Mapuche National Liberation from a Global History Perspective: On the Road to Building a New Type of Governance 1977-1992: en el camino a construir un nuevo tipo de gobernabilidad 1977-1992

Abstract

The Cold War contributed to a new type of politicization within the Mapuche people in Chile. On a political level, it influenced the transition from mediating institutions to movements that ascribed to Self-Determination, On an ideological level, by maintaining that colonialism was a long-lasting historical construction, it favored a new type of ethnic movement that extracted from its own histories of resistance the arguments that supported its aspirations for liberation. Decolonization contributed to the creation of a plurality of movements, some created new types of mediating institutions (neoindigenism), others opted for redesigned the States into Plurinationals (Autonomy “from above”) and a third aspect promoted experiences of Territorial Control (Autonomy “from below”). These different governance proposals cannot be understood without an international dimension. Relying on some proposals of the so-called Global History –such as mobility, exchange and connection–, we hypothesize that the project horizons of the indigenous movements were created as a response to the Cold War and the militants who forged the autonomist movements contributed to the creation of a new type of Mapuche movement.