Introduction
Chile is often portrayed as a successful example of a peaceful transition to democracy sustained by high rates of economic growth. This picture, although true in some respects, conceals a more complex reality of social conflict brought about in part by the very political and economic models implemented by the democratic governments. The southern region of the Araucanía, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche indigenous people, is a compelling case in point. In recent years, Mapuche communities have clashed with private and state interests over development projects and territorial claims, in some cases reaching a level of violence reminiscent of the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90). Faced with rising Mapuche mobilisation, the state has instituted multicultural policies to recognise some indigenous rights and promote diversity in Chilean society. Local structures of racism persist, however, and in some cases seem more salient than ever.
This article is part of a broader project examining how gendered and racialised meanings of belonging are deployed by different groups in the ‘neoliberal multicultural’ context, and how national and transnational policies and discourses are internalised, interpreted and resisted in everyday life. In this article, I am interested specifically in two tasks: examining the way in which neoliberal multiculturalism is produced in Chile, and looking at the ideas about race, ethnicity, and nation that are mobilised among non-indigenous parties involved in conflicts in the Chilean south. Recent literature on neoliberal multiculturalism argues that it represents a new form of governmentality involving the subjectification of a new type of citizen.Footnote 1 I want to draw attention to how the process of creating neoliberal multicultural citizens is not only imposed from above, but is actually informed by local-level social relationships. The production of neoliberal multiculturalism as a transnational discourse is important to understanding the current state of indigenous affairs in southern Chile, but local histories and social imaginaries are not always easily scripted into the neoliberal multicultural agenda.Footnote 2 Indeed, historically woven local realities can shape and challenge processes driven by state and transnational forces.
Most of the fieldwork for this study, including 80 interviews with Mapuche leaders, government workers and local elites, was conducted over ten months between 2004 and 2007, focusing mainly on four municipalities that differed on key components: the intensity of inter-ethnic conflict, the presence of European settler colonies, the degree of local Mapuche political influence and the presence of forestry plantations. In the following pages, I first provide historical background to Chilean nation-building discourses. In the subsequent two sections, I examine how neoliberal multicultural discourses and policies have developed in contemporary Chile, focusing on the governing Concertación – the coalition of centre-left parties that has held the presidency since the return to democracy – as well as the political Right and the print media. I document the simultaneous development of multicultural policies and the application of anti-terrorism legislation in the context of recent conflicts. Then, I explore how colonos (here defined as European-descended settlers) and other elites construct the Mapuche at the local level. I argue that local elites reinforce the constructions disseminated at the national level in some ways but refuse to consent to them in others, thus contributing to the shape of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile. In the conclusion I discuss broader implications, focusing on the interplay among transnational, national, and local discourses and practices, and history, culture and political economic power.
The Mapuche and the Chilean Nation
The history of Mapuche–Chilean relations begins with the Spanish conquest of Chile in the mid-fifteenth century. Whereas the conquistadors subdued the indigenous populations of Chile's Central Valley (the historical heartland of the country), they were unable to conquer the Mapuche.Footnote 3 Instead, the two parties signed a series of more than 30 treaties establishing the Bío-Bío River as the border between Chile and Mapuche territory. The uniqueness of this situation must be stressed. Unlike the indigenous in other parts of the Americas, the Mapuche (or the araucanos, as the Spanish called them) were not indios cristianos (tribute-paying indigenous communities subject to the crown) or indios bravos (those who remained outside settled areas and were subject to Spanish punitive campaigns). Rather, they were people whose rights to independence and sovereign territory, while precarious, were officially recognised by the Spanish.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, Chilean revolutionary patriots symbolically incorporated the Mapuche to justify their war for independence from Spain (1810–18). For the patriot leaders, ‘the rebel Indian represented love of the soil of the fatherland and irrevocable liberty, high values that had impelled them to fight victoriously during long centuries against the Hispanic conquistadors and against the royal army. Arauco constituted, then, an example to follow, a goal to be achieved’.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, this symbolic incorporation failed to garner Mapuche support for Chilean independence. Instead, most Mapuche sided with the Spanish, preferring their extant treaties to an unknown future with the Chilean patriots.Footnote 5
