Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights by Patricia Richards (review)

Richards’ core argument is that although the Chilean government has promoted multiculturalism, in the context of a neoliberal economic system its policies entail no structural changes that would actually alter the severe power imbalance between the Mapuche and the non-Mapuche populations. Instead, the state’s commitment to the indigenous people became a matter of promoting their economic productivity rather than providing them any substantive rights. Furthermore, the economic model is based largely on the export of raw materials, which includes timber found in Mapuche communities. Thus, the “Chilean Miracle” meant “massive outmigration, dispossession, lands depleted of water and nutrients, lack of control over natural resources, inability to contribute to decisions that affect them, criminalization of demands” (215).

Richards’ methodology is qualitative sociology, and her analysis is founded on seventy-five in-depth interviews with farmers, activists, local elites, and state officials in four comunas (municipalities) of the Araucanía region in central Chile. She provides an insightful discussion of methods and shows a laudable self-awareness as a researcher by generating responses from her interviewees that reflect their race and class position: “More than once I was told that maybe Chile should have done what the United States did and just kill all the Indians” (29). The narrative is well-crafted, effectively capturing the different positions of relevant actors.

The “Chilean miracle” has come under fire in many works that focus on how inequality, military autonomy, police brutality, lack of protection for labor, lack of educational opportunity, environmental degradation, and gender discrimination have posed serious obstacles to democratization. Many of these problems stem directly from a market-oriented economic model. That facet of Richard’s argument is not especially novel. More valuable is her detailed discussion of the pervasiveness of the economics model. Ironically, even though the Mapuche suffer from its effects, the government’s response (whether the left or right is in power) remains fundamentally economic. The problems of the Mapuche are viewed narrowly as a result of poverty, not as a lack of rights to land, representation, self-governance, and formal recognition. Multiculturalism is top-down and inflexible.

Since the state views the Mapuche primarily in economic terms, it quickly labels them as terrorists whenever they assume an activist role. “Bad Indians” are not “authentic”; “good Indians” work with the state by participating in, among other things, ethnotourism. Richards’ study reveals how racism reinforces the economic model. Although the literature about Chilean democratization often centers on poverty, rarely does it focus specifically on race. The state’s use of anti-terrorist legislation to justify detentions of Mapuche—while targeting no one else— underlines that reality.