an absurdly long post that I promise to edit down---if you make it to the end you win a prize!(probably just my undying affection)

So I haven’t written this post yet because when I tried to tell this story to my mom I failed to strike a balance between gritty realism and dramatic speculation and ended up freaking her out.

Let me see if I can explain this truthfully without exaggerating or underplaying.
So what the heck am I talking about?!
Well, similar to the United States, Chile has a long history of repressing, massacring and discriminating against the indigenous groups who lived in south America long before any European whose name rhymes with Shmistopher Shmolombus stepped foot on a boat.

As soon as the Spanish began colonizing South America, they started killing indigenous people and taking their lands. The main indigenous group in Chile are the Mapuches, who at one point spanned the land from Bolivia to Antarctica and from the Pacific to the Atlantic, aka Chile and Argentina. As the Spanish colonized, they mixed with the indigenous populations(ok, this is a euphemism for sexual relations between Spanish men and indigenous women-and even “relation” is a nice word, considering the bulk of these brief hook-ups were plain old rapes) as happened across Latin America and their children became the people we now consider “(Latin) Americans”. Unfortunately, with the creation of the Chilean nation-state, Mapuches found themselves alternately being massacred, and then “assimilated” while their land was slowly taken, stolen or “purchased”(of course 99% of Mapuches couldn’t read or speak Spanish, so the legitimacy of contracts they couldn’t read in government offices they didn’t know existed is questionable). By 2009, a full 95% of their original land had been transferred to the hands of private citizens and/or multi-national corporations.



While there have always been Mapuches who fought back (physically and politically) against these injustices, there was no massive social movement until around the ‘60s, but really the ‘80s.

There are a million interesting issues involved, including fascinating water rights, globalization, and cultural patrimony issues. Basically, since the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America (also known as the Spanish invasion) in 1992 there have been widespread Mapuche protests for constitutional recognition, the right to self-determination and/or self-government, the return of ancestral territory, the right to bilingual/bicultural education and much more. Since the largest Mapuche communities are concentrated in the South, most of the protests also take place there. In general the police have reacted to these protests with extreme and unwarranted force, using tear gas, rubber bullets and sometimes even live ammunition. There are over 50 Mapuche political prisoners in jail right now and over a dozen Mapuches have been murdered by police in political actions in the past 15 years. As Mapuche demands have been met with nothing but police brutality, protests have radicalized and SOME Mapuches have begun to attack the pine tree plantations, mostly by cutting down the trees and/or burning the trucks that transport the harvested logs, and fight back against the police.