The new state maintained border relations with the Mapuche until 1862. By the 1850s, economic and geopolitical interests, in combination with positivist logic and scientific racism, had led to a notable shift in discourse toward the Mapuche.Footnote 6 The Mapuche came to be portrayed by politicians and newspapers alike as barbarous, uncivilised beings whose conquest could no longer be delayed. The leading newspaper, El Mercurio, argued in 1859 that ‘nature had spent everything on the development of [the Mapuche's] body, while his intelligence has remained at the level of scavenging animals’ and that ‘[the Mapuche] are nothing more than a wild horde, whom it is urgent to chain or destroy in the interest of humanity and for the good of society’.Footnote 7 Buttressed by this discourse, the state began a war of extermination, formally titled the ‘Pacification of the Araucanía’. Not until 1883 did the state definitively defeat the Mapuche. Surviving Mapuche were relegated to small parcels of land aptly called reducciones, which made up just 6.4 per cent of their previous territory.Footnote 8 Much of the appropriated land was deeded to Chileans and European immigrants, who would farm it for internal consumption and export. Practices such as shady purchases, manipulated debt, contradictory land titles and running fences soon resulted in the loss of significant portions of reducciones.Footnote 9 Until quite recently, schoolbooks uniformly discussed the Pacificación as a victory of civilisation over barbarity, disregarding Mapuche losses in human life, territory and autonomy.Footnote 10
This history conditioned the Chilean response to the myth of mestizaje. In much of twentieth-century Latin America, mestizaje, or racial and cultural mixing, was a tool for assimilationists who sought to dissolve minority racial and ethnic identities into a homogenous national citizenry.Footnote 11 In the process, claims to rights based on collective, indigenous identity were construed as unfair to other citizens. Once indigenous people were defined as citizens, regardless of whether they were actually granted the substantive rights associated with that status, their rights and cultures were effectively suppressed. Chilean assimilationism diverged from this pattern. In the first half of the twentieth century, middle-class nationalists used figures from literary criollismo and Nicolas Palacio's (1904) writings on the raza chilena to define the essence of the nation.Footnote 12 By the late 1930s, images of Araucanian warriors from the time of the Spanish conquest were incorporated into school curricula that promoted a mestizo identity. According to Barr-Melej, however, this ideology was principally directed at diluting class conflict in the cities and mining regions of the north.Footnote 13 It was not developed to integrate the actual Mapuche subjects south of the border who just recently had been defeated militarily and divested of their lands. While the araucano from the time of the Spanish arrival was incorporated into nationalist imagery, the Mapuche who survived the Chilean Pacificación were excluded symbolically and materially, paving the way for their erasure throughout the remainder of the century.
Thus, the historical existence of the border between Chile and the Araucanía uniquely shaped the discourse and experience of race well after the Pacificación. Unlike the Central Valley, where the idea of the ‘Chilean race’ built on but elided indigenousness, the existence of the border allowed Mapuche–Chilean relations to be understood in dichotomous terms.Footnote 14 First, the Mapuche were an external other, the enemy who threatened the integrity of the Chilean nation. Later, they became an internal other, either negated or set apart from Chileans. The relegation of the Mapuche to the reducciones shows the extent of their otherness; recruitment of European immigrants to the area further marginalised the Mapuche and privileged whiteness. Despite the fact that by the early twentieth century, images of the noble araucano warrior were once again incorporated into national identity discourses, in everyday practice, the Mapuche were marginalised in their interactions with Chileans and colonos. So while authorities nominally expected the Mapuche to become ‘Chilean’ like anyone else, daily life in the borderlands relentlessly underscored the dominant presumption of Mapuche racial and cultural inferiority.Footnote 15
The mestizo nationalism that formed the basis for popular movements throughout Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century was not prominent in Chile. Instead, Chilean reformist and revolutionary movements privileged class ideology with little ethnic content. Nevertheless, the Mapuche did benefit from agrarian reforms instituted under Alessandri (beginning in 1962), Frei Sr. (1964–70) and, especially, Allende (1970–3). In all, 163 properties, totalling over 152,000 hectares, were expropriated in favour of the Mapuche between 1962 and 1973.Footnote 16 Although the expropriations were not framed in these terms, some of the properties were ancestral lands, and others were part of the títulos de merced. While the Alessandri and Frei administrations treated the Mapuche as peasants like other rural Chileans, there was some movement toward recognising the specificity of Mapuche claims under Allende. In 1972, parliament passed a modified version of a law that had been proposed in 1970 by indigenous organisations. This law represented the first time that indigenous people were legally recognised as existing independent of their lands; it created an Institute of Indigenous Development and included a promise to restore to the Mapuche lands that had been usurped.Footnote 17 All of this became inoperable, however, after the military coup the following year. Despite the 1972 law, the Allende administration has been criticised for forcing collective land ownership on the Mapuche and failing to recognise their rights to participation and self-determination.Footnote 18
Later, in an offhand reference to mestizaje, Pinochet called the Mapuche ‘one of the essential components in the formation of our nationality’.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, many Mapuche who opposed the dictatorship were tortured, disappeared or driven into exile. Moreover, much of the land that had been returned to the Mapuche under Agrarian Reform was restored to local farming elites or deeded to corporations that would plant it with pine and eucalyptus, laying the bases for a lucrative logging industry in the region. All told, by the end of the counter-reform, Mapuche families retained only about 16 per cent of the land recovered between 1962 and 1973.Footnote 20 In addition, Pinochet decreed a law facilitating the division of indigenous lands and the erasure of Mapuche identity.Footnote 21 The re-dispossession of Mapuche communities under Pinochet is the immediate antecedent of the current conflicts among Mapuche communities, local farmers, forestry companies and the state that serve as the background for this study.
Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Contemporary Chile
In post-dictatorship Latin America, multiculturalism has replaced mestizaje as the hegemonic nation-building discourse.Footnote 22 Multiculturalism ‘can refer to the multiethnic makeup of a place or society’, but ‘more often the term refers to the efforts of liberal democratic governments to accept and embrace these ethic differences’.Footnote 23 In one sense, the adoption of multicultural discourses entails recognition of the damaging effects of the assimilationist policies that accompanied mestizaje discourses. Multicultural discourses are often accompanied by social programmes, such as intercultural education and healthcare, which are intended to be culturally inclusive. As Postero suggests, the idea behind multicultural policies is to remedy past wrongs and incorporate indigenous participation. Nevertheless, multicultural policies and discourses are frequently assimilationist in their effects. Part of the problem, as Hale has pointed out, is that multiculturalism does not require people to deal directly with the ways in which racial hierarchy continues to pervade social life.Footnote 24 It is tantamount to recognising diversity without doing anything about the power inequalities that racial structures entail. Seen from this perspective, multiculturalism does not necessarily challenge racial dominance on a societal level, and this has implications in terms of interpersonal relations as well as institutional forms of discrimination.
The shift toward multiculturalism has taken place in the context of neoliberal reform, broadly characterised by an export-based economic strategy, elimination of trade barriers, decentralisation and the elimination of universal social services. Indigenous movements are among the strongest social movements in the region, and their goals and logic often directly contrast with those of the neoliberal project. As a result, multiculturalism has become an important means of generating consent for neoliberalism. Still, rights and recognition are granted to the indigenous only insofar as they do not threaten state goals in the global economy. Latin American states tend to highlight diversity and grant a limited measure of autonomy, but construe demands for radical redistribution, autonomous territory and self-government as counterproductive for multicultural society.Footnote 25 The result is cultural recognition without the economic and political redistribution that would lead to greater equality.Footnote 26 As Postero shows for the Bolivian case, despite the presence of multicultural policies, neoliberal reforms applied in the 1980s and 1990s ‘reinforced the racialised inequalities long existing in Bolivia, laying bare the continued monopoly of power held by dominant classes and transnational corporations’.Footnote 27 In simple terms, neoliberal multiculturalism addresses ethnic or cultural concerns without dealing with redistributive ones. Indigenous demands, of course, focus on both.
Neoliberalism has been driven in large part by transnational entities like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, and is frequently accompanied by a multicultural mandate at this level, as well. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank and other development agencies have made indigenous participation and consultation part of their internal practices, and have promoted similar practices in the projects they fund.Footnote 28 Multiculturalism is intended to generate consent for neoliberalism among citizens; adopting multicultural policies is equally important for countries eager to polish their reputation in the international community.Footnote 29
While the Chilean state and economy are relatively strong in comparison to others in Latin America, the agenda of powerful global institutions has shaped Chilean policies. Indeed, neoliberal multiculturalism is the prevailing form of governmentality in contemporary Chile, where, according to the 2002 census, the Mapuche represent 4.6 per cent of the population (and about 26 per cent of the population in their ancestral territory). In this section, I examine the unique contours of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile.Footnote 30 I argue that while neoliberal multiculturalism is a transnationally informed set of discourses and practices, the specific form it takes responds to the particularities of Chilean history as well as to demands made by the Mapuche movement since the return to democracy.
