By Carlos Aznárez on November 27, 2017
Another member of the Mapuche community has been murdered in Argentina. His name was Rafael Nahuel, he was 22 years old, and now added to a long list of fighters who have died at the hands of the system. Unlike what they did after Santiago Maldonado’s death, they weren’t able to plant false leads nor hide what happened. The military officers who murdered him did so in broad daylight on the orders of a judge.
They belong to a terrible division of the the navy called Albatross, which during the 1976-1983 dictatorship acted with complete impunity, hunting and murdering political militants. They are now acting in the same way where they receive orders from a government that appears to be democratic but little by little is imposing the practices of a military dictatorship. They are counting on many police agencies and also on the complicity of the many citizens who vote for them as they did in the recent election.That is, their crimes are going unpunished thanks to the support of the people, which is the worst thing that can happen to a country.
What is happening right now, in the territories of the Mapuche in Patagonia, is very serious. I don’t refer to these territories as “Argentina” because it used to be the domain of the Mapuche people before it was illegitimately taken away by the ancestors of our current government. It is a sample of what happens throughout the entire continent—which used to be called Abya Yala.
The government is trying to impose on these Mapuche lands a cemetery-like peacefulness, in order to ensure that a handful of rich people can keep making profit—the Benetton family and Joe Lewis to name a couple. This group of people is represented in the Chamber of Commerce of the Rural Society of Bariloche, Río Negro or Neuquén and all celebrate the death of those who resist.
Of course, Macri might argue that the problem didn’t begin with him, that every government that preceded him opened the road to hand the Patagonia over to transnational capital. That’s true, but our current president has now made the conscious decision to apply a plan of extermination against the original inhabitants of the land. Since the moment he arrived in the Pink House, he began to disseminate the idea that in the South “there are active terrorist organizations”. He publicly brought attention to one particular organization; the Ancestral Mapuche Resistance, or RAM. With his Minister of Security, he hypothesized that down there might also be “people of the FARC, or the Montoneros and even ETA”. It sounds idiotic, but many people unfortunately believe these things because “they were said on TV”. They threw in random names of left-wing armed organizations in order to create terror and concern and reinforce the idea that “indians must be exterminated”—a common phrase in social networks or comment sections in the big business newspapers. These newspapers help disseminate this sort of wild conjecture and lies, so then when someone like Nahuel dies, will lead the article with headlines like “Mapuche dies in a confrontation”. And then go on to insult common sense by highlighting he “resisted by throwing rocks” instead of placing the focus on the fact he was shot with live ammunition.
Years ago, the “founding fathers” of Argentina proclaimed we had to “pacify these savages”, and general Julio Argentino Roca carried out a genocide. Nowadays, Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich is the one leading the charge in militarizing their territory—and president Michelle Bachelet does the same on the Chilean side of the Andes mountain range. Whoever travels along both sides of the mountains will find hundreds of military officers, prefects, policemen, Carabineros and even Israeli soldiers (who come to the South of the world to take a rest from torturing the Palestinian people). We must keep in mind that the Zionists always imagined the Patagonia as a potential territory for their project for a republic. It makes sense, who wouldn’t want to take those areas that have water, minerals, tourism and even oil.
That’s why we must not be surprised by what’s going on now. The plan of imperialism and of the local oligarchy is the same for the Mapuche, the Palestinians or the Zapatistas, to name a few. It is to expel them from the land of their ancestry, to criminalize them, stigmatize them, defame them and then begin to hunt them like animals. And those who support or show solidarity with them will also be targeted—like Santiago Maldonado was.
At the same time as the government wages this war against an enemy that was invented by the media, they are also carrying out another task that is “necessary” for their goals. To instill fear in the general population, while they punish it with policies of savage capitalism – layoffs, closing factories, rising inflation, elimination of hard-earned rights and for impunity for perpetrators of genocide during the last military dictatorship. They also have launched a campaign of censorship in the media so that neoliberal measures find no opposition, as well as a plan of co-optation of union leaders and persecution of those that keep fighting. They imprison social leaders, and put pressure on workers’ leaders so that they don’t fight the changes that will prejudice all workers and “ensure governability”.
They are trying to block the probabilities of a social uprising, but they can’t hide the obvious: this government is a part of the imperialist escapade in South America that obeys the IMF and the World Bank, and seeks to silence with hunger and repression the voice of a people that has a history of resistance and struggle even under the worst of circumstances.
That’s what it’s all about. To get the streets, the squares and the most remote corners of this country to stand up against terror, to struggle against the crimes against the Mapuche people, and to fight the policies of social extermination of the marginalized sectors of society. If we don’t do it now, they will continue to increase their power and then we will have no way to complain about the state of social destruction they are leading the country to. We have already experienced this during the dictatorship, and under presidents Menem and De la Rúa. It is a matter of self-defense to protect ourselves against their agenda.
Source: The Dawn