In repressive and unjust conditions, which erode the Mapuche people’s right to freedom, it is necessary to break the silence, especially when the position we have been forced to take is defensive, in the face of militarisation, which installed forces with a war mentality and an official discourse aimed at distorting the Mapuche demand to the state, wanting to show it as a confrontation between community members and private individuals.
By Diego Ancalao G.
These are the same conditions that prevailed during the Spanish invasion, our ancestors who channelled the people towards the noble task of shaking off the yoke, resorting to recessive measures against the invader. These conditions prevail today in the Mapuche together with anger and resentment, which grows when we see that for the government, “peace” means repression. This happens because the rules of the game are made by the oppressors to suit their privileges. A recent example is the approval of the draft agreement by Congress, which has declared four Mapuche organisations illegal and terrorist.
Those political filibusters who, after criminalising my people, stand up and say that the Mapuche who live in these conditions are willing and determined to sit back, patiently and peacefully looking for some goodwill to change the existing conditions, waiting for manna to fall from heaven. They are wrong, events suggest defensive action. Especially today, when a landowner murdered a young Mapuche, Eloy Alarcon Manquepan (33) in Villarrica, will the government prosecute him under the anti-terrorist law?
The declarations of the socialist senator Juan Castro, who says: “he fears the formation of “Sendero Luminoso” in the south”, do not help to establish a peaceful dialogue, on the contrary, they collaborate in the creation of a climate of insecurity and fear. It was a position to be expected from the fundamentalist right, but not from a government senator, so how can it be a progressive government if it uses retrograde methods, as was done 140 years ago, in the pacification of Araucania, with similar officialist discourses.
These messages of fear, used to unify a group against a perceived dangerous and terrifying enemy, is one of the most effective ways in which humans justify and rationalise atrocities against other people, not wanting to see them as people, and some of the words they use, over and over again, is criminal and terrorist.
Indeed, fear is the tool that these power groups use to discriminate against groups that have been marginalised since the very creation of the state, it is a political decision to dehumanise Mapuche people, to treat them not as people, but as barbarians, undeserving of the rights of “civilised citizens”. In this way indigenous peoples are always criminalised and condemned.
The conclusion is that the Mapuche do not live in a democracy; they live in a police state, characterised by the brutality of the carabineros and the military, they have the form and force of an army of occupation, whose aim is not to protect us, nor to look after our wellbeing; their only objective and cause is to protect the interests of businessmen, those who do not even live there.
But what to do when the institutional channels deny dialogue and try to solve it by violent means? when there is a double standard, calling the Mapuche people to dialogue and declaring them partly illegal and terrorist? what to do when they say that the solution is peace, and they militarize? When they are untruthful when they say that the Plan buen vivir, with $400 billion pesos, more repressive force and land purchase is the solution to the basic problems.
This government plan has already failed. First, from the very moment they call it “Good Living”, a dehumanised policy that does not respect life and that has made a mockery of a concept that has taken thousands of years to build and that is about the spiritual relationship between Che (people), ñukemapu (mother earth) and itrofilmongen, (life in all its forms). It has nothing to do with budget and repressive force.
Second, because it presents the Mapuche as an indigenous population, “poor and violent”, and not as a people, and third, because it presents the purchase of land as the solution, and the demand is not land, but territory, which is a political term that refers to the integral set of natural elements of a geographical space, it is the starting point and final result of the people, and cannot be confused with the soil that a farmer needs to produce potatoes.
It seems that the “Mapuche conflict” has been transformed into a political and economic business, attended by its own owners, the government and businessmen. In these conditions, where there is no real will for dialogue, the way forward is what the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Martin Luther King, said: “protest is the voice of those who are not heard through institutional channels”.
This protest must aim for a real and fundamental solution, a general parliament in which everyone participates, the friends of the government, the “good Mapuche” and those who do not agree with the government, the “bad Mapuche”. This has been the historic way in which the Mapuche people have resolved disputes; the more than fourteen parliaments that my people have held are irrefutable proof of this.
In this parliament, the territorial restitution and economic compensation for all the years of illegal usufruct of the usurped territory must be agreed upon, so much so that thanks to this plundering, a new agrarian economic caste was born in Chile, which acquired political power, which extends until today in different parties, in which they continue to use the same ideological, exclusionary and racist discourse, which was invited to justify their appropriation of the land.
For those who believe that it is not possible, the truth is that all that is lacking is political will, since according to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ratified by Chile, article 20, number 2, states: “Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their means of subsistence and development have the right to just and fair redress”.
To be more precise, this is not new, it has been done in New Zealand with the Maori people since the recognition of the Treaty of Waitangui in 1840, and today in Canada, President Justin Trudeau, has signed a land claim agreement with the Siksika indigenous first nation and will pay 1.3 billion dollars, to help “right a wrong of the past”. Of lands usurped in 1910, where treaties had been violated.
In view of the fact that the State of Chile has violated the Treaty of Tapigue of 1825, in which 10 million hectares were usurped, this is the time to follow these examples of moral statesmanship, you just need to have the stature and political will to resolve Mr. President. In your hands is the opportunity to demonstrate that the political and economic caste has not hijacked the State and democracy for its own petty ends, where the highest price is paid by those you call the lesser evil, the nameless, as Galeano said.
