Chile’s opportunity to resolve the conflict with the Mapuche – Flora Genoux

Among the pines and eucalyptus stands a modest house: a large room, a stove, two well-worn sofas, a TV. Outside, next to the garden, there are a vegetable garden, some animals – chickens, geese, sheep and horses – and some wood to warm up. Carolina Soto Campos, 33, and her 52-year-old husband, have lived on this property for five years with their three children. We are in the Araucanía region, in southern Chile, a largely agricultural area full of forests between the Pacific and the mountain range. It looks like a place at the end of the world: further south, the country continues crumbling into the ocean; further up, towards the north, you have to travel six hundred kilometers to reach Santiago, the capital.

Carolina Soto Campos and her family are Mapuche, literally “people of the earth”. They are the largest native population in Chile: 1.7 million out of nineteen million inhabitants. They live in the Araucanía precisely to claim possession of the land of their ancestors. “As Mapuche we need to cultivate the land,” says the woman, who has a determined character. “After being plundered and deceived we want to stay close to the map, the earth. Here I feel free ”.

Free and committed to a single challenge: to redeem the six hectares it occupies and which are actually owned by a private forestry company.

A deeper malaise
Sixteen other Mapuche families living in the area are in the same situation. They claim a total of five thousand hectares, enough to feed what Chileans call the “Mapuche conflict”, a question of history and identity marked in some cases by violence. On one side of this “struggle”, as Carolina Sotos Campos defines it, there are police charges and inquisitive drone visits, even in the middle of the night.

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, the Mapuche were breeders, also present in the south of present-day Argentina. After resisting the invasion of the colonizers, they were gradually forced to retreat, robbed by the Chilean state.

“In 1803 they owned five million hectares. In 1927 he had no more than 500,000 left, ”recalls Sergio Caniuqueo, a Mapuche historian and researcher at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies. “They keep losing other lands. A part was returned to him in the sixties, as part of an agrarian reform carried out by the socialist president Salvador Allende. But the reform was withdrawn by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), which granted subsidies to forestry companies to establish themselves in the region ”.

Although the land issue is fundamental, according to many observers the malaise is deeper. “There is an open wound, with a Chilean company that does not accept that there is another, and that this other one was there before,” observes Rubén Sánchez, Mapuche and former director of the NGO Observatorio ciudadano, based in Temuco, the capital of Araucanía.

If, like Soto Campos, Mapuche people determined to reclaim their land recognize themselves in a rural way of life, more than a third of this population is resident in and around Santiago. Almost 20 percent live in Araucanía, the poorest region in the country. The Mapuche are not on the fringes of Chilean society, but they have their social and intellectual elites made up of doctors, researchers, officials, lawyers and professors. Some feel completely Chilean, others don’t.

Excessive use of force
What is their place in today’s Chile? On 11 March, on the occasion of his investiture speech, President Gabriel Boric (left) recalled “the indigenous peoples, robbed of their lands but not of their history”, suggesting the possibility of compensation based on dialogue .

Boric assured that he wanted to put an end to the military deployment in the south decided by his predecessor Sebastián Piñera (right) in October 2021. Piñera had justified the decision by referring to “serious and repeated episodes of violence linked to drug trafficking, terrorism and crime organized ”of which some indigenous organizations were accused. A few months earlier, in May 2020, the United Nations had called for an investigation into “the excessive use of force”, expressing concern over “the discrimination and expressions of hatred against this people”.

These “targeted” operations began to multiply around the 2000s. According to forestry experts, the phenomenon accelerated: seventeen protesters were attacked in 2017, twenty-four in 2021. Piñera at the time used the expression “terrorism”, judged excessive by human rights organizations . “We demand the right to security and peace,” says José Hidalgo, leader of the association of forestry service providers.

The World Index of Terrorism, developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a research group based in Australia, places Chile in second place among Latin American countries, after Colombia. “In 2021, Mapuche extremists claimed responsibility for 206 attacks that resulted in one victim,” the report reads. “You don’t work quietly. Where there is a forestry company there are attacks ”, says José Calbuqueo, employee of the company of Gerardo Cerca and himself a Mapuche. “It is one thing to claim the usurped lands, another is vandalism and terrorism”.

