Another Look at the Mapuche Conflict in Chile

The Mapuches are the most numerous indigenous people in Chile. With nearly a million people considering themselves members of that culture. The country’s history is inseparable from Mapuche history. The Spaniards called them Araucanos and the word became famous in the poem “La Araucana”, by the poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga.

At the arrival of the Spaniards, they inhabited an enormous territory from the valleys to the north of where is now the capital of Chile, Santiago, to where the southern islands begin, the Chiloé Archipelago. Today, they live in rural communities in southern Chile and to a lesser extent in southern Argentina, and many have migrated to the cities. They are a people with a strong identity that keeps most of its traditions and language alive.

The Mapuche are considered direct descendants of the pre‑Hispanic archaeological cultures Pitrén (AD 100‑1100) and El Vergel (1100‑1450), which developed in the region, between the Bío Bío River and the middle of Reloncaví. However, when the Spaniards arrived, their language, Mapudungun, was spread from the Choapa River to Chiloé, which does not mean a cultural homogeneity of the different groups that inhabited this extensive territory.

The Hispanic arrival in the 16th century was apparently the trigger for different populations to group together and strengthen their social and cultural ties, forming the historically known Mapuche identity. In a generic way, Mapuches are all the peoples who spoke or speak the Mapuche or Mapudungún language, expanded to the east of the Andes mountain range, present‑day Argentina.

Upon the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, they lived between the Aconcagua Valley and the center of the Big Island of Chiloé, in what is now Chilean territory.

The northern groups, called picunches by historians, were partially under the rule or influence of the Incan Empire. The invasion of the Inca Huáscar to the Mapuche territory in 1480, stopped by the tenacious resistance in the Bío‑Bío river, made it possible for the Mapuche people to assimilate cultural traits of the “children of the sun”, incorporating, among other elements, garments such as shirts, ponchos, waist bands and headbands. The Incas used the Punchan Paccu, a brownish green poncho, similar to the one later adopted by the policemen of Chile and which earned them the nickname Pacos.

The picunches were mostly subsumed to the Spanish. But those who lived in the territory south of the Maule River had a military tradition and successfully faced the Incas in the Battle of Maule and then the Spaniards in the Arauco War, where they showed outstanding command of the horse, which was an important factor in the development of their culture. From the middle of the 17th century, borders and periodic peace agreements endorsed in “parliaments” were established.

The economy

The Mapuche economy has varied over time. Until the 16th century, it was focused on hunting and gathering, complemented by the semi‑domestication of camelids and non‑intensive horticultural production, which consisted mainly of clearing fields by burning forests to alternate arable land (what is known as conuco towards the north of Latin America). Its economy was one of subsistence, that is, with little productive accumulation. Women were in charge of housework and ceramic and textile manufacturing (düwekafe/weaver).

The Arauco War, held during Colonial times, determined an economy typical of war, in which assaults and malocas (surprise assaults on towns and houses) were a source of income. At this same time the incorporation of the horse takes place, without which the traditional Mapuche economy cannot be understood.

The Mapuches made silverware, pottery, leatherwork, and loom work, especially ponchos and matras (wool-based fabric or cloth) for bartering or conventional exchange. From beyond the mountain range, the Ranqueles or Pampas brought salt, rhea feathers, and equine or bovine cattle. A matra was exchanged for a dozen horses and a poncho was worth sixteen.

In the second half of the 16th century, the cotton cloth replaced the coin in the Río de la Plata, Paraguay, Tucumán and Chile. The work of the aborigines and Creole peons, the rental of land, the tasks, the tithes of the Church, the purchase of properties and the salary of the governors were paid with rods of this cloth. Commercial exchange also included dyes, e.g., indigo.

In the Pampas on the Atlantic side of the Andes Mountains, a gigantic mass of cattle and horses had multiplied in the wild. The traffic of animals, cattle and horses from the Argentine Pampas, transformed the Mapuche into merchants not only between Argentina and Chile but also to other parts of the world. They herded thousands of animals to the fairs that had been established on the Bío Bío border. These animals were converted into dried meat, charqui, and were shipped in order to supply the markets of the Pacific and then to California, French Polynesia, Australia and the rest of the Pacific Ocean.

