Prosperous Chile's Troubling Indigenous Uprising

Members of the local Mapuche Indian community participate in a "Xrawen," or meeting, at Puerto Dominguez town 420 miles south of Santiago, Chile.

In the December 12, 2009 TIME magazine article "Prosperous Chile's Troubling Indigenous Uprising," Jonathan Franklin reports:

Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest, Chile's Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks. Their assaults — torching forests, hijacking forestry trucks, seizing rural ranches — have created Chile's worst security crisis in decades.

But the uprising, which has left four Mapuche dead and more than 100 arrested or convicted, has also spawned a political quandary for President Michelle Bachelet. She has resorted to a controversial anti-terrorist law — developed during the brutal, 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet — to prosecute Mapuche militants. The measure, used by Pinochet to hound political opponents, allows fewer pretrial rights for defendants, who can be accused by anonymous and masked witnesses. It also imposes longer prison sentences and augments the powers of the police and judicial system — never a comfortable prospect in a country that is still shaking the iron-fisted ghosts of the Pinochet regime. "This law is an abomination," says Richard Caifal, a Chilean human rights lawyer, "and the government is using it in a discriminating way, only against Mapuches."

Bachelet had promised before taking office in 2006 that she would not use the law in Mapuche cases. She and her government, however, insist they have no choice at this point. "We've decided to invoke the anti-terror law to go after these groups of people who are set on perpetrating crimes, disorder and unrest in a region seeking peace and harmony," Chile's Deputy Interior Secretary, Patricio Rosend, said recently. (See why Chile's Atacama Desert has become a tourist destination.)

The area he's referring to is the central Araucania region, where Chile's 700,000 Mapuches (4% of the country's 17 million people) were forced to settle after the military finally "pacified" them in 1881. Until then, the Mapuche had resisted efforts by the Inca empire, Spanish colonizers and the new Chilean republic to subjugate them. Many Mapuche leaders still argue the country should return their ancestral lands in regions like south central Chile; but they're also angry about vast tracts they say were illegally taken from them in Araucania, near the city of Temuco, for forestry operations. This year militants have set fire to tree farms, leaving huge swaths of eucalyptus and pine trees scorched — and prompting local ranchers to stock up on weapons and ammunition.

Government efforts to control Mapuche protests have backfired. Recent raids by special forces of the Carabineros, the national police, have scored arrests of Mapuche leaders but also provoked charges of brutality after the shooting of children, journalists and other bystanders. Three Mapuches youths have been killed, and Caifal claims two others were shot in the eyes. What's more, whereas left-wing terrorist groups garnered little public sympathy during Pinochet's rule, opinion polls in Chile today show widespread support for Mapuche efforts to regain land.

Bachelet, a member of Chile's Socialist Party, and her center-left coalition, the Concertación, have been criticized for being soft on criminals. Many political analysts suggest that with presidential elections set for Dec. 13 — and with the Concertación well behind the conservatives in voter polls — the left may hope that employing the anti-terror law will bolster its law-and-order bona fides. Sebastian Piñera, the billionaire businessman who leads the polls, has made security and crime-fighting a centerpiece of his campaign.

The government has installed security cameras on major highways, where more and more smoldering frames of forestry trucks are being found after Mapuche hijackings. Tourists have also been warned during this southern hemisphere summer, when the forestry attacks have been escalating, not to use major roads at night. At the same time, Mapuche leaders have made it clear that the latest surge of attacks is part of a strategic push to undermine Chile's bicentennial celebration next year.

Meanwhile, dozens of Mapuche communities have joined forces to create the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, which among other demands calls for the group's political independence from the Chilean state. Whether or not that's a viable proposition, the coalition may well prod the government to a more serious dialogue over the land issues. "Otherwise," says Caifal, "we are creating a [Mapuche] generation that has grown up in a climate of violence, and that offers a bad future for the country." Especially if it means raising ghosts from the past.

Can Chile's Right Emerge from Its Dark Past?

Chile's right is haunted by the brutal legacy of Augusto Pinochet (center) who seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody coup and ruled for 17 years.

In the December 12, 2009 TIME article "Can Chile's Right Emerge from Its Dark Past?," Tim Padgett reports:

Chileans have had macabre reminders this month about how vicious the country's political right once was. Last week saw the reburial ceremony for Victor Jara, a popular 20th-century Chilean folk singer. His remains had been exhumed recently to help determine just how he was killed in 1973, after he'd been arrested by the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. (An autopsy revealed Jara was tormented in a game of "Russian roulette" and then executed by machine gun fire.) This week, a Chilean judge ruled that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Pinochet opponent who died in 1982, had actually been fatally poisoned by Pinochet agents.

