[Translation of an article from Clarín of Santiago, Chile, for January 30. See original here and related articles here and here.]
By Ricardo Candia Cares
There is nothing new about the militarization of Mapuche lands. The army was in charge of the first version of these pacification efforts in the 1860s, when the state decided that the lands deserved other owners and that the Indians were a nuisance that had to be gotten rid of.
The minister of war at the time, Federico Errázuriz, instructed General Pinto, the hero who led the operation, “Use your weapons and harass them in whatever way you find most prudent in order to punish their rebellion, to strip them of their resources and to weaken them to the point of leaving them powerless…”
And if they should surrender, as proof of good faith the chiefs should turn over to the army one or two of their sons as hostages, who, after a certain time, should be exchanged for others to avoid having separation from their parents weaken their mutual affection.
The Mapuche defeat of November, 1881, defined the way the State would relate thereafter to the survivors: that is, without seeing them. The idea of the powerful of the time was not only to occupy their lands but to do away with what they called the Mapuche race. And from that time onward, the intent was to have them cease to exist, as though they had evaporated after the last executions.
Reduced in number, the survivors went from being a free people to living like peasants, squeezed together, poor, defeated and, above all, invisible. The State’s efforts at integration turned the Mapuche into a workforce to serve in the cities and on the new land holdings. Chilean society fulfilled its governing role by teaching Chileans to relate to the remnants of its civilizing wars as though they were people who were not people, practically with no rights.
For the greedy of the day, these expanses, with no owners now, were rich plunder. A society had just been dismantled by cannon and repeating rifle and great fortunes in the center of the country were being financed by the lands the army had seized through blood and fire.
And then it was discovered that these ragged Indians who were spoiling the view, scattered about with no idea where to go or what to do, were not at all like the daring and brave Indians of literature, of the tales of valor and resistance against the invader, that were talked about in schools and in speeches.
A famous homage to the Mapuche is a bronze statue that Chilean artist Nicanor Plaza conceived in the mid 19th century. Born with the Anglo-Saxon name The Last of the Mohicans for a contest honoring the last Mohican, that Indian with feather headdress, bow and arrow, although it was not an accurate depiction the artist, to avoid a total loss, changed the name and placed it on one of the terraces of the Santa Lucia hill. Since then it has been known as Caupolicán.
Another homage is stamped with the date 1904. With lyrics by Eusebio Lillo, our national anthem warns that “with his blood the proud Araucano left us the inheritance of his valor…”
These descriptions, befitting Alonso de Ercilla or Pedro de Oña, were the object of rewards, honors and references of epic proportions. But no longer for the starving migrant barbarian left in the limbo of non-being.
This dichotomy has defined the relationship that the dominant culture has had with matters Mapuche ever since those not-so-distant and heroic expeditions that General Pinto described in his memoirs of 1869 and that reached an emotional summit in the month of November, 1881, near the present-day Temuco.
On the one hand, the survivors of the war came to be treated like miserable losers of no worth whatsoever, and on the other, the Mapuche idealized in literature and legend, founders of a race through whose veins runs the blood of warriors without peer, they are exalted as worthy descendents of Caupolicán, Colocolo and other heroes who may not even have existed but who are much more presentable than those found still wandering about.
What reverberates today through those lands, with their dismal trail of death and suffering, are the echos and reflections of a war in which the Mapuche were defeated but who survived in those ruins by means of that mysterious native force that all the peoples of the world possess in order to negate eternal defeat and to struggle for their right to be.
Therefore, by dint of great effort, the Mapuche continues to exist, even though the triumphant, predominant and greedy society decrees his invisibility by means of scorn in the shape of laws that the armed forces and the police enforce with pleasure and good marksmanship, while awaiting reinforcements.
The Mapuche is still invisible for whoever chooses not to see him. And the deaths and suffering that day by day take over the land, all of them, are explained by that self-interested duality of Chilean society, by the optics perfected over 130 years of scorn and blindness.
Source: Lo de allá