From this “globalized mercantile” period, belongs the enormous and beautiful “Araucana silverware”, an expression of the wealth that this indigenous society reached. Textile work also increased, both for use and for sale, as well as basketry, ceramics and especially silverware, a male occupation (ngutrafe or retrafe/jeweler), which reached its greatest development in the 19th century.

The colonial era

Everything changed radically with the Conquest. The Spanish conquerors demonstrated a vertiginous impetus. In a few decades they crossed from the Caribbean Sea to the Strait of Magellan in the southern Americas. In the south of Chile lived a population close to a million people. In less than forty years the Mapuche population was decimated and reduced to less than two hundred thousand. They would not rise above that figure until the end of the twentieth century.

The losses on the Hispanic side were not few and among them was the Governor and Conqueror of Chile himself, Pedro de Valdivia, who succumbed to his defeat. The young warrior, known as Lautaro, defeated him in Tucapel, in the south of the territory. The history of battles and wars is endless. A century passed and a new governor rode to the Quilín plains in 1641 and for the first time signed a peace treaty, in which the King of Spain agreed to recognize the borders and respect the independent life of the indigenous society. The Spanish colony was unable to penetrate the territories occupied by the Mapuche peoples with either the cross or the sword.

The peace endorsed in Parliament meant a very long period of independence for the Mapuche. From 1598 to 1881 they lived without being dominated by an external government and would be governed by their own rules and laws. Their territory extended from the Bío Bío River in the north to the Chiloé Islands in the south and, crossing the mountain range through the Argentine Pampas, they dominated a territory that extended to the Atlantic Ocean.

The republican era

The Mapuche, ranchers and merchants, had been generally very wealthy until the emergence and consolidation of the republican States of Chile and Argentina. Between 1881 and 1927 indigenous lands were expropriated and “reductions” were created, equivalent to reservations for indigenous people in North America.

The 1950s saw the most important Mapuche movement towards integration into Chilean society. Venancio Coñoepán, an indigenous leader, became a minister to President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo and numerous Mapuche leaders were elected to the National Congress. This movement would join the Chilean political right. Not much would be accomplished; nor would it be able to stop the dispossession of land, the so‑called “usurpations”, or the impoverishment of their communities.

At the end of the 1960s and in the years of President Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government, there was a massive occupation of large estates by Mapuche communities, lands that had been taken from them forty years earlier. At that time, especially in 1971, there was an insurrection of the Mapuche communities in southern Chile, who saw an ally in the so‑called “left” and in the Allende government a possibility of realizing their historic territorial claims.

The military coup of 1973 was extremely hard for the Mapuche world, many were detained, disappeared or exiled. After a period of brutal repression, in 1978 the dictatorship proceeded to distribute common goods to the indigenous peoples. All communal lands were divided up and assigned to families with a “private property” certificate. It was thought that with the liquidation of the communities and the introduction of private property, Mapuche society would weaken and lose its energy and combativeness. But exactly the opposite happened. In the 1980s, in the midst of the dictatorship, new organizations and political currents were born that affirmed the Mapuche identity on the basis of their ethnicity and culture, separate from the Chilean.

The transition to democracy in the indigenous sector took place within the political framework of the Agreement between the Coalition of Parties for Democracy and the representative organizations of indigenous peoples, solemnly signed in 1989 in Nueva Imperial, a small town in the middle of Mapuche territory, by then presidential candidate Patricio Aylwin, the first president of the post‑Pinochet period. With the Agreement, the indigenous peoples accepted submission to the rites of democracy, which was being “rebuilt”, that is, to channel their demands through institutional channels, and not de facto, such as the occupation of lands. The new government promised to reform the Constitution of the Republic to recognize the existence of the Indigenous Peoples of Chile and pass new legislation.

As of 1990 there were many expectations among the Mapuche that the return of democratic governments to Chile would open a space for indigenous claims and for a new relationship between the Mapuche and the State. In 1993 the new indigenous law was approved, but constitutional reform was rejected by the National Congress.

