Times of Tyranny: Where the Power Lies. The Tyranny of Private Ownership in Chile

The third entry in the column Times of Tyranny, written by Ben Gordon.

Mapuche Activists Showing Solidarity at a Protest for Palestine in Santiago, Chile. Photography by Ilaria Lipperi.

Julia Chuñil, a human rights and environmental activist, had told her friends and family of  the violent threats she had been receiving for years. As an elder of the Mapuche indigenous  people, and president of the Putreguel community in Southern Chile, she had long  challenged and resisted attempts from private companies and landowners to seize their  ancestral land for extractive, profit-oriented purposes. On the 8 November 2024, she headed  out on a walk with her dog, Cholito, to check on her farm animals at the nearby Lafrir estate,  land which she had been looking after amid dispute over its ownership. She has not been  seen since. Over four months later, with her whereabouts still unknown, her family continues to seek answers.  

Any case of a missing person is deeply traumatic, but in Chile these instances are stitched  into the embroidery of a brutal authoritarian past and, for the several indigenous groups across the country, centuries of settler-colonial oppression. During Augusto Pinochet’s  seventeen-year military dictatorship, thousands of people were murdered, detained, raped  and tortured in a project of brutal systemic repression. Over a thousand people were  ‘disappeared’ – arrested and taken by state forces, never to be seen again. The physical and  psychological impact of these disappearances was devastating, with families left searching eternally for the remains of relatives murdered by the state. While Chile has been a  democracy for over thirty years now, the state has never reckoned with the enduring legacy  of the dictatorship. The country’s vast socio-economic inequalities and rampant  individualism deeply reflect the extreme neoliberal policies and ideologies of Pinochet’s  regime. Chile remains the only nation in Latin America to still operate under a constitution  written during dictatorship. 

While Pinochet certainly repressed indigenous rights further, for the Mapuche people and the many other indigenous groupsin Chile, such violence far pre-datesthe terrors of his regime and even the inception of the Chilean state. The Mapuche make up 12.5% of the  national population, making them by far the largest indigenous group within Chile’s borders.  They hail from a region which today spreads across the contemporary states of Argentina  and Chile. On the Chilean side, this zone is called Wallmapu. Despite centuries of oppression,  eviction and ethnocide, the Mapuche have never been fully subjugated, by Spanish  colonizers in the 16th century nor the Chilean state, resisting settler-colonialism for almost 500 years. Contemporary struggles with the state mainly revolve around the expansion of  elite landholders and private companies onto ancestral lands, leading to the extraction of  resources and irreversible natural destruction. Land disputes are deeply rooted across Chile,  in relation to Mapuche resistance, but also at the heart of general economic disparities.  Following independence in the early 19th century, Chile maintained many of the bourgeois  social structures of the Spanish crown. Latifundistas, massive landholders with a workforce  of poorly-paid peasants living on their property, continued to dominate economic and  political spheres, expanding their territory and property through the violent expulsion,  murder and destruction of indigenous communities across the country. Throughout the 20th century, these landholders maintained excessive amounts of wealth and power, along with  national and international private companies. The deep ties between these companies,  landowners and the state were heavily reinforced during the dictatorship, with Pinochet’s  policies prioritising profit-driven enterprises, undermining worker’s rights and ignoring  indigenous concerns, leading to further displacement and territorial destruction. Today,  decades after democracy’s return, Chile languishes behind other countries in the region in  terms of indigenous rights and recognition. Despite ongoing processes of erasure, assimilation and violent repression, the Mapuche continue to resist through the  maintenance of language and cultural practices, political music and art, peaceful protest and  militant action. 

The response from the state over the four months since Chuñil’s disappearance is indicative  of its ingrained violence towards indigenous people. Friends and relatives have implored the  government to dedicate more time and resources to her search and to a proper investigation 

of her disappearance. They were the first to notify authorities of the threats made against  her by Juan Carlos Morstadt Anwandter, the forestry and agricultural businessman involved  in the dispute over the Lafrir estate. This has gone nowhere in four months. Instead, the  response to these demands has been to deny any plausible proof of threats, and instigate a farcical investigation of Julia Chuñil’s family. The prosecutor’s office has raided her family  home five times, interrogating and attempting to portion the blame on those most traumatised by her loss. 

