A Space for Autonomy: Indigenous Rights in Post-Independence Latin America

Existing research analyzes government-recognized Indigenous autonomy as a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet even in the unlikely case of nineteenth-century Latin America, where central states systematically targeted Indigenous groups for exploitation, discrimination, and assimilation, governments sometimes adopted policies to recognize Indigenous communal landholding and self-government rights. This paper explores when and why this surprising recognition of Indigenous autonomy occurred. It argues that incumbents were most likely to recognize autonomy when (1) they viewed Indigenous leaders as valuable allies and (2) rural elites were sufficiently weak and could not block government policies they disliked. The former condition incentivized incumbents to recognize autonomy, while the latter gave them the capacity to do so. I test this argument using within-case comparisons across several nineteenth and early twentieth-century cases, which include Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. The findings offer important insights into historical autonomy and the more recent expansion of Indigenous rights in Latin America.