State Violence against Mapuche Women in Chile,1998

Abstract

Mapuche women both suffer and resist state violence in Chile, particularly with regard to neoliberal, multinational extractive projects in the southern regions and the militarized police that protect these projects. While there is a great deal of historical scholarship on topics related to women or the Mapuche people from 1990 on, there is relatively little specifically on the struggles of Mapuche women. Additionally, the majority of texts on state terrorism and women in Chile focus on the Pinochet dictatorship and non-Mapuche women. A study from the perspective of decolonial feminism reveals the persistence of the “coloniality of gender” while critically reflecting on the tensions between Mapuche women and the Chilean feminist movement.

Las mujeres mapuches sufren y resisten violencia estatal en Chile, particularmente en lo relacionado a los proyectos extractivos neoliberales y multinacionales en las regiones del sur y la concomitante presencia de la policía militarizada que protege dichos proyectos. Si bien y desde 1990 ha habido una gran cantidad de investigación histórica sobre temas relacionados con las mujeres, por un lado, y el pueblo mapuche por otro, hay relativamente poca literatura en torno a las luchas de las mujeres mapuche. Lo que es más, la mayor parte de los textos sobre terrorismo de Estado y mujeres en Chile se centra en la dictadura de Pinochet y mujeres que no son mapuche. Un estudio abordado desde una perspectiva de feminismo descolonial nos revela la persistencia de la “colonialidad de género”, al mismo tiempo que reflexiona, de manera crítica, sobre las tensiones entre las mujeres mapuche y el movimiento feminista chileno.

Keywords

Mapuche women State violence Coloniality of gender Chilean feminist movement Decolonial feminism

On the night of May 16, 2021, when the results of Chile’s Constitutional Convention election were announced, the televised counting process began in Magallanes. The first vote chosen, seemingly at random, to be opened, green because it was for an indigenous reserved seat, was for Natividad Llanquileo, and the second was for Francisca Linconao. Without knowing it, the man in charge of this voting table in the extreme south of Chile had made history not only by announcing the first votes for the Constitutional Convention but also by naming the two Mapuche women who came in first (Linconao) and second (Llanquileo) in the Mapuche vote, gaining 2 of the 17 seats reserved for indigenous peoples.

The election of Linconao and Llanquileo was highly symbolic in recognizing the key figures in Mapuche resistance to Chilean state violence. The case of the political persecution of the machi (Mapudungun for “spiritual authority”) Francisca Linconao has become well known in Mapuche and feminist circles, and Llanquileo, a lawyer, is known for her work as spokesperson for Mapuche political prisoners. Other Mapuche women who won seats included the academic Elisa Loncon, who specializes in topics related to intercultural education, Mapudungun, and gender, and Rosa Catrileo, a human rights and indigenous rights lawyer. Both also proposed platforms for the convention that included a plurinational state and the protection of human rights and indigenous rights.

This recent election can be seen as a decisive victory for Mapuche women in politics, particularly with regard to questioning the neoliberal extractivist model implemented in southern Chile and the human rights violations and gender violence that have resulted from the state’s militarized implementation and protection of this model. To understand this victory we must critically review recent Chilean history with regard to human rights violations, indigenous peoples, and gender. For example, since the late 1990s there has been increasing militarization of primarily Mapuche areas, particularly in the Araucanía region. The Mapuche people, especially those who are part of autonomous communities or who engage with radical indigenous or ecological political projects, have been painted by the state and the mass media as homegrown “terrorists” wreaking havoc on the local population, especially the leaders of agri-business and the timber industry. In response, militarized police and privately contracted security teams have strictly patrolled autonomous Mapuche territories and agricultural and timber sectors that are perceived as “at risk of attack,” and the Mapuche comunero Camilo Catrillanca was killed by police on November 14, 2018, while driving a tractor in his field. This political assassination sparked outrage in Chilean society, but this violence and Mapuche resistance to it have been decades and even centuries in the making.

There have been multiple documented instances of state violence and human rights abuses, and Mapuche women, in particular, have borne the brunt of them. However, in Chilean society and politics, as well as in Chilean and international academia, when we talk about human rights abuses and gender we are usually talking about the dictatorship period. In this paper we would like to question this narrow framework, arguing that historical pacts between the state, the militarized police, local landowners, and large multinational extractivist corporations have only become stronger since the 1990s and, in the face of Mapuche resistance, have promoted the use of gendered and racialized state violence and sexual political violence against Mapuche women. At the same time, however, we would like to stress the resistance of those women, particularly with regard to the multinational extractive projects that have been steadily encroaching on Mapuche lands and waterways. Here we would also like to briefly discuss the types of discourses used by Mapuche women to denounce this violence and reflect on the often tense relationship between these women and the Chilean feminist movement.

