2024-02-29 20:55:33
In the midst of an unprecedented economic and social crisis, it is not surprising that alleged “foreign” threats or internal subversion appear that require “jail or bullet.” On a tour of England and the Republic of Ireland, the weychafe (warrior-guardian-defender) of the Mapuche Tehuelche people, Moira Millán is denouncing the persecution suffered by her community at the hands of a government that does not stop finding enemies to the point that it seems be looking for a social outbreak that generates a repressive axis to the crisis, diverting attention from the ongoing planned misery. “This government is creating a very dangerous atmosphere of violence and hatred. We are facing an intimidation campaign that seeks to involve the armed forces in internal repression. The target in Patagonia is the Mapuche people,” Millán told Page 12.
The objective, according to the weychafe, is to promote the businesses of transnational corporations and large fortunes, to once again steal the land from the native peoples to do large real estate businesses, take advantage of the underlying mining wealth and end ethnic cleansing, whether through assimilation cultural or repressive eradication. “The Government has been playing with the hypothesis of an external threat to justify the participation of the armed forces in internal security tasks. There are no differences in this between Javier Milei and Governor Ignacio Torres.”
Millán participated last week in a conference organized by War on Want with figures of the stature of the author of “The Shock Doctrine”, Naomi Klein, the former leader of the Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn, the famous Swedish teenage environmentalist Greta Thunberg, trade unionists and more than 60 social organizations from 25 countries. The interest that Milei’s government arouses at the international level is undoubted and was reflected in interviews with the BBC, the “The Guardian” and other British and Irish media. “This tour allowed me to create an international protective shield against the possibility that the government wants to detain me upon my return to Argentina this Friday. I hope it does not happen, but if they decide to continue with their political and judicial persecution there will be serious international repercussions,” Millán told Page 12.
The chasing
The new hunt was unleashed with the forest fire detected on the night of January 25 in the Los Alerces National Park in Chubut. Governor Ignacio Torres directly accused the Mapuche community with reckless words that included thrown around terms like “terrorists” and “criminals.” “We must go all out to evict the criminals who occupy our National Park. “We must separate the good Mapuches from the RAM, who are criminals who have real estate businesses and take land.”
The governor was particularly cruel to Millán and the famous RAM (Mapuche Ancestral Resistance), which was already classified as an international terrorist organization under the government of Mauricio Macri and under the same current security minister, Patricia Bullrich. “The new leader of the RAM is Moira Millán, who generates these types of terrorist acts,” said the governor of Chubut at the end of January.
In the midst of the growing chaos that the country was experiencing at that time with the comings and goings of the omnibus law, Vice President Victoria Villarruel made herself available to the governor and indicated that “Under the umbrella of the indigenous peoples, several national parks suffer fires, usurpations and various damages.” This message from the national and provincial government was replicated by parliamentarians during the debate and carried by La Nación, Clarín and other proto-government media. The common denominator was an accusation with sinister historical connotations in national history: terrorism.
A month after the event occurred, today fortunately under control, investigations and surveys continue without any evidence being found to point against anyone. Most forest fires have a human hand, whether accidental (a cigarette, a campfire) or deliberate (an economic interest, the remaining terrorism). Moira Millán characterizes the accusation against him as the classic strategy applied against the Mapuches. “They have no evidentiary elements, they have no indications. Just a delusional narrative. For example, they propose that the fire was caused by a candle wrapped in paper that was intentionally lit. That is to say, more than eight thousand hectares of land were burned, but the paper and the candle survived. And they don’t say anything about the drones that roamed the area in the days before the fire,” Millán said.
Biased justice
This lack of evidence and investigative bias also affect Mapuches imprisoned for other reasons. “Matías Santana is imprisoned for being a key witness in the case of forced disappearance and death of Santiago Maldonado. They have invented crimes so that he does not leave as a witness in a case that is still being processed, that is current. On the other hand, there is the situation of my twin brother, Mauro Millán. They want to imprison him with up to three years in prison, for exercising his identity right to solidarity and spirituality. We have a president who has the freedom to change his religion, embraces the Pope, but criminalizes the spiritual expression of the Mapuche people,” said Millán.
– The trial against his brother in the Bariloche courts will take place between March 5 and 15. Do you trust in justice? – asks Page 12.
– Not really. I don’t trust justice. I trust in the organized strength of all sectors. I trust in the newen, in the strength of my Mapuche people, but above all in the articulation of all human rights organizations, of all social, popular, and environmental sectors. Because it seems to me that what they want to develop is an exemplary action against solidarity. It is very dangerous that people begin to be imprisoned for being supportive. They are clearly features of a dictatorship. And what is the worst? That hate is installed as policy And that hate installed as policy can enable lynchings, it can enable organized and criminal violence from sectors that want to take justice into their own hands.
– Today the political context has changed compared to what was happening at the end of January. Today we have a confrontation between the governors and the president of the Nation.
– It doesn’t change anything for us. I believe that both the Milei government, which has Bullrich, and Bullrich, who is Torres’s patron saint, pursue the same thing. Who puts Torres in his position? Bullrich. Torres is a former “Das Neves boy” who answers to Bullrich and Bullrich is Milei’s Minister of Security. So on one point everyone agrees. They want to confront good Indians, bad Indians and foreign Indians. They want to establish that we are foreigners. That is why they want to change the intervention of the armed forces, which would be against foreign forces instead of against a foreign state. And basically what they are looking for is to facilitate their real estate, forestry, mining and oil dealings.
cosmological abyss
Between the concept of “good living”, the community with the earth and the cosmos, and Milei’s anarcho-capitalism that allows the individual to pollute the waters or depredate the environment, there is an unbridgeable abyss. In the current context of the advance of the global extreme right, the Mapuche conception may seem idealistic to the point of naivety, but it is part of a different temporality. In this vision there is a long-term view that is not consumed by the instant and material benefit that characterizes Milei-Macrismo.
In that sense, Millán has no doubt that, regardless of what happens to her – whether she is arrested, imprisoned or something worse – the Mapuche voice will continue to be heard. “We Mapuches, like Argentines, have different currents of thought. There are some who want to assimilate to have greater access to capitalism. Others, more reformist, propose plurinationality. There is a very small separatist minority that wants a Mapuche state. And a fourth faction, ours, that wants a social change that has a new civilizational matrix, that of the telluric peoples.”
This message is present in the novel he published in 2019, “El tren del olvido” which will be translated into English this year and published in French next year. A Catalan production company is making a film based on the novel and Netflix will film it in series format. “They are not going to silence us. If I’m not there anymore, my message will be there. Personally, I am not afraid, I am calm, I have not done anything wrong, I have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, I feel worthy, strengthened because the only thing I have done is walk in the wisdom of my people to protect life.”