The Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Mapuche case

76 
CHAPTER 3 
THROUGH THE MAPUCHE’S HISTORY UNTIL NOWADAYS 
 
Some believe the Earth belongs to them… 
… we know we belong to it. 
History of the Mapuche  
Taken from an interview with Roberto Nankucheo, werken spokesperson of the Mapuche 
Community of Neuquen
155
.  
We believe that the territory and nature are the reason behind our existence and origin both as a 
people and individuals. Every Mapuche is an integral part of nature, this means that each and 
everyone of us stems from the energy of the territory where we live, “to belong to a place but not 
owning it”. 
This is a difficult concept to grasp for European cultures, where each territory has been subject to 
possession historically passed on but not determined by colonial invasion. In Italy, a country that 
descends from the Roman Empire, grasping such a concept I would imagine to be even more 
difficult. The Argentine Law is based and developed on the pillars of the ancient Roman Law on 
property. The colonizing forces that took the lands from the indigenous people still apply this Law 
today. It is a law, that doesn’t contemplate the possibility that the Earth could have been lived on 
without being owned by indigenous people. 
                                                           
155
 http://ita.anarchopedia.org/Intervista_ai_Mapuche
77 
In our language the Mapudungu there are no words to describe the concept of lacking something 
because nature fully provides for us.  
We are not familiar with the concept of being poor or needing and our language reflects that so if we 
have to express the need for something we have to resort to the Spanish word “faltar” (to lack and 
need).  
The same thing happened to other parts of the Americas, words such as poverty and need were 
introduced after the European colonization.  
The ability of the European invaders to introduce words aimed at belittling the indigenous culture 
is very interesting: when they colonized Patagonia they called it the Conquest of the Desert, even 
though there is no actual desert in Patagonia.  
The Huinca (a Mapuche word to describe the foreigner, the white man, the Christian etc.) think in 
an egocentric manner: “As long as I am not here, this place is uninhabited”. Indigenous 
populations are perceived as savages, less than human, therefore they believe our land to be a desert. 
Some people and cultures have been cohabiting and living in symbiosis with nature for millennia 
but the Western World will declare: “no cities stand here, no life is possible consequently this is a 
desert!”. It all comes down to how people perceive the world and how they observe life of the planet.  
The Western World does not respect our understanding of nature, does not show any interest in 
understanding our relationship with it and relies solely on written documents validated by 
professionals or experts, who share a common narrow-minded view of the world.  There are multiple 
ways to perceive the world, which is a concept difficult to accept; as shown by the fact that the 
Western World still declares to have discovered the Americas: how could a country already 
inhabited throughout the millennia be discovered?
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It has been 500 years and the Huincas are still pretending to have brought civilization and 
knowledge, that in reality brought destruction of the native culture. In Chile as well as in 
Argentina many legal proceedings against the Mapuche are taking place: those Mapuche are our 
brothers, we are one people. In Chile the oppression is quite harsh about 100 Mapuche are being 
prosecuted. I myself have been sentenced to a month and a half in prison for “usurpation of land”, 
an outrageous concept: how could I usurp a land to which I belong?  
The State has never been convincing neither with its statements nor with the past agreements. To 
the contrary its powers of persuasion have always relied on the powers of weaponry. In the 
beginning through the cross and the sword and today through more sophisticated means. 
In the short time I was in Patagonia, Mapuches I met, told me about their struggle for self-
determination of their own people, for the recognition of the multinationality of the 
Argentine State, to take back the lands that had been taken away from them, they talked to 
me about the their struggles against the mega-mines in open air and the oil factories that 
use fracking. They do radio, they do politics, they use facebook. Some speak the 
mapudungun, others know only a few words, some wear traditional clothes, others wear 
jeans, some have a more political vision, others more spiritual one. 
To fully understand this people and their struggle, we need to analyze and understand 
their philosophy, their life, and maybe understand why this fight is so important to them, 
and why it should be for us too. 
"Mapuche" (literally "People of the Earth", derived from That, "People" and Mapu, "of the 
Earth") are the inhabitants of Central and Southern Chile and Southern Argentina's 
Amerindians. The Mapuche, like all the indigenous peoples of the continent, exist starting 
from the link with the territory. The Mapuche people live by following the rules of 
collective cohabitation. From there comes their history, their culture, their philosophy, 
their lives and on this territory depend their children, grandchildren and their future as a 
people
156
. The Mapuche have a language called mapudungun which means "language of the 
                                                           
