Entre dos mundos: pueblos indígenas y espacios de castigo en Colombia

Abstract

Since the enactment of the 1991 Colombian Constitution, a legal and institutional framework has been established to address the political demands of multiculturalism. This article examines the incarceration of indigenous individuals in this multicultural context and highlights the various factors influencing the adoption of penal confinement as a response to indigenous criminal behavior. The article traces the process by which indigenous special jurisdiction has embraced incarceration over the past two decades and examines the potential factors that have led to transcending the multicultural boundary with imprisonment as the dominant punitive form. The emergence of a special legal subject—the incarcerated indigenous individual—indicates the outcome of this collision between legal worlds, placing them in the liminal space of identity uncertainty, reintegration impossibility, and the latent potential for the disappearance of their cultural identity.

Keywords

• imprisonment
• indigenous people
• legal pluralism
• liminality