A bitter battle ensued over the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Ralco for which hundreds of Mapuche families were evicted from their land. The expansion of the forestry companies in the territories inhabited by the Mapuche communities opened another conflict that led in 1997 to a drastic break in the “institutional route” agreed upon in Nueva Imperial. Numerous new indigenous organizations left the institutional framework provided for by the Agreement and began a period of mobilizations, confrontations and State repression.

This is the current state of the Mapuche conflict.

Transformations of Mapuche society

Social relationships within Mapuche society were based on the family, on a preferably endogenous kinship system with marriage between cousins.

In the 19th century, marital unions between families had given rise to the rich (ulmenes), caciques (loncos) and captains (nidol-loncos) who constituted territorial identities that played on their political balance. The more extensive the kinship network and the greater the number of relationships that were formed within it, the more it was possible to maintain warriors (conas) who defended the territory and formed armies following the different tribal chiefs. Thus, patrilineage (a group of unilineal affiliations in which all members are considered descendants, exclusively through the male line, of the same ancestor, real or mythical) and patriarchy formed social groups that responded to external aggression and ensured control and domination of the territory and its livestock resources.

With the expansion of capitalist productive relations, especially in the postcolonial and republican era, the Mapuche population became peasants or were proletarianized, as a concrete expression of their “inclusion” in Chilean society, while maintaining their own ethnic and cultural identity. It was a forced change that collided with Mapuche culture: a culture closely associated with the control of a specific territory, land now lost and passed into the hands of landowners.

The process of peasantization led to the transformation of the peasant domestic economic unit into a nuclear family system, unable to maintain its former size within the reduced territorial space. Additionally, as families lost their influence as an economic and political unit, patriarchal authority, unable to fulfill its political and social functions, weakened. This has caused the impoverishment, migration and aging of the communities, accentuated by the subdivision of the ownership of communal Mapuche lands under the military government’s Decree Law 2,568.

As a further consequence, men who did not have a patrimony of land on which to settle their families were forced to migrate to cities to join the work force, or to remain in the community depending on the family and in celibacy for life. In effect, male domination over Mapuche society and the family has been strongly weakened. Poverty makes it impossible to fulfill the roles assigned to the Mapuche men normally required by tradition and customs. The family unit is also altered by the migration of women from communal land to cities, producing instability in communities where elderly and unmarried men are unable to feed their families.

The Mapuche political movement

Young intellectuals began to take up old ideas with new words, such as self‑government, autonomy and self‑determination for indigenous peoples. The conflicts of the land and the territorial claims are confusedly mixed with proposals for autonomy that arise from the most diverse sources, both from the past and from other experiences now present everywhere.

A confrontation began with the Chilean bourgeois State based on the defense and vindication of its territories, linked to the recovery of a lost social and family structure, and with it the political and hierarchical role of the lonco and men in general, in nostalgia for its pre‑Republican wealth.

The political movements that rose up against the Chilean State, whether by peaceful and legal or armed and illegal means, clung to their ethnic and cultural conditions, to remain integrated in and be vindicated over the rest of Chilean society.

The “Mapuche question” is the term used to indicate the ethnic conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche community, coalescing around the effects of the aforementioned Decree 2568 on the Mapuche and their ability to integrate within bourgeois Chilean society.

Therefore, the struggle of the Mapuche movement, which emerged in the first decades of the 20th century, as an expression of an organized action of that ethnic group within Chile, is a political struggle. It is part of the so‑called “social movements”, a movement that has its own identity of ideas, which brings together peasants, proletarians and petty bourgeois, mostly impoverished, who claim a past that no longer corresponds to the historical development of capitalist society, in Chile and beyond.

The clash of the Mapuches with the Chilean bourgeois State does not arise from the capital‑work contradiction or from the class struggle of the proletariat.

