JANUARY 23, 2012 | By Tania Peña
This indigenous town hit the media headlines in Chile as 2012 got underway, this time for being linked with the criticised anti-terrorist law.
It was a forest fire in the Carahue town of the Araucanía region, which resulted in the death of seven firefighters that was the trigger for what is now a familiar link between the two.
Although the Government later retracted it, its Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter hinted that Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM), an organisation that fights for the rights of Mapuche people, could be behind the Carahue tragedy, and announced that there existed sufficient precedents to believe that the incident had been started deliberately, and that such an act fully justified the implementation of this law against the culprits.
The government’s spokesman, Andrés Chadwick, later said: “It needs to be investigated, the State Prosecutor must do what it takes to determine who was responsible.”
What is for certain is that the statement made by Hinzpeter and by other figures on Chile’s extreme right stirred up matters surrounding the sensitive Mapuche issue.
But, let us call it what it is – there is nothing new in it. “You only need to scratch the surface of our history to reveal what people have tried to conceal because of shame or shamelessly – racism entrenched in Chile’s elite,” said Tito Tricot, sociologist and head of the Centro de Estudios de América Latina y el Caribe.
The academic calls to mind the terrible ordeal that the native people of Chile went through during centuries of colonisation, and how they have had to suffer the seizure of their land, sacred sites and special places for keeping their culture alive.
“What for the Carahue is a typical seasonal fire that tragically got out of hand, for Hinzpeter is the consequence of an orchestrated Mapuche terrorist plan,” stated Pedro Cayuqueo, editor of the newspapers Azkintuwe y Mapuche Times.
It revolves around a provocative theory of “Mapuche terrorism”, he added. “La Moneda (the Chilean Parliament) should look in another direction, he said – giving back land to the indigenous communities, recognising the historic debt and making amends for decades of injustice.
Other, even more probing observations on the situation have come into the open inside the country. “We are a country with a dreadful memory, half our own responsibility, half that of a pro-government press presenting information that is completely manipulated,” stated Hanzinho (Jorge Sepúlveda Retamal) in an article published on http://www.gamba.cl/.
His text recalls how “in the year 1991 the Forestal Mininco, a company belonging to the Matte family (one of the richest in Chile) was itself involved in each of the arson attacks, where everything was blamed on the Mapuche people and the government in power invoked the anti-terrorist law.”
He refers to reports by journalists about a series of events in Araucanía between 1999 and 2001, which point to the timber companies in the area stirring up problems which led to, as it came about, the police’s militarisation of Mapuche territory and the persecution and arrest of people in the communities.
Statements made to the police about the fires being started by forest rangers themselves were never investigated, and were always kept under wraps, the article asserted.
The issue has been highlighted at the start of what points towards being another turbulent year for the right-wing government in Chile.
With regards to the speculation directed at the Mapuche people, the political opposition and even the government coalition’s exponents agree that the Executive got it wrong and the mistake was made worse by invoking the anti-terrorist law.
We are faced with a false situation engineered to justify the use of the anti-terrorist law against the Mapuche communities in dispute, against the independent Mapuche movement and in particular against CAM, the native leader, Héctor Llaitul, stated from his prison cell.
Accused of being CAM’s leader, Llaitul pointed out that this strategy seeks to strengthen this legislation as a valid tool for also confronting the Chilean student and social movements, anticipating a year in which greater mobilisations and conflict appear to be on the horizon.
In terms of the deaths of the workers who fought the fire, he said that they were poor people, workers on very low salaries, who worked in appalling conditions, without the necessary safeguards.
It is the same forestry businessmen who have pillaged the Mapuche people who are responsible for the incident, he declared in a public statement.
The media farce surrounding the Carahue fire coincided with reports of raids on Mapuche communities and even a shocking video uploaded to Youtube which clearly shows an armed Chilean policeman brutally hitting a woman and threatening her with his weapon in front of her children.
According to a statement by the Autonomous Region of Temucuicui, which has been seen byPrensa Latina in Chile: “It is an attempt to stigmatise, pursue and create new excuses to be able to keep riding roughshod over our brothers and sisters, as people have spoken out about for years.”
The text, endorsed by the ancestral authorities of that emblematic community, sets forth that seven members of the Temucuicui community are accused unjustly under the anti-terrorist law because of “a blatant set-up and a racist political and judicial persecution that seeks to criminalise the just claims of the Pueblo Nación Mapuche.”
(Translated by Victoria Nicholls)
Source: The Prisma
