This is the clash of history with the present, a centuries-long battle between tradition and modernity, that is what is unfolding in the south of chile, here is an indigenous nation called the mapuches a culture that flourished much earlier by the way of the first European conquerors that they even knew that America existed and even before the concept of Latin America existed.
Now they are fighting to recover the lands that were once their home and in this scenario resound the words of the Mapuche leaders who say "our ancestors walked here, this is our ancestral land and it belongs to us", and
how is it possible that the Mapuches who were once the owners, the true owners of large tracts of land, now see themselves marginalized in their own home and who has stripped them of their wealth.
This is something that is far from over and today unfortunately there is news in the world of this legendary conflict that continues to claim victims.
The arson attack in the town of Traiguén in the Chilean Araucanía, where "unknown individuals supplied with accelerating liquids proceeded to burn the rural post, the ambulance, private vehicles, the school, a neighborhood office and the community church, a paramedic suffered minor injuries trying to control the fire in the health center, in the place the police found a Lienzo in which the radical resistance group Mapuche Malleco takes responsibility for the attack and demands the departure of Mapuche territory from what it considers racist institutions”
What strikes me so much about the Mapuche Indians is that perhaps it is one of the few struggles of the Spanish conquest that is still in force, in fact that conflict dates back precisely to the Spanish conquest of Latin America in the 16th century. And since then, despite the efforts of Los Conquistadores, the Mapuches are one of the only peoples that have managed not only to survive, but to resist European domination for more than two centuries, and we continue to see that struggle for domination there.
They have preserved their independence and their way of life, but they have also been deprived of everything that by right corresponds to them, then the independence of Chile came, for them it was not even called chile and that concept of States, they neither know nor understand it. They accept because they are present long before the state and they are the real owners of that territory that they continue to occupy today, not only in Chile, between Chile and Argentina.
In the 19th century, this new stage of conflict began in what became known as pacification with the "pacification of Araucanía", the Chilean government basically undertook a campaign to colonize and control Mapuche lands to displace them from what they were entitled to. It corresponds and as legendarily for more than two centuries the Mapuches have done it, they continue to defend what is theirs, through a combination of military violence it must be said and forced displacement, they have been expelled and dispossessed of a large part of their ancestral territory .
And in this process, many Mapuches have been displaced from their homes, forced to live on reservations and marginalized socially and economically, which is why it is important that we remember that this news that we are seeing today is not something isolated, like that there is a group living, not It is a radical group, it is a group that has been fighting against Spanish colonization for more than two centuries.
The only ones who have managed to resist colonization for so long, a battle that does not end to safeguard their culture, their language, their land and their tradition.
Comments