From the Coordinator of the Parliament of the Mapuche People of Río Negro and the Council for the Development of Indigenous Communities (Co.De.CI), in particularly complicated moments, after the eviction of the so-called Lafken Winkul Mapu community in Villa Mascardi, and expressions of the lof Wiritray (historical in that place) contrary to the actions of these organizations regarding the conflict, a letter was sent to Pope Francis.
“We know that the historical debt that the Argentine State and the Church have with the original peoples and in particular with the Mapuche Tehuelche is not alien to him,” the letter begins.
“The Conquest of the Desert marked a before and after for Wallmapu -our ancestral territory-, the violence unleashed since that time continues to this day,” he continues, later developing: “Despite the fact that indigenous rights were recognized in the last reform constitutional, in provincial and national laws and the ratification of international treaties, violence in territorial conflicts reflects that these proclaimed rights continue to be violated and violated on a scale that constantly puts the life, culture and worldview of our country at risk. village”.
The text states: “More than a hundred territorial conflicts cross the province of Río Negro, with extractive projects, evictions, criminalization and racism.”
Thus, it is considered: “Today the most visible is the one that crosses the Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu, where in 2017 the Argentine Naval Prefecture assassinated Rafael Nahuel from behind. It is the State that denies us, violates us, criminalizes us, silences us and advances sacrificing our inhabited territories, pushing us towards exclusion and extermination.”
“The irrational operation of the State in the eviction carried out by the Unified Command of the security forces created by the Ministry of Security of the Nation, on October 4 of the current year and that still continues today, October 12, is another proof that the genocide perpetrated at the end of the 19th century is updated and reissued again and again”, point out the werken (spokesperson) of the Coordinator of the Mapuche-Tehuelche People’s Parliament of Río Negro, Orlando Carriqueo, and the president of the Co .De.CI, Nehuen Loncoman, who sign the letter.
“Laws, conventions, international treaties, rights to defense in judicial processes that protect us as a people were systematically violated, the rewe (ceremonial sacred site) of the Machi Betiana Colhuan Nahuel (spiritual authority) was violated – the only machi that has been raised after a hundred years in Puelmapu (Argentina) -, our peñi and lamgen (brothers and sisters) are being persecuted and detained in an inhuman hunt with dogs and weapons of war within the territory”, they affirm.
“Seven Mapuche women were arrested, four of them all mothers are in house arrest along with their children (babies of 1 month and 4 months) and a pregnant woman, who will have her Mapuche girl or boy in captivity,” they state.
In this way, they point out: “The repression is imposed with an exaggerated and unnecessary number of security forces, elite troops with weapons of war and dogs, a helicopter, drones, tanks. We cannot continue allowing these atrocities that threaten human dignity and the development of life, we cannot continue losing our peñi (brothers) and lamgen (sisters) in the hands of the State”.
“This year on your trip to Canada you apologized to the native peoples for so many years of violence. Today we ask you to break your silence again, to intercede with the national government of Argentina and the provincial government of Río Negro so that they agree to the path of dialogue, recognition and application of indigenous law. We are a pre-existing people to the State that continues to be threatened”, they write.
The text also reads: “We ask you as an authority of the Catholic Church to accompany us in what you express in the Encyclical Querida Amazonia: ‘It is possible to develop intercultural relationships where diversity does not mean a threat, does not justify hierarchies of power of some about others, but dialogue from different cultural visions’”.
“The need for dialogue to be able to face territorial conflicts is a greater obligation of the State after having subjected us to a genocide initiated in the Desert Campaign whose continuity of territorial dispossession, institutional violence and racism continues to this day”, reflect the Mapuche leaders provincial.
“Retracing the path of violence that the State has imposed in order to find bridges between different cultures, they demand that we commit ourselves to the path of dialogue, based on the recognition of the true history on which the State is founded. Because in order to repair, you must first recognize it”, they add, stating: “We are a people that refuses to disappear. We are a people that defends the territory of capitalist extractivism, we are a people that fight tirelessly to recover territory to live and develop as Che (person or people). We are a people that seeks to reconstruct itself in its language, its spirituality, its knowledge. We are a people that, despite the immeasurable pain of the genocide, harbors the idea of reparation, harbors the hope of respect for those differences and seeks in its demands the path of a society different from the one imposed by the modern State.”
“We hope that you can convince the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, and the governor of Río Negro, Arabela Carreras, to accept the path of dialogue, but fundamentally that they accept that dialogue must imply reparation for a genocide, and that this reparation includes among its central demands suitable and sufficient land with respect to our spirituality”, they express.
The final greeting, they indicate, is “with the embrace of the peoples”.
It should be noted that the letter is preceded by a phrase by the poet Graciela Huinao, the first Mapuche woman to join the Chilean Academy of Language. The expression reads: “Ñomumngenochi dungun meu, entuken ñi dungun, alumñmalechi pun meu apumniengeam” (“In indomitable language my words are born from the prolonged night of extermination”).
Mapuche referents wrote a letter to the pope | El Cordillerano Newspaper