Para No Olvidar el Colectivo Que Somos: The Mapuche Struggle and the Chilean State

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY SERGIO CALDERÓN HARKER

Less than six months after the Chilean right wing’s victory in failing the project to replace the Pinochet constitution, Mapuche poet and writer Daniela Catrileo reflects on her memories of the 2019 massive revolts and the solidarity failures from the Chilean Left to address the colonial structure of the state. 

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There is an image that is difficult to return to—perhaps it is because we are so far removed from it now; far away in time, far away from what could have been. There was a moment when we were rivers, flowing through the avenues and into public squares. Statues, genocidal busts, and settler-colonial heads were overthrown. We surrounded ourselves with Mapuche symbols, popular icons, Chilean flags in mourning. Posters and different phrases—witty, poetic, multilingual—plastered the walls. Even Mapudungun was vividly mixing with other languages. 

As I invoke this image, I refer to the memories left by the 2019 revolt in Chile. While it all began with the mass fare evasions carried out by students in the Santiago Metro, as a protest against the rise of public transport fees, the collective rage that exploded on the afternoon of October 18 had rapidly spread to other bodies, awakening the spirit of struggle. 

During those days, the struggle consisted of not losing the streets and staying there, despite collective exhaustion. But as with every revolt, resistance is not easy. They militarized the streets and shot their weapons at us. We learned to defend ourselves with what we had: stones, barricades, frying pans… Since the hegemonic media was distorting the facts, we filled our phones with messages reporting what was going on in each territory. 

It is difficult to see that justice is yet to arrive, for so many bodies that had lost their eyes, that were tortured, and deprived of their freedom. 

I begin with these scenes to understand why our political horizons are radically different today. The revolt in Chile led to a political process with the purpose of drafting a new constitution. Because of this, a plebiscite was organized to legitimize it. The results of the first referendum showed the possibility of re-writing the Pinochet-era constitution. We elected those who would form the constitutional convention to draft the new text. It was a long road. But a few months ago, that river of revolt had receded. In turn, the vote on September 4, 2022, resulted in the rejection of the proposed new constitution.

Today, we find ourselves broken, defeated and fragmented. As painful as it may sound, I want to be honest: we’ve lost a golden chance.

The reasons are manifold: contradictions, fears, structural inequalities. Our loss has been capitalized by some who seek to annul our experience of the revolt, as if we had no memory; or much worse, as if it had happened only in our heads.

The revolt was immense for those of us who were there: a beautiful and fierce moment. I do not want to indulge in aesthetic nostalgia; on the contrary, I want to look at it through the sieve of failure, because nothing has changed since then. We are still living under the same inequalities that threw us onto the streets, and we remain without any reparations for the human rights violations we witnessed.

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We lost the last referendum by a large majority, and the political sector that rejected the new constitution sees itself as the proud winner. They have disseminated a denialist discourse in the past months, attempting to erase the demands that had mobilized us and thereby twisting their political responsibilities. They feel triumphant, upholding their victory as a messianic conquest in the country’s name all while pejoratively calling us “Octoberists” (in reference to the month of the revolt). Under an intact colonial rationale, they advance their centuries-old binary: civilisation vs. barbarism. It would seem once more as if the enlightened experts were tasked with saving us from our own animality, characteristic of that heterogeneous collective that sought to break institutional barriers.

Waves of classist and racist phrases spread from various fronts following the defeat, even from progressive and some left-wing groups. Suddenly, for many, their responsibility to our failure became a desire for plurinationality to be enshrined in the new constitution. Phrases such as “they wanted to go too far,” or “they wanted to divide the country into two” were constant. Likewise, representatives across the right-wing and conservative spectrum propagated misinformation throughout the media. Plurinationality then became a complicated and dangerous word, used as a catch-all for fear and hatred of anything and anyone Indigenous. 

In Chile, this translates concretely into: “It’s the Mapuche’s fault.” This does not surprise me, since we grew up in this colonial country. Within minutes of learning about the September 4 defeat at the polls, this was the first thing I resented: the hate speech we would have to endure in the coming weeks. Here I position myself specifically as part of the Mapuche Nation People, the territory of the Ngulumapu, located in the western part of the Andes Mountains, what we call Chile today. I recognize that I am crossed through by other experiences and mobilized by demands that I do not conceive as isolated from those we have as a society. Therefore, I write from a plural, because I felt summoned by the revolt and was a part of what happened in 2019, as I have also been part of the student and feminist upheavals of recent years.

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Our Mapuche families have been migrating for decades due to the colonial occupation of their territories.