Within this movement various organizations coexist, an assemblage or association of an ethnic and peasant nature, grouped by community. Some of the organizations that make it up were born as a response to a specific problem and do not last over time. Generally, the Mapuche organizations maintain their autonomy, some even opposing each other; some act without asking for the support of the others, while others have only a local scope; and some are, by constitution, in open conflict with others.

As a whole, the movement seeks to resolve the material misery and social marginalization of the Mapuche people in Chile by obtaining special political rights for their minority ethnicity. For the most part, the various organizations have limited themselves to acting as pressure groups, seeking the mediation of State institutions, parties and churches to intercede with governments in order to obtain legislation to protect indigenous people.

Among the objectives pursued we list: 1. The right to self‑determination, an autonomous legislation on the property regime of the land, the territory and its resources; 2. The constitutional recognition of the pre‑existence of the Mapuche “nation” at the creation of the State and its right to self‑determination, to land and territory (including the use of land and subsoil); 3. The right to democratic participation, positive discrimination in Congress that guarantees two Mapuche parliamentarians per chamber; 4. Recognition of an autonomous Mapuche parliament made up of representatives elected according to their own culture; 5. Restitution of lands, reserve and ancestral; 6. Ratification of international conventions applicable to indigenous peoples, in particular ILO Convention 169; 7. Respect for the Mapuche legal system through a reform of the criminal procedure code that includes substantial aspects of Mapuche culture. 8. Recognition of Mapuche sovereignty and cultural structures.

The background of this organization dates back to 1996, when, in the midst of territorial struggles, Mapuche from various communities from the Arauco area formed the Lafkenche Territorial Coordinator as an alternative to the existing organizations.

For the first time, the traditional request for land restitution, abandoning the criterion of Merced Titles, is made from the memory of the elderly, from what they remembered as belonging to this or that family.

In addition, from this moment on, «the elaboration of the territorial demand and the struggle around it will go beyond the existing legality, not only because of the demand that was made there or because of the political content expressed, it will also imply a higher quality mobilization and decision, more confrontational» (Weftun 2001).

The rupture with the institutional order materialized with the burning of the trucks of a forestry company on December 1, 1997.

At the Tranakepe meeting in February 1998, the first agreements were reached between all the Mapuche organizations. In the second meeting, also in 1998, two visions for the future came in confrontation: one more “autonomous”, led by the Lafkenche Coordination Committee, and another more “official”, led by the mayor of Tirua, Adolfo Millabur, giving rise to a fracture within the movement.

From a new meeting in Tranakepe with only the Mapuche communities in conflict, the Mapuche Coordinator of the Arauco-Malleco Conflict Communities (CAM) was formed, with the support of the two organizations in the capital, Meli Wixan Mapu and the Mapuche Coordinator of Santiago. At the time of its constitution, a commitment was assumed to support all the communities in conflict and incorporate them into the CAM if the community and its lonco so wished. The first work meeting of the Coordinator was held in 1999 in the forest workers’ union in the city of Concepción.

One of the initial actions of the CAM was to seek a unified approach within the Mapuche movement. To this end, the communities were invited to attend meetings.

The CAM tried to spread the concept of a “Mapuche nation”. «That is where our goal points, so that in a year or two we practice and develop this concept of Nation… which will lead at some point to the stage that we call rebellion, once we have massified the concept. That is why we claim our ancestral forms of organization, where the authorities have the capacity to act and think autonomously, exercising real power in their own territories» (Antileo 1999).

Along with all this, the CAM exposes its utopian vision: «The restructuring of all the aspects of the Mapuche People is sought, from a philosophical-religious order, ideology, values, until it is reconstructed ideologically and politically… to sustain our own way of life. As the Mapuche Nation People» which «…involves the exercise of community, ceremonial and organizational practices such as the mingako, guillanmawun, guillatun, machitun, palin, trawun, kamarikun, nutram, among others, and above all the Mapudungun as a concrete expression of our own identity and life project». They also get into the details of the society they are trying to build. «At the same time, rescuing and strengthening our traditional organizational structure and the roles played by certain people within the Mapuche world, such as the lonco, werken, machi, weupive, cona, dugumachife, genpin, among others» (Arauco-Malleco Coordinator, 2000).

