Government Rejects Invitation to Participate in Mapuche Summit

Written by Charlotte Meritan on January 10, 2013.

The Chilean government has rejected an invitation to a Mapuche summit that was planned for January 16 in Temuco.

mapuche flag 270x180 Government Rejects Invitation to Participate in Mapuche Summit
Mapuche Flag. Photo credit: Public domain.

TEMUCO — Various Mapuche organizations have scheduled a Mapuche summit for January 16 at the Cerro Ñielol, in Temuco. They have invited President Piñera, as well as a number of government members and representatives, in order to find a solution to the currently wreaking havoc in the Araucania region.

Topics tackled during this day will include the militarization of the area, which must be reiterated in response to the invocation of the Anti-Terrorism Law.

Aucán Huilcamán, a representative of the Mapuche organization ”Consejo de Todas las Tierras”, announced that he truly believed that this meeting could end the violence in the region.

“We are convinced that this situation can’t continue. We, the Mapuche, together with the government and Chilean society, have a huge role to play on the path for social peace,” he said.

From the government, however, the reaction is quite different and many representatives will be missing at the summit. Government spokeswoman Cecilia Perez rejected the invitation.

“La Moneda wishes to have a dialogue, but only with those who respect Chilean institutions,” she declared.

Perez is actually referring to the Area de Desarrollo Indígena (Indigenous Development Area, or ADI), in which Temucuicui Mapuche community refuses to participate, accusing the initiative of be a government strategy in order to conceal the Mapuche issue and the claim over their ancestral lands.

Despite the fact that the ADI is committed to indigenous social and economic development, Temucuicui spokesman Jorge Huenchullán says that it is not an acceptable compromise.

“The Mapuche are not fighting to obtain an assistantship,” he said.

The ADI demonstrates a severe misunderstanding between the Chilean government and Mapuche communities. When Minister of Social Development Cristian Larroulet defends “development programs” in which Mapuche communities are “in cooperation with enterprises” to develop agriculture on their land, Mapuche leaders accuse the monopolization of their lands by capitalist enterprises and massive agricultural firms.

According to Nancy Yañez, the co-director of the Observatorio Ciudadano, this initiative doesn’t match with indigenous people’s land declarations, which go against private interests. “Forestry enterprises have settled in large areas, and their economic interests are contrary to Mapuche claims on lands they consider their ancestral property,” she explains.

In addition, the lawyer points out that indigenous peoples must be consulted on every project connected to them, as the Convention 169 of the OIT recommends.

Mapuche communities claim for their lands for spiritual, not economic reasons. This is what the government obviously does not understand.

Source: I Love Chile

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