Moira Millán finds it difficult to remember a happy image from the last four decades. If she thinks about the 40 years that followed the end of the last military dictatorship in Argentina, only “images of pain” appear to this Mapuche leader. “Those that are related to democracy are not images of liberation or recognition for indigenous peoples,” explains Millán (El Maitén, Chubut, 55 years old). She thinks, for example, of the memory of a seven-year-old girl she saw escaping from the police in a land eviction in Patagonia; She also remembers the murders of young Mapuche people, like Rafael Nahuel, shot in 2017 by members of the Naval Prefecture. “The scenes of my childhood, which was under the military dictatorship, scenes of soldiers arriving in the most humble neighborhoods, I experienced again in democracy,” says the activist.
Making an effort, he evokes an image: that of his mother in front of the television listening to President Raúl Alfonsín’s speech on December 10, 1983, the day of his inauguration after seven years of dictatorship. “I think it was one of the few times I saw her have hope,” Millán tells EL PAÍS in Buenos Aires, days before the victory of the far-right Javier Milei in the elections. But the Mapuche leader believes that this system is already “obsolete” and she defends, instead, what she calls terracracy: “They believe that beyond voracious capitalism there is no alternative and they are hindering the little time we have to be able to build an alternative. We have to listen to the earth again.”
Ask. How do you remember the return to democracy? He was 12 or 13 years old.
Answer. I remember being very excited listening to the proposals that the candidates brought. There was a much more interesting level of political debate than what we see today, there were proposals, there was a model of a country that they wanted to build… It also made me happy to see the streets daubed with posters. Bahía Blanca, where we lived, is a very conservative society and it was not common to see writing on the walls. When we got closer to democracy the streets started talking and that impacted me.
Q. What was your childhood like in that city that you describe as conservative?
R. It was very hard. We were a very humble family, Mapuche, with our ways and customs. At school, the racialized gaze of teachers, managers, and sometimes classmates was felt. I worked from a very young age cleaning houses and school was like a prison that I didn’t want to go to because I suffered; To go to school was to feel mistreatment and contempt from my peers.
Q. Until she was 18, she lived away from her community.
R. I was not aware that I was Mapuche, but all the pieces fit together when I found my identity and realized what was happening to me, what I was experiencing, why they looked at me the way they looked at me. That’s where I understood racism.
Q. Is it still difficult to talk about racism in Argentina today?
R. Yes, because Argentine society in general is built on hypocrisy. People are offended when the situation of oppression of indigenous peoples is exposed. Racism does not lie beneath, it is increasingly on the surface. It is a hateful democracy, where freedom of expression is given to a sector that goes out to shout hateful slogans and voices like ours, indigenous peoples, are in short supply. Everything that comes to question or oppose has no place within the media. Like the Malón de la Paz, which with hunger strikes, with chains, has had no media impact.
Millán is referring to the march that hundreds of members of indigenous peoples made in August from Jujuy, in the north of the country, to Buenos Aires to demonstrate against an express reform of the provincial Constitution. The malón is a march of indigenous peoples from northern Argentina that took place for the first time in 1946 to bring demands to the national government; the second was organized sixty years later, in 2006. In August, it was the third. Since then, representatives of the people have camped in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Government headquarters, waiting to be attended to by the national authorities.
Q. The election campaign lasted seven months. Did you find representativeness? In Argentina, 2.4% of the population is indigenous, according to the latest data, from 2010.
R. Nothing, we are absent. There was a reference and recognition of the problems of indigenous peoples by [la diputada izquierdista] Myriam Bregman, who was the only one who raised the issue. It is said that there is a right-wing movement of the Argentine population, but I believe that the Argentine people are right-wing. Education has been created in this country to create the subjectivity of the national being, and within that subjectivity, the contempt for everything brown…
Q. What is for you the current state of democracy in Argentina?
R. This democratic model is obsolete. It not only affects indigenous peoples, it affects all peoples, it affects the Argentine people. I talk about the terracracy because that was our ancestral way of organizing ourselves: we have to listen to the earth again. We must also democratize the process of electoral representation. Democracy has to become more direct and participatory. I am already adding the wishes of women from all over the world who think that this idea is not crazy.
Q. You created what you call the good living movement. What is it?
R. Our fight is against terricide and all these governments are terricides, it doesn’t matter if they paint themselves as progressive or far-right, they join hands when it comes to destroying the earth. What we can do is create the model of the world we want. There appear territorial recoveries to create autonomy, cultivate the land, reestablish a cosmic order… I do not believe in binarism, but in this case I am going to put it this way. There are two large groups in the world, demographically speaking: there are the telluric peoples and the domesticated peoples.
The telluric peoples have awakened, they have understood that they have to reconnect with the spirit of the earth. Domesticated peoples resign themselves to being servile to the imposed model and believe that beyond voracious capitalism there is no alternative; they say this [su planteo] It is utopia. They do not realize that they, with this pragmatism functional to the system, are taking time away from the opportunity to save the planet. They are precisely the ones who are hindering the little time we have to build an alternative.
Q. Do you recognize democracy’s achievements in these 40 years?
R. Democracy in itself has been a denialist process of indigenous peoples. Despite this, I am going to rescue two important facts that provide a legal framework, which are small steps in the amplification of rights and recognition. One is the reform of the Constitution [en 1994], when the recognition of the pre-existence of the native peoples is achieved. The other is the ratification of Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization [sobre los derechos de los pueblos indígenas], which also gives an international legal framework for our rights. Of course, there is not a full practice of these legal instruments, but they are important steps.
Q. And what do you think are the pending issues that democracy has with the indigenous peoples?
R. There must be a recognition of the genocide. There is an omitted truth, there is denialism on the part of the State. This democracy becomes a racist dictatorship. The historical presence of indigenous peoples must give rise to the recognition of the plurinationality that inhabits these territories. Whether you like it or not, we are here and we are going to continue cohabiting. For there to be harmonious cohabitation we have to agree on how we want to inhabit a world. Today’s democracy is very far from this.
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