(preface of Yves Deloye) Among the figures conveyed by neoliberalism to legitimise local management and politics, the Indian Community is associated with participation as a form of consensual democracy and a figure of autonomy. Thus, political practices that are supposed to act locally and form part of an international political order that calls for them are essential. The article attempts, using the Mexican example, to deconstruct this figure of the Indian Participative Community and its uses, both at national and local level, to question the nature of the ‘participation’ to which it refers. The analysis is based on an archaeology of the Participative Indian Community: for Mexican national regimes, it was first a local figure that immediately refers to a national or international order, then a figure of participation used to better control and depoliticise, and finally a complex figure that combines the fundamentalisation of actors with political liberalisation through decentralisation. The latter raises questions about the attributes of autonomy and democracy associated with the Participative Indian Community, through the effects of this figure in two Mexican Indian regions. Firstly, there is the instrumentalisation of the CIP figure on the part of local elites to legitimise their political power, thus cultivating a confusion between ‘autonomy’ and empowerment. Secondly, in both cases, it can be seen that the ‘democratic’ feature in fact empowers community-based political models which are very well integrated into a neoliberal concept of politics, i.e. which equate rational economic participation and popular control over power to participatory democracy.