Violence against Indigenous Peoples

DELRIO WALTER; LENTON DIANA

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism

The Gale Group, Macmillan

Lugar: New York; Año: 2012; p. 243 - 247

Latin America is made up of an heterogeneous group of national states as a result of particular and general historical processes. From European colonization in the XVth century the indigenous people were, on the one hand, submitted to different forms of exploitation as labour power under slavery or half-slavery systems for the mining development (silver and gold) and of agricultural and cattle farms. On the other hand, they were progressively expropriated of their territories by genocide campaigns and/or were concentrated in limited and marginal spaces. After the colonial period and about the middle of XIXth century, the consolidation of new national Latin-American states implied the admission of the region into the world market as primary producer. This resulted in a continuity of the territorial expropriation and state violence processes on indigenous peoples , and also in the strengthening of their workforce exploitation in the rising of a subproletariat . In this general framework, the indigenous population was constructed as a racial and ethnically definite otherness, therefore they kept on being a victim of exceptional politics, which have historically characterized their colonial and civic subordination.