La tragedia de la utopía de los Mapuche de Chile: reivindicaciones territoriales en los tiempos del neoliberalismo aplicado

Abstract

We are able to postulate, based on past and recent history, that the Mapuche have a relatively clear and unbreakable consciousness of being a people, a nation, in spite of the remodeling they have suffered due to the combined impact of neoliberal and globalizing policies in Chile. The particularly acute and crucial dilemma in our times with which this group must battle, consists perhaps in confronting their perception of being a people with the perception that is its counterpart, almost to the point of negation, by the Chilean State, since their inclusion through the sinister “War of Pacification” (1881) with the drastic reduction of their territories, the failed progressive attempts of disolution of their unique cultural traits and the unconditional supression to the arbitraryness of economic and social public policies of the same State. Let us emphasize that the strategies of territorial reduction begun since their defeat in 1883 continued through the early 1950s. The measures of the agrarian Counterreform dictated by the Pinochet junta (1973-1990) irreversibly agravated this process.
Facing this challenge and faced with the violence of the State, albeit democratic, the Mapuche people dream their utopian territories. What are the possibilities of them achieving these dreams?