Mapuche seek support for struggle in Chile

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Two guests of the Co-ordinating Committee in Support of Mapuche People in Chile visited Edmonton in the first week of March during a month-long North American tour to gain support for the Mapuche in their struggle to regain their land, culture and human rights. Other stops were Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Oakland, Calif.

Jeannette Paillan from the Mapuche Information Centre Lulul Mawida in Santiago Chile, and Juan Bautista Ancalao, a Longko (chief) from the Co-ordinating Committee of Communities in Conflict - Arauco-Malleco, met with community groups, media, Native and human rights activists, and local Native people during the tour. In Edmonton, Dionicio Barrales from the Chilean-Canadian Community Association of Edmonton interpreted for them.

The visitors explained although there is supposedly a democratic government in their South American country, the Mapuche face ongoing violation of their human rights, including the constant threat of imprisonment or worse if they try to organize to do anything about it. They have been pushed out of nearly all their territory to make way for highways, dams and other progress. Police enter their houses on any pretext, and several Mapuche leaders are currently detained.

The government does not recognize they are a people, they said, therefore they have no rights and there is no avenue for complaint. Chief Bautista Ancalao's group is nevertheless striving to organize a movement to push for Mapuche autonomy.

In 1540, just prior to Spanish colonization, the Mapuche occupied 31 million hectares of land in Chile. By 1979 that was down to 350,000 hectares, and it continues to decrease drastically as a result of clear-cut logging and massive development projects such as a dam on the Bio-Bio River.

Before European contact, up to two million Mapuche had a mixed economy that included nomadic and sedentary communities throughout half of Chile and Argentina. Today 1.5 million (10 per cent of the population of Chile) subsist on small-scale agriculture on marginal land south of the Bio-Bio. Even that livelihood is threatened by international developers who hire city dwellers, not the local Indigenous people. The Mapuche face contamination of their crops and ground water, industrial and traffic hazards, harrassment and desecration of their sacred sites if they stay.

Paillan said even though there are some laws and regulations in place that are supposed to protect the Mapuche and the environment, they are not enforced against industry and the transnational corporations, "either in Mapuche territory or around Mapuche territory. . . . The Chilean government never goes forward into [enforcing] these regulations. The industries operate almost whatever way they want."

International human rights observers have reported to the United Nations that brutal repression of the Mapuche has been stepped up this past decade by Chilean authorities who override treaties.