This has all occurred under a supposedly progressive, left-wing government. Gabriel Boric, the current president, initially rose to prominence as the leader of student protests in 2011. His 2021 election victory bucked the trend of far-right populist success across the globe  (though he only narrowly edged out the ultra-conservative Antonio Kast, a Pinochet  sympathiser, and close friend of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil) and occurred in a moment of  tentative optimism for the country. The estallido social, a nationwide social uprising in 2019, where protests and riots were met with brutal police repression, finally led to a successful  plebiscite to rewrite the constitution. One of the youngest leaders in the world, Boric appeared to represent a fresh start for the country. However, despite enacting some small  positive changes, his rule has been defined by a gradual acceptance of the institutions and politicians he once so actively critiqued, particularly following the resounding rejection of a  redrafted constitution, which shattered confidence in his progressive ideologies and has  ultimately left in place Pinochet’s doctrines. The introduction of various repressive policies  over the last few years have shed light on his own moral frailty and demonstrated where power truly lies in Chile. Amidst a raft of familiarly intangible pledges, Boric vowed to restore territory to indigenous groups and attempt to mend the broken relationship between them  and the state. His government has done anything but. Having promised to end the military occupation of the Araucanía region, at the heart of Wallmapu, and focus on dialogue with  indigenous communities and leaders, he has instead reinstated a state of emergency in the  region, allowing a strong military presence to return. Boric justifies this remilitarization by criminalizing Mapuche resistance and militancy, which targetsthe infrastructure being used  by corporations and landowners to occupy and destroy their territory. The situation in Araucanía is so drastic that one Chilean friend of Palestinian descent referred to Araucanía as  ‘Chile’s own Gaza strip.’ 

While private corporations are constantly provided police, military and legal support to  enact their violent occupations of their territory, Mapuche activists and militants have  constantly been branded as terrorists and dehumanised by media outlets and the state for  any attempt to resist this. Boric’s government has expanded the legal definition of terrorism to further deepen the criminalization of Mapuche activists, leading to increasing aggression  and arrests, including an excessive 23-year sentence for the prominent Mapuche leader Hector Llaitul. Even the state institutions designed to support and protect indigenous  communities are compromised. Chuñil’s family has accused the National Corporation for  Indigenous Development (CONADI), created in 1993, of exacerbating the tensions between  her and nearby landowners through a failure to assert legal ownership of the Lafrir estate which it had acquired. CONADI has been criticised since its foundation for supporting  corporations and landowners over those who it was created to protect. In 2011, it kicked out the only two Mapuche representatives on the board after they vetoed a hydropower project  on their land. 

A whole host of other repressive laws contradict Boric’s supposed progressive values,  targeting indigenous people and other marginalized sectors of Chilean society. The ‘ley anti toma,’ gives proprietors of deserted land the ability to forcibly remove squatters, threatening  prison sentences for people and families who have been forced into occupying abandoned  land to survive. The ‘gatillo facil’ law has lowered the requirements needed for carabineros  (police) to shoot civilians. This has already led to several fatalities from a police force which  maintains the brutally violent methods and structures developed during Pinochet’s reign. 

The fact that Mapuche people continue to be murdered and disappeared, with complete  impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes, is a demonstration of total neglect and active  aggression from the state and an indictment of the tyrannical power of land owners and  corporations in Chile, who will stop at nothing to prioritise capital gain. Paulo Zapata, an  independent photographer living in Santiago, told me of a common metaphor used by  Chileans – that their whole nation’s social structure is akin to a massive ‘fundo,’ (an estate). The owners and masters of the country – the landowners and elites – maintain complete  social, political and economic control over the rest of the subjugated and marginalized  population. 

These columns hope to contribute to a nuanced and detailed understanding on the rise of  tyrannical rule, which has underlined all political discourse over the last decade. For the Mapuche people, tyranny is not a novel or rising phenomenon – it has defined their  existence for centuries. Equally, for many people across the world, exclusion, oppression and  violence from interlinked tyrannical forces is an intrinsic part of life. The absolute  concentration of power and wealth in the hands of elite businesses in Chile is itself a tyrannical force, one which liberal democratic governments cannot escape ceding to, and  which violently marginalizes and excludes millions, particularly its native population.