Mapuche nation. The Mapuche enemy that prevents looting the territory

*By Mauro MillanLatin American Summary, October 16, 2022.

It was not enough for them to strip us of history and territory: now they strip us of the story. We have no place, our story is inaudible in the mass media. And if we do, we will have a court made up of journalists, judges, and prosecutors willing to convict us. The theme of Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu requires a general account of how the rights of the native peoples are being subjugated and, specifically, of the Mapuche-Tehuelche people. There is no society that can withstand so much outrage, so much persecution.

They use RAM and absurd arguments to generate a non-existent internal enemy. If they come to take me out of my territory, I will defend myself with what I have, which are usually stones and sticks. With that we defend ourselves in the Mapuche territories, because if we had firearms, as they say, there would have to be deaths on the other side. How many members of the repressive forces died? The dead are all ours, and yet they treat us like terrorists.

The Mapuche people never gave up the idea of ​​returning to their territory. Even though they took away our history, our language, our philosophy, our ideology, our spirituality. Those territories are in the hands of the Rural Society, the business community, politicians, judges and lawyers. We began to reaffirm our presence in the territories, this has been going on for thirty years.

The communities live permanently in the uncertainty of not knowing if they are going to repress them or assassinate a member, that is psychological and state violence. There are more and more people prosecuted, criminalized, women, men. Every time we are more. The judicial apparatus is conditioned by a deep, structural denialism. All the rulings that we are going to obtain are detrimental to our rights.

In 1994, the National Constitution was reformed to moderately equate the violation of rights that minorities had, including indigenous peoples. The Argentine State drew up that Constitution and must comply with it, but judges and prosecutors do not take our rights into account and rely only on the Penal Code. The number one priority is private property, which for them is above all rights.

When we talk about private property, we are not talking about the violation of the rights of ordinary citizens who want to have some property. They take the discussion to such a degree that any neighbor, from any Patagonian city, thinks “They are going to come for my land”. They catch up with Benetton, Lewis and the Qataris who do business in the region. They seek to generate empathy through political levers.

We have seen Patricia Bullrich and Miguel Ángel Pichetto who came to ignite hate speech. And they have succeeded. Both the macrismo and the Peronist right, when it comes to business go together. There is no crack there. For them, strengthening the concentrated economic sectors is to guarantee their perpetuity in public office.

What can Jorge Lanata know? What can Clarín know about what it is like to live in Patagonia? Any. They are mercenaries with microphones, they say barbaric things about us, they have no idea what they are talking about. That’s where this macabre triangle of the judicial, business, political and journalistic apparatus ends, or whatever you want to call it.

We speak of the concentration of Mapuche ancestral territory, which is in few hands, which is used for business and is contaminated. It is the vision that capitalism has about what the land means and what the Mapuche-Tehuelche people put into discussion.

Faced with this, we have a political decision that we are materializing and that is the defense of the territory. It is a collective decision of the Mapuche-Tehuelche people that crosses provincial and country borders. When they ask us what political project we have, we tell them that there is one that is already underway: the defense of the territory.

The defense of the territory against what or against whom? The great threat is this capitalist extractivist system, they are advancing on the territories that are often inhabited by communities and remain at the mercy of the business community and real estate businesses. These territories are under threat.

What does it mean that the Nation has agreed to unify the repressive forces with the provinces? When States create this type of alliance and create this climate, what they really seek is to strengthen the image of the internal enemy.

The Justice ruled that the businessman Joe Lewis, one of the many businessmen who has seized the water, must open the roads so that whoever lives in this territory has the right to access the Escondido Lake. What does the State of Rio Negro do? He goes out to question that ruling.

So we ask ourselves: who is threatening these basic rights that every citizen should have? Are we the Mapuche or is it the State itself that is creating this type of hypocritical policies to defend foreign business interests? The State should ask itself what is happening to the Mapuche-Tehuelche people.

