Mapuche
An estimated 1 million indigenous Mapuches lived in the territories now known as Chile and Argentina, when Spanish colonizers arrived in the sixteenth century. The Mapuche people were sedentary small farmers who also hunted and gathered, subsisting largely on fish, potatoes and beans. The Mapuche were organized into familial clans, each with a chief or lonco. Unlike their neighboring, centralized indigenous nations, the Mapuche escaped Spanish rule and remained autonomous for some 260 years, until being conquered at the end of the nineteenth century by the new state of Chile. The historian José Bengoa attributes the Mapuche's resistance to their decentralized structure:
in contrast to the Aztecs, who had centralized governments and internal political divisions, the Mapuche had a non-hierarchical social structure. In the Mexican and Andean cases the conquerors struck at the heart of political power and, by seizing it, assured the dominance of the empire. This was not possible with the Mapuche, given that subjugation would entail conquering thousands of independent families
Today, the Mapuche struggle against devastating land grabs from the timber and hydroelectric industries. 1 million Mapuche live in Chile, 40 percent of them in the city of Santiago. Mapuche groups have used strikes, road blockades and setting fire to forests, in order to resist the theft of their land. The Chilean government responds with the the sharp criminalization and repression of Mapuche "terrorism". [1]
- ↑ Raúl Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (Oakland, AK Press, 2010), 109-119.