Around 1975, when the ‘Chicago Boys’ convinced Pinochet to go with their ‘rightist shrunken state and extreme free market capitalism’, the regime began a process of neoliberal reform that was both prior to and more severe than that implemented elsewhere in Latin America.Footnote 31 Neoliberalism has likewise shaped the content of Chilean democracy; the Concertación has generally left in place the economic model begun under Pinochet. Not just the Mapuche, but all Chilean citizens, are affected by neoliberal governmentality. For example, in the Araucanía, as elsewhere, neoliberalism has brought an increase in farming for export and greater competition from foreign agricultural products; these trends affect Mapuche communities as well as small and medium-scale non-indigenous farmers. The drive to increase exports has also led the state to promote the timber industry, described in detail below. Thus, the strategic goals of the democratic Chilean state cohere closely with global neoliberal agendas.
The specific form of neoliberal multiculturalism that has arisen in Chile also reflects the historical dynamic between the state and the Mapuche and, to the extent that they fit with neoliberal development goals, responds to some Mapuche demands.Footnote 32 The historical context described above – the existence of the border, the relegation of the Mapuche to reducciones even as the araucano was incorporated into imagery aimed at generating cross-class unity, and the belief that the indigenous were largely irrelevant or nonexistent – contributed to a situation in which, particularly at first, national-level politicians in democratic Chile were reticent to endorse policies involving recognition. The specific character of conflicts in the Chilean South has also shaped Chile's version of neoliberal multiculturalism, as has the extreme centralisation that continues to dominate the policy arena. All told, while Chile was the first state in Latin America to embrace neoliberalism, it has been one of the last to embrace multiculturalism.
Mapuche activism against the dictatorship led to hope that the Concertación would address their claims. In 1993, a new Indigenous Law was passed. It established means for the protection and expansion of land and water rights and created the Corporacion Nacional de Desarrollo Indigena (National Corporation for Indigenous Development, CONADI) to administer these and other policies. The law stipulates that indigenous land cannot be sold to non-indigenous parties. It establishes a fund that provides subsidies for communities that wish to purchase additional land, and also finances direct purchase of lands in conflict. Importantly, the law deems ‘indigenous lands’ to be only those granted by the state to the Mapuche after the Pacificación, thus excluding the tierras antiguas.Footnote 33 Despite the new law, the relationship between the Mapuche, the Concertación and other social actors has been fraught with conflict.
The privileged status of neoliberal development over indigenous rights is at the root of these conflicts. Hydroelectric dams, airports, highways, corporate fisheries and garbage dumps are among the initiatives Mapuche communities find themselves struggling against. Perhaps most emblematically, today in ancestral Mapuche territory, national and foreign timber companies own three times more land than the Mapuche.Footnote 34 The companies were heavily subsidised under Pinochet, as they are under the Concertación. Pine and eucalyptus plantations surround Mapuche communities, leach the soil of water and nutrients, and make small-scale agriculture unsustainable. In summer, the government has to ship water into some communities suffering desert conditions produced by the plantations. The plantations are a major target of Mapuche protests, including land occupations, fires and equipment sabotage. Mapuche have also been accused of committing arson on fundos belonging to colono farmers. While only a small number of communities (2.4 per cent) are estimated to have been involved in the more extreme forms of protest, most Mapuche share their grievances.Footnote 35
Under presidents Frei (1994–2000) and Lagos (2000–6), the Concertación responded to the growing conflicts with a dual approach. On the one hand, they expanded policies addressing some Mapuche demands. As I demonstrate elsewhere, many of these policies construed Mapuche demands as socio-economic problems that could be eradicated with development-oriented solutions, such as land subsidies, education and housing grants, and training programmes.Footnote 36 Frei and Lagos generally did not address more radical demands, such as autonomous territory, self-government or even collective political representation. This approach is likely related to the historical tendency on the Chilean Centre-Left to view the Mapuche through the lens of social class rather than ethnicity. In a sense, then, Chile's version of multiculturalism, particularly in its earlier stages, differed from that of other Latin American states by privileging redistribution over recognition. Nevertheless, these policies tended to be ameliorative and did not represent redistribution in any radical sense.
Over time, Chilean indigenous policies have given greater attention to culture and diversity, thus moving closer to multiculturalism elsewhere in the region. Many of these policies directly link into neoliberal values, emphasising an increase in indigenous individuals' access to the market rather than recognising their status as sovereign peoples.Footnote 37 The state (through CONADI as well as the municipalities) sponsors programmes through which elements of Mapuche culture can be exploited in the global marketplace; examples include ‘ethno-tourism’ projects and the marketing of artisan products. In this sense, under neoliberal multiculturalism Mapuche culture becomes a brand to be sold. Indeed, one municipal employee, whose job involves commercialising the region's craftwork in Europe, noted that ‘culture’ gave Mapuche products a competitive advantage. He explained that cultures that were denigrated or attacked in the past are highly marketable today.Footnote 38 Thus, the neoliberal values that pervade Chilean social policy take on unique significance when it comes to indigenous policy.
