On July 25, over a hundred members of Chile’s most militant indigenous group, the Mapuche, burst into government offices in the south-central city of Temuco, throwing rocks and sticks at the police officials who guarded the site. By the end of the day 14 officials were injured and 120 Mapuches detained. The violent action was a protest against what the Mapuche felt was repeated police aggression against their communities, especially the targeting of the leaders of their communal organizations. Four days earlier, the government had raided the headquarters of the Council of All Lands—the governing group of the different Mapuche communities—and arrested several of its leaders. And the government, the military, and private enterprise—particularly the timber industry—have now demanded that the State Internal Security Law be applied against the Mapuche, a measure that has led to the arrest of several indigenous leaders. In early August, four of the arrested leaders, free on bail, sought asylum in the Swedish Embassy. The four agreed to leave the Embassy under a guarantee that they would not be re-arrested so long as Stockholm had their request under consideration.
The government attacks, in turn, have been reactions to militant Mapuche mobilizations aimed at recovering indigenous lands and traditional community prerogatives. At issue is what the Mapuche communities feel is the gnawing away of their ancestral, cultural and economic rights. They began the current wave of militant protest in 1996, and in 1997 activists burned forestry company trucks in an area called the Lumaco Commune. The Lumaco conflict marked the beginning of activists’ radical attacks against the security systems and timber production centers in the Arauco and Malleco regions, where the expansion of the timber industry is causing a high degree of soil erosion, crippling the traditional self sufficiency of the Mapuche communities. Over the past four years, the timber industry has remained at the center of the conflict. The industry is now active in a broad swath of south-central Chile where nearly 60% of the rural Mapuche population live.
There are about one million Mapuche living in Chile, the majority of whom have moved off the land and into cities. Despite this urbanization, the Mapuche still think of themselves—and struggle to remain—a people closely tied to the land. The original Mapuche communities are divided geographically: Pikunches (people of the north), Huilliches (people of the south), Lafkenches (people of the sea, who gain their livelihood fishing off the Pacific coast), and Pewenches (hunters and gatherers living close to the Andes, who get their name from the pewen tree, whose fruit is an essential food source for the community).
In recent years there has been an open expansion of private investment and state activity into the ancestral territories of all these groups. This expansion is a direct result of pro-growth government economic policies that have marginalized traditional forms of production. The state, first under the dictatorship and now under the elected Concertación governments, has continually attempted to create material conditions for the successful promotion of private economic growth. At the beginning of the 1990s, for example, to produce energy to meet industrial needs, the government began construction of six hydroelectric plants in the southern Bio-Bio River region. The plants will transform the landscape in ways that particularly affect Pewenche communities. A large number of indigenous organizations and non-governmental organizations have called for abandoning this project because it violates the rights and customs of the indigenous people of the Upper Bio-Bio.
Similarly, the Ministry of Public Works is building a coastal highway whose construction is affecting communities of Lafkenche Mapuche in various coastal provinces of southern Chile. The government has argued that, by facilitating the sale of their products in the regional market, these roads will make it possible for the indigenous communities to take part in the economic progress now underway in Chile. But a stretch of more than 200 miles of the highway runs through Mapuche territories and violates religious rights by passing through sacred spaces, including community cemeteries.
Forestry has been perhaps the key economic sector confronting Mapuche rights. The rapid growth of the timber industry has been encouraged under a law enacted during the dictatorship, Decree Law 701, which provides incentives for investment in wood-producing forest plantations. Indeed, the dictatorship’s backing for this project significantly contributed to the ability of several forestry companies to move deep into Mapuche territory in a short time. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, the National Forestry Corporation auctioned off land in south-central Chile, this land fell into the hands of Chilean forestry companies like Mininco, Forestal Arauco and Crecex.
Some of these domestic companies have received support from, and are in some manner interconnected with, transnational enterprises like Celulosa del Pacifico S.A. Another company, Forestal Santa Fe, subcontracts for Citicorp, Shell Oil Company and Scott Worldwide. In spite of conflicts and continual confrontations between Mapuches and representatives of the forestry companies, the government has not offered any economic alternative that would protect the essential resources of the Mapuche population.
