Political Exception in the Contemporary Chile: A Critique of its Normalization in the Case of the Chilean-Mapuche Conflict

This presentation investigates the structural persistence of exceptional rule in Chile, arguing that the Chilean-Mapuche conflict serves as a primary example of how the state maintains a functional legal fiction to legitimize systemic violence. By exploring this case, we see how an emergency mindset, once introduced under colonial or authoritarian conditions, becomes a permanent feature of public order strategies. This phenomenon is not an isolated crisis but a normalized paradigm of governance where the state uses the language of the exception to justify a violent normalcy that spans centuries. The research contends that this normalization stems from three of factors: the racialized construction of an enemy, extraordinary violence, and legal dispossession. First, the portrayal of the Mapuche as an internal enemy dates back to colonial stereotypes of the barbaric and rebellious, a narrative that justifies exceptional policing and legal measures. Second, the state employs overt violence, transitioning from nineteenth-century military campaigns like the "Pacification of Araucanía"—a process involving massacres and genocide—to contemporary special-operations forces. Third, legal dispossession serves as the structural backbone, utilizing mechanisms like the fiction of terra nullius and the dictatorship’s Decree Law 2568 to fragment communal territories and exclude indigenous people from normal law. This case mirrors global and regional patterns of settler colonialism and authoritarian legality. Following the scholarship of John Reynolds, I propose that Chile’s emergency structures exploit racial difference, paralleling contexts such as Palestine, Australia, and Canada. Within Latin America, this dynamic is comparable to contemporary regional trends of authoritarian legalism where the suspension of constitutional rights becomes a routine administrative tool for social defense, similar to the "war against gangs" in El Salvador. This mutation shows up in the recent integration of military deployment into critical infrastructure laws and the expansion of counterterrorism legislation in 2025, demonstrating how the military has been deployed as a standard operational asset. Methodologically, this study employs a critical socio-legal approach, combining historical context with the analysis of legislation and social narratives. By blending archival records and official decrees, the paper reveals how the biopolitical construction of the Mapuche allows the state to operate in a zone of legal indistinction where the exception is the norm. Ultimately, this research challenges the durability of the normalcy-exception binary, raising a fundamental question about the future of post-dictatorial transitions: if the exception has been successfully metabolized into the routine administrative and legal life of the republic, what are the actual limits of the liberal comprehension of law and democracy in governing structural violence?