Perhaps the most emblematic example of the Concertación's approach to indigenous policy was the creation of Orígenes. Orígenes is an indigenous development programme established through a US$ 140 million IDB loan in 2001, at the height of the conflicts over the timber industry. Orígenes funds projects related to health, education, community and institutional strengthening, and productive development. The programme was designed entirely without indigenous input, and communities are limited in the particular projects they can undertake. The programme is recognised among indigenous leaders as a strategy to pacify the conflicts by throwing money at the communities. Even the programme's motto, ‘Mira el futuro desde tu origen’ (‘Look towards the future from your origins’), seems to encourage the indigenous to keep their traditions but forget their ancestral claims.
The Concertación's approach can also be seen in the Comisión de Verdad Histórica y Nuevo Trato (Historical Truth and New Deal Commission), established by Lagos at the beginning of 2001. The commission was charged with writing a historical report and generating proposals and recommendations for policies that would contribute to a new relationship between the state, indigenous peoples and Chilean society.Footnote 39 It submitted its report in October 2003. In April 2004, Lagos announced the measures he would take in response. Aside from proposing to give urgency to the ratification of ILO Convention 169, which recognises many indigenous rights, he did not take up the commission's recommendations regarding the recognition of indigenous peoples, the demarcation of their territories or their rights to natural resources. Nor did he take up the recommendation to establish indigenous representation in electoral bodies. Instead, he focused on strengthening the existing law and ‘development with identity’ programmes in the areas of education, production and restitution of land and water rights. All told, Lagos' measures amounted to strengthening programmes already administered by CONADI and Orígenes and doing little to respond to the issues that had triggered Mapuche protests in the first place.Footnote 40 They also reflected the persistence among certain sectors of the Concertación in insisting that the ‘Mapuche problem’ is poverty-based and should be addressed with ameliorative policies.
While some critics argue that neoliberal multiculturalism consists of symbolic recognition with little redistributive substance,Footnote 41 recognition itself is a limited and highly controlled aspect of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile. The Concertación policies that do recognise Mapuche culture to some extent, such as intercultural health or education programmes, tend to be limited in scope and focus on integrating the Mapuche into the Chilean whole (intercultural education programmes are only directed at the Mapuche, for example). In addition, rhetoric that presents the Mapuche as part of Chile's folkloric past is common, as is that which reduces demands for cultural rights to a less threatening recognition of diversity.Footnote 42 In fact, Chile lags behind most Latin American countries in terms of formal recognition of indigenous rights. Despite repeated attempts, Chile has failed to recognise the Mapuche in its Constitution, and only recently passed ILO Convention 169.
This pattern has changed somewhat under current president Michelle Bachelet (2006–10). While her government continues to promote Orígenes, the land fund and other development policies established by previous administrations, in 2007, Chile voted in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in 2008, it finally ratified ILO Convention 169.Footnote 43 In addition, in April 2008, the Bachelet government released a document entitled Reconocer: pacto social por la multiculturalidad, which summarises its plans for indigenous policy in the second half of her administration. The document recognises the persistence of indigenous poverty and unmet demands, and outlines a plan of action related to the political system, rights, institutions, development, multiculturalism and diversity. Some of the proposals not seen before include indigenous participation in parliament, regional and communal councils, institutionalisation of the right to participation, construction of a multicultural policy, promulgation of the Verdad Histórica report, and passage of an anti-discrimination law. The document lacks specific details on how these changes will be put into effect and what they will consist of in practice, however. While these steps bring Chile more in line with neoliberal multiculturalism elsewhere, it is too early to tell if significant changes in practice will follow. Finally, as of March 2009, the Senate was again debating the constitutional recognition bill. The bill, promoted largely by Rightist politicians, was very problematic. It referred to the Chilean nation as ‘one, indivisible, and multicultural’ and recognised indigenous peoples, but made clear that their communities, organisations and members – not the peoples per se – were subjects of rights, and insisted that indigenous ways of life must not contradict Chilean law.Footnote 44
Indians and Terrorists: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Conflicts
