Chile’s Senate President Urges Intervention To Forestall Mapuche Hunger-Strike Deaths
Written by Steve Anderson - Monday, 30 August 2010
Senate President Jorge Pizarro on Monday urged President Sebastián Piñera to begin talks with 32 Mapuche activists who have been on a hunger strike for almost two months.
“The state cannot allow these men to die,” said Pizarro, who met Monday with Lorena Fries, head of the National Human Rights Institute and with Senators Patricio Walker and Jaime Quintana.
Eighteen of the 32 hunger strikes completed their fiftieth day without food on Monday.
President Piñera traveled last week to the Araucaria Region (where most Mapuche live) to inaugurate a US$400 million aid and entrepreneurship program last week (ST, Aug. 27), but pointedly made no mention of the striking Mapuches.
“The government and President Piñera cannot just pretend and hope this issue will go away,” said Pizarro. “The Mapuches are asking that they not be discriminated against. They don’t want to avoid sanctions or penalties. What they are saying is that they demand balance, that they be judged by the law that is applied to all Chileans, and not by the anti-terrorism law.” Pizarro added that Congress needs to act fast to modify the current Anti-Terrorism law so that the kind of discrimination the Mapuches are protesting will no longer exist.
Sen. Walker urged immediate action, “Because lives are at risk.”
“We are applying a law against the Mapuches that was created in the era of the Pinochet dictatorship,” added Sen. Quintana.
The three senators – Pizarro, Walker and Quintana – are all from the opposition Concertacion coalition and did not speak out against using the Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law against Mapuche activists during the 20 years their coalition governed Chile (1990 – 2010).
SOURCE: EL MOSTRADOR
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Source: The Santiago Times