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The Mapuches, Chile’s largest indigenous group, have endured centuries of fighting.
They resisted conquest first by the ancient Incas, then by the Incas. SpanishThey fought when the emerging Chilean state occupied their territories and as military dictator generals, Augusto Pinochet Devastated their communities by abolishing collective property, allowing their land to be confiscated and sold to forestry companies.
Now the Mapuches, who make up about 12% of Chile’s 19 million people, fear another violent chapter in their history is yet to come as the country prepares to elect its next president on Sunday in a contest tilted toward the far-right.
“It will get worse with a far-right government,” Karen Rivas Catalán, a 37-year-old Mapuche political scientist, told The Associated Press from her lush plot where chickens roam. “There will be more Mapuches in our prisons.”
The favorite to win on Sunday is José Antonio Caste, an ultra-conservative former lawmaker who has vowed to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status and give emergency crime-fighting powers to the army and police.
His rival, Communist Janet Jara, who represents the ruling coalition, has also adopted a law-and-order approach to woo voters.
The Mapuches are the targets of a planned crackdown
A turning point for the Mapuches came in the social uprising of 2019, when Chilean protesters demanding changes to the country’s market-based economy adopted the Mapuche flag and breathed new life into their cause. Leftist President Gabriel Boric came to power vowing to withdraw troops from their lands and replace the dictatorship-era constitution with one that ensures their rights.
But Boric soon redeployed the army. Armed Mapuche groups attacked security forces. The government extended the state of emergency. Voters rejected a proposed constitution that would have initiated radical social change.
The Mapuche conflict raging in the hills and lush forests of the southern region of Araucania is one of the more delicate issues facing Chile’s next president.
But unlike past presidential elections, the campaign focused on voters’ fears about organized crime and illegal immigration, barely mentioning possible solutions to the unrest and leaving almost everything else out.
When the Mapuches have come forward, it has been in the context of planning for drastic security action.
Caste’s campaign said in September, “We are going to use all constitutional, legal and administrative instruments; all intelligence and technology; all force and resources to eliminate terrorism in the region.”
Caste kicked off its campaign on Thursday in Temuco, a southern city widely considered the capital of the Mapuche people. In a fiery speech delivered from behind bulletproof glass, Cast said that the Araucania region around Temuco was “plagued by fear, terror, barbarity.”
“They are cowards who attack at night with their faces covered and forgive nothing, do not respect anyone’s rights,” Caste said of Mapuche militants, who have carried out sabotage attacks against soldiers and forestry companies, whom they see as an invasion of their ancestral lands.
“We’re going to shut that group down,” he said.
For years the area has been under the control of Chile’s militarized police, whom the Mapuches accuse of using excessive force.
The group’s distrust of the state has deepened in recent years, including the killing of civilians by security forces, such as the shooting death of a young, unarmed Mapuche farmer in 2018.
In a dramatic case, in 2017 a police intelligence unit came under investigation in connection with a scheme to fabricate evidence to falsely implicate Mapuches in terrorist activities. The trial is going on against the accused police officers.
Indigenous groups fear return of dictatorship-era conflict
Angelina Cayuqueo, 58, a Mapuche language teacher, finds the choice existential.
She suffers from a “terrible fear” that if CAST wins, her community will relive the trauma of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship under his government.
“We are already afraid that things could be like what happened under Pinochet, because that is his intention,” she said while picking cherries on her land.
During three previous presidential bids, Caste repeatedly expressed his desire to change the law allowing the Mapuches to reclaim their ancestral lands, claiming that it encouraged violence.
In his latest rally speech, Caste decried state-funded Mapuche land restitution programs after Chile’s return to democracy in the 1990s as “degradations” that profited Mapuche people from “occupying someone else’s land.”
Although hundreds of thousands of hectares of land assigned to non-Mapuche farmers and forestry companies during the dictatorship have been returned to the Mapuche over the past few decades, the program has done little to change the group’s endemic poverty and marginalization.
“It is not fair to them that we as Mapuche reclaim our land,” Cayuque said. “They want the Mapuche people not to exist in history.”
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Reported from Debre santiagoChile.