The Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Mapuche case

”Being indigenous today is to be subversive”, summed up simply in a ’mateada’ Jeremías Chauque, Mapuche, musician, organic food producer (without agro-toxics). And he added: “We natives do not accept the extractivism. We will never accept it. And we will die by fighting against mining companies, oil companies, transgenic companies. That is why they see us as a danger.
Facundo Jones Huala, from Esquel prison, was on the same line: ”The Mapuche promote the reconstruction of our world and the expulsion from extractives from the territory. As Mapuche we can’t be in lands that have been mistreated, we cannot be Mapuche with oil wells or with mining companies. We need our earth to be healthy, balanced and harmonious. Restoring that balance today is revolutionary, it is altering the current order of mining capitalism. That is why we are a problem for power”.

Life of the mountains - pu newen de la mawiza - have begun to fall, used as targets for weapons of war.

Life of animals - pu kujin - forced to flee from the frightening noise and fear of death.

The life of our medicinal plants - lawen - who are destroying.

The life of lakes, rivers and streams that have had a hectic impact producing an imbalance in nature that endangers human life.

What they struggle for, what they cry out for, is the right to life. They are in favour of life, rights, and of the reproduction of a different society, in which all can live and grow worthily. Where the diversity of cosmovision allows the creation of new forms of use of natural elements and not the exploitation of these forces that have life. The scenario they witness every day is the poverty in which communities are rampant, deprived of water, forced to live in unproductive lands or cases of families who have been deprived of their lands to live worthily.

The same Lof in Resistencia of the Department of Cushamen and the Autonomous Mapuche Movement in a press release288 asked to assert their own rights to information and ensure the mechanism of consultation, while at the same time questioning on this
model of capitalist development, extractive and polluting. They want to stop this economic asymmetry that enriches businesses and impoverishes and diseases people and nature.

What they propose emerges in the final document following the ’FIRST MAPUCHE TRAWN', CONTADIN AND THE CIVIL COMPANY IN REPORT ON THE EXPANSION OF THE HYDROCARBURIFERA FRONT” in El Maiten, Chubut on 14 and 15 October 2011:

- To contribute to the construction of an economic model based on reciprocity and equity between peoples and nature.
- Rethinking the energy model.
- Prioritise food production by diversifying cultivation.
- Put an end to the concept of fiscal land as uninhabited territories.