Rethinking State Violence against Mapuche Women

Most analysis of gender and state violence in Chile has to do with political prisoners and the Pinochet dictatorship (Hiner, 2009; 2015; 2016). However, in general, victims of human rights abuses during the Pinochet dictatorship, even women political prisoners, have generally not been identified as belonging to indigenous or Afro-descendant groups (Hiner, 2018; 2019; Alfaro, Inostroza, and Hiner, 2021). There are, however, important texts that relate the political violence of the dictatorship to Mapuche communities and Mapuche women in Chile (Barrientos, 2003; Calfío, 2009; Mallon, 2004; Reuque, 2002). The Mapuche historian Margarita Calfío (2009), who belongs to the Mapuche History Community,¹ has pointed to the organization of Mapuche women in southern Chile during the 1970s and 1980s not only in opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship but also in an effort to arouse interest in Mapuche rituals, spirituality, language, and knowledge.

Texts that focus on state violence and the Mapuche people since 1990 have a related problem with regard to dictatorship and gender but inversely: here a gendered analysis is generally lacking, although some of the most emblematic Mapuche women from the late 1990s and early 2000s—for example, the Quintremán sisters (Antileo, 2013; Bengoa, 2002; Cayuqueo, 2012; Correa and Mella, 2010; Levil Chicahual, 2006; Pairicán, 2014)—are mentioned. Valuable work on Mapuche women in this time period has been done by the United States–based Chilenist anthropologist Patricia Richards, particularly with regard to the conflict with mainstream women’s and feminist groups but also touching upon gendered tensions within the Mapuche movement (Richards, 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007; Painemal and Richards, 2011). In more recent years, there has been an upsurge in academic and activist interest in Mapuche women, and academic publications by Mapuche women themselves have emerged, particularly with regard to Mapuche women’s history (Calfío, 2009; 2012), state public policy and Mapuche people (Figueroa Huencho 2014; 2016), and the Mapudungun language and intercultural education (Loncon 2019a; 2019b; Mayo and Salazar, 2016).

Between Santiago and Temuco, the Mapuche feminist group Rangiñtulewfü (Between Two Rivers) has also been quite active in recent years, supporting activist, academic, and artistic work from decolonial feminist and antiracist perspectives.² It is often critical of Western binary conceptualizations of genders and sexualities and static identities related to place and migration.³ Additionally, there has emerged a strong group of women researchers in the southern city of Temuco, many associated with the Mapuche women’s group Aukiñko Zomo and/or the Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO) (Ketterer, 2011, 2014; 2016; Ketterer et al., 2017; Ketterer and Zegers, 2012; Mercado Catriñir, 2012; Mercado Catriñir et al., 2015, 2021).⁴ In particular, at the UFRO there is the Observatory on Gender and Health, which has worked on a local level with Mapuche women, particularly with regard to public policy on health and antiviolence initiatives. Ximena Mercado Catriñir (2012; 2021) has done very interesting decolonial feminist work, in particular analyzing the tendency of social science investigation and state public policy to separate gender or intimate-partner violence from other forms of violence related to the state and multinational extractivist companies, as well as questioning colonial and racist practices of understanding Mapuche women and violence in Chile. Along with other researchers, a number of Mapuche women have called attention to the many forms of violence to which Mapuche women in Chile are subject. As one of them said, “There are several levels. There is institutionalized state violence toward Mapuche women in conflict zones, where . . . the police are violent with women . . . but there is also the other violence, which is internal violence.” Another summed up the situation as follows: “We are a threatened people that is surrounded by constant violence, which increases the risks of living with this issue [violence against women]” (Mercado Catriñir et al., 2015: 10).⁵

