Indigenous peoples’ rights and the law in Latin America

Since the late 1980s, legal innovations at international, continental and national levels have converted indigenous peoples into subjects of rights. Throughout the history of Latin America, indigenous people have figured amongst dominant groups whose human rights have been most systematically denied and violated. The International Labour Organization&s;s Convention 169, approved in 1989, the first international convention setting out the collective rights of indigenous peoples, was ratified by most countries in the region. Rights to free, prior and informed consent were invoked in specific cases before the Inter-American human rights system even prior to 2007, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has become a point of reference in indigenous organizations&s; campaigns and attempts to generate national and regional jurisprudence in Latin America. Evidently normative advances in national, regional and international law affirming the collective rights of indigenous peoples have been an important element in their struggles for inclusion and respect for their cultural difference.