156
 http://www.yabastaedibese.it/2017/12/cosa-ce-dietro-la-campagna-antimapuche/
79 
Earth", they have their own philosophy and spirituality. The land is understood as a 
Mapuche nation, Wallmapu, which extends in Argentina and Chile from approximately 
Santiago-Buenos Aires in the north, to the province of Chubut in Argentina and the Chiloé 
archipelago in Chile, in the south. Two great territorial units were distinguished: the Gulu 
Mapu or lands of the west (Chile) and the Puel Mapu or lands of the east (Argentina), 
internally each of these units, was constituted by distinct Butal mapu, geographic spaces 
which have given the name to territorial groups such as the Pikunche, the Willjche, the 
Peweche, the Lafkenche, the Wenteche, the Nagche, etc. (it receives a different name 
depending on whether the Mapuche community lives in the mountains, in the plains or on 
the coast). Mapuche cannot be separated from the element that gives life to it in its 
territory. Mapuche culture thinks that the mountain, like the river have life being these 
elements part of all the forces with which the Mapuche communicate through the 
mapudugun. There is an interdependence that the Mapuche cannot break: because when 
one of them is attacked by any of these other forces, he unbalances his own life. Then the 
Mapuche is one more element, it is not superior to the mountain or the river, or to the 
wind: all the elements are necessary, indispensable and none of them is superior to the 
other
157
. 
They are organised in countless autonomous communities, Lofches
158
. They are agricultural 
communities, with a lonko, the guide, a machi, the shaman, and weichafe, the warriors. 
Traditionally, Mapuche community’s decisions are taken collectively, everyone has the 
right to speak and every opinion has the same value. A sort of direct democracy, 
horizontal and widespread in a people in which the concept of slavery, of private property 
were not present and in which the idea of foreign domination was not conceivable. It lives 
through a community and collective management of life and resources, aimed at 
defending from industrial exploitation, contamination of the soil, air, water, monoculture 
cultivation through the use of agro-toxics. Currently, about 1. 5 million Mapuche live in 
                                                           
157
 http://www.yabasta.it/spip.php?article1575  
158
 http://storiedellaltromondo.com/chisonoquestimapuche/
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Chile and about 200,000 in Argentina, making up one of the largest indigenous 
communities in South America
159
. 
The Mapuche are the only native people that have not been conquered and subjugated by 
the Spaniards 500 years ago. It has developed as a free, independent and reigning nation 
in most of the territory now known as Chile and Argentina
160
. At the same time, the 
Spaniards baptized the continent they intended to conquer, and called the Mapuche 
territories, Patagonia
161
. When the states of Chile and Argentina have been formed since 
1810, after independence from Spain, the colonists failed several attempts to invade the 
Mapuche territories, actions that were resolved at the end of the nineteenth century with 
"The Conquest of the Desert" which was a military campaign carried out by the Argentine 
Government at the hands of General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s against the 
southern indigenous and which turned in a real genocide: it transformed the Mapuche 
into an ethnic minority, oppressed, impoverished and subjected to the sovereignty of the 
foreign State
162
. Some years before the intervention of Argentine army in Patagonia, the 
political referents and the press managed to inculcate and disseminate a sort of 
colonization of being. According to Walter Mignolo, this consists in instilling the idea that 
some people are not part of the story because in reality, its members are not human being. 
The same Domingo Sarmiento (Argentine politician and President of Argentina from 1868 
to 1874), asserted: 
Will we be able to exterminate the Indians?  I feel an indomitable repugnance towards the savages 
of America without being able to remedy it. These rougues are nothing but disgusting Indians who 
would be hanged instantly if they showed up. Lautaro and Caupolicàn
163
 are lousy Indians, because 
they are all like that. They are incapable of progress, their extermination is providential and useful, 
                                                           
159
http://www.unrepresentedunitednations.org/it/nazioni-o-popoli-non-rappresentati/mapuche/view-
details.html  
160
 http://www.antennedipace.org/html/articoli/art_408.html 
161
 Adrian Moyano, Descolonizar la historia mapucheen Patagonia, Alum Mapu Ediciones, 2013. 
162
 Ibid 
163
 http://www.mundohistoria.org/temas_foro/historia-la-edad-moderna/lautaro-caupolican
81 
sublime and great. They must be exterminated without even exonerating a child, who has already 
the instinctive hatred of the civilized man. 
Christians and Westerners, were bringers of an idea of history, the only possible, true and 
applicable to the rest of the inhabitants of the planet. This conviction led to the 
establishment of a colonial matrix of power that implied that certain people were excluded 
from history, thus justifying the violence against them, to pursue evangelization, 
civilization, progress and, nowadays, the development or economic growth. So in the 
Argentina of the nineteenth century, the resulting geopolitical configuration traced a line 
between the minority that considered itself bringer of higher values and an immense 
majority of margins, which became the object of conquest. Among them, the Mapuche 
people. The idea behind the Desert Campaign had Europe as its objective and model, the 
symbol of modernity. In the Latin-American continent the European lifestyle came as 
something triumphal, as a synonym of progress and humanity, for this reason, once  
Mapuche armed resistance ran out, the real construction of the Argentine State began 
through the immigration of European origin. 
 