Hale links the confluence of neoliberalism and multiculturalism to ‘the creation of subjects who govern themselves in accordance with the logic of globalised capitalism’.Footnote 45 One subject position created through neoliberal multiculturalism is the indio permitido, or ‘authorised Indian’.Footnote 46 Hale notes that, in dialectical fashion, neoliberal multiculturalism constructs another subject position, as well: ‘Governance proactively creates and rewards the indio permitido, while condemning its Other to the racialised spaces of poverty and social exclusion’.Footnote 47 Hale calls this ‘other’ the ‘insurrectionary Indian’.Footnote 48 While the authorised Indian readily embraces integrationist policies and participates unquestioningly in government programmes, the insurrectionary defies the principles of neoliberal multiculturalism by pursuing recognition of ancestral rights and redistribution of power and resources. These subject positions are a resource that allows the state to constrain indigenous behaviour; communities or individuals who do not adhere to the ‘authorised’ model are marginalised at best or subjected to state violence at worst. These positions do not capture the full range of behaviours and attitudes of indigenous peoples, of course, but their dichotomous character is part of their power; individuals and communities who seek inclusion while also making ancestral claims walk a fine line between acceptance and marginalisation.Footnote 49
The authorised/insurrectionary dichotomy governs the Concertación's response to the conflicts. The indigenous policies described above demonstrate the type of indigenous subject deemed authorised: Mapuche who accept their role in fostering appreciation for diversity and Chile's folkloric past, whose demands do not exceed state-sponsored multiculturalism, and who actively promote those policies. The authorised Indian serves to reinforce what the insurrectionary is not, prescribes what s/he should be, and denies the possibility that an individual could embody aspects of both – for example, participating in cultural initiatives and taking advantage of government programmes while simultaneously supporting autonomist efforts.Footnote 50 The Concertación has responded with punitive policies when Mapuche do not adhere to the authorised archetype. These policies have come into play in the context of land occupations, plantation fires and other protests, and, beginning with the Lagos administration, have centred on constructing the Mapuche not just as insurrectionists, but as terrorists. The construction of the Mapuche as either authorised or terrorist is consistent with Robinson's characterisation of the role of peripheral neoliberal states as maintaining social order on behalf of capital; if subjects will not consent to what the state offers through (neoliberal multicultural) development policies, they face direct coercion.Footnote 51
Altogether, over 200 Mapuche have been arrested in association with the conflicts. The state considers the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) responsible for the majority of the violence. The CAM seeks to establish ‘territorial control’ in pursuit of its goal of reconstructing ‘the Mapuche nation’. Its occupation of disputed lands is ‘intended to be permanent, rather than symbolic’.Footnote 52 Thirty-one of the individuals arrested under Lagos, mostly members of the CAM, were accused under anti-terrorism legislation established during the dictatorship. Four anti-terrorism ‘processes’ were initiated under Lagos.Footnote 53 The first, in 2003, was called the Trial of the Lonkos, because two of the three defendants were the heads, or lonkos, of Mapuche communities (Aniceto Norin of Didaico and Pascual Pichun of Temulemu). The third defendant was Patricia Troncoso, a non-Mapuche sympathiser. The three were accused of committing terrorist threats and arson on the property of Juan Agustin Figueroa, a former Minister of Agriculture. They were found not guilty, but the Supreme Court declared a mistrial in response to a petition from the plaintiffs (which included the state).Footnote 54 They were then retried; Troncoso was absolved, but the lonkos were each sentenced to five years. The second case, in 2004, was that of Victor Ancalaf, who was sentenced to five years for throwing an incendiary device at a truck during the construction of the Ralco hydroelectric dam. The third was the Poluco-Pidenco trial, in which five members of the CAM, including Troncoso, were charged with terrorist arson in association with fires set on a pine plantation owned by the Mininco logging company. A lower-court judge declared the terrorist charges inapplicable before the trial began, but the Supreme Court removed her from the case, and in August 2004 all five were sentenced to ten years. The final case focused on charges of illicit terrorist association brought against 16 alleged members of the CAM. At least five of them (including Norin, Pichun and Troncoso) had ‘already been convicted on a different charge for the same underlying acts’.Footnote 55 In November 2004, eight were tried and found not guilty.Footnote 56 This acquittal was also overturned by the Supreme Court; six were retried, and it was again determined that there was insufficient evidence to convict them.
