Children Injured in Police Crackdown on Chile’s Mapuche Indians – It seem always tied back to US Weapons and Security Forces Training

Children Injured in Police Crackdown on Chile’s Mapuche Indians
By Marianela Jarroud – IPS

SANTIAGO, Jul 27 2012 (IPS) – “We have been trampled by this racist Chilean state, which oppresses us. The police force represses all Mapuche people…they shoot at us in cold blood.”

This comment came from a 16-year-old boy describing a police crackdown of which he and other native peasant farmers were victims in the region of Araucanía, 680 km south of Santiago, during an eviction of several indigenous communities occupying land that they claim as their ancestral property.

“That is how children in communities involved in land conflicts feel, because they have grown up in the midst of violence,” Ana Cortés, the head of the ANIDE children’s rights foundation, told IPS.

“The adolescent who gave this account belongs to a community that for years has been trying to recover territory that would make it possible for them to survive and make a living. Racism and repression are all he has known from the state, as reflected by what he says,” she added.
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This complaint about police repression published by the Mapuche language on-line daily Werken offers concrete testimony of the escalation of violence over the last few days, in which a dozen people were arrested and several were injured, including five children.

The conflict broke out on Monday Jul. 23, when residents of Temucuicui, a Mapuche community, were evicted by Carabineros police from the La Romana and Montenegro forestry plantations, where the Mininco and Arauca logging companies operate.

According to indigenous spokespersons, the native demonstrators were holding a peaceful protest and occupation to draw attention to the government of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera’s failure to live up to promises made in the context of the long-running Mapuche struggle for the recuperation of their ancestral land.

The land, they say, forms part of the territory that was seized from their ancestors in the second half of the 19th century during a military invasion process known as the “pacification of Araucanía”.

The Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, number nearly one million in this country of over 16 million people. The struggle for their rights to what they claim as their ancestral lands in the south of the country has frequently spilled over into violence, as they clash with extractive industries and logging companies.

Monday’s occupation was carried out by some 60 members of the Mapuche community. But some 200 police were sent in to evict the families, using tear gas and shooting both pellets and shotgun bullets, according to witnesses.

Twelve people, including three minors, were arrested, and denounced that they were the victims of abuses, beatings, and sexual harassment by the Carabineros.

The repression continued a few hours later outside the hospital in the nearby community of Collipulli, where police opened fire on a group of Mapuche people who were waiting for the demonstrators being treated for their injuries.

A 12-year-old girl was shot in the back with pellets, and a 16-year-old boy was hit in the head with rubber bullets.

The attack prompted President Piñera to announce an investigation into the role of the Carabineros in the incident, although he emphasised that his government “supports the police action 100 percent.”

According to the Anide Foundation, between 2001 and 2011, Mapuche children between nine months and 16 years of age have been the target of rubber bullets, pellets, tear gas, and beatings by the police. …more