Analysis by Héctor Llaitul Carrillanca
In the context of October 12, an obligatory analysis on what is happening in the historic Wallmapu.
One of the great discourses of this government, of the Chilean institutionality, is that of public security. And it is in this context that it is intended to legislate in Chile regarding “usurpations” and “self-protection”, in order to prevent and protect the political and business class from the effects on their interests by one of the main actions that the Mapuche autonomy movement has promoted: territorial recoveries.
The first thing that should be pointed out is that this legislative initiative is part of the conflict that the Chilean State maintains with the Mapuche people and that has meant, in fact, a constant failure of the State to try to channel through institutional crumbs the historical demands of the communities in struggle. Contrary to what the State expected, in this conflict strong and deep political processes have been nested that gave rise to and strengthened the Mapuche Autonomist Movement, an issue that frightens the fascist right and Chilean pseudo-leftism, who see territorial recoveries as a threat to neoliberal governance. That is why they are trying to implement this regulation, substantively, to put a stop to the actions of the Mapuche people that besiege the reproduction of capital in our ancestral territory.
Those affected by these measures, as always, are the poor in the countryside and the city. Fundamentally, we are talking about families, communities that reclaim their lands lost by the Chilean colonial occupation, as well as impoverished families on the urban margins who are looking for spaces to improve their quality of life, as they have done historically. We are talking about Mapuche and non-Mapuche families. The legislative initiative classifies this entire set of practices as “usurpation”, overlooking the diversity of needs that are nested there, as well as the consequences of political polarization that are coming.
It is in this framework that we can say, without hesitation, that this proposal was ideologically designed, with political purposes to affect the Mapuche autonomy movement that, in its diversity of expressions, has managed to recover around 200 thousand hectares of the usurped property system that was in the hands of the forestry industry and other capitalist investments. In fact, these actions of the Mapuche autonomist movement entail effective processes of territorial control that re-establish geographical spaces for the reconstruction of the Mapuche world, since these lands not only cease to be in the hands of large timber corporations, but also imply profound transformations and changes in favor of the Mapuche world, putting an end to extractivist policies and depredation of nature.
For this reason, we must denounce that what the law of usurpations seeks is to “force and erase the history of the territory and origin of the Mapuche people”, which takes us back to the teachings of our ancestors to reaffirm something very basic and fundamental for all Mapuche, which is: “the Mapuche had our territory plundered and our ancestral lands were usurped”. It was to us who were occupied and stripped of what belonged to us.
Today, with the law of usurpations, what is intended is to change the history about the origin and ascendancy with respect to ancestral territories, they want to install a post-truth by force, using different tools of the law that the political and economic class is used to use in their favor.
It is in this sense that the political elite, the oligarchy, resurfaces the legal figure of “self-protection” or “privileged defense” as a right of protection against flagrante delicto. However, this mechanism eventually leads to the “mercenarization” of the conflict, disguising these effects with a discourse of national security. This is how the conditions are created for the intrusion of paramilitary gangs as a private form of thuggery.
In this regard, it can also be said that paramilitarization against movements in struggle or social protest is a model that the ultra-right in Chile wants to follow to confront the Mapuche cause with an absolutely counterinsurgency sense, following the parameters of the doctrine of National Security that caused so much horror after the coup d’état in Chile in 1973.
In the face of the government’s pretensions in the framework of the current neo-fascist offensive, the law of usurpations must be understood in a broad way, because it is related to other norms, such as the Nain Retamal Law, which is a type of early amnesty for the police and military for acts of repression exercised against social protest. In our opinion, it is a kind of ‘chipe libre’ to the excessive repression against all demonstrations and without discrimination. It means, in fact, a green light from the State to repress any social protest movement.
Therefore, we are in the presence of a type of legislation that points in the direction of the structuring of a police state and that in Wallmapu would imply a process of de facto occupation, with political-military characteristics, and private-business for the domination and oppression of our people.
To which is added the creation of an ideological contraption, which is the fiction of permanent flagrancy and whose determination can give rise to the action of police repression without a required complaint, either by the “current owner” of the property, and because it is not under the jurisdictional protection of any court. Strictly speaking, this constitutes an absurdity, from the beginning, since neither the police nor the military are technically qualified to determine whether an occupation is in fact a usurpation or not.
This has only one explanation, the interests of the large landowners, as is the case in the Mapuche ancestral territory with the forestry companies, and the same would happen with the large real estate corporations around the cities where it is intended to protect, at all costs, the financial speculation and techniques of the marketing of urban land that only favors the powerful.
Currently, in the political situation, a part of the law has been subject to the ‘presidential veto’, because Boric’s government cannot appear so subordinate to the oligarchy, but the scope of this cursed law in the legislative process in the Chilean parliament is not yet well defined. This is because, strictly speaking, for the political class in power, addressing the legal creation of “privileged self-defense” means, in fact, legitimizing the externalization of repression. It should also be considered that this law allows the issuance of new norms that go in the same direction, legislating on behaviors that are not even well described in the law.
In short, the conditions are created for the definitive installation of a regime of military occupation in the Wallmapu, as these are norms that have as a reference and model the norms of Criminal Law that has been implemented by the Zionist State of Israel, which has currently led to a State in permanent war based on occupation, which has brought acts of genocide by Zionism and dignified resistance by the heroic Palestinian people.
They are the norms of an authoritarian State, of an occupation regime that imposes apartheid measures, which is precisely what they want to build in Chile against our people or our organizations and that we consider, therefore, as one more act in the declaration of war to which we are subject by the Chilean State. It can only be said that the fascist right and its progressive allies have been gradually imposing norms and laws that aim to legitimize the criminalization of Mapuche social protest, to the de facto installation of a regime of military occupation in our historic Wallmapu.
In this regard, we must add that the legalization of paramilitary groups has had disastrous consequences for other societies, as has been demonstrated in Central America and Colombia, as well as in Asia and Africa, where the formation of these groups, far from helping to put an end to conflicts, has meant the intensification of military actions that target and victimize the poor people. the peasantry and the native peoples. Thousands of peasants and indigenous people have died under this type of private repression, under this concept of ‘security’.
Finally, we can affirm that the law of usurpations and its norms have a name and surname, and must be considered at all levels and denounced in the international order as a measure of a racist nature, which clearly represents and portrays the Chilean State of a capitalist and colonial type. And it is, in this sense, that it must be understood why this government has allowed militarization in its entirety, reflected in a de facto military occupation, not only referring to the permanent State of Exception, which has meant having the military deployed throughout the Wallmapu, but also to all the racist actions and political intolerance on the part of the current “authorities” who have openly developed repression and persecution of the Mapuche autonomist movement and resistance.
In the face of racist and colonial occupation, Long live the self-determination of the peoples!
¡¡Amulepe taiñ weichan!!
Héctor Llaitul Carrillanca, October 12, 2023
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano