The Wiritray lof, located in the northern head of Villa Mascardi, which has always differed from the Lafken Winkul Mapu, spoke about the situation in the area.
In a statement, its members begin by clarifying that theirs is “the only Mapuche community, historically and genuinely recognized on the margins of the Relmü Lafken coast. (as the Mapuche call the lake)”.
Thus, they express: “We denounce our most absolute repudiation of the outrage of which we have been constant victims silenced by direct action or omission, both by organized crime that arrived in our territory in 2017, and by the CoDeCI authorities. (Indigenous Communities Development Council)of the Coordinator of the Mapuche Parliament, of the INAI (National Institute of Indigenous Affairss), and other state bodies that protect, assist, and finance them, and that are flagrantly colluding in the commission of crime after crime, by the first already mentioned.”
“Our constant peaceful struggle for the recognition of our rights as native people pre-existing the national and provincial States, for integration and intercultural respect, for the right to coexist in the diversity of thoughts, processes of which our werken Clarisa Montenegro was a pillar and an example to follow, today it is embarrassed and distorted by these nefarious characters, who in their ideological blindness fail to see that those who harm the most are our brothers, many of whom are still struggling to exercise their sovereign rights in their historic territories”, continues the text.
At the same time, it clarifies: “From now on, we strongly repudiate any type of conduct and appeal to irrational violence, fire, bullets, whichever side they come from”, and then continue: “Our Mapuche people have historically cultivated dialogue and respect as a philosophy of life, that is what our elders bequeathed to us, and that must never be forgotten. But the last straw that has already broken our patience is the media pantomime of pretending to stage a ngvillatun ceremony on the shores of the lake, in our territory, without any type of free, prior and informed consultation with our people, carried out in its entirety by people completely outside our community, with the full consent, accompaniment and participation of the CoDeCI authorities, who are supposed to know in advance the profound gravity of the matter, which involves stubbornly juxtaposing outsiders to our community in our territory to unbalance all our spirituality, all the balance of our ixrofill monguen, our fillke mapu, our ngen lafken, ngen mahuiza, ngen lemu…”.
“Unbalance all our ancestral worldview and cosmogony, in our territory, without any kind of justification or valid pretext other than some whim of cheap politics,” they sentence.
“This act without consultation is not only baseness, a total lack of respect, but also harms our autonomy and territorial self-determination, which these leaders talk about so much and fill their mouths with in the media,” they appreciate, and then develop : “In other words, not only do our neighbors suffer from material vandalism, carried out by these anonymous outsiders for more than five years, but we also suffer from the spiritual vandalism that supposes the malpractice carried out by these intruders, who have nothing to do with it. staging their fantochadas in our community territory, knowing the consequences that the imbalance of forces has on our mapu, for meddling where no one called them, lying treacherously, exercising the most atavistic and stolid violence towards everyone, under the mantle of the deaf and complicit state impunity”.
“We reiterate for the umpteenth time, that the only rewe as such, or understood as ‘sacred site’, in the entire area, is in the heart of the territory of our community, and was duly surveyed at the time, by the cadastral legal recognition of Law 26,160”, point out the members of the Wiritray community.
And, on this norm, they point out that also, from it, the historical presence of their ancestors in the sector in conflict is recognized.
“The same place that still preserves the historic paintings in which our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grazed their cattle,” they say.
“But it seems that for these leaders, being a peaceful, dialoguing community and acting under the mantle and protection of the law does not work, it does not correspond, it does not proceed, it only serves to act de facto, and speak the language of violence and victimization,” they say.
“As a community, we once again call for peace and harmony, but as long as it respects the law, justice and the truth of things,” they conclude.
The Wiritray community spoke of “organized crime” | El Cordillerano Newspaper