The terrorist construction has important legal implications. The anti-terrorism law allows for indefinite detention of suspects without charge, permits prosecutors' use of wiretapping and protected witnesses to whom the defence has no access, and authorises sentences longer than those for similar violations of the civil code. Most of the crimes committed by Mapuche have been against property (especially arson) and therefore do not qualify as terrorism as defined in international treaties.Footnote 57 Moreover, the legal artifice conceals the politics behind the use of the law: the Lagos administration repeatedly insisted the conflicts were an issue for the courts to deal with, but sponsored an intelligence operation called ‘Operation Patience’ to substantiate charges against the CAM. Although Bachelet promised during her campaign that her government would not apply the anti-terrorism law, it has been invoked against at least four individuals during her presidency.Footnote 58
The application of the terrorist label also has legitimated state violence. Raids on Mapuche communities, in which police brutality and human rights abuses have been documented, have accompanied the conflicts.Footnote 59 Three young Mapuche protesters have been shot dead by police: Alex Lemun in 2002, Matias Catrileo in 2008, and Jaime Mendoza Collio in 2009.Footnote 60 In October 2007, Patricia Troncoso went on a hunger strike in a plea for herself and two others to be allowed weekend leave and transfer to an alternative prison that would give them access to the rural outdoors and other opportunities. The government responded with intransigence, but with the help of international human rights groups, the UN Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Rights, and the Mapuche media, Troncoso's story drew solidarity from around the world. The government finally acceded to her requests in January 2008, when the strike had reached 112 days and Troncoso was near death.
Nevertheless, the Concertación is not the only force shaping neoliberal multiculturalism from above in Chile; the political Right and the media are also influential. The political Right in Chile tends to reject Mapuche claims for territory and recognition while simultaneously critiquing the Concertación for failing to contain the conflicts. For example, conservative think-tank Libertad y Desarrollo was already calling Mapuche land recoveries ‘terrorist attacks’ in 1999, and in September 2001 it published an essay lamenting the attacks on Washington and New York.Footnote 61 The essay identifies the ‘indigenous issue’ in Chile as a ‘risky situation’ that needs to be addressed in the new global context, thus discursively linking Mapuche activism to the attacks on the United States. The use of ‘terrorism’ to describe Mapuche land claims reflects global discursive flows and also demonstrates historical continuity with the Southern Cone dictatorships (as well as the Guatemalan civil war), during which civilians were labelled terrorists in order to justify the use of state violence against them.Footnote 62
Other rightist responses echo these concerns about terrorism. In 2002, the Senate's Constitution, Legislation and Justice Commission emitted a lengthy report on the ‘Mapuche conflict’. Senator Alberto Espina initiated the report, arguing that the Mapuche were threatening the physical integrity and way of life of agriculturalists, campesinos and lumber transporters, in addition to seeking their own autonomous nation-state. Another report exposed ‘cybernetic terrorism’ – websites purportedly advocating Mapuche violence.Footnote 63 The identified sites included those of several academic, advocacy and human rights organisations. The Right represents Mapuche claims as illegitimate and dangerous, a tendency that is clear in the Chilean print media, as well. Indicative headlines include ‘Alert in Arauco, Fearing Wave of Mapuche Violence’, ‘The Mapuche Intifada: The Indigenous Uprising Worsens’, ‘Mapuches Threaten’ and ‘Indigenous Communities on the War Path’. One article reads in part: ‘The kindling is there and the matches available – the indigenous conflict [could] become a little Chiapas’.Footnote 64
Although the terrorist construction is dominant on the Right and in the media, the authorised Mapuche has some presence as well. The Right is extremely critical of the Concertación's land policy. It blames the Concertación for tying the Mapuche to the land and instead promotes the idea that ‘it is possible to be Mapuche without land’. For example, Armando Torres, a university administrator and former rightist politician, denied that land was a central part of Mapuche identity, claiming that they were hunters, not farmers, before the Pacificación. I heard this rationale for denying Mapuche land claims time and again. Notably, it conflates the right to land with private property, which not only defends elites' own interests but has an affinity with the neoliberal model. In addition, rightists often promote education to facilitate assimilation but are critical of state spending on indigenous policies, saying it discriminates against the non-Mapuche. Torres explained:
I believe it is necessary to increase the levels of education considerably, and perhaps within that educational policy, generate elements for the maintenance of culture, but the only way to get [the Mapuche] out of poverty is to train them to compete in equality of opportunities. You can't think that in Chile, the State of Chile is going to permanently subsidise an ethnic group. That is not possible, because otherwise, they are going to end up the same as the indigenous reservations in North America that are waiting for the money or the casino to arrive, the alcohol, la la la la – that model is not possible.Footnote 65
For Torres, culture can be maintained, but the goal of indigenous education should be to promote competition under ‘equal opportunities’. An oft-invoked concept, ‘equal opportunities’ reinforces neoliberal ideals of ‘choice’ and ‘personal responsibility’ while de-emphasising the role of broader historical structures of inequality in shaping people's life chances. Rightists also frequently oppose or, as noted above, seek to limit the meaning of, Constitutional recognition, citing a principle of ‘one country, one people’.Footnote 66 By and large, the view predominant on the Right stands in contrast to that of the Concertación to the extent that it directly promotes assimilation rather than multiculturalism (though multicultural policies are often similar in their effects).