This body of work dialogues with the “subaltern” and “post/decolonial” turns within Latin American history, which have focused on indigenous and black women and the manner in which the pachakutik⁶ of colonial violence upended the traditional orders of indigenous peoples. The Aymara postcolonial sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010: 223) reminds us that the colonial texts of Waman Puma are “very eloquent in their description of episodes of rape and abuse of indigenous women” and that this colonial violence evidences the “normative crisis that the colonial process meant for Andean societies.” The decolonial feminist María Lugones (2011: 108) stresses that the “coloniality of gender” was always directly related to violence, the colonial state, and Christianity: “The colonial ‘civilizing mission’ was the euphemistic mask for brutal carnal access to people through unimaginable exploitation, rape, reproductive control, and systematic terror. . . . Christian confession, sin, and the strict division of good and evil served to mark female sexuality as evil. Colonized women were seen in relation to Satan and sometimes as being taken by Satan.” More recent texts have also examined the coloniality of gender in relation to the human rights abuses that took place in Guatemala and Peru in Cold War contexts, which disproportionately affected indigenous women (Boesten, 2014; Martin and SáCouto, 2020; Theidon, 2012). Clearly, then, the racist state violence of today, expressed in gendered and sexualized ways, must be understood in relation to continuities with the coloniality of gender and its many intersecting forms of violence, particularly state violence.

More recent works by decolonial feminists such as Yuderkys Espinosa (2010; Espinosa, Gómez and Ochoa, 2014) and Ochy Curiel (Curiel, 2013; Curiel and Galindo, 2015; Curiel, Masson, and Falquet, 2005) have focused on the fact that racist colonial frameworks, among them women’s and feminist groups’ being composed primarily of white-mestizo women, continue to dominate Latin American sociopolitical scenarios. At the same time, many new decolonial, communitarian, and antiracist feminist activists and academics have stressed the presence of Afro-descendant and indigenous women in the forefront of women’s local organizing and resistance to neoliberalism, racism, sexism, and violence, pushing the boundaries of feminisms in their respective contexts (Bastos and Cumes, 2007; Cabnal, 2010; Curiel and Galindo, 2015; Espinosa, Gómez, and Ochoa, 2014; Guzmán, 2019; Pequeño, 2009; Tzul Tzul, 2016). This work is also closely connected to critiques concerning neoliberalism, ecocide, multinational extractivist companies, and state violence against indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America (see Gómez-Barris, 2018).

With regard to the Chilean context, in an article discussing the possibility of a Mapuche feminism the Chilean feminist academic María Antonieta Vera (2014) points to contested feminist genealogies in the United States and Europe with regard to race and ethnicity and situates Mapuche women leaders’ discourses and practices in an alternative intersectional feminist canon. In a provocative publication titled “¿Es que acaso debemos ser todas feministas? Reflexiones de mujeres mapuche para un debate” (Should We Really All Be Feminists? Mapuche Women’s Reflections for the Debate), Millaray Painemal and Isabel Cañet (2018) have questioned the need for all Mapuche women’s demands to be viewed through the lens of “feminism.” Vera (2019) and Ange Valderrama Cayuman (2019) have pointed to the fact that feminism within the Mapuche community and groups of Mapuche women, while embraced by some Mapuche women, continues to be questioned. State violence against Mapuche women is increasingly denounced by Chilean feminist groups, although not without criticism and even some rejection on the part of Mapuche women and their communities.

Methodological Note

In this article we will present some of the results of two research projects with a strong oral history base and an intersectional feminist perspective. In 2014 and 2015 Hiner conducted 162 interviews as part of the FONDECYT project “Unfinished Histories: Gender Violence and Public Policy in Chile, 1990–2010.” Of these interviews 37 were done in the regions of southern Araucanía, Los Ríos, and Los Lagos and 9 with Mapuche women, 6 of whom lived in southern Chile at the time. In 2015 González interviewed 2 Mapuche women and 5 Mapuche men, all in the South, as part of her undergraduate thesis, which was financed by Hiner’s FONDECYT project “Women, Mapuche, and Environmentalists: Struggles against Violence in Democratic Times (1990–2010).” All interviews followed strict ethical guidelines and informed consent procedures. They were complemented by an analysis of Chilean national, regional, and specialized Mapuche press sources.

We are extremely aware of the challenges of working on state violence against Mapuche women while not being Mapuche women ourselves. The danger of falling into the “epistemic extraction” trap is ever-present. However, as feminist historians we suggest that making visible state violence against Mapuche women and their resistance to this violence in Chilean history is an important part of doing intersectional, decolonial, and antiracist feminist work in academic and activist settings. In studying gender violence, state public policy, and feminist social movements, excluding or playing down the violence against Mapuche women would be detrimental. We follow the historian Florencia Mallon (2004) in developing “dialogic” oral histories while also recognizing the limits and the power dynamics involved in this process.

