Indigenous people find voice in Chile’s constitution rewrite

When Margarita Virginia Vargas Lopez thinks back on her childhood, she recalls boating with her family to patches of land shrouded by deep forests. It was a “nomadic life connected to nature” in Jetarktétqal, her remote community accessible only by water in southern Patagonia.

That is, until the dictatorship of Augosto Pinochet in the late 1970s, when authorities sent her community packing to nearby cities.

“They harmed us. They broke our traditions,” says Ms. Vargas. “We were inserted into a Western world that didn’t understand us.”

Now, she’s hoping to strengthen those traditions – and have a say in how the Chilean government governs not only her ancestral territories,

Land protector or “enemy of the state”?A “living culture”