Chile: Hungry for Justice
CHILE: Hungry for justice
Mapuches protest police killing in the capital. Benjamin Witte
Police killing and hunger strike heat up country’s Mapuche conflict.
In what appeared to be a turning point in the centuries-old conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche indigenous community last September, Chile joined 142 other nations in ratifying the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
The declaration grants indigenous peoples the right to self-determination and self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs.
But four months after ratifying the declaration, agression against the Mapuche community has worsened with the recent police killing of a Mapuche activist, bringing this social and political struggle once again to the national forefront.
In the early morning of Jan. 3, approximately 30 members of a southern Region IX Mapuche activist group attempted to occupy a farm located some 20 miles southwest of Temuco, the regional capital.
There they were met by armed carabineros (uniformed police), who fired on the activists, killing 22-year-old university student Matías Valentín Catrileo Quezada. Police later confirmed he was shot in the back.
“Criminalized” movement
The incident sparked protests throughout southern Chile — home to a large percentage of the country’s estimated 800,000 Mapuche — as well as in Santiago, where on Jan. 4 police arrested dozens of protesters and sprayed demonstrators with tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd in the city center. Several days later carabineros arrested Catrileo’s mother and sister during a demonstration in Temuco.
“This is sad situation, but one that’s not really surprising given how the Mapuche social movement has been criminalized in recent years,” says José Aylwin, who co-heads an organization called the Observatory for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“One manifestation of that has been the legal persecution of Mapuche leaders involved in protests to recover their lands. The result has been the jailing of those leaders under an anti-terrorism law that has been questioned by human rights organizations.”
During the Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) government, courts began applying an anti-terrorism law to cases involving Mapuche attacks on private property.
The law, which dates back to 1984, was originally aimed at controlling armed political groups involved in kidnappings, attacks on police stations and assassinations.
According to the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), the anti-terrorism law is the “harshest” of all Chilean statutes.
“It doubles the normal sentences for some offenses, makes pre-trial release more difficult, enables the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defense for up to six months, and allows defendants to be convicted on testimony given by anonymous witnesses.
These witnesses appear in court behind screens so that the defendants and the public cannot see them,” notes a 2004 HRW report.
Property exempt
Following the election of President Michelle Bachelet in 2006 the government shifted its posture, declaring it would only apply the anti-terror law to cases involving violence toward people — not property.
Still, resentment continues to simmer over the dozen or so prisoners who are currently serving out prison sentences dictated under the Augusto Pinochet-era law.
“The application of the anti-terrorism law in those previous cases was inappropriate and unjust, because they involved acts of resistance…The application of the anti-terrorism law was incorrect.
It allows for certain Mapuche actions to be interpreted as domestic terrorism, and that’s a serious thing, because that’s not the nature of the resistance they’ve carried out,” says Sergio Laurenti, executive director of Amnesty International Chile.
One of those “domestic terrorists” is Patricia Troncoso Robles, also known as “La Chepa,” who was arrested in 2002 and — more than a year later — sentenced to 10 years and a day for her involvement in burning nearly 250 acres of pine plantations belonging to the powerful Matte conglomerate.
On Oct. 10, 2007, Troncoso and four other prisoners — Jose Huenchunao, Juan Millalen, Jaime Marileo and Hector Llaitul — launched a hunger strike to draw attention to their plight.
Arguing that the anti-terrorism law should never have been applied in their cases, the strikers demanded the release of all Mapuche political prisoners.
Huenchunao, Millalen and Marlieo ended their fast on Dec. 14. A few days later the two remaining strikers, who by that time had each lost more than 50 lbs., were transferred to a nearby hospital. Llaitul broke his fast in early January, after 81 days. But Troncoso refused to give up, insisting she would continue until her death, if need be.
As the strike stretched to 90, then 100 days, public concern over La Chepa’s fate only raised the stakes in a dangerous face-off already exacerbated by Matías Valentín Catrileo’s recent death.
Demonstrations continued throughout the country and on Jan. 24, former presidential candidate Tomas Hirsch of the Humanist Party led a peaceful takeover of the International Workers Organization headquarters in Santiago. That same week doctors began force feeding Troncoso intravenously.
Four days later, with the Catholic Church acting as mediator, Troncoso finally agreed to end her 110-day hunger strike after government officials agreed to grant her and two of her fellow prisoners (Millalen and Marileo) weekend leaves and an opportunity to complete their prison sentences in a special work and education center.
“It’s just horrible. We repudiate the fact that our brothers, these political prisoners, must submit their bodies to this type of pressure in order to get the state to acknowledge our people’s demands,” says Raul Cariñe of the Mapuche group Meli Wixan Pau (“Of the Four Points of the Earth). “We, as Mapuches, are not going to just calm down.
We’ve got a lot of rage to let out. We’re very angry. The state, cowardly and at point blank, killed our brother, who was unarmed.”
President Bachelet responded to the crisis by appointing an inter-ministerial committee headed by newly appointed Interior Minister Edmundo Pérez Yoma.
The special committee, which also includes Bachelet’s planning minister and secretary general, promises to study the situation and come up with a list of recommendations.
“It’s an important advance. This mutli-ministerial team is a good initiative. But there are a number of factors at play here. For starters there’s the issue of the international instruments.
Chile has to move forward and ratify them without any more delay. There’s no way to justify, for example, the fact that after 18 years [Congress] still hasn’t ratified ILO Convention 169,” says Amnesty International’s Laurenti.
Thursday, February 28, 2008