Mapuche Women, Neoliberal Extractivism, and State Violence

A complex discussion about gender, racism, equality, and intersectional and decolonial feminisms has begun to emerge in Chile since the late 1990s as indigenous women have begun to take leadership roles and participated more actively in the public sphere. Perhaps the turning point was the events surrounding the commemoration of 500 years of colonial invasion in 1994 and the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where several Latin American women’s delegations, including Chile’s, specifically included indigenous women (Reuque, 2002). The intensification of local struggles against large multinational extractivist corporations on the part of Mapuche communities initiated in 1997 with the cases of the energy company Endesa in Ralco and the timber companies in Lumaco⁷ has also highlighted the spiritual leadership of Mapuche women. Female Mapuche leaders such as the machis Francisca Linconao and Millaray Huichalaf and the lonkos (community authorities) Juana Calfunao and Juana Cuante have achieved national recognition in their struggles against the encroachment of extractivist corporations on their lands, rivers, lakes, and seas and the inequality, discrimination, and violence perpetrated against the Mapuche people by the Chilean state.

National and international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Universidad Diego Portales’s Human Rights Center have extensively documented the human rights abuses of the Chilean police and military against Mapuche communities, particularly in the militarized zones of the South, where physical, psychological, and sexual violence against Mapuche people has been reported (Amnistía, 2015; 2018; Fundación ANIDE et al., 2012; Centro de Derechos Humanos UDP, 2018; Olea, 2013). Since 1997 Mapuche men have been disappeared or killed by the state, among them, in addition to Catrillanca, José Huenante, Alex Lemún, Matías Catrileo, and Jaime Mendoza Collío, and many more have become Mapuche political prisoners. Macarena Valdés, engaged in a difficult fight against RP Global’s encroachment on her Mapuche community, was found by one of her children hanging dead in her house, where she had been killed and then positioned in such a way as to fake a suicide (Aldunate, 2018). Many other Mapuche women, among them the above-mentioned Linconao, Calfunao, and Huichalaf, have spent considerable time in jail for their political beliefs and efforts to protect their communities from extractivist corporations and the state.

As Mapuche women have become more visible in their communities’ struggles, they have also become much more exposed to state violence. Lonko Juana Calfunao describes abuse in her community of Juan Paillalef, in the Cunco area of the lakes district, where women historically led the resistance to the encroachment of extractivist companies, particularly in timber. At the time of her testimony, her community was involved in a conflict with the energy company FRONTEL, which had installed power lines in Mapuche territory without their residents’ permission. The struggle resulted in 18 families’ being forced to migrate to the capital because of the lack of land; only 4 families could remain, although living in resistance and facing violence (Calfunao, 2003):⁸

Due to various things that I do I am persecuted by the police and arrested countless times. As a Mapuche woman I wear my traditional clothes, for which I am discriminated against. The police treat me like a clown and refer to me [with disrespect] as an “Indian.” . . . I was detained by the police in the Segunda Comisaria police station. . . . In this place they stripped me naked, they insulted me, and they pulled me by my braids, all of this in front of my son, my husband, and other arrested men, keeping me in these conditions for many hours until I asked to be transferred to the hospital because I was bleeding and vomiting. . . . I was transferred to the Temuco Hospital, where I was hospitalized for three days. It was there that they did various tests that showed that I had suffered a miscarriage.⁹

On March 12, 2006, four Mapuche activists started one of the longest and best-known hunger strikes. Patricia “La Chepa” Troncoso, Juan Carlos Huenulao, and the brothers Jaime and Juan Marileo were sentenced under the Anti-Terrorist Law to 10 years in prison for burning 100 hectares of pine trees that belonged to Forestal Mininco in Poluco Pidenco (Diario Austral de Temuco, May 3, 2006). Because of the severity of their sentences, the application of the Anti-Terrorist Law, and the weakness of the evidence on which they had been convicted, they went on strike, and their health began to deteriorate. This resulted in a civil society protest in Temuco and police repression (Diario Austral de Temuco, May 5, 2006). This hunger strike finally came to an end on January 30, 2008, after 112 days (the longest in Chilean history), when the Bachelet government promised the prisoners early release and parole (Página 12, 2008). They were paroled in 2011, and in 2014 Troncoso and seven others won a favorable decision from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In the ensuing years hunger strikes have become increasingly common, with perhaps the best-known taking place in 2010–2011 period and involving the leader of the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco, Héctor Llaitul. In this period Natividad Llanquileo often appeared in Chilean and international media and human rights circles, condemning the application of the Anti-Terrorist Law and the treatment of Mapuche political prisoners, which included torture techniques such as force-feeding, beating, and solitary confinement (The Clinic, 2011).

