- Cecilia Barria
- BBC News World
1 hour
image source, EPA
After two months in power, the president of Chile, Gabriel Boricturned its strategy around to address a historic problem that, so far, no government has been able to solve.
A staunch opponent of the deployment of the military in the conflict zones in the south of Chile where the mapuche communities claim land as part of an ancestral claim, Boric decided this week his militarization.
It did so by decreeing a “limited” state of exception, which in practice implies authorization for the military to guard routes and highways in the region of Araucania and in the neighboring provinces of Arauco y biobioepicenter of a security crisis that has worsened in recent weeks.
“It is evident that in recent times we have had an increase in acts of violence on the roads, we have witnessed cowardly attacks,” Interior Minister Izkia Siches said Monday night.
“We have also seen extended road closures, which put free transit at risk and cut supply chains, increasing the cost of living in the most backward areas of our country,” he added, referring to the mobilizations of carriers demanding greater measures. of security.
The decision is politically complexgiven that in his presidential campaign Boric had assured that if he came to government he had no intention of renewing the constitutional state of emergency that his predecessor, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera, had decreed in October of last year and that, following several extensions, governed till March.
image source, EPA
While the harshest voices accuse him of having betrayed that electoral promise, the more moderate ones argue that this new state of exception is not a replica of the measures taken by Piñera, since it is only focused on the protection of public roads and does not establish military operations in indigenous communities.
Plan B”
In recent weeks, the 36-year-old president tried to get Congress to approve a “intermediate state of exception”a new legal formula that allowed the deployment of military to protect the roads, without having to resort to the declaration of a state of constitutional exception.
But the proposal, which did not get the necessary votes (and did not even have the full support of his own coalition), ended up scrapped.
It is that in some sectors of the Chilean left, the use of the military, even if only to protect public roads, is seen as a policy that threatens democracy and respect for individual freedoms.
It was in this context that finally, in the absence of an intermediate formula, the government made the decision to apply this “Plan B”which does not give the Armed Forces the power to control people or accompany the police forces when enforcing judicial orders, but in any case uses the same legal tool applied previously to deal with the problem of security.
With citizen support eroding and demands from truck drivers and forestry workers to reinforce security in the area, the government made the difficult decision to send in security forces.
image source, EPA
“It is a measure that comes late, but at least it arrives,” said the governor of Araucanía, Luciano Rivas, in statements to the local press.
“We waited 50 days to make this decision and in these 50 days we had 122 attacks“, affirmed the regional authority, defending the management of the previous government.
In dialogue with BBC Mundo, Fernando Pairican, historian and academic from the School of Anthropology of the Catholic University of Chile, argues that there is a sector of the Mapuche movement that has decided to resort to violence to claim their demands.
“There are two streams. A disruptive path that seeks self-determination, which is outside the State, and which seeks to achieve autonomy from territorial control. The other is a gradualist path that, in order to achieve autonomy, occupies institutional spaces.”
Although the administration of President Boric, he points out, “has shown a greater willingness than other governments to be able to develop a dialogue, political parties that have been the architects of a policy of criminalizing the Mapuche persist in their coalition.”
That is why, he says, “there are a contradiction within the government.”
image source, Getty Images
Boric promised during his campaign that he would give another approach to the situation of the Mapuche.
Part of the political fissures in the coalition have been expressed in cases such as that of the Minister of Social Development, Jeannette Vega -the authority in charge of indigenous issues-, who had publicly opposed the state of emergency and a few days later had to support it. to the president.
Or the negotiations in which the Communist Party participated, which, at first, was once morest the idea, but finally ended up lining up reluctantly.
The problem of public safety
When he came to government, Boric opted to focus on political dialoguebut following a wave of violencethe path became more and more difficult.
So much so, that when Minister Siches traveled to the area for the first time, she was greeted with shots fired into the air.
Those who live in those territories have had to constantly deal with roadblocks, burning trucks, shooting of hooded men, property seizures and police operations in communities punished by poverty, a scenario to which complaints from international organizations regarding human rights violations are added.
Opinions regarding who is finally responsible for the violence have become increasingly polarized, while the authorities try to find a formula that allows them to achieve a basic political consensus to advance their objectives.
image source, Getty Images
Roadblocks have been part of the protests in regions such as La Araucanía.
According to Claudio Fuentes, an academic at the Diego Portales University School of Political Science, President Boric’s decision “is made in the midst of an escalation of attacks on property and at a time when public opinion is very sensitive to security issues“.
“This scenario has pressured the government to give more forceful responses to the issue of public security in the country, not only in La Araucanía.”
A public opinion with high expectations that has apparently lost patience quite quickly, when the rejection of his management in the polls exceeds 50%.
“People want to see results in the public order agenda,” says Marco Moreno, director of the School of Government at the Central University of Chile.
“The government has had to resort to available tools to try to restore public order in an area of high complexity due to the demands of radical groups installed in the region”.
image source, EPA
Members of the Mapuche community have denounced that there are “political prisoners” in La Araucanía.
In recent weeks the government has accelerated a package of measures related to the conflict in the area.
Among them, the request for a special prosecutor for the area to investigate crimes such as drug trafficking and wood theft, the creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, the participation of the United Nations in dialogues with representatives of the Mapuche people and the provision of more resources for the return of land and the financing of public works .
But since the Mapuche people do not have a single representative, but are organized through different community leaders, the task remains daunting.
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