The Class Origins of the Mapuche Insurgency in Chile

The Mapuche are the biggest indigenous group in Chile, with around 1.7 million Mapuche in the country, comprising 84% of the Chilean indigenous population and around 9% of the country’s population of 19 million. Most Mapuche people have moved to the cities, mainly Concepción, Temuco and Santiago, but they originate from the Southern Zone of Chile, especially Biobío and La Araucanía, where many live in poverty. These zones are known as hotspots of political violence between Mapuche guerrilla groups and the terrorist forces of the bourgeois regime.

The Mapuche insurgency, which has been going on for a while, has once again exploded in a shocking way, escalating to gun battles for the first time amidst the general background of State terrorism on the behalf of the farming and logging companies which systematically take land from impoverished Mapuche laborers in their lands.

Economic Origins of the Conflict

Never subjugated by the Incas, the tribal society of the Mapuche remained independent right up to the late nineteenth century. War and trade were the main relationships between the Mapuche and Chile and Argentina. Acquiring horses, the Mapuche resisted conquest and raided Hispanic settlements. They also traded horses, cattle, textiles and silverware. Silversmithing, a male occupation, developed from an older tradition of working in copper once silver was obtained through trade.

In 1881 the Mapuche were “pacified” by the Chilean army and confined to reservations like many other indigenous people in bourgeois regimes, but even then, reservation land continued to be held communally, rather than private property. This changed as powerful landowners expropriated more land from them. From the 1930s, land hunger led many Mapuche to migrate to the cities.

The bourgeois Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende passed an Indigenous Law and began restoring Mapuche lands, but this stopped with the Pinochet coup. During the regime, alongside trade unionists, leftist party members and militant workers, many Mapuche rights activists were killed and tortured.

But despite the change from open dictatorship to a democratic facade of bourgeois dictatorship, nothing has changed, least of all exploitation – Chilean forestry companies now own and exploit most of the Mapuche land, a monopoly they enforce with the aforementioned ruthless terrorism, while the Mapuche themselves live in incredible poverty, earning around 60% less than the average Chilean, and often without access to potable water or electricity. As such, this is not a “racial”, “indigenous” revolt as the bourgeois media likes to paint it in order to hide any class character out of the events, but a revolt of impoverished rural laborers against capital and the bourgeois State.

According to the provisos embedded in Decree 701 (introduced by Pinochet in 1974) forestry companies today enjoy State subsidies of up to 75%. It is no coincidence then that two of the biggest forestry corporations, CMPC and Bosques Arauco, own by themselves over two million hectares while the Mapuche hold less than 500,000 hectares (and these statistics are based on conservative estimates).

To keep the bourgeois dictatorship, hidden behind a democratic facade, safe from attacks, the State has turned these areas in the Southern Zone into an outright militarized area: kilometers of eucalyptus and pine plantations are surrounded by frequent carabinero checkpoints, as well as army tanks and heavily armed riflemen.

The Course of Events

The insurgency is not new – the most militant of the Mapuche rights groups (whose demands range from the return of their ancestral lands to a fully independent Mapuche State) began a guerrilla campaign of violently destroying company property back in 1997. The bourgeois regime naturally calls this “terrorism” and uses the Pinochet-era Anti-Terrorist Law to allow its terroristic forces, the heavily militarized Special Forces police, to kill unarmed Mapuche, torture, abuse, fabricate evidence, detain without trial for months on end, etc. The guerrilla groups, for their turn, tend to avoid straight gun battles, and tend to stick to the destruction of company vehicles by lobbing molotov cocktails and sabotaging machinery. But things have escalated, and are escalating even now.

The conflict has moved onto a new stage in 2021: in July there were clashes between the police and members of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), a typical indigenous guerrilla group that fights for an independent Mapuche State, not unlike the EZLN in Chiapas, Mexico.

In July, a group of CAM militants set fire to three vehicles belonging to the company logging on their land – the police answered with fire and killed one of their militants. According to a CAM member, he was “executed on the spot”. Rebellion broke out soon afterwards with armed clashes, and in October the Chilean government declares a state of emergency to restore “order” in South after serious gun battles, which had been a rarity up to this point.

In early November there were reports of Mapuche being shot by army-backed police, as well as reports of a dead child.

The Weichán Auka Mapu (WAM), a more radical split from the CAM, releases videos of its militias decked out with full armor and military-grade weaponry such as assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols.

On 6 November, the police open fire on unarmed Mapuche, injuring a child and killing a 23 year old man, which led fighting out of the rural south and into the cities, particularly in Santiago where clashes occurred in protest over his death.

The CAM and WAM have upped their armed campaign against the State in the increasingly violent and still developing insurgency – there are dead on both sides and the conflict has reached an intensity as of yet unseen.