The machi Francisca Linconao first gained national notoriety in 2008 when she invoked the International Labor Organization Convention 169 to protect the land, rivers, and menokos (sacred wetlands) near her Mapuche community of Rahue, outside of Padre Las Casas in southern Chile (Cayuqueo, 2016). This case went as far as the Supreme Court, where she was declared victorious, but ultimately she will be remembered primarily for being tried as an accessory to murder in the Luchsinger-Mackay case. On January 4, 2013, Werner Luchsinger and Vivianne Mackay, who had large landholdings and had been in constant conflict with the neighboring Mapuche community, were killed when their home was set ablaze. Immediately after the fire, Linconao was arrested. According to Frontline Defenders (2018), she was “forced to change out of her indigenous clothing. She submitted a civil claim on the treatment she endured during her detention. In 2015, the Civil Court of Temuco ordered the Chilean state to pay 30 million pesos in compensation. . . . The Appeals Court of Temuco later revoked this decision.” Finally, in May 2018, she and seven Mapuche men were declared not guilty (Mapuexpress, 2018). Beyond questions related toracism in the Chilean justice system and the increasing militarization of the Chilean South and, particularly, Mapuche communities “in resistance,” the Luchsinger-Mackay case also motivated a high degree of feminist interest based on the stated innocence of Machi Francisca and her denunciation of the Chilean justice system as sexist, racist, and corrupt. On various social media platforms, younger feminists shared images with messages like “Free Machi Francisca!”¹⁰

Ana Tragolaf, president of Aukiñko Zomo and member of the previously mentioned Observatory of Equality in Health, identifies the continuity of violence against Mapuche women over time, highlighting the fact that machis have been particularly vulnerable to it (interview, Temuco, January 22, 2015):

There aren’t many changes between Pinochet’s dictatorship and now, it’s the same thing in the communities and the families. . . . In [the Mapuche women’s group] Aukiñko [Zomo] we worked on the Ralco issue, the lamgenes [sisters] that were suffering in Lumaco, in Tirúa. We were very present in those processes, but we had to be very careful. . . . Many years ago in the Malleco area they were directly attacking the machi, which affected the machi’s role and life, since there is an understanding of the machi’s role within the culture. And of course, in that case, I see that there was a direct relationship with being a woman but also because of that role [of machi], which was going to weaken an important part of the community or the family group.

Mapuche Women’s Resistance to Violence and the Ñuke Mapu

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a steady and escalating condemnation of neoliberalism and the presence of neocolonial multinational extractivist companies in Chile. Rural areas throughout the country have been impacted by large mining, timber, agri-business, and energy projects conducted without proper environmental safeguards. The extractive economy not only promotes deforestation, soil erosion, and unsafe disposal of chemicals and toxic waste but also contributes to problems associated with “big-picture” environmental issues such as drought, flooding, and climate change (Aylwin, Sánchez, and Yañez, 2013). In the Chilean South, opposition to multinational extractivist exploitation has been most forcefully and consistently expressed by the Mapuche community, since many projects involve traditional Mapuche lands and/or bodies of water. Mapuche women, in particular, have been in the forefront in protecting their communities and lands from environmental damage, to the point that some have considered this an ethnic and gendered identity “awakening.” Lucy Ketterer (2011) has suggested that these racialized and gendered environmental struggles in the Chilean South have led to increased organizing on the part of Mapuche communities and empowered Mapuche women.

María Guineo, a rural Huilliche¹¹ woman from Ancud, Chiloé, has condemned not only past state violence and efforts at assimilation but also corporate greed and contamination. Here she is adamant that Huilliche women have been crucial leaders (interview, Ancud, February 6, 2015):

They punished us; some even didn’t want us to learn our language. They hit my father so that he wouldn’t continue speaking his language. Right now it’s still alive, but they say that very little is left. I have been trying to learn it, and I know how to say many things in Huilliche. . . . We had many things here: woods, oceans that were a treasure. They came and contaminated them. Now there is “red tide” (marea roja) because the salmon fisheries came to get rich here and haven’t cleaned up any of the ocean floor. If it weren’t for us women! We have resisted more than the men. They have become inactive. We have taken the bull by the horns, and we’ve been struggling.

