

Many commentators have been highlighting the novelty of the Ecuadorian constitution’s recognition of the right to nature and even the concepts of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (‘good living’ in Spanish and Quechua respectively), analyzing them as though they were simple variations of liberal concepts that can be found in other Latin American constitutions. However, the subject encompasses themes that have not yet been sufficiently explored.

First, the concepts of both sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, of the Quechua-Aymara tradition, are located within an indigenous cosmology based on the following principles: (a) the relationship of the whole as the life force by which it exists; (b) correspondence, where the different aspects, regions and fields of reality correspond harmoniously with one another; (c) complementarity, in the sense that no being or action exists just for itself in isolation, but always in coexistence with its equal and opposite; (d) reciprocity, such that distinct beings mould one another and, thus, an exertion on one side is balanced by an exertion of the same magnitude on the other. More than simply ‘living well’, it is a matter, in essence, of ‘co-existing’, of ‘living as a community’.

Second, these concepts are related to notions of interculturalism and decolonization — the former especially in Ecuador, and the latter particularly in Bolivia — and, therefore, do not exclude other world visions. In this sense, the constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia highlights the ethical and moral principles of ñandereko (harmonious life) and teko kavi (good life), in the Guaraní mould. An intercultural exercise would be interesting in Brazil, where the Guaraní are the most numerous indigenous population in the country. What implications could we extract from this ‘pluralism of ideas’ (which, of course, is a constitutionally consecrated concept around here), or even from the suggestions of ‘collective well-being’ and of muntú as world visions of the African populations (in Ecuador and Colombia, respectively), rooted in self-determination, solidarity and the fundamental connection between society, nature and ancestros y vivos (ancestors and the living)?

Third, such concepts require, as Raúl Llasag Fernández highlights, an entire way of life: (a) a community as a form of basic social organization; (b) a form of political organization, which comprises internal authorities, regulation of those authorities, the resolution of internal conflicts, and the creation of deliberative bodies; (c) an economic model, which stems from the tenet that everything is a part of nature (human beings, land, water, air, animals, rocks, etc.). It is therefore a civilizing project that goes against the principle of dominating nature and people and exploiting resources to the point of exhaustion. What can be said, therefore, about the processes of neo-extractivism, taking place all across Abya Yala (the Continent of Life), in so many ‘monocultures’ and not in ‘plural economies’? How can we formulate a means of transition from the current regime of economic appropriation to one that constitutionally guarantees sumak kawsay?

Fourth, there is no exact correspondence between the right to ‘live well’ and the social rights of the liberal tradition, at least as far as Ecuador is concerned — property, the family and social groups most in need of support fall into other categories. Nevertheless, these rights are interdependent and inseparable, which reinforces, from an emancipatory perspective, an enlargement of the internal restrictions of the constitution itself.

Fifth, to ‘co-exist’ signifies, also, a widening of the traditional concepts of participation and its liberal variants. Hence Marco Aparicio Wilhelmi points out that the new Andean constitutions deal as much with the right to participation as they do with participation through having rights. They are formulas for ‘intense citizenship’.

Sixth, in viewing, for example, unpaid subsistence and care work in the home as ‘productive work’ (article 333, Ecuador), and the foundations for education as being ‘decolonializing, emancipatory, anti-imperialist, depatriarchalizing and transformative of economic and social structures’ (article 3 of the Avelino Siñani – Elizardo Perez Education Law of 2010, Bolivia), it is clear that such notions are connected to a wider process of depatriarchalization. As feminists would say: there can be no decolonization without depatriarchalization and, in that sense, there remains the large task of intercultural resignification of the concept of chacha-warmi (the complementarity of men and women) and therefore of the issue of gender equality in the indigenous world view, while remembering the major contribution of feminists — often hidden in historical analysis — in the Cochabamba water war (2000) and the Bolivian gas war (2003).

Seventh, in understanding other world visions, interculturalism goes hand in hand with the decolonization of knowledge, nature, and the colonized and the colonizers. More than just a decolonization of the past, we are still talking about decolonizing the present.

These dimensions are hidden away in the ‘low-intensity versions’ of the emancipatory potential of these new texts. And as Marco Aparicio Wilhelmi indicates, both aspects of these rights should be viewed in emancipatory processes: the rights are tools of resistance, when standing up to overrepresented social sectors and ‘majoritized minorities’; and, at the same time, these rights are in the hands of ‘minoritized majorities’, those who are underrepresented, as a means of ‘transforming the conditions that have reproduced relationships of domination’.

César Augusto Baldi, PhD candidate at Pablo Olavide University (Spain), is Advisor to the Brazilian Regional Fed­eral Court 4thRegion and the editor of Direitos humanos na sociedade cos­mopl­ita [Human Rights in Cos­mo­pol­itan Soci­ety] (Ren­o­var, 2004).

Trans­lated by Alex Higson.

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