Indigenous rights at a crossroads: Territorial struggles, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and legal geographies of liminality

Abstract

Despite recent advances to create a robust body of international and domestic indigenous rights law, indigenous peoples' rights are increasingly under threat across the Americas. Amidst these challenges, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has become an important legal avenue to support indigenous territorial claims that communities use to seek redress for human rights violations. This article examines the implementation politics regarding two Enxet-Sur indigenous communities that received favorable rulings from the IACtHR. The judgments state that Paraguay must restitute land for the Enxet-Sur as reparations for the socioenvironmental injustices and human rights violations both communities have endured. However, land restitution is complicated by histories of indigenous dispossession and contemporary politics shaped by racist and classist logics that frame private property as a productive resource and indigenous peoples outside of production. Thus, I untangle the shifting forms of power, representation, and land control that accompany struggles over the IACtHR judgments and their implementation in Paraguay. I weave interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary legal geography scholarship together with theories of legal abandonment and an ethnography of Enxet-Sur resistance to argue that the politics of implementing IACtHR judgments in Paraguay produces spatial and temporal liminality that positions Enxet-Sur peoples as rights-bearing subjects who are subject to the abandonment of their rights. Employing the symbolic notion of the crossroads alongside an analysis of Enxet-Sur struggles for rights at a material crossroads, the article shows that legal abandonment is not always the end of political struggle and can be a site of political possibility where indigenous self-determination is changing the practice of human rights.