Foquismo Has Done Nothing for Native Workers

Foquismo, or focoism, a small concentration or vanguard of guerrilla cadres engaged in rural paramilitary struggles and inspired by Che Guevara’s insurgent tactics, has become a mainstay in Latin American struggles since the victory of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba; however, it has brought absolutely no successes – neither the urban guerrilla revolts in Brazil, nor any of the Guevara-inspired insurgencies (indeed Guevara himself died on one such insurgency in Bolivia) nor the “native revolts” that followed guerrilla lines have led to gains.

Focoism in this context has taken the role that Bakuninism had in the 19th century European workers’ movement. To quote Lenin: “What is missing is 1) an understanding of the causes of exploitation; 2) an understanding of the development of society, which leads to socialism; 3) an understanding of the class struggle as the creative force for the realisation of socialism […] Anarchism is a product of despair. The psychology of the unsettled intellectual or the vagabond and not of the proletarian” (Lenin, Socialism and Anarchism, 1901).

Focoism is likewise a product of despair, of the exploited, crushed by exploitation and seeing no way out due to the tragic lack of an organized working class, to take up arms at once, as the main form of struggle. Knowing that they are unable to take on State forces, the groups limit themselves to the forest, to small attacks, not hoping to take down the State that backs their exploiters but rather engaged in endless hopeless skirmishes, desperately trying to hold back their exploiters by means of violent but small attacks, to no avail.

It has not emancipated native people – it cannot. The supposed “success” of the Zapatistas in Chiapas is a prime example – in trying to protect the Tzotzil, who have been exploited and repressed violently for centuries, all it did was lock itself in the most remote parts of the jungle engaged in a sterile struggle with its opponent while allowing the Mexican State to lead its death squads right onto Acteal and execute its horrendous massacre that left 45 dead, while the EZLN remained barricaded and impotent to help.

After such a loss, all that came from the naive reformist group was, essentially, municipal self-management for Chiapas, which does not harm the bourgeoisie or ease the exploitation of the natives any less and it’s something that the experienced Mexican government knows full well it could end at any moment should it so choose to. And they have.

Militarization Against “Native Rebellions” Is not Limited to Chile

The increased militarization of the security forces fighting against the Mapuche insurgents is not exclusive to Chile, but rather an example in a general trend in South America.

On October 18 the Ecuadoran government decreed a 60-day state of emergency, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking, in reality to repress the ongoing protests and strikes. The Government deployed the Armed Forces in the streets to support the police. Indigenous organizations, which have led to the collapse of two governments this century, carried out protests, including roadblocks. Skirmishes between the natives and the police ensued. The President called for dialogue and rolled back the increase in fuel prices in reaction to the native and proletarian unrest, which for the moment is still rooted in class demands.

In Guatemala, on the 17th of November, the police set fire to homes of Maya Q’eqchi’ families in El Estor, as part of a State siege targeting indigenous communities resisting palm oil plantations and a nickel mine. This was after the heavily militarized police carried out more than 40 raids and 60 arrests and the government declared a 30-day state of emergency.

Everywhere the struggle is the same – that of native laborers who need their land to work and live off of, and who know that exploitation of their lands by capital can only bring unbearable exploitation. Just as the struggle is the same everywhere, so is the enemy – Capital and the bourgeois State, and their repression and exploitation of workers.

Only Workers’ Struggle Can Free the Native Laborers from their Oppression

It can never be on the terrain of democratic compromises, no matter how many acts of guerrilla violence are backing it, that the oppressed and exploited will liberate themselves, and this is true of Latin American natives, violently exploited for centuries, as well.

The Mapuche people, as well as all who are exploited, can not put their hopes for liberation on small armed struggles and even less on the opportunists that court democracy, but only on a truly revolutionary party that organizes the workers and exploited on all levels, which can link up the urban workers’ struggles with the rural workers’ and natives’ struggles in order to bring down the bourgeois dictatorship that oppresses them.

In the 2019 protests, the rioting and striking Chilean proletariat managed, through its own hands and violence (rather than democracy!), to wrest significant concessions from the government: an increase in the minimum wage from 310,000 to 350,000 pesos, 20% increase in basic retirement pensions allowance, and the cancellation of the recent increase of 9.2% in electricity tariffs. The government had acted in the same terroristic way it does towards the natives. It did this by fighting for classist demands.

During the protests, many protesters flew the Mapuche flag as opposition to the government. But while the urban Mapuche workers certainly scored a victory by acting along with the entire working class, no concessions were made to the rural natives in the Southern Zone. This is because the Mapuche movement does not have any links to the workers’ movement. From this, the path to take is clear – uniting the rural and the urban struggles as one single workers’ struggle, rather than on either a “racial” or “national” basis. Only the revolutionary party can and will link together the forces of the proletarian class.