Global Issues
Indigenous People feel excluded from parliamentary systems
Indigenous people feel excluded from the official democratic systems in their countries as long as they can't be elected without forming a political party. This concern was brought up by a number of representatives of indigenous people of Latin America and the Carribean at a round-table discussion held on Thursday in New York.
The representatives said they wanted their indigenous movements to be recognized as electoral group and not being forced to be organized as a political party in order to be elected. The discussion entitled 'Electoral Observatory from the indigenous people perspective' was carried out in the realms of the Eleventh Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues held at U.N. Headquarter last week.
While there are more than 400 different indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Carribean, panelists mostly represented indigenous people in different parts of Mexico and Ecuador, and talked about their legal situation and their recognition — or the failure of recognition — by the national constitutions.
'Indigenous people suffer discriminations of all kinds,' Heraldo Munoz said, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the U.N. Development Programme UNDP.'They are also three times more impoverished than other people,' he added. In order to improve their situation, they must be better included in the decision making processes, Munoz underlined.
Indigenous people usually have their own traditional justice and political systems, so these must be strengthened on the one side, but the official democratic systems of the states must become more open to indigenous participation also.
'States must adopt measures so that indigenous people — and especially women — can participate in the democratic system, and their political rights are guaranteed', Mirna Cunningham of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said. 'Yet these measures must be worked out and adopted in collaboration with the indigenous people themselves,' she added.
This was not only a question the political institutions had to deal with, but also the indigenous people 'have to take on this challenge,' Cunningham said. And they do. Nahela Becerril Albarran gave an account of the electoral observatory process in Chiapas, Mexico, a province in which one third of the population or 3.43 million people are considered to be poor.
Her NGO 'Desarrollo, Género y Ciudadanía' (DEGECI) has so far educated 26 women — both indigenous and non-indigenous — as electoral observers for the upcoming presidential elections on July 1st this year.
Yet, findings of DEGECI so far show that indigenous people and over all women are not well presented in the presidential elections in Mexico so far, with four male candidates running for president, but only one female candidate. 'Plenty of work still remains to be done,' Munoz said.
© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service