The red tide to which she refers, provoked by the industrial fish farming industry, was again the subject of protest in May 2016, and in the forefront were women, including Mapuche women such as Teresa Calfunao, president of the Duhatao Women Shoreworkers’ Group (The Clinic, 2016). In 2019, conflict once again erupted in Ancud when the regional government planned to install a large garbage dump near waters used by the Huilliche community for living, medicinal, and spiritual purposes. Guineo was also involved in this struggle, and Huilliche women were attacked by the police during police actions (Resúmen, 2019).

The state’s efforts to confine the Mapuche issue to southern Chile have also been resignified by Mapuche communities, giving the movement a regional identity and reinforcing its territorial identity. In recent years, the slogan “Respect Ñuke Mapu” has been seen in multiple pamphlets during protests against the intervention of private capital in the exploitation of natural resources. “Ñuke Mapu” is the Mapuche expression for “Mother Earth,” and, as in other cultures (like the Andean “Pachamama”), it links the Earth— particularly the natural world, planting and harvesting, and the conservation of natural resources—to an ideal of femininity based on cycles associated with fertility, childbirth, and child rearing. Discourses associated with variations on the Mother Earth theme have been a political resource associated with both feminism (particularly indigenous communitarian feminism) and environmentalism, referring to the bond between indigenous women and the land from which they obtain their resources, both material and spiritual. However, there is also a significant material and economic element to the relationship between women and natural resources, one linked to the labor market and neoliberalism. This has been theorized in relation to feminist political ecologies, motherhood, and ecofeminism by various Latin American feminist and environmental groups (Arriagada, 2020; Arriagada and Zambra, 2019).

Because of the economic hardships associated with neoliberal extractivist projects (which disproportionately affect women and children) and women’s leadership roles in Mapuche communities, it has increasingly been rural Mapuche women who have led the fight to protect their communities’ lands and water resources. At the same time, however, there are disparate interpretations of Mapuche women’s leadership. In some cases, for example, Mapuche women justify leadership abilities and experience in organizing resistance in terms of the complementarity discourse of the Mapuche worldview, related to traditional, ideal gender roles for Mapuche men and women. Maritza Huentemilla is a Mapuche woman who has worked on many projects related to Mapuche women, among them the Casa de la Mujer Mapuche in Valdivia, a regional project with the intention of empowering indigenous women first launched in Temuco, in Araucanía. She currently works with her husband supporting communities with legal conflicts in Mehuín, Máfil, and Futrono, in the southern Los Ríos region. She is actively engaged with many projects related to Mapuche culture and small businesses, and she even has a specific project to help Mapuche women market and sell their artisanal products, such as traditional crafts, woolen clothes and blankets, and other products such as jam and native spices. For Huentemilla as for many Mapuche men and women, complementarity is the bedrock of gendered familial and societal relationships, and if women are leaders it is only because they are taking up appropriate historical and cultural roles (interview, Valdivia, October 5, 2015, quoted in González, 2016: 58):

Women in several communities are leaders. For example, in Rio Bueno women have always played an important role, in raising children, keeping the family together, supporting their partners; now, this has just been made more visible. There are now female lonkos in this region, but that was also the case before. There are also female machis and male machis. For the Mapuche people there is a duality: it’s the two of them, it’s not that one is better than the other. Work is always reciprocal and cooperative. . . . Everyone has a defined role, but they complement each other—for example, when there was conflict with the Spanish and women had to assume men’s roles because men had to go out and defend the community. Additionally, machismo was really incorporated into communities through the Church and Christianity, where it is the man who rules.

While Mapuche women are being recognized and valued as leaders in their communities, there continues to be a certain degree of resistance on the part of Mapuche women themselves to having their leadership associated with feminism. This resistance often stems from the racism and paternalism expressed by white-mestizo Chilean feminists, who often have little interaction with or knowledge about Mapuche women beyond outdated stereotypes. Isabel Cañet, a Mapuche woman and activist, has spoken on this complex issue:

There are many things about feminism that I like. I even participated in the National Feminist Congress in Valparaiso in 2011. But the truth is that there I was really disappointed because I realized that Chilean feminism is very colonizing in nature. At every turn I heard, “We have to help the poor Mapuche women and save them from being oppressed women.” . . . OK, we have to defend the issue of abortion, I agree, but also as a people, I, as a Mapuche woman, have certain issues to consider and that are as important to me due to my identity. . . . In the end, one always begins to question the organizations and trying to assert small things, like language, for example. In Mapuche organizations we see a lot of machismo in language, for example when they say, “Let’s go there with the peñis [man’s term for brother]” or “Let’s do this with the peñis” and “the peñis, the peñis,” and I always said, “Hey, what about the lamgen [woman’s term for sister or brother, in this case inferred as sisters]?”

