Structural Violence and Religious Freedom: Towards a Legal Principle of Structural Justice in the Chilean Experience

Recent Chilean jurisprudence on Indigenous religious freedom has revealed a profound dissonance between the legal categories applied by the courts and the spiritual conceptions of Indigenous peoples. This gap between formal recognition and the effective protection of sacred sites generates a form of structural violence, understood as the institutional reproduction of inequality under the guise of neutrality. This study proposes to reformulate the notion of structural violence as an operative legal principle capable of activating heightened judicial scrutiny. Through a qualitative approach, it develops a doctrinal and jurisprudential analysis aimed at identifying normative patterns of exclusion and assessing the hermeneutic, normative, and diagnostic functions of the proposed principle. The results show that Chilean law, by translating spiritual practices into liberal categories of property or procedure, neutralizes their religious content and perpetuates relations of subordination. The study concludes that incorporating the principle prohibiting structural violence enables the reinterpretation of legal norms and the correction of historical asymmetries, orienting the law toward a form of structural justice sensitive to the ontological, cultural, and spiritual plurality of Indigenous peoples.