CHILE: PRESIDENT SEBASTIÁN PIÑERA PROMISES NEW APPROACH TO AGE-OLD MAPUCHE QUANDARY.

By Benjamin Witte-Lebhar

First-year President Sebastián Piñera is promising a fresh start to a festering problem that long perplexed his leftist predecessors and continues to percolate in Chile's southern Araucanía region. There, historic tensions between the state and marginalized Mapuches, the country's largest indigenous group, have turned increasingly violent in recent years.

This time last year, then President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) of the center-left Concertación coalition had her hands full trying to quell a surge of violent confrontations between Mapuche activists and carabineros, Chile's uniformed police. The dangerous cat-and-mouse game took a tragic turn in August, when a carabinero officer shot and killed 24-year-old Jaime Facundo Mendoza Collío during an operation to evict Mapuche activists from a seized Araucanía farm (NotiSur, 2009-11-13). Mendoza was the second Mapuche to die at the hands of carabineros in as many years.

The crisis, erupting as it did in the home stretch of Bachelet's presidency, raised serious questions about the Concertación's handling of the Mapuche issue.

The four-party coalition, which governed Chile for two decades before losing the presidency earlier this year (see NotiSur, 2010-01-22), employed what observers describe as a classic stick-and-carrot approach with the Mapuche community. Through its Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (CONADI), the Concertación sought to meet Mapuche territorial demands with modest land allocations. At the same time, authorities employed a zero-tolerance approach to periodic Mapuche land occupations and/or arson attacks, responding with heavy police repression and using, in some cases, a dictatorship-era Anti-Terrorism Law that is routinely criticized by international rights groups.

Responsibility for the Mapuche "conflict" now falls on the shoulders of Piñera, Chile's first conservative leader since dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). A billionaire businessman with a pronounced law-and-order streak, Piñera doesn't come across as the most likely of peacemakers. In his first state of the nation speech (see NotiSur, 2010-06-18), the new president failed to even mention the issue, raising serious doubts about his commitment to improving relations with the Mapuches.

Piñera did finally turn his attention to the matter late last month, however, taking advantage of a current lull in the violence to pledge his government's good will toward the Mapuche and...

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