The president landed in the region at 7:30 this Thursday. It is his first visit to the Mapuche area.
The Chilean President Gabriel Boric landed this thursday Mapuche area, in La Araucanía, on his first visit to the region since assuming the Presidency in March. His arrival was framed in a series of violent incidents, which started before the president’s arrival and in rejection of his presence.
Boric landed at La Araucanía Airport, in the commune of Freire, to begin a two-day tour, during which he will visit Temuco, Angol, Villarrica and Lonquimay.
The visit contemplates a wide security device. It is estimated that some 300 police officers were assigned to guard the president.
But, as in March, when a delegation from the Minister of the Interior traveled to the region (attacked by gunshots on her way to a meeting in a community), violence sets the pace for this new visit.
As a prelude to Boric’s arrival, new arson attacks occurred this Wednesday in the region just hours before the presidential visit.
An indeterminate group of subjects set fire to a building and vehicles in the Bajo Meco sector, in the commune of Lautaro, in the south of the country.
Boric arrived in search for answers to violence who live in the area and also to respond to the demands of the ancestral Mapuche people for land restitution.
Before the trip, Boric listened to the concerns of the legislators of the region focused on the security issue.
The bench of the right-wing National Renovation party will ask Boric to declare the Arauco Malleco Coordinator (CAM), whose founder has been detained since September for inciting violence.
Congressman Jorge Rathgeb told the newspaper El Mercurio that together with the state of emergency that has been applied in the region, he must also speed up “other measures that are sleeping in Congress, such as the law on usurpations, intelligence, the theft of agricultural inputs, because the issue of wood theft has been successful so far”.
His peer Miguel Mellado will request that “once and for all increase the contingent of soldiers and carabineros in the zone”.
extortion of farmers
He said that “we are at the end of the year, the harvests are comingWhere do the extortions of farmers come from and pressures for them to pay a certain amount of bribe to be able to get what is the product of their work during the year and they do it to produce.
The senator of the ruling Party for Democracy, Jaime Quintana, warned that “no visit by a president alone solve automatically the problems that exist there” but he valued the trip and noted that “I would hope that in this visit I can give a response to those needs where there is a conflict and require a dialogue and a political solution”.
The CAM calls to fight
While the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, assured that the new attack in La Araucanía “is not going to prevent the presence of the president”, the CAM called to “repudiate and combat” the Government’s strategywhich, he said, “obeys the interests of the oligarchy.”
Tohá maintained that “we still don’t have a way to assess whether (the attack) is related to a reaction or to creating a climate resulting from the approaching presidential visit that we have been announcing for a long time.”
He immediately added that “what we can say is that there is no doubt that this will not prevent the presence of the president and that is not the reason why he has waited for this date to make the visit.”
He explained that the delay has to do “with preparing conditions to have a substantive visitlet no one doubt that the president goes to the region just to say ‘I’ve already been here'”.
On the other hand, CAM maintained that the visit “is part of a strategy of the current government, which seeks to legitimize itself against sectors that accept the institutional crumbs of a system in crisis. His trip to Wallmapu is due to the interests of the oligarchy, to power of the economic groups that directly confront the Mapuche cause, since under their government the structures of domination that we have historically fought against have worsened.
Source: Ansa
ap