They define their struggle as “national liberation”, “anti-colonial” and claim the so‑called self‑determination of peoples. This conflict occurs through two paths: the institutional one, which seeks to achieve reforms in the Chilean Constitution and laws favorable to the Mapuche people, which is represented by participation in the Constituent Assembly underway in Chile; and that of some organizations that have formed armed groups who aim to recover Mapuche lands and their territorial autonomy from the Chilean State.

Within the framework of the armed struggle undertaken by a sector of the Mapuche movement, recently, on April 3, 2022, the CAM issued a statement in which it rejects «the new assimilationist and indigenist tactics of the elites and of Chilean President Gabriel Boric» and condemned the indigenous presence in the Constituent Assembly. «What the government is looking for is not to advance in the resolution of the conflict, but to legitimize its assimilationist apparatus at all costs, mainly with co‑opted and servile Mapuche sectors». He calls for a struggle for “Mapuche national liberation”. «It is for a reason that we have defined ourselves as revolutionary Mapuche and we have fought for years the territorial expressions of the capitalist and colonial State. It is for the same reason that our actions will continue to strike at the reproduction of capital that operates with blood and fire in our Wallmapu and we will strengthen territorial control as the basic and only platform to transform the reality created by genocidal extractivism. As CAM, we are not going to have a dialogue with those whose ultimate goal is the annihilation of our people, like Monsalve and company».

«In the midst of so much confusion, we reaffirm our weychan’s political-military path, just as Leftraru, Pelontraro and our fallen in combat weychafe did at the time, which is not focused on obtaining bureaucratic crumbs from the enemy but rather on laying the foundations of our proposal of Mapuche national liberation, for which the expulsion of all capitalist and colonial expression of the Wallmapu is necessary».

The only way forward is the class struggle of the proletariat

The Mapuche guerrillas adopted a self‑contradictory approach, declaring that they fight against capitalism and end up claiming the utopia of an autonomous Mapuche State, which would end up assuming the production and commercialization of goods anyway, as in the past, that they intended to revive.

Communist society will not be a “society of nations”. The national claim is an exclusively bourgeois historical transition.

The proletariat will have to undertake the task of destroying bourgeois rule and conquering political power in each country in which it manages to accumulate the forces necessary to achieve its aim. «From here onwards, and from the contingent and formal legal-constitutional perspective, the proletariat must establish itself in a class State (dictatorship), all transitory in nature» (Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory, 1953).

There is no other State to constitute in the fight against capitalism than the State of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and only temporarily, for the implementation of the communist program and to advance towards the extinction of social classes and of all forms of the State.

And in this context there is no historical space for the struggle for a Mapuche State.

The program of proletarian socialism supersedes the nation; it does not organize it in new ways. The survival of ethnic and cultural differences in the same territory cannot be a reason to demand a return to phases of historical development already surpassed by capitalism, which would distance the proletariat from the struggle for communism.

The Chilean proletariat – while not remaining indifferent to the armed resistance of the Mapuche and certainly not taking sides in solidarity with the bourgeois Chilean State – must concentrate its energies on the struggle against capitalist exploitation, with changes such as rising wages and the reduction of the working day, organizing class unions and confronting any artificial, non‑proletarian division based on ethnicity or nationality.

In the practice of the general strike, the workers will also have to confront the capitalists of the countryside and of the lumber companies, but they must be confronted by the proletariat.

In Chile, the Mapuche struggle is not a national liberation struggle: ethnic and cultural differences are not enough to justify it. The struggle imposed by history throughout Chile is now only the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois regime, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the implementation of the communist program.

Workers of Mapuche origin will have to join the struggles of the working class and eliminate from their demands those based on reminiscences of an ancestral past no longer possible.

The middle classes of indigenous origin, crushed and impoverished by the advance of capitalism, have only two paths ahead of them: either join the proletariat in the struggle for communist revolution, or side with the big bourgeoisie and the landlords as forces fighting to preserve the regime of capital. The class struggle today presents no other options.