of the Afro-descendant tribal people: the Ministry of Social Development, headed by Karla Rubilar, because on April 16, 2019, Law 21,151 came out, which gives legal recognition to the Chilean Afro-descendant tribal people. its culture, language, history and institutions. But a year later, “they had to have the regulations in place to work with the Chilean Afro-descendant tribal people and also create a technical undersecretary. And they don’t fish, they don’t answer. So they are responsible.”
Regarding the future of the participation of the Afro-descendant tribal people in both Chambers of Congress, Salgado believes that the Chamber of Deputies will go well. On the other hand, in the Senate there is the problem because “we need 26 votes in the Senate. From the ruling party, we barely have the vote of the senator from the Durana region and another that he would get, and the opposition would vote for us, which is supposed to be 24 votes squares”.
“Crude discussion”
From the NGO Lumbanga, its director Cristián Báez, spoke about this issue with 24 hours. “Here there is a racist attitude of the ruling party, of the right,” he accused. As he argued, “the discussion of whether we are indigenous or tribal peoples is a crude discussion of parliamentarians and the Government.”
“We have to have a space in the Constituent Convention,” he said. “The right wing talked about the cooking that was made in the agreement of November 15th. Later, the government, through Minister Rubilar, said that there were no clear elements to include us,” he accused.
“The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has already carried out a study and said that we are more than 10,000 people of African descent,” he said. “To say that there is nothing, of Minister Rubilar is ignorance, tremendous ignorance and a demonstration of the centralism that exists in Chile,” he closed by saying that “they do not want anything other than blacks.”
The “structural racism” of the right
For Luis Campos, an anthropologist, researcher at the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano University, the decision on Afro-descendants represents “unacceptable exclusion and discrimination based on absurd arguments”.
“The definition of 17 seats for native peoples within the 155 conventional ones is a recognition in justice, although the ideal would have been for them to be supernumerary positions. Until now, Afro-descendants are technically being left out (by putting it to a vote), which means that although progress is being made on the one hand, on the other we cannot be satisfied while arbitrary ignorance also operates ”, he indicated.
According to the UAHC anthropologist, “this structural racism represented by the right wing is unintelligible, especially that it argues a lack of institutionality regarding the Afro-descendant people to sustain these actions, when there are between 40 and 50 initiatives where it does consider them as the variables in health centers, the CASEN survey; statistical reports from the INE, records of the municipality of Arica in 2002, funds and initiatives of the Ministry of Cultures and the Ministry of Housing that incorporates them as beneficiaries ”.
Campos, also a researcher at the CIIR (Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies) compared the situation with the decision on the Chango people, who will have a seat in the Constitutional Convention. “The Chango people were officially recognized as such in September of this year, the Afro-descendant people in April 2019 and that recognition must be adapted to the same international regulations in this regard. The participation of the changos is a very important step for the constitutional construction, for that reason the same norms must be applied for the Afro-descendant tribal people “, he assured The counter.
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