Chile’s Mapuche and new president

By David Dudenhoefer, Today correspondent - May 27, 2010

Three months after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake fractured south-central Chile, President Sebastian Piñera, who took office less than two weeks after the quake, is focused on coordinating reconstruction. But Chile’s new president – one of the country’s richest men and its first leader from the right in 20 years – may also be steering the government toward greater conflict with that region’s Mapuche.

Chile President Sebastián Piñera

Photo courtesy www.gobiernodechile.cl

After two months of relative calm following the quake, Mapuche activists have resumed demonstrations to pressure the government to return ancestral lands and free their jailed leaders. On April 23, approximately 200 members of the Mapuche Territorial Alliance protested in the southern city of Temuco to demand the government restart negotiations for the purchase of approximately 24,000 acres of land claimed by dozens of communities. Protest organizers warned that Mapuche activists would occupy some of those properties in one month if the government didn’t resume the negotiations, which were suspended after Piñera won the presidency.

Following the protest, the director of the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI), Francisco Painepán, told the local press the government would continue the policy of the previous administration, purchasing land for Mapuche communities that can prove their claim to it, but its first priority would be to help the communities that suffered the most earthquake damage.

Two weeks later, Piñera announced a plan to restructure CONADI in order to make it more efficient, and prevent the corruption that tainted past land purchases. He also said CONADI would dedicate more of its resources to urban populations, since an estimated 70 percent of the country’s Indians now live in cities.

The announcement drew fire from activists, who pointed out that rural Mapuche suffer twice the poverty rate of the rest of the country, which is why so many move to cities. Studies have shown that one of the main causes of that poverty is the fact that most Mapuche families lack enough farmland to support themselves.

Juan Jorge Faundes, executive secretary of the Fundación Instituto Indígena, said Piñera’s plan to improve CONADI’s administrative capacity is good news, since the institution’s slow and inefficient response to Mapuche demands has fueled conflicts in the past. However, he said the government should not scale back the process of returning ancestral lands.

Faundes explained that after the Chilean army conquered the Mapuche in the late 19th century, the state granted survivors communal “mercy titles” for a total of 1.2 million acres – about one-tenth of their pre-conquest territory. However, the Mapuche lost more than about half of that land during the 20th century due to laws dividing communal land and an array of shady deals. He said the government’s land restitution has thus far been limited to areas covered by mercy titles that communities lost control of, but some Mapuche groups are pushing for the return of territory that Chile took from them during the conquest and autonomy from the Chilean state.

Faundes said Mapuche communities began demanding the restitution of lost land following the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile with an iron fist from 1973 – 1990. However, the center-left Concertación coalition that governed from 1990 through March was slow to respond to Mapuche demands, which resulted in communities occupying farms and forestry operations and fueled the birth of radical groups that have burned logging trucks and tree plantations.

The government responded to that violence by reinstating an anti-terrorist law passed by the Pinochet regime that limits a defendant’s rights and allows testimony by anonymous, masked witnesses. Faundes said various experts have found the law to be below international standards and called upon Chile to stop using it.

Faundes said the last administration, of President Michelle Bachelet, allowed the prosecution of more than 100 Mapuche under the anti-terrorism law, but it also approved 115 requests for land restitution. Nevertheless, the administration only managed to purchase 60 percent of that land before leaving office in March, and another 308 Mapuche communities have presented demands for land that the state has not yet responded to, but should.

"The current government can’t ignore the historic debt,” he said. “Returning the requested land is an obligation of the state.”

According to Faundes, another major problem is the Chilean police’s use of excessive force to break up Mapuche demonstrations and land occupations, which has resulted in the deaths of three protesters. As recently as May 13, police broke up a march by approximately 200 people in Temuco and arrested 17 protesters.

“During the dictatorship, the repression was more generalized. Under the democratic governments, repression has been focused on the Mapuche,” said Gabriela Cafucoy, a Mapuche activist who belongs to a support group for political prisoners. She claimed that many jailed Mapuche leaders were framed and convicted based on the testimony of anonymous witnesses in retaliation for their efforts to recuperate land.

José Aylwin, co-director of the human rights organization Observatorio Ciudadano, noted that whereas the last two administrations “criminalized Mapuche protest,” Piñera’s campaign promise to strengthen law and order does not bode well for the Mapuche.

“It is quite possible that there will be a lot of conflict under this administration,” Aylwin said.