REGION IX, Chile – Matias Valentin Catrileo Quezada, 22, was reportedly shot and killed by Chilean police Jan. 3 as he and 30 Mapuche activists occupied a private farm in southern Chile and allegedly burned bales of hay. A bullet punctured his lung, killing him instantly, and sent waves of anger and shock throughout Mapuche communities in Chile and Argentina.
The Santa Margarita farm, owned by Jorge Luchsinger and located about 30 miles from Temuco, was being guarded by caribineros (Chilean state police) because of past conflicts with masked men that Luchsinger believed were Mapuche.
The activists were members of CAM, the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Group, a Mapuche organization that has advocated direct action to recover disputed lands.
Officer Walter Ramirez Espinoza has been arrested and charged with the killing, and will be tried by a military tribunal.
But Mapuche organizations and their supporters want a civil trial, fearing a repeat of what happened in 2005, when a caribinero accused of killing 17-year-old Mapuche activist Alex Lemun was set free by a military court.
Fears of a government cover-up were also what caused Catri-leo’s companions to keep his body after the killing, Mapuche representatives said. The body was finally relinquished to a Catholic bishop.
Caribineros told Chilean press that they fired six shots at the group of activists.
One Mapuche leader who attended Catrileo’s funeral, Victor Marilao of the Juan Quintramil community, accused the caribineros of deliberately trying to kill the activists. Two police vehicles tried to run him over during the protest, he said, and the caribineros fired at him with a submachine gun.
”They shot my brother in the back,” he told the Chilean newspaper El Gong. ”The Chilean state has declared the Mapuche to be enemies.”
Protests erupted throughout Chile and Argentina following Catrileo’s death. In Santiago, Chilean tanks swept through a demonstration of approximately 1,000 people, spraying water cannons into the crowd.
Roadblocks and rock-throwing incidents were reported in southern Chile.
Protests against Catrileo’s killing were also held in Spain, England and Belgium.
On Jan. 7, two shots were fired in Santiago at Mario Javier Marchese Necklenburg, an executive of the Trayenko hydroelectric corporation. Pamphlets with the name of the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Group (CAM), and no other text, were left at the scene of the crime. CAM has denied any involvement in this shooting. Representatives from other Mapuche organizations noted that previous demonstrations against Trayenko, which had only days earlier decided to withdraw from Mapuche territory, had been consistently peaceful. They suggested that the action was a deliberate sabotage of the Mapuche public image and an effort to draw attention away from Chilean state violence against them.
Chilean senators Alejandro Navarro and Nelson Avila have called on the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene in the conflict between the Mapuche and the Chilean government.
The Mapuche, about 1.5 million strong, held on to much of their original territory in Chile and Argentina until the 1880s, when they were confined by the Chilean and Argentine governments to about 1/20th of their original territory. Development by forestry, oil and hydroelectric companies, as well as individual allotment policies, has continued to diminish their lands.