The initiative, which now goes to the Senate, African descent gives the right to consultation in legislative and administrative matters, according to the Convention 169 of the ILO, and includes them as a category within the next population censuses, among other benefits.
Fulfilling an old demand of the Afro-descendant people who live mainly in the Arica and Parinacota region, the Chamber of Deputies supported, with 93 votes and 1 abstention, the bill that grants legal recognition to the Chilean Afro-descendant tribal people (bulletin 10625).
It is a motion presented by the deputies Karol Cariola (PC), Ramon Farías (PPD), Marcela Hernando (PRSD), Issa Short (UDI), Daniel Melo (PS), Vlado Mirosevic (PL), Roberto Poblete (Ind), Yasna Provoste (DC), Luis Rocafull (PS) and Leonardo Soto (PS).
Although the percentage of Afro-descendants present in Chile is not known with certainty, the first characterization survey of this segment of the population, carried out by the National Institute of Statistics in the year 2013, estimated that in the Arica and Parinacota Region there are about eight thousand five hundred people who have that quality (5% of the total regional population).
In accordance with it, the legal text grants legal recognition to the Chilean Afro-descendant tribal people, your cultural identity, language, historical tradition, culture, institutions and worldview.
By Chilean Afro-descendants it is understood the human group that, having Chilean nationality in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic, shares the same culture, history, habit, united by awareness of identity and anthropological discourse, descendants of the African diaspora and self-identify as such.
The initiative indicates that the knowledge, traditional knowledge, traditional medicine, Languages, rituals, Chilean symbols and clothing tribal people of African descent are and will be assessed, respected and promoted by the State, recognizing them as intangible cultural heritage of the country.
While, Chile's national education system will endeavor to contemplate a programmatic unit that enables students to have an adequate knowledge of history, language and culture of Afro-descendants and promote their artistic and cultural expressions from the preschool level, basic, middle and university.
The project also establishes that Afro-descendants have the right to be consulted through the agreement 169 of the International Labor Organization each time legislative or administrative measures that may affect them are envisaged, particularly those related to social policies, cultural and educational rights or that affect the Afro-descendant community in their third generation rights.
The State shall endeavor to include the Afro-descendant category within the Afro-descendant tribal group in censuses of the national population., according to the agreement 169 of the ILO, since the approval and publication of this law.
Source: Congreso.cl
