Police
brutality against Mapuche protests in Chile
(The
following article is from
the January 16-31,
2008
issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles
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Condensed from reports on the website
http://www.mapuche-nation.org.
A peaceful protest by the Mapuche met
a bloody end on January 3 when police opened fire into the crowd,
killing 22-year-old university student Matias Catrileo Quezada. The
young Mapuche man was shot in the back while retreating, when Chilean
police began firing indiscriminately into the crowd with machine guns.
Among the protestors were elderly civilians and children, but nobody
else was killed.
For years
the Chilean judicial
system has refused to return the indigenous land illegally taken by the
estate Santa Margarita, owned by Jorge Luchsinger, in the district of
Vilcun. The local Mapuche protested by moving onto their land to
attract the attention of the authorities. The police responded by
shooting into the crowd, which immediately dispersed and ran for cover.
Matias' body
was handed to the
local Catholic Church, who appointed Bishop Sixto Parzinger to arrange
an independent autopsy, and mediate with the authorities. This murder
has caused immediate outrage among both the Mapuche communities and
non-Mapuche throughout the ancestral territory of the Mapuche, and the
capital of Chile, Santiago.
The ensuing
civil outcry has
been met with yet more protestors being injured and detained, including
Matias Catrileo's mother, Monica Quezada, his sister, and various other
members of his family. On January 9, in Temuco, Monica Quezada was
arrested along with 16 other protestors during a march condemning the
murder of her son.
The tension
between the Mapuche
people and the Chilean authorities has been growing since last October
10, when six Mapuche political prisoners went on hunger strike. The
prisoners originally agreed to stop their protest upon the intervention
of Bishop Camilo Vial, who organised a mediation between the Mapuche
and the government in an effort to clarify the conditions concerning
their imprisonment, including why the authorities had decided to use
the Anti-Terrorism Law, a relic from the time of the Pinochet
dictatorship that only last year the President had promised never again
to use upon the Mapuche. The government agreed to this mediation, and
on December 17 the negotiations were supposed to start.
With this
agreement, all but one
of the prisoners, Patricia Troncoso, stopped their hunger strike.
Patricia decided she would wait until the talks began. She is now being
kept alive by a saline drip. According to a Jan. 7 medical report,
Patricia has lost 26.2% of her original weight, is suffering from
cramps, slowed heart rate, respiratory difficulties, and a very weak
pulse. She is disorientated, and drifting in and out of consciousness.
The prognosis shows that even if she were to stop her hunger strike
now, she would never fully recover.
The present
outrage felt by the
Mapuche communities has been expressed through many public protests.
These demonstrations have been aggressively broken up by the military
police, who use water cannons to disperse the crowds, beating and
arresting countless Mapuche and supporters, including children. The
result is that the tension is continuing to escalate.
For further
information, visit the Mapuche International Link website at http://www.mapuche-nation.org.
Found at:
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Police_brutality_against_Mapuche_protests_in_Chile.html