SANTIAGO, Chile (CMC) — Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Alicia Bárcena says the indigenous peoples of the region hold the “master key” to a transformative post-COVID-19 recovery, based on their knowledge, collective conscience and worldview. 

“It is crucial to reaffirm the centrality of indigenous peoples’ rights, the standards of which have been enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other international human rights instruments,” said Bárcena during a high-level event organized by the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC). 

“Although it is undeniable that progress has been made in recent decades on their recognition and collective rights in all the region’s countries, important gaps still remain,” she added. 

For that reason, the ECLAC chief said that “it is critical that recovery policies emphasise the collective rights of these peoples and that their pivotal themes be participation and consultation with a view to obtaining free, prior and informed consent for any measure that would affect them, including the participation of indigenous women and young people”.

Bárcena was one of the main speakers at the High-Level Political Forum entitled “Challenges in times of pandemic: A dialogue for ‘Good Living,” which was inaugurated by Gabriel Muyuy, Technical Secretary of FILAC. 

During her presentation, Bárcena said that Latin America and the Caribbean is the region that has been hardest hit by the pandemic, since it represents 8.4 per cent of the global population but accounts for 32.5 per cent of worldwide deaths caused by this disease. 

She added that the region is facing a “profound asymmetry versus the developed world”, especially in terms of access to vaccines and the impacts of climate change. 

Bárcena underscored that indigenous peoples experience the structural inequalities, discrimination and racism that characterise the region, creating “a scenario of greater vulnerability and risk in the face of COVID-19 and the effects of the crisis”.

She noted that, according to the Social Panorama of Latin America report for 2019, the poverty rate of indigenous people was 46.7 per cent while that of extreme poverty was 17.3 per cent, equivalent to double (2.1 times) and triple (3.1 times) the respective rates for the non-indigenous population in the set of nine countries that had information available. 

ECLAC’s Executive Secretary warned that the pandemic has prompted “differentiated and intersectional” impacts on the fulfilment of indigenous peoples’ right to health and to life, as well as on other dimensions of their economic, social, cultural, territorial and environmental rights, having particular repercussions for indigenous women, children and young people, indigenous older persons, and indigenous persons with disabilities. 

In that context, she stressed the need to have better sources of disaggregated data, to understand the pandemic’s true impact on indigenous peoples and to guide public policies. 

“The lack of disaggregated information is also a manifestation of discrimination,” she emphasised. 

Bárcena also warned that the tensions and conflicts stemming from the lack of guarantees for indigenous peoples’ territorial rights and external threats have continued to rise. 

“These are the challenges of ‘good living,’ because our societies are returning to the privileges that deny rights, to concentration, to a neoliberal model that we have not managed to get beyond,” she said. “These historical inequalities are accompanied by the dispossession and plundering of lands, and of the resources of indigenous peoples.” 

She also stressed the urgency of making visible, and condemning, processes to criminalise indigenous social protest in the face of investment projects that affect their territories.

In that regard, she pointed up the relevance of the Escazú Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, “the only treaty that protects the life of environmental defenders”. 

The high-level official asserted that “good living” requires recognising the relevance of territory, the right to culture beyond language — that which provides a conscience and historical memory, spirituality, a vision of life; the right to a pertinent education and to indigenous peoples’ development with respect for their identity as rights holders, and to territorial rights.

Bárcena expressed solidarity with thousands of inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean “who have had to face the pandemic’s effects in conditions of marginalisation and exclusion”. 

“I send a special greeting to the silent guardians of the land and biodiversity, who in the midst of this crisis have unswervingly continued their work to defend the environmental and social rights of us all,” she said.