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Mapuche Indians in Chile Struggle to Take Back Forests
By LARRY ROHTER
New York Times
August 11, 2004 |
Mapuche
Indians carrying lances demonstrated in June against the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation meeting in Pucón, Chile. The forests in
the south once belonged to them, but now they are filled with tree
farms supplying lumber to United States, Japan and Europe, and the
Mapuches are trying to reclaim them, employing tactics some say verge
on terrorism.
TRAIGUÉN, Chile - Before the conquistadors arrived, and even
for centuries afterward, the lush, verdant forests of southern Chile
belonged to the Mapuche people. Today, though, tree farms stretch
in all directions here, property of timber companies that supply lumber
to the United States, Japan and Europe.
But now the Mapuches, complaining of false land titles and damage
to the environment and their traditional way of life, are struggling
to take back the land they say is still theirs. As their confrontation
with corporate interests has grown more violent, Chile's nominally
Socialist government has sought to blunt the indigenous movement by
invoking a modified version of an antiterrorist law that dates from
the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, 1973 to 1990.
Despite international protests, 18 Mapuche leaders are scheduled to
go on trial soon, accused under a statute that prohibits "generating
fear among sectors of the population." The charges stem from
a series of incidents during the past seven years in which groups
of Mapuches have burned forests or farmhouses or destroyed forestry
equipment and trucks.
"Clearly,
this is a conflict in which some fairly serious crimes have been committed,"
said Sebastian Brett, a representative of Human Rights Watch in Chile.
"But that does not mean you can call the people involved terrorists.
These are crimes, not against human life or liberty, but basically
against property, and they stem from a wide sense of grievance among
the Mapuches that they have illegally been deprived of their lands."
To many Mapuches, the current dispute is merely the continuation of
a conflict that has existed since the arrival of the conquistadors
in the 16th century. Retreating south of the Bío-Bío
River, they succeeded not only in fending off Spanish control but
also in having their independence formally recognized in treaties,
and were only incorporated into the Chilean state in the 1880's as
the result of a series of violent military expeditions.
After that, in a conscious imitation of the American method of dealing
with indigenous peoples, Chile put the Mapuches onto reservations
so that German, Italian and Swiss colonists could settle in the region.
But by the 1920's, policies had changed, and the Mapuches lost title
to all but a tiny fragment of their ancestral lands through procedures
they now describe as illegal.
"From the moment the Chilean state annexed Mapuche territory,
and used violence to do so, the rule of law has never existed south
of the Bío-Bío," said Aucán Huilcamán,
a leader of the Council of All Lands, a Mapuche group based in the
city of Temuco, south of here. "The state refuses to recognize
that we are a people with rights that were in force even before Chile
existed as a nation and which remain in force today."
During the past decade, "the Mapuches have seen this country's
economy growing rapidly" as the result of free market policies
that have led to an export boom, said José Bengoa, Chile's
leading historian of the Mapuche, who account for one million of Chile's
15 million people. "But they are themselves in a state of misery,
with an awareness of their situation that drives them to desperation
and exasperation."
Though Japanese and Swiss interests are active here in the region
that the Mapuches call "Araucanía," both of the main
forestry companies are Chilean-owned. On land the Mapuches claim is
theirs, the firms have planted hundreds of thousands of acres with
Monterey pine and eucalyptus trees, species that are not native to
the region and that consume large amounts of water and fertilizer.
"Many Mapuche communities have risen up and said, 'We don't want
any more tree farms here,' '' said Alfredo Seguel, a leader of a group
of young Mapuche professionals called Konapewman. "Productive
fields have been turned over to a monoculture that hurts other activities,
helps destroy the land, employs very few people and pays low wages."
Yet the signs of a landscape transformed are everywhere here. Highways
with billboards that proclaim, "If the forest grows, Chile grows;
obey the forestry law," run for mile after mile past fragrant
groves of trees that are uniformly spaced and nearly identical in
height.
Chilean exports of wood to the United States, almost all of which
come from this southern region, are about $600 million a year and
rising. Though an international campaign led by the conservation group
Forest Ethics resulted in the Home Depot chain and other leading wood
importers agreeing late last year to revise their purchasing policies,
to "provide for the protection of native forests in Chile,''
some militant Mapuche leaders are not satisfied.
"The
big companies and the big landowners are usurpers who profit at our
expense, and we want them to leave," complained José Huenchunao,
a Mapuche leader in an area east of here who is among the 18 scheduled
to go on trial. "We are a people who have been defrauded, who
have exhausted every legal means of attaining redress, and we have
the right to recover what was stolen from us, even if that means incorporating
violence within our struggle."
In an effort to defuse tensions, a special government body, the Commission
for Historical Truth and New Treatment, issued a report late last
year calling for drastic changes in Chile's treatment of its indigenous
people, more than 80 percent of whom are Mapuches. The recommendations
included the formal recognition of political and "territorial"
rights for Indian peoples, as well as efforts to promote their cultural
identity.
President Ricardo Lagos has hailed the document as an effort to "correct
the errors, at times inevitable, that the Chilean state committed
in its treatment of ethnicities." But neither Mapuche leaders
nor forestry interests seem satisfied, and despite Mr. Lagos's promise
to push for adoption of the measures, the Chilean Congress has taken
no action.
Some Mapuche leaders, including Mr. Huilcamán, who was a member
of the commission, oppose the report because they think it "a
colonialist document" that does not go far enough. But landowners
believe that the self-determination provisions of the plan will encourage
Indian uprisings like the one in Chiapas, in Mexico, or even lead
to separatist Indian movements like those that have sprung up in neighboring
Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
"Carried to an extreme, this could lead to the dismemberment
of the Chilean state," said Juan Agustín Figueroa, a former
agriculture minister and Supreme Court justice who is a leading spokesman
for property holders in this region. "National unity is a great
achievement, won at great cost, and it is folly to talk of granting
autonomy to 'Mapuche territory.' "
Mr. Figueroa's family has owned a 3,000-acre farm here since the 1940's
and he said that "we always had a good neighbor policy with the
Mapuches." But late in 2001, after what he described as "first
threats and then forest fires, a group of radical Mapuches burned
down" a manor house on the property.
Though he said he recognized that Mapuche organizations had nothing
in common with "groups like Al Qaeda or those in Iraq,"
Mr. Figueroa argued that use of the antiterrorism statute against
them was appropriate on both judicial and political grounds. But it
is precisely that two-pronged campaign against the Mapuches that worries
their advocates.
"In the 1990's, the Mapuche cause had more support among the
Chilean population than it does today," said Rodrigo Lillo, a
lawyer who has defended Mapuche leaders in military tribunals. "By
using the terrorist law, the government has not only succeeded in
disarticulating Mapuche groups, it has also robbed them of the moral
prestige and sympathy they once enjoyed." |
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