Mireille Fanon-Mendès France: “The Struggle of the Mapuche People Is As Exemplary As That of the Palestinians or Congolese in Defense of Their Lands and Traditions”

Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation and daughter of the influential philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, recently visited Wallmapu to observe and document the situation of Mapuche political prisoners. Her father’s decolonial theory, expressed in works such as “The Wretched of the Earth,” is a crucial analysis of cultural oppression and colonization, themes that Mireille continues to address in her work on Human Rights. During her visit to Chile, she highlighted the connections between the struggles for self-determination in territories such as Palestine and Wallmapu, drawing a parallel between the practices of resistance to colonization and neoliberalism, the same systems that Frantz Fanon denounced for perpetuating racial and cultural hierarchies. Fanon-Mendès underlines the discriminatory treatment and the “racial justice system” applied by the Chilean State, treating the Mapuche people as an “internal enemy”, this construction seeks, according to Mireille, to justify the expropriation of ancestral lands for the benefit of the state and transnational corporations, sometimes using questionable testimonies and evidence.

“The Chilean State focuses on demonstrating that the Mapuche are an internal enemy, we are facing the construction of a vision of an internal enemy that most of the time is built on cases that have false evidence, false testimonies and bought testimonies.”

Conditions of political imprisonment and cultural rights of Mapuche prisoners.

On October 21, Mireille Fanon visited the CCP Biobío, where she spoke with Héctor Llaitul, spokesman for the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), who is serving a 23-year sentence on charges related to the State Security Law (15 years). Héctor Llaitul was convicted on charges of theft of wood (5 years) and attack on authority (3 years), charges that he and his family attribute to political persecution, alleging false evidence and forced testimony. The sentence was the result of a trial that spanned more than 25 days, where numerous witnesses appeared, most of them with protected identity.

In a conversation with Radio Kurruf, Mireille clarified that her visit was organized by the organization Terre et Liberté (France), relatives of Mapuche political prisoners from the CAM and Mapuche communities. In turn, it was the international support network for Mapuche political prisoners of the CAM who asked Mireille to act as an observer during the judicial processes, but since “the agendas did not coincide (…) a more general observation mission was proposed”, finally her itinerary consisted of meetings and visits in Santiago, Concepción and Temuco, including the “young prisoners of the social movement (…) in prison since July 6″ referring to the raid on the Luisa Toledo soup kitchen in Villa Francia and the Mapuche political prisoners.”

Mireille underscored the differences in the treatment of Mapuche prisoners, whose incarceration “is absolutely related to the land,” emphasizing how the Chilean penal system shows a distinct “racial justice” for non-Mapuche and Mapuche political prisoners. This resonates with the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which obliges states to respect the cultural rights of indigenous peoples. The situation in the Biobío Penitentiary Complex highlights the failure to comply with these regulations, as Mapuche prisoners face restrictions on practicing their cultural and spiritual traditions, including denial of access to ceremonies and modules adapted to their ancestral practices. These shortcomings reinforce the discrimination that Mireille described as part of a colonial strategy aimed at stripping the Mapuche people of their connection to the land.

“The conditions of imprisonment are quite similar, except specifically what has to do with the conditions of the Mapuche that are absolutely related to the land. The problems, although different, coincide in fighting against the capitalist system (…) but in the Mapuche case there is the situation of belonging to the land that is linked to sovereignty and the problem of colonization, what I am saying is that the land belonged to them before colonization and that this right to ancestral land was taken away by colonization.”

Double standards and racism of the Chilean judicial system.

When asked about the long sentences imposed on Mapuche political prisoners or practices such as the so-called “early sentences” that materialize in extensive pretrial detentions, Mireille does not fail to mention the differences with which the judicial system operates in Chile when it comes to Mapuche people or social activists:

“… It is a fact and a confirmation of a racial justice that works in one way for Chileans and in another for the Mapuche and the general set of political prisoners. In this sense, the observation mission aims to publicize these particularities, to show how this justice works and why it works that way, because people abroad believe that life is beautiful in Chile. That is why it is important to inform people well and understand well the reasons why the Mapuche are treated in this way.”

Parallels: Palestine, Wallmapu, other struggles and the coloniality of power.

“The struggle of the Mapuche people is as exemplary as that of the Palestinians, the Congolese in defense to preserve their lands, their traditions, it is a struggle for the sovereignty of the land. What the hegemonic power puts at a crossroads is the self-determination of the peoples, the Mapuche and the Palestinians claim this self-determination, much like in Yemen or the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

During the interview, Mireille also addressed the similarities between the Mapuche struggle and the Palestinian resistance. In line with her comments, she observed that peoples who defend their lands and natural resources are often described as “internal enemies,” pointing out how in Chile, the Mapuche are stigmatized and criminalized by transnational corporations and the State, which seek “to have rights to their lands.” The recent escalation of violence in Palestine illustrates this pattern, where the Palestinian people face territorial dispossession and military repression, a conflict that Mireille places as an example of the “coloniality of power” that sacrifices people and cultures in the name of capital and resource exploitation.

“There are many elements in common, but above all the land grabbing, because the colonial system has invaded all spaces in the world and the neoliberal capitalist policy is to take everything that does not belong to it, among other things the natural resources of the earth and when there are peoples who resist that they look for a way to eliminate them in one way or another.”

For Fanon, the intention to eliminate those who resist colonial capitalist policies is reflected both in “Palestine with the genocide that is being committed at this moment” and also in the Democratic Republic of Congo where “by the grabbing of natural resources six million people have been killed without anyone saying anything.” “We can affirm that these dynamics are not incidental, but reflect a power structure imposed since 1492, when colonial expansion began to impose the Eurocentric hierarchy and the dispossession of land.” “This is a colonial strategy that is expressed or executed through the coloniality of power, which to save capital sacrifices people, their traditions, their culture and the relationship with the other, the colonial power has no relationship with the other, only a relationship with money.”

Active resistance, autonomy and sovereignty.

In her analysis, the racist and capitalist system that promoted slavery and colonization is still in force in modern mechanisms of domination and exploitation of indigenous peoples and their territories, a “deadly and harmful system” that requires active resistance to preserve the autonomy and sovereignty of peoples, for Mireille “to fight against capitalism is to fight against the paradigm that has been imposed since 1492, a paradigm that imposes whites as the chosen and dominant people, that says that Eurocentric modernity is the only possibility for the world to build democracy and that also says that the lands of others belong to whites because they are the only ones who supposedly know how to exploit them.”

However, resistance inevitably faces criminalization and those who resist face the possibility of imprisonment, “the capitalist system, starting with slavery, managed to guarantee never to be convicted for the crimes of genocide it committed against humanity, putting into operation a whole system of impunity, which allows us to understand why there are people who defending their land are criminalized and punished, while the system that steals land goes unpunished,” she concluded.

By Noemí Ulloa Valenzuela, Radio Kurruf/ Resumen Latinoamericano, November 3, 2024.