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News > Latin America

International Protests Defend the Rights of Indigenous Mapuche

  • Mapuche people march for their rights.

    Mapuche people march for their rights. | Photo: AFP

Published 22 June 2017
Opinion

The Chilean state has sought to “accentuate violence" against Mapuche leaders, communities and organizations.

Systematic police violence perpetrated by the Chilean state against Indigenous Mapuche communities mobilized hundreds of teachers, students and social activists in worldwide protests on Thursday.

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The protests, held in response to the recent murders of Luis Marileo Cariqueo and Patricio Gonzalez Guajardo and the brutal police raid on children at the G-816 School in Chile’s Temucuicui region, called for the defense of the rights of Mapuche people.

Indigenous leaders have released a manifesto in defense of the demands of the Mapuche community to “recover their territory and the right to self-determination” — a rallying call the Chilean government has refused to accept as being their legitimate rights.

Instead, the manifesto explains, the Chilean state has sought to “accentuate violence against leaders, communities and organizations that are involved in territorial repossession processes within the framework of the construction of autonomy and historical reparations related to dispossession.”

The authors of the text emphasized that “targeted violence towards children, young people, women and the elderly, is intended to infuse terror and demobilize” activists fundamental to the autonomy and cultural life of the Mapuche. 

They added that the strategy behind intimidating, hitting and raping children is “common in the deployment of low intensity warfare and represents the continuity of punishments, symbolic violence and kidnappings experienced by Mapuche over generations of internment and (forced) enrollment in missionary schools.”

The process of stripping the Mapuche people’s cultural heritage was deemed by the Chilean state as being a sign of “progress” and “civilization.”

RELATED:
Chile Police Tear Gas Indigenous Mapuche Children During Raid

Cited in the text were the murders of Alex Lemun (2002), Julio Huentecura (2004), Zenon Diaz Necul (2005), Jose Huenante (2005), Matias Catrileo (2008), Jaime Mendoza Collio (2009), Rodrigo Melinao Lican Macarena Valdes (2016) Luis Marileo and Patricio Gonzalez (2017) and the “systematic criminalization and violation of Mapuche human rights which has been a mainstay of Chilean policy since the Spanish first set foot in the region.”

An Indigenous group located on both sides of the Andes in southern Chile and western Argentina, the Mapuche successfully fought resistance wars against Spanish invaders ever since their arrival in the 1500s. Writing for CounterPunch, John Severino noted that, “unlike their hierarchical neighbors, the Inca, the Mapuche organized horizontally, and their capacity for self-defense was so renowned that Wallmapu (Mapuche's historical territory) became known to Europeans as “The Spanish Graveyard.”

Spanish colonizers in Chile and Spain weren't able to conquer Wallmapu until the 1880s. Since then, through waves of invasion and dispossession, the Mapuche have struggled tirelessly to preserve their language, culture, religion, food and medicinal knowledge. 

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