We are a heterogeneous people, both culturally and territorially. There are those who live in autonomous territories, those who have changed their worldview for the evangelical church, and those who have historically opted for parliamentarism. There are Mapuches who live by the sea, in the mountains, in the deep South, or in the valleys. The worst we can do at this stage is essentialize our identities. In lieu of this diversity, the Mapuche discussion for a new constitution took multiple channels, and the internal debate on plurinationality hardly resulted in consensus.

We can be divided into three most representative positions within this debate. First, there are those who advocated for an institutional route to building a Plurinational State via participating or supporting those on the Indigenous-reserved seats at the convention. Their positions were linked to social movements and some left-wing parties. Secondly, those who rejected the new constitution and allied themselves with political parties, businessmen, and right-wing groups. And thirdly, there were those who, dispersed through different organizations, maintained defense of the radical autonomous path, calling for “Mapuche National Liberation.” Naturally, they were critical of those who sat down to draft a new Magna Carta.

There is nothing homogenous here, as you see.

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Let’s return to the proclamations for a “constituent assembly” and “plurinationality.” A popular outcry to change Pinochet’s constitution was already emerging prior to the revolt. Perhaps it was not a widespread demand: there were other priorities in a neoliberal country like Chile. However, the specter of this discourse was present in social movements and student protests. As the 2019 protests progressed, specific and urgent demands emerged spontaneously: health, pensions, housing, and education. Proclamations against recent years’ voracious extractivism were added to this, including “free waters” and “it’s not a drought, it’s plundering.”

While these surfaced spontaneously at first, through signs held up and highlighting their own causes, a general demand for structure and organization arose from this organic impulse. Spaces for dialog and self-convened councils were set up, perhaps as a consequence of asking ourselves how to sustain a weeks-long revolt, in addition to the early signing of the so-called “Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution,” an institutional solution to the crisis proposed by the Piñera government alongside other political parties. This angered many of us at the time: it required us to act by the rules of those massacring us. 

Following the “Agreement,” the number of assemblies grew to give shape to our demands, so that these would be considered for the new constitution. The demand for a Plurinational State gained ground, but it was not easy. The demand for and commitment towards plurinationality originated from spaces constituted by Indigenous participants located mostly at universities and urban centers. This brought forth two issues. On the one hand, plurinationality was not an urgent cause mobilizing self-convened Chilean collectives, which is paradoxical given the predominance of symbols drawn from our cultures throughout the revolt. On the other hand, as the demand was raised from urban centers, this once again displaced the voice from Wallmapu (Mapuche territory) and barrios populares (working-class neighborhoods).

This realization gained greater visibility and subsequently mobilized discussions in historic Mapuche territory. Beyond the self-convened city councils, Mapuche dialogs and assemblies were organized throughout various communities from Wallmapu. This enriched discussions on the process through debates on autonomy and self-determination, which deepened the meaning of plurinationality. Different proposals emerged, including having Mapuche political candidates whose seats would later be reserved for Indigenous people. Instead of simply opposing plurinationality against the struggle for autonomy, this position engaged in the political process by electing those who would be our representatives.

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Prior to the first plebiscite, I wrote: “It would seem that the struggle for Mapuche autonomy is a discussion too far removed for Chilean people, given that we are not even allowed to trace the lines of plurinationality.” That suspicion was always present, even though we believed, perhaps naively, that we could win—in part because we previously triumphed during the first referendum. My position is that we deserved the minimum demand of a Plurinational State, thereby defeating Pinochet’s constitution. And like many pu lamngen (siblings), I believed that a plurinational set-up would not contradict our desire for autonomy. In fact, I thought this should be a minimum, basic right for Indigenous peoples, since getting what is minimally “just” is already difficult in the Chilean colonial context. I knew, however, that though other countries have had experiences with plurinational constitutional struggles, no experience was comparable.

But today our territories remain militarized: the current government has newly extended the state of emergency into Mapuche territory. We have no Plurinational State, nor any concrete guarantee of our autonomy. On the contrary, we have been left out of the debate for a new constitutional agreement, and we have regressed to the 19^th century in terms of representation. Meanwhile, Chile has already been defined as a single nation within the very basis of the future constitution.

It seems that our imperative is the same as prior to the revolt: to continue investing in our communal networks, recapturing our spaces, and recognizing our own epistemologies. Above all, we mustn’t disengage from our commitments to other peoples and their own processes.

We have experienced a defeat, and have verbalized it, so our bodies do not remain shaken, and so we do not forget the collective we are.

Because beyond institutional participation, we weave affective paths and anti-colonial encounters. Because beyond our pain, we allow ourselves to continue imaging emancipatory possibilities. ■