As the anthropologist Diana Lenton says, "The State was built on genocide, establishing 
that there were no more ethnic differences on Argentinean territory. It is what is called 
“constituent genocide”, they are genocides that give rise to a State
164
”. It is therefore the 
Argentine State and the Chilean State that have been subjugating this population since the 
end of the 1800s. 
Coming to the present day, it is precisely the territories of the Argentine Patagonia 
inhabited by Mapuche natives to be part of the capitalist project of expropriation and 
looting of those lands that have become a source of wealth for foreign companies, such as 
the Italian Benetton. These latter act with the complicity of the government that privatizes 
the land by selling it to the large landowners, forcing ancestral people to abandon, by 
                                                           
164
 Dario aranda, La nuova campagna contro i mapuche, in Comune-info, 16 agosto 2017, https://comune-
info.net/2017/08/cosa-ce-dietro-la-nuova-campagna-mapuche/
82 
force, their living environments to settle in the urban suburbs as cheap labor. The 
delimitation of national boundaries and the growing power of multinational companies 
have been created - and are still growing - through the "dispensability" of the original 
people and the deletion of both their history and ethnic difference and biodiversity
165
. 
Identity, culture and ancestral knowledge of the original people is annihilated and 
replaced by that of the colonists. Since history is written by those who win the war, 
Mapuches become wild, the history of the Americas becomes "recent" (since the one taught 
at school starts from "when it was discovered") and Europe becomes "the old world". 
Naturally, the Americas already existed and people who inhabited them had, and 
continue to have, a more advanced level of consciousness than that of the colonists. So, 
most of Latin Americans are the progeny of European colonists, they acquire a lifestyle 
that is identical to ours and keep a racist behaviour towards the native peoples that still 
live in the country
166
. 
 
In Chile alone, from 1881 until the beginning of the 20th century, the State illegally stole 
95% of the historical territory from the Mapuche people, losing 9,500,000 hectares of land. 
Similar events also occurred in Argentina. Today, most of this land is owned by large 
companies, such as forest companies, fisheries, mining, oil and hydroelectric companies
167
. 
Interestingly, is one of the many accusations that are used against Mapuche residents in 
Argentina. They accuse them of being Chilean, although in January 2017, the researchers 
of the CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research) declared: "We 
affirm that the Mapuche are not Araucans of Chilean origin and have not exterminated the 
Tehuelches (…) The Mapuche are not 'Chilean Indians', but pre-existing peoples. This 
                                                           
165
 Ibid 
166
 http://www.mundohistoria.org/temas_foro/historia-la-edad-moderna/lautaro-caupolican 
167
 http://www.antennedipace.org/html/articoli/art_408.html
83 
means that they lived in these territories before the states existed and that there were 
Mapuche in what is now called Argentina
168
". 
This false accusation is used, most likely to justify what they are suffering, repression and 
violence, justifying that they are not as peaceful people as they themselves sustain. For 
example, according to this article from Infobae of 2017
169
, it reports the history of Mapuche, 
sustained that following the Desert Campaign, the Mapuche invaded the Argentine lands 
exterminating the indigenous peoples of the time; As we can see, the research of 
CONICET is not taken into consideration at all, but, as has already been said, the 
Indigenous Peoples have thousands of years of history, and the Mapuche People, in 
particular, existed long before the creation of the Nation-States, that is, they predated the 
creation of Argentina and Chile
170
. 
From Menem to Macrì 
It was during the period of President Menem (1989-1999) that the legal architecture that 
gave rise to the search for the exploitation of raw materials in Argentina was approved: 
mining laws, privatization of YPF, forestry law, approval of transgenics with the use of 
agro-toxics. But the implementation in the territories took place during the Kirchner 
government (2003-2015). Two examples: from 40 in-process mining projects (in 2003) to 
800 (in 2015), from 12 million hectares with transgenic soya to 20 million (22 in 2017
171
). 
The government of Mauricio Macrì (December 10, 2015- currently in force), with the 
decree 820/2016
172
, has amended the law 26. 737
173
 approved by the Congress in 2011, has 
tried to rectify ambiguous situations by modifying the limitations on foreign properties, in 
                                                           