Everything that our people have experienced is tremendous, with episodes such as the Pacification of Araucanía and the Conquest of the Desert. That left collateral damage on us. My great-grandparents experienced it first-hand, they were imprisoned in concentration camps. Some survived, because the one who died, died mutilated, impaled, women without breasts, they cut off their heels.

It is the sad history that we inherited, the Chilean-Argentine nationality was imposed on us because we had no other, but in this process of deconstruction of the Mapuche-Tehuelche people, we say that we are Mapuche. For saying that we are a threat.

In this process of returning to the territory, our ancestral authorities are also returning. In Winkul, after many years, the first Machi was built in Puelmapu (“Eastern land”, on this side of the mountain range). The Machi, our doctors, heal our spirit and body. For all of Puelmapu it is an event and for us it is also important, because in some way they come to diagnose this healing process that the Mapuche people have.

I am Lonko because I got sick in spirit. I had an ancestor who told me that I have to get up like Lonko. I cannot diagnose it, nor can a general practitioner or clinician. That is why it is so important for the Mapuche people, because they begin to recompose historical, ancient fabrics of our Mapuche institutionality. This Machi is in Winkul and Mapuches come from everywhere, from all the provinces to attend to her.

There is a character named Diego Frutos who is supposedly a neighbor in the conflict zone, next to Lake Mascardi. But he does not live there, he is not a person who gets up every morning to throw corn to his chickens on his land. He lives in Buenos Aires, he is a pointer to Patricia Bullrich and number one participant in the group Consenso Bariloche and in all the defamation that is generated against us.

Frutos is the one who hires security forces, gangsters and intimidates the lof permanently. Imagine having a neighbor like that, that he is permanently filming you, provoking you. What the people of the lof did was to control that territorial space, which is one hectare or half a hectare, where this man goes once or twice a year.

In a situation of so much economic and territorial crisis, there are many people who have their weekend place in National Park territory. They are National Park lands. Has no one thought about how it is that Diego Frutos and many people from the business community get hold of those public lands? Would you or I have the right to a parcel in National Parks? Well, no, it’s not for everyone. They give it to a certain elite.

A document is being prepared where all the communities are going to go out and endorse this recovery process that the lof carried out. Obviously, this is going to generate an absolutely repressive action, because Frutos is not a poor neighbor of Villa Mascardi. He is a leader of the Pro, obviously he is going to resort to the political forces and they are going to want to evict the people from there with violence.

The modus operandi that we are experiencing at this time in Lafken Winkul Mapu is that the Gendarmerie cuts off the route together with the special forces of Río Negro and they form a commando type. They go, shoot, get in the truck and leave. They come back, they shoot and so on… I experienced it personally and all kinds of cases are collected: shotgun, 9mm, everything you can imagine. Our people keep them as evidence, but that evidence is useful to us because… what Justice are we going to claim?

We are putting together a delegation to travel to Buenos Aires soon. We are fed up with the story that is being made and we want to make a great walk there. Several lonkos and several communities that are in struggle are organizing ourselves. We are going to ask for the accompaniment of all the organizations and the conscious society, that they be with us and accompany us, that we go to deny the fallacies of those national media that make a story of the life, not only of the Mapuche, but also of the life of the poor people, of the peasantry, of the indigenous peoples in general.

They claim the right to report what we are experiencing at this moment in the history of humanity. Why can’t they and we? Why do we passively accept that only they can be the narrators of our history? We must disobey and seek alliances, because we will never have their economic capacity, but we do have the capacity to show solidarity.

The project that we have from the Mapuche-Tehuelche people is not a selfish project. It is not a project where we want to have a State above the State. No way. We are proposing a political decision to defend the territory, and when we defend the territory we defend Mapuches and non-Mapuches so that they can continue drinking the water and continue camping on the banks of the rivers and lakes of Puelmapu.

*Lonko of Lof Pillañ Mahuiza.