Chile: The leader of a radical Mapuche group rejected dialogue with the government of Gabriel Boric

Hector Llaitul, leader of the Arauco-Malleco Coordinator (CAM), one of the radical Mapuche defense organizations in Chile, said Wednesday that he will not talk with the current Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches.

“With this position she assumes, we no longer consider her a valid interlocutor. We do not have the slightest intention of dialogue when there are speeches of this kind,” Llaitul said in the Buta Rincón community in the region of La Araucania (south), according to local media.

The statements came a day after Siches announced, before the Chamber of Deputies, a strengthening of the police presence in the southern part of the country, where there has been a bitter territorial conflict between the Mapuche indigenous people, the State and large agricultural and forestry companies for decades.

The leader of the CAM, an organization that has claimed hostile actions, added that the government is trying to make “an artificial paragon” with “the violence that Mapuche resistance exerts when it comes to confronting the interests of capital goods and against the brutal and criminal repression that is exercised in the Wallmapu” (territory Mapuche).

New strategy

Since the current president, Gabriel Boric, took office on 11 March, a strategy has been deployed that consists of staying in the area through various government authorities to try to establish a “dialogue” with representatives of all parties affected by the conflict.

On his recent visit to Buenos Aires, Boric said: “We have decided on a path that is that of dialogue, and that dialogue will bother many. It will bother those who believe that from violence or confrontation things can be achieved.”

Boric, who took office on March 11, disagreed with those who believe that the conflict that exists “between the Chilean State and the Mapuche nation people” is only one of public order, since he stressed that it is also “a historical and political conflict.”

“It is a conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche nation-people. And we are not going to ignore that,” he reiterated.

Weeks ago, Siches was received at the entrance of an indigenous community with a series of shots in the air. And, also weeks ago, the Undersecretary of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, had to interrupt his agenda in the Biobío region because a group of people cut him off on one of the roads.

The CAM, the most important organization of the Mapuche “autonomist” movement in the last 20 years, has carried out numerous violent actions from 1997 to the present day. The most recent was the burning of three trucks in the Araucania Region last March.

Increased violence

In that area and other regions of southern Chile, there has been the so-called “Mapuche conflict” for decades, which faces extractive agricultural and forestry companies linked to large economic conglomerates and indigenous groups that claim their ancestral lands.

The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Chile, claim the territories they inhabit for centuries, before they were forcibly occupied by the Chilean State — at the end of the 19th century — in a process officially known as the “Pacification of La Araucania”.

In the past year, this dispute has seen an escalation of violence with frequent arson attacks on machinery and premises, shootings involving fatalities and hunger strikes by indigenous prisoners.

(With information from EFE)

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