Military returned to patrol the region of La Araucaníain the south of Chile, after the order given by the president Gabriel Boric after the increase in violence in the area amid Mapuche indigenous land claims, confirmed on Wednesday the AFP.
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The military forces entered the region of La Araucanía, some 600 kilometers south of Santiago, as of Tuesday night and this Wednesday they were visible on several routes in this area, where also at dawn arson attacks were recorded.
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The order to re-militarize the Araucanía region and some towns in the neighboring Biobío region was given on Monday by President Boric, that he should have given up his initial intention of not resorting to this measure again -established by his predecessor, the conservative Sebastián Piñera- to protect the place.
Boric tried unsuccessfully to get congressional approval of a “Intermediate State of Emergency”which would allow him to deploy military only in some places.
But in the face of the notorious increase in acts of violence and the call for an armed uprising by a radical group, he chose to once again use this presidential power, focusing military control mainly on the safety of highways and rural roads, guarded by different military vehicles, including trucks and tanks.
Announcing the move Monday night, Interior Minister Izkia Siches said the government “decided to make use of all the tools of the State to provide security to our citizens“.
The deployment of the military coincides with a call from indigenous leaders to come and support those whom they considered “Mapuche political prisoners”, inmates at the Temuco Penitentiary Center, for various crimes, mostly arson attacks. About a hundred Mapuches attended the call and waited by campfires on the outskirts of the prison, according to AFP journalists.
“The resistance is not terrorism. Freedom for the Mapuche political prisoners”said a huge poster displayed on the outskirts of the place, which was without police protection and where no incidents were recorded at the moment.
The mapuche march
Dozens of Mapuches, summoned by the resistance group Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), gathered this Wednesday in front of the jail in the southern city of Temuco to defend their “political prisoners“, at the beginning of the controversial state of emergency decreed this morning by the Government of Chile, which has given back to the Army control of the routes and highways in the conflictive “macrosur” region.
As Efe was able to verify, members of the Mountain Detachment No. 8 Tucapel, in Temuco, mobilized through the province of Cautín and units of the Logistics No. 3 regiments of Victoria and Cavalry No. 3 Hussars did so in Malleco and Angol .
Those gathered celebrated a ceremony in the park that extends in front of the Temuco prison, in southern Chile, to request a more flexible visitation regime and the transfer of “political prisoners” to a prison with other Mapuche members, in which they are not mixed “with common prisoners.”
“We have come here as an organization to support Daniel Canío, the CAM political prisoner who is here kidnapped in jail by the Chilean state, and we also support Luis Vásquez Tramolao, who is imprisoned in the Angol prison. “, Rafael Pichun, spokesman for the CAM, explained to Efe.
“As an organization, we fully support our political prisoners and all political prisoners who are unjustly imprisoned. We free them for their freedom, that is our approach, for the freedom of all Mapuche political prisoners,” added Pichun, who did not want to refer to the state of emergency.
What is behind the Mapuche conflict?
The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Chile, claim the lands they inhabited for centuries, before they were forcibly occupied by the Chilean state at the end of the 19th century in a process officially known as the “Pacification of La Araucanía” and that now belong mostly to forestry companies of powerful economic groups.
In this context, arson attacks on machinery and property are frequent and the conflict has cost the lives of a large number of Mapuche community members at the hands of State agents, also registering the death of policemen, settlers and hunger strikes by prisoners. natives.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
* With AFP and Efe
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