According to researcher Gonzalo Bustamante, professor of psychology and native populations specialist, the conflict has become complicated in the last five years, with the presence of armed groups, including the Coordinadora arauco-malleco, a militant organization that claims the fires of trucks. but not attacks on people.

“We don’t even know how it is structured,” he admits. According to anthropologist Natalia Caniguan, “the frustration has grown along with the feeling that nothing ever changes. There is also this at the origins of the social revolt of 2019 against the profound inequalities of the country “. Yet after 1993 and the legal recognition of native populations, the question “has always been present” on the political level, observes Caniguan. Then you underline a point that you believe is fundamental: “The error of the various measures was to focus on the reduction of poverty, which has very high rates among the Mapuche, neglecting rights”.

Security and peace
Not all those who claim the lands are moving in illegality. “We are not for the fight. In our community, things are done through dialogue, ”says Marta Guillermina Colimil, a 53-year-old Mapuche who talks about her on behalf of her family and her neighbors. She too has come into possession in the most legal way in the world of fifteen hectares of land belonging to a specific owner on the outskirts of Ercilla, a town in Araucanía.

This restitution system was established in 1993 by the Corporación nacional de desarrollo indigenous (Conadi), linked to the ministry of development. It allows the state to repurchase private land to redistribute it to native families who request it. So far the state has bought back 215,000 hectares of land. “It is still little, and the system is not transparent enough,” says Hernando Silva, from the NGO Observatorio ciudadano.

In her tailoring workshop, Marta Guillermina Colimil pulls out aprons and some colorful blouses out of a plastic bag. After thirteen years of working in Santiago’s wealthy families, Colimil is back in the region she left behind as a girl due to poverty. Thanks to a public grant, she launched her own small business. “The clothes I sell allow me to live. With this land I feel good, I have recovered something that had belonged to our people “.

Colimil, however, has one regret: “I don’t even speak my language, and this saddens me,” he says with a gesture of impotence. Mapudungun is spoken of less and less due to discrimination and internal migrations to cities. Today only 10 percent of Mapuche natives communicate in this language.

Conditions for dialogue
In the midst of this population that has different aspirations and demands, without a leader or a single organization, some make much more aggressive speeches.
One example is Mijael Carbone, a 34-year-old Mapuche leader, father of five children. He has only one goal in mind: self-determination. He lives in Temucuicui, an emblematic area for the conflict. “We are not saying that cities should disappear, but we would like to manage them, and also control the streets,” he says. Carbone, who has a determined gaze and a determined tone, denounces the constant persecution of the police: “We hear the wind of the helicopters over our homes”. More than two thousand hectares have been recovered here, he says before suddenly stopping his 4×4. On the side of the road you can see a tractor with bullet marks and decorated with flowers. At the wheel of the vehicle, now transformed into an altar, in November 2018 the police killed Camilo Catrillanca, a 24-year-old Mapuche.

That murder, whose perpetrators were convicted in January 2021, made relations between the state and the native population even more strained. It was therefore no coincidence that on March 15 the first visit by Interior Minister Izkia Siches was to Temucuicui. The trip was supposed to be an opening gesture to dialogue, but some shots exploded in the air put an end to the meeting. Carbone, on her part, is adamant. Truck fires without human casualties? “If they belong to forestry companies I say yes, ten times yes”. The dialogue? “We are in favor. But we will not sit down to discuss without the guarantee that we are also talking about autonomy, ”she says.

The historian Caniuqueo wonders about the plurality that characterizes this very particular population: “How many wish to return to those lands? And under what conditions? One of the weaknesses of the Mapuche movement is that it has not been able to create a research center capable of giving these indications ”.

The constituent assembly, which has seats reserved for representatives of native populations and whose first president was the native Mapuche Elisa Loncón, is writing a new basic law. The draft of the text establishes the principle of the pluri-national state, a first opening to a constitutional recognition of the Mapuche. The formula could remain purely theoretical. Or finally allow the solution of the conflict.

(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)