Abstract

This article explores the struggles of indigenous rights based on the adoption of the 1980 Chilean Constitution, under an authoritarian frame, that resulted in water being considered as a commodity and, therefore, subject to radical market rules that serves as a relevant local example in conflict with ratified international treaties. The argument proposes a critical approach to establish a continuum of the recurring rejection of the ancestral beliefs of Indigenous People since colonial times. In light of the actual constituent process for drafting a new constitution in Chile (2015), the article evaluates the emancipatory potential of Chile’s early sovereignty proposal on natural resources and later articulations of water as a human right. The argument assesses the possibility of including alternative views in the constituent debate over water, under the light of Third World Approaches to International Law [TWAIL] and Latin American International Law [LAIL] legal scholarship, aiming to find space in the Chilean constitutional realm for non-extractive perspectives.