The state has also favored and promoted a policy of private investment aimed at developing regional tourism that would take advantage of the area’s lakes, mountains, rivers and thermal water springs. Accordingly, the government is promoting the progressive incorporation of the Mapuche population into what they term “ethno-tourism” projects, as a means, they say, of increasing Mapuche families’ income.
But the bulk of this investment has not benefited the indigenous communities. The Mapuche now seek help from a limited number of government programs designed to promote the creation of new rural productive systems such as coops and associations. Local Mapuche communities have their own particular forms of collective economic activity known as the Mingako, a traditional form of work that includes community construction of housing, collective farming and community food gathering. There are few government programs that support this kind of collective endeavor. Mapuches can take part in the economic development which results from the new investment only as temporary workers in the agro-industrial and other large-scale projects which are being developed in this region and elsewhere in the country. Investment, development and expansion of capital are progressively proletarianizing the Mapuches, the majority of whom have no individually held land.
The government agency that should be the Mapuche’s strongest advocate has thus far been of little help. Throughout its seven-year existence, the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI)—the agency charged with implementing government indigenous policies—has been a great disappointment. Rather than representing the views of the communities, CONADI has instead supported the particular interests of private companies and the state. In the face of grassroots movements aimed at the recovery of community lands that were usurped in the past, CONADI has limited its action to buying back some of these lands for limited redistribution. Worse, CONADI officials are currently under investigation for fraudulent sales of land, corruption and misappropriation of funds in this process. All this has fed the conflict.
Beyond this, the economic and social conditions of a significant number of the indigenous communities have dramatically deteriorated. The continuing decrease in total indigenous landholdings and the division of community-held lands into private holdings, all combined with continuing soil erosion, do not allow for subsistence or secure settlement of the Mapuche population within their communities. As a result, there has been a continuous process of migration to urban centers. Service and construction work are new for the Mapuche, and characteristic of their new social condition. There is also significant Mapuche participation in the temporary labor sector. And Chilean agro-industry is creating new spaces for the insertion of the most vulnerable manual laborers.
As a result of all this, new political strategies have emerged. Without abandoning their material demands, indigenous communities and their local leaders have placed a greater emphasis on a politics built around Mapuche identity. The Mapuches have observed the growth of state power at the expense of indigenous rights and above all they have seen the lack of political will for the design of indigenous policies that would be more in accord with community interests. In response, they are encouraging a re-examination of the political situation and the history of the Mapuches’ own strategies of struggle. They are searching for ways to reconstruct traditional organizations and political practices in order to do away with the heirarchical structures that previously influenced the Mapuche movement.
They are also rethinking the meaning of “the local.” Indigenous communities are looking for basic meaning in their relation with natural surroundings and ecology, as was true in the pre-colonial period. As a result, we can observe the growth of a political discourse that is more in harmony with the community’s own reality. The gestation of an indigenous movement with nationalist characteristics is evident in the Mapuche demand for a historically determined territory in Chile’s south-central region; in the resurgence of local movements like the “identity territories” of the various indigenous groups who represent different ecological zones in the ancestral Mapuche territory; in the spread of symbols like the flag of the All-Lands Council; in local development projects and educational systems that put renewed emphasis on the cultural importance of older community members. These make up part of the new process of cultural revitalization and the establishment of a Mapuche-based political discourse.
Because of the failure of the political process and their experiences with political parties, some communities and local leaders have decided to seek out their own strategies by drawing from historical experience—both national anti-colonial struggles and political experiences particular to the Mapuche. The crisis of national political parties also has implications for the way local power is understood and envisioned as a form of re-establishing traditional rights and customs. This is seen, for example, in attempts to take control of municipalities. In last year’s municipal elections, indigenous communities ran mayoral candidates and many are now local council members. For the new generation of leaders, the municipality offers conditions that make it possible to take political control and thus be able to channel resources to their communities.
The Mapuche organizations are facing a great dilemma: On the one hand, they can participate actively in the spaces made available to them by civil society and the state, such as the municipalities. In this way, by positioning themselves to participate in the top-down dialogue imposed by the state, they can struggle to ensure that state policies take account of the interests and cultural particularities of the Mapuche people. On the other hand they can engage in more outright autonomous action and wage constant struggle against any state control of their territories. For the present, it seems the communities and their leaders have chosen to combine the two strategies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosamel Millaman is a Mapuche anthropologist and academic secretary of the School of Anthropology of the Catholic University of Temuco. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
