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In the southern regions of Chile, Chihualaf said that the forest industry, which is linked to transnational capital groups, is fighting with the Mapuche over land resources.
In Argentine Patagonia, the Mapuche community of Santa Rosa Leleque is in conflict with the multinational clothing maker Benetton Group, which claims 500 hectares of land occupied by the Santa Rosa community. One of the largest landowners in Argentina, the Italian Benetton family, owns around a million hectares in the south of the country.
When Chile’s largest electric company Endesa, built the Ralco hydroelectric dam, upstream waters submerged Mapuche land displacing the local Mapuche population.
Chihualaf said the native people are not opposed development, which also means the creation of jobs for them, but want fair development practices. The indigenous Indians he said, reject “uneven development, the unevenness that has exacerbated poverty in the indigenous population compared to the prosperity of transnationals.”
He added that the native people reject “abusive land occupation, population displacement, damage to the environmental balance, excessive rate hikes, such as on water, threats, and abuse of their organizations and leaders.”
Institutional Violence Against Children
Mapuche youth are victims of abuse by Chilean authorities with reports of Mapuche children and adolescents who live in communities that are mobilizing to recover their ancestral lands being wounded by pellet guns and tear gas, and harassed, tortured, and illegally interrogated in schools. Mapuche youth also receive death threats and live with the fear of kidnapping and forced immersion, according to a report by Mapuche Ombudsman Claudia Molina presented in January 2010, before the Committee on the Rights of the United Nations.
The violence by the Chilean government against Mapuche children was also condemned in April this year by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington, D.C.
European Involvement
Under an Association Agreement between EU and Chile, European investment is providing more than 16 million euros (US$22.9 million) to Chile for social cohesion starting in 2007 until 2013.
Catalonian Member of Parliament Oriol Junqueras, said at the Brussels conference, that as a major player in the world market, the EU has significant bargaining power with international leaders and with Chile, and that “to the extent that the EU is able to reconcile these trade agreements with peoples’ rights … we will be much closer to our goal of a more just and equal opportunities.”
The program director of France-Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand, Tapia Olavarria Rodrigue, said that one step the EU needs to take is to stop implementing policies that cause other countries to develop systems that unsustainably extract natural resources and threaten the environment and the livelihoods and fundamental rights of indigenous peoples.