The implementation of ILO Convention 169 in Chile: The paradox of Indigenous rights

The Western life model built a rationality, called Modernity, which allowed the inclusion within its reflective parameters of all the others existing beyond its civilizing borders. In the 20th century, the International System of Human Rights was created, as well as the System of Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A concrete manifestation in Chile of this system was the ratification of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization. In recent years this treaty has presented legitimacy difficulties, because the actors do not express a positive evaluation of its implementation process. One possible explanation is that Convention 169 stresses and confronts two models of life: globalization and the way of life of indigenous peoples. The indigenous peoples with their claims take this rational architecture of Modernity to the limits of its possibilities. The problems of Convention 169 would not only be problems of applicability, but in making proposals for the defense of the indigenous peoples’ ways of life, it leads to a general crisis of the whole legal-philosophical architecture that sustains the State and its modernity.