ABSTRACT
Secession has been a notion politically and intellectually marginalized in modern Latin American history, despite the secessionist origins of the Republics of America. The indigenous nations and peoples have also side-stepped it in favor of the more flexible notion of ‘self-determination.’ In this chapter, we focus on a nation that is a partial exception to this, because of the importance of territorial control to their survival: the Mapuche. We summarize the horrific history that has diminished their membership, territorial and spiritual heritage, and socioeconomic standing, and we survey the opportunities opened up by the 2019–2021 constitution-making process and draft for the Mapuche and other indigenous peoples inhabiting Chile. We look at the main provisions of the draft constitution (rejected in referendum but nonetheless a core piece in the current Chilean process of political rebuilding), which declares Chile a plurinational state and sets down new standards to manage the country’s national diversity. We then invite its assessment not only from the perspective of other Latin American experiences of plurinationalism, but also from the perspective of secession and multi-national federalism. The exercise not only suggests a new prism for the study of last-wave Latin American pluralist constitutionalism, but also reveals the moderation of the draft constitution’s proposals, which must be celebrated in any case as an important step forward.