At the same time, as Ximena Mercado Catriñir points out, tensions between feminist and Mapuche organizations must be understood in the context of ongoing state violence and militarization (interview, Temuco, January 22, 2015):

When we speak about feminism, it’s that many sisters (lamgen)—in spite of sharing . . . I think, on a day-to-day basis, they are really in agreement with it—[but] we know that it comes from outside the community, related to the bourgeoisie, related to Europe, and that is not seen as being very friendly, because of the Spanish. That generates resistance, but that doesn’t mean that it [feminism] isn’t present, and because of that there are organizations that fight for inclusion in [other] organizations. And you do it constantly, you have to bring it up, show that it isn’t like they say. But taking up that extra banner is hard, because of this situation, because there is a different sense, something extra, in trying to keep something of your own in this massacre that is constantly taking place.

Final Reflections

Since the 1990s there has been increased state violence against Mapuche women, generally in conjunction with the protection of neoliberal, multinational extractive projects. Women in communities in resistance, particularly in Araucanía, have been targeted by special militarized police forces, and their homes and territories have been violently invaded. This perpetuates the continuum of colonial violence historically used to subdue and terrorize indigenous peoples in Chile, while also contributing to an extension of the military and police tactics that were perfected under the Pinochet dictatorship, all of which have produced gendered and sexualized violences that disproportionately affect Mapuche women and girls. At the same time, however, there has been an extremely high level of resistance on the part of Mapuche women, particularly with regard to the protection of their communities and territories. This was evident in the recent election to the Constitutional Convention of many ecofeminists, water activists, and Mapuche women with clear linkages to environmental and territorial demands (Hiner, 2021). Additionally, it has become more and more common for Mapuche women not only to take up the banner of the protection of the Ñuke Mapu but also to link this demand to decolonial feminist projects in the Americas.

Mapuche women are well aware that the term “feminism” produces different reactions in their political projects. However, there are also new and interesting horizons with regard to the possibility of constructing resistance from an explicitly gendered Mapuche point of view, one that can dialogue with and question intersectional, decolonial, and antiracist feminisms. As Elisa Loncon (quoted in Rodríguez, 2020), also newly elected to the Constitutional Convention, states:

The feminist movement has to decolonize itself and consider indigenous participation in another way, as a struggle in equal conditions with indigenous compañeras, who see the world and nature in a different way. Feminists are defending nature, they have adopted plurinationality, and we are going to nourish that content with indigenous women’s perspectives. It is not just a theoretical or spiritual perspective; it is also practical. In Mapuche women’s history there is resistance. We lived experiences of war and ways of surviving. There is a lesson here for rewriting women’s history in Chile.

In the future, we would do well to continue to consider how these tensions and discussions inform our understandings of both Chilean feminisms and Mapuche women’s leadership roles in their communities and in broader social movements (for example, indigenous, anti-neoliberal, environmentalist, or feminist movements). Of particular interest, of course, will be how Mapuche women in the future will advance their demands and form political coalitions. In this connection, we offer this article as an invitation to open up historical and political discussion concerning state violence, Mapuche women, and discourses and practices of resistance, especially with regard to democracy, justice, and decolonial feminist frameworks.

Footnotes

Notes

Hillary Hiner is an associate professor in the History Department at the Universidad Diego Portales and a coordinator of Chile’s Red de Historiadoras Feministas. She works on topics related to gender, sexualities, feminisms, violence, oral history, and memory in the contexts of recent Chilean and Latin American history. Karina González is an M.A. student in history at the University of Toronto. Research for this paper was made possible through FONDECYT grant 11130088.

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State Violence against Mapuche Women in Chile,1998–2018

Abstract

Keywords

Rethinking State Violence against Mapuche Women

Methodological Note

Mapuche Women, Neoliberal Extractivism, and State Violence

Mapuche Women’s Resistance to Violence and the Ñuke Mapu

Final Reflections

Footnotes

Notes

References