168
 http://www.anred.org/?p=87694  
169
https://www.infobae.com/politica/2017/08/12/claudio-chaves-hablar-de-nacionalidad-mapuche-es-un-
disparate/  
170
 https://comune-info.net/2017/08/cosa-ce-dietro-la-nuova-campagna-mapuche/  
171
 http://www.yabastaedibese.it/2017/12/cosa-ce-dietro-la-campagna-antimapuche/  
172
 http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/260000-264999/262676/norma.htm  
173
 https://www.mininterior.gov.ar/fronteras/pdf/ley-26737.pdf
84 
the purchase and sale of rivers, lakes and state-owned areas, eliminating the competence 
of the bodies of control of rural land, all this to give the green light to the accumulation of 
land by businesses, generally agricultural, mining or oil. 
Macrì’s government is continuing in this direction: removing obstacles to the mining 
sector, low taxation for agriculture, making work more flexible for oil workers. More 
extractives, more advancement in rural areas, where indigenous peoples and peasants 
live. 
Amnesty International has counted a plan of 250 conflicting cases, among which it has 
noted a common point: behind them there are always companies (agricultural, oil and 
mining, among others), acting with complicity, for action and / or omission, 
governments
174
. 
As happened with the Desert Campaign, which had as its economic purpose, to annex 
land to the capitalist market, Argentina of the XXI Century repeats the story of 
"progressing" through the Indigenous Peoples. 
In Argentina the expropriation of the territories is accompanied by the militarization and 
violent repression by the police, to make room for capitalist activities related to real estate 
speculation, the construction of tourist complexes, agribusiness projects or oil and mining 
extractions
175
. The process of global financialization passes, in those places, through the 
devastation of territories, the pollution of the environment and the death of local 
inhabitants.
176
 Among the main impacts of this expropriation there are considerable 
environmental damage and the looting of natural resources such as the disappearance of 
the undergrowth (due to the industrial plantations of monoculture) that produces the 
elimination of series of edible plants, from which the originals draw active principles to 
                                                           
174
 http://www.yabastaedibese.it/2017/08/patagonia-aumenta-la-violenza-nei-territori-del-gruppo-benetton/  
175
 Veronica Gago, In Argentina the new «desert conquest» kills, in Il Manifesto, 4-12-17. 
176
https://rightcitylab.wordpress.com/2017/12/20/la-colonizzazione-dei-corpi-e-dei-territori-la-lunga-
resistenza-del-popolo-mapuche/
85 
develop their natural medicine, but which are also the habitat of animal species, forced to 
escape towards other places perhaps more arduous and not reached by the exploitation by 
man
177
, or the impoverishment of the land that is due to the contamination of water and  
environment caused by the use of companies of fertilizers and pesticides that make rivers 
and sources useless, but also more simply by different time of penetration of meteoric 
water in the ground, deprived of the slowdowns that the undergrowth generates; a 
phenomenon that, in such a large scale, negatively affects the hydro geological apparatus 
of the whole region, we also talk about the general displacement and eviction of the 
communities from their native lands, an increasing trend in prices and the progressive 
privatization of public services, the attrition of labour rights, numerous and repeated 
persecutions against social organizations and trade unions and, in general, a series of 
abuses and violations of human rights
178
. 
 
Therefore, it is quite clear that the claim of land by indigenous peoples cannot be reduced 
to a mere ownership dispute, because it has to do with the right to self-determination and 
the possibility of access to territories that guarantee the livelihood and living conditions of 
the inhabitants. They’re not demanding for the property of the land, but they try to 
propose an alternative and respectful way of living on Earth. 
In addition, it should be noted that all this happens, despite the recognition of ethnic and 
cultural diversity and the pre-existence of indigenous peoples, their right to possession of 
traditionally occupied land and their direct participation in the management of natural 
resources guaranteed by the Constitution of Argentina itself since 1994 and by ILO 
Convention 169, signed by Argentina and Chile. But the choice of the Argentine 
government to continue to sell Mapuche territories to foreign companies remains. 
                                                           
177
 http://www.yabasta.it/spip.php?article158  
178
 http://cdca.it/archives/10045