It's hard to consider those grisly findings and not wonder whether the Chilean right might still be capable of such reactionary cruelty if it ever came to power again. Chile, in fact, stands at that very crossroads this weekend. On the eve of Sunday's presidential election, conservative billionaire Sebastian Piñera leads the liberal candidate, former President Eduaro Frei Ruiz — Frei Montalva's son — by at least 10 points in most polls. Chile's incumbent left hopes the Jara and Frei Montalva cases give voters pause. But the exhumations underscore how important it is that the right, after almost 20 uninterrupted years of center-left rule, gets a new chance to govern South America's most developed country. It can prove once and for all that it has purged the ghosts of Pinochet, who died in 2006. "This election," says political analyst Guillermo Holzmann, "is an opportunity to see that a center-right exists in Chile."

That message has been a centerpiece of the campaign run by Piñera and his conservative coalition, the Alliance for Chile. The Chilean right is known less for open minds than for Opus Dei, the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic society. But Piñera, 60, a Harvard-educated tycoon whose brother was a government minister under Pinochet, has deflected charges that he's a right-wing lapdog by embracing progressive causes like gay rights — a stance that has scandalized the country's Catholic church. As an economist in the 1970s and 80s, Piñera followed Chile's free-market orthodoxy; but on the stump today, he's pledged not to cut social programs. "On the contrary," he said recently, "we're going to strengthen them." Says Michael Shifter, vice president of the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington, D.C., "Chilean voters have been eager to see that kind of pragmatic evolution from the right."

Still, concerns abound that if he's elected, Piñera faces heavy pressure from conservatives, especially in the military, to move Chile far back to the right. The recent exhumations indicate how nervous many Chileans are that the rightward shift will enervate the robust human rights apparatus established since Pinochet stepped down after a 1988 referendum rejected his continued rule. Piñera himself opposed Pinochet in that plebiscite. But last month he told a gathering of retired military and police officials who served under Pinochet that he'll work to rein in the trials — "proceedings that go on ad eternum," he remarked — that have convicted a number of their colleagues for murders and other abuses committed during the dictatorship. Some 3,000 people were killed or disappeared in that 17-year period.

Among them were leftists like Jara and, as the court has now declared, moderates like Frei Montalva, who was President from 1964 to 1970. He was succeeded by Salvador Allende, whose sharp leftward turn alarmed Chile's conservatives and prompted Pinochet's iron-fisted 1973 military coup. Along with thousands of others in the putsch's early and darkest days, Jara was rounded up and held in Chile Stadium in the capital, Santiago. After being tortured and killed, his body was tossed into the streets. Frei Montalva originally backed Pinochet's rule, but by the 1980s opposed him. According to the Chilean judge, three men tied to Pinochet, including a doctor, secretly injected Frei Montalva with toxic mustard gas and thallium while he was in the hospital for stomach surgery.

But it's doubtful that even those morbid revelations can turn enough voters back to Chile's center-left coalition, the Concertación. President Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist and Chile's first female head of state, remains hugely popular; but Frei Ruiz, 67, hasn't been able to exploit her cachet and has instead come to symbolize the Concertación's staleness after two decades in power, especially as the global recession slows Latin America's most envied economy. Frei Ruiz's problems have been highlighted by the remarkable rise of a third candidate, Marco Enríquez-Ominami — born, ironically, in cataclysmic year 1973 — a socialist who bolted the Concertación and is gleaning younger voters weary of the two-party order. While none of the candidates look likely to win a majority on Sunday, the question is whether Frei Ruiz or Ominami will face Piñera in a January run-off.

Piñera is expected to win that round as well. And if he can truly govern as a reasonable instead of rabid conservative, it could do a lot to relieve the polarization and distrust that linger 20 years after Pinochet. "Pinochet is dead and fortunately not really an issue in this election," says Holzmann. "But if Piñera becomes the President most Chileans hope he'll be, it will amplify that gray area between liberal and conservative that countries like ours need more of."

Mapuche warrior Jacinto Lefignir Ineleu

The May 28, 1934 TIME magazine article "
CHILE: Bones to Rest" recounts the story of a 120-year old Mapuche warrior:

The armies of Peru's Incas marched again & again during the 15th Century deep down into the narrow strip of coast that was even then called Chile, to conquer the proud Araucanian Indians. Pizarro's men took the job over, passed it on to generations of Spanish soldiers who tramped in, left behind broods of half-breeds, tramped out again. When Chile broke away from Spain in 1817, she went on trying to conquer the Araucanian in his southern provinces of Malleco and Cautin. Not until 1882 when some of the Araucanians who called themselves Mapuches turned against their kinsmen was the Araucanian conquered.

One of the Mapuche warrior chiefs who led his braves against the Araucanian, again against Argentine invaders from across the lesser Andes of the south, was venerable Jacinto Lefignir Ineleu, then 68 years old. Last week, 120 years old,

Chief Ineleu felt that he was ready to die but Chilean law commands that the dead be buried in authorized municipal cemeteries. By a kinsman he sent a message to Chile's blue-eyed President Arturo Alessandri. Spoke he with grave dignity: "I am the last of the Mapuche warrior chiefs and I have served you well. It is not right that my aged bones should be laid to rest among Christians. They belong in the place called Auquell near Cunco in the province of Cautin."