Police Brutality in "Democratic" Chile
Mapuche Student Shot Dead; Political Prisoner Slowly Dying From Hunger Strike
Mapuche International Link - 13th January 2008
A peaceful protest by the Mapuche met a bloody end on 3rd January when police opened fire into the crowd, killing 22-year-old university student Matias Catrileo Quezada. The young Mapuche man was shot in the back upon retreating, when Chilean police began firing indiscriminately into the crowd with machine guns. Among the protestors were elderly civilians and children, and it was a miracle that nobody else was killed.
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For years the Chilean judicial system has refused to deliver justice and return the indigenous land illegally taken by the estate Santa Margarita, owned by Jorge Luchsinger, in the district of Vilcun. The local Mapuche protested by moving onto their land to attract the attention of the authorities. The police responded by shooting into the crowd, which immediately dispersed and ran for cover. |
Due to serious mistrust in the conduct of Chilean institutions, including the police (who have a long history of manipulating the evidence to meet their own ends), Matias' body was handed to the local Catholic Church, who appointed Bishop Sixto Parzinger to arrange an independent autopsy, and mediate with the authorities. This murder has caused immediate outrage among both the Mapuche communities and non-Mapuche throughout the ancestral territory of the Mapuche, and the capital of Chile, Santiago.
The ensuing civil outcry has been met with yet more unnecessary police brutality, which has resulted in many protestors being injured and detained, including Matias Catrileo's mother, Monica Quezada, his sister, and various other members of his family. On the 9th January, in the city of Temuco , Monica Quezada was arrested along with 16 other protestors during a march condemning the murder of her son by the police.
The tension between the Mapuche people and the Chilean authorities has been growing since the 10th of October 2007, when six Mapuche political prisoners went on hunger strike and were subsequently ignored by their government.
The prisoners originally agreed to stop their protest upon the intervention of Bishop Camilo Vial, who organised a mediation between the Mapuche and the government in an effort to clarify the conditions concerning their imprisonment. Including why the authorities had decided to use the Anti-Terrorism Law, a relic from the time of the Pinochet dictatorship that only last year the President had promised never again to use upon the Mapuche.
The Chilean government agreed to this mediation, and on the 17th December the negotiations were supposed to start. With this agreement, all but one of the prisoners, Patricia Troncoso, stopped their hunger strike. Patricia decided that she would wait until the talks began to take place, and she was sure of the government's integrity in this situation, before she joined them. And she was right to do so, as this agreement has apparently now been forgotten.
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Patricia Troncoso is now being kept alive by a saline drip. She has been on hunger strike for 93 days. According to the latest medical report issued on the 7th January 2008, Patricia has lost 26.2% of her original weight, is suffering from cramps, slowed heart rate, respiratory difficulties, and has a very weak pulse. |
The mental examination found that she is speaking very slowly, she is disorientated, and she is drifting in and out of consciousness. The prognosis for her future shows that, even if she were she to stop this now, she would still never fully recover. Her body has suffered too much damage to be able to return to its former health. Patricia continues her protest, but she is dying.
Patricia's private doctor, Doctor Berna Castro Rojas, advises that her patient be kept in the hospital permanently, rather than the current situation of traveling back and forth from prison. She also states that Patricia should be undergoing at least daily examinations, but that this is not happening. She is being neglected. In her final report, Doctor Castro Rojas requested that Patricia be immediately interned in a hospital that would guarantee her life, have doctors continuously accessible, and respect her rights of protest.
The present outrage felt by the Mapuche communities has been expressed through many public protests. These demonstrations, though passionate, have not been violent on the side of the Mapuche; however, they have been aggressively broken up by the 'military police', who have used water cannons to disperse the crowds, and have beaten and arrested countless Mapuche and supporters, including children. The result of this is that the tension is continuing to escalate.
For further information, please visit our website at www.mapuche-nation.org