A-Infos (en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #235 - Mapuche Indians in Chile: Leaving or collectively fight (fr, pt) [machine translation]

While Chilean socialists still win an election shunned by the people, Mapuche Indians are 
torn between town and country, in an individualistic society where land ownership is 
highly unequal. ---- On 15 December 2013, the Socialist (Socialist Party) Michelle 
Bachelet, was re-elected with a large majority over his opponent right, Evelyn Matthei, 
daughter of General Pinochet's military junta. Disinterest Chileans and Chilean for this 
election was final as 60% of potential voters were not moved to the polls. A "democracy of 
forbearance." ---- After the dictatorship that forced neoliberal march of the country, the 
"transition to democracy" in Chile (since 1988) is not without history and without 
protest. Among them, the Mapuches, Chile's main Indian people. Today, they account for 
about one million people. Over 50% of them live in the popular suburbs of Santiago.

"People of the earth" (Mapuche Mapudungun , the Mapuche language means people of the 
land), people become cement in the space of forty years. Indeed, over time, the "reserves" 
in which were assigned to the Mapuche live in the early twentieth century, are made ââ 
smaller and smaller to the increase in population.

Unequal distribution of land

With the liberalization of agricultural markets and the conversion of forest area in 
mega-plantation during the military dictatorship, many impoverished peasant families have 
no alternative than intensive exploitation of their small plot of land, quia result 
promote soil erosion. As incomes in general, what characterizes social relations in the 
countryside, it is the extreme polarization of land distribution. While two forestry 
companies Arauco and Forestal Bosque Mininco have a heritage property close to 2 million 
hectares, the few 200,000 Mapuches living in the countryside share 500,000 hectares.

Faced with this reality, the young "communities" (reserves have been transformed by the 
magic power of state categorization "communities" following the adoption of the 
"indigenous law" in 1993) have not been any choice to survive but to migrate to the big 
cities of the country to incorporate the employee and precarious work. No choice or almost ...

Good and bad Indian

Because in the 1990s, the new generation Mapuche, mostly landless, and reviving the 
history of mobilization of their parents under the Popular Unity government of Salvador 
Allende, has picked up the thread of their land claims have historically been usurped. 
Widely publicized and stigmatized, these struggles have left in the shadow hesitations 
many communities. To the repression of protest most decidedly are (police violence up to 
the death of several activists and jail), public individualisation policies (to promote 
the emergence of a Mapuche ethnic entrepreneurship ) and even precarious employment 
opportunities in the city, many of these communities have abandoned the collective 
dispute. Some prefer to enroll in the image of the "good Mapuche" worker and able to seize 
the opportunities a market society citizens sought, rather than that of "Indian 
terrorist", claiming its land defying the boundaries of private property.

This dichotomy - which is not only discursive since materialized in a series of governance 
arrangements (rewards for "good Indian" and punishment for "bad Indians") - was at the 
heart of government action since the return of democracy. The government of Bachelet opens 
under the auspices of modern socialism and renovated, which is not afraid to investors, 
and that promises a "growth with equity", also contributed his time to the erection of 
this mode Government of inequality.

Wiful (Ami AL)
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