Criminalisation and violence against indigenous peoples. An analysis of the architecture of cruelty in indigenous territories

Abstract

The document analyzes the criminalization and repression of Indigenous peoples in contexts of resource exploitation and large-scale infrastructure projects. These patterns of violence seek to dismantle Indigenous connections to their territories and ways of life. Criminalization is aimed at suppressing Indigenous resistance, undermining their collective rights, especially self-determination, territoriality, and Indigenous cultural identity. State complicity with corporate actors that violate Indigenous territorial rights is fundamental to this, utilizing repressive and punitive practices such as the detention and stigmatization of community leaders. This form of repression configures an «architecture of cruelty» with a devastating impact on Indigenous social cohesion and cultural life. The work therefore proposes a review of Indigenous collective rights, from the potentialities they offer, from their practices of non-violence, as active, combative resistance to the processes of criminalization that extractivism entails.