Latin America’s Multiculturalism: Economic and Agrarian Dimensions

Abstract

This chapter examines some economic and agrarian dimensions of Latin America’s multicultural challenge. Given that the impetus for state reform is coming from the indigenous movement, the main emphasis is on issues of indigenous rights and development. Yet the move for multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism and multilingualism (the ‘three Ms’) clearly embraces more than indigenous peoples alone. A feature of the constitutional reforms of the 1990s, notably in Colombia and Ecuador, has been to extend to certain rural black communities the special collective land rights that had previously been recognised only for indigenous peoples. The growing recognition of differentiated rights over land and related natural resources, based at least in part on factors of ethnic origin and historically based patterns of land and resource use, has as yet unforeseen consequences for Latin America. If such trends were to extend to Brazil, for example, the implications would be immense. The concept of differentiated citizenship, and its implications for land and resource rights, would take off on a new and more complex plane.