Of course, there is a global context to all of this, shaped by the US-led ‘War on Terror’. Many of the steps taken by the Concertación and the Chilean courts, including all applications of the anti-terrorism law, came after 11 September 2001 and are part of a general context in which the terrorist label is used to delegitimate subaltern struggles, much as ‘communist’ was during the Cold War. As Human Rights Watch put it, ‘The US led campaign against terrorism has, unfortunately, become a cover for governments who want to deflect attention away from their heavy-handed treatment of internal dissidents’.Footnote 67 In addition, it was rumoured that the US set controlling Mapuche activism as a precondition for its Free Trade Agreement with Chile in 2003. More interesting than whether this rumour is ‘true’ are its ‘truth effects’.Footnote 68 The rumour is illustrative of a political reality in which the aftermath of 11 September 2001 made it possible to use anti-terrorism laws against the Mapuche without invoking substantial moral opposition among the Chilean public. Of course, efforts to construe the Mapuche as terrorists are also facilitated by past representations of the Mapuche as a threat to the Chilean nation.
This is the content of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile. Constructions of the Mapuche as ‘authorised’ and ‘terrorist’ seem contradictory, but ultimately sustain one another. Authorities emphasise the role the Mapuche can play in enhancing the diversity of Chilean society but downplay claims for recognition of their collective and cultural rights to territory and self-determination, particularly insofar as these are perceived to violate national development goals and the property rights of forestry companies and local elites. In this way, neoliberal multiculturalism takes specific form given the particularities of Chilean history and contemporary social relations.
Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Local Elites
How do dominant groups construct the Mapuche in this context? Large-scale surveys provide conflicting information about the Chilean public's views on the Mapuche. While some surveys conducted in major cities (all outside the conflict zone) indicate endorsement of Mapuche claims, others indicate support for use of stronger tactics against Mapuche activists.Footnote 69 One recent study examining attitudes in ancestral Mapuche territory indicates that many Chileans there harbour the belief that the Mapuche are lazy, violent, drunk, uncivilised and primitive.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, rejection of the Mapuche is not monolithic; this was evident in the support Patricia Troncoso received in the latter days of her hunger strike, and in recent years a few multi-ethnic coalitions have emerged in the south, focusing on issues of mutual concern to Chileans and Mapuche.
In this section I explore what happens to the views of local elites when they are confronted not just with growing Mapuche activism and social conflict, but with the emergence of new ideas about multicultural citizenship that filter down through state policy, political discourse and the media. In the previous sections, I demonstrated that although neoliberal multiculturalism is a set of transnational discourses and practices, it takes specific form given the particularities of Chilean history and social relations. Here I show that local-level social understandings and relationships, also historically produced, are crucial to understanding how neoliberal multiculturalism plays out. Local elites' beliefs and practices are not always an easy match with neoliberal multicultural discourses. In fact, local elites often actively resist multiculturalism in order to preserve their own positions. Engrained racial discourses underlie subject formation and inform lived experience, creating fissures that complicate a top-down analysis of neoliberal multiculturalism.
About 25 of my 80 interviews were conducted with local elites, including medium-scale colono farmers who have been targets of land recoveries or arson, as well as some lawyers, politicians, businessmen and local historians. Sampling was purposive, meaning that I selected respondents who I knew were key players in the region and/or its conflicts. In some cases, respondents recommended other potential interviewees. Most were men, middle-aged or older; their wives and children often participated in the interviews as well.Footnote 71 Some of the respondents are not only relevant political actors at the local level, but also have influence regionally and nationally. Others, including most of the colono farmers, have less influence at the regional level than they once did, but by virtue of their names, family history and direct involvement in the conflicts, they have significant influence in shaping local public opinion.
Local elites in the conflict zones draw from, but do not strictly follow, insurrectionary and authorised archetypes when they discuss the Mapuche. Instead, their narratives are threefold, falling on a recognition/non-recognition continuum. First, many local elites recognise the Mapuche as terrorists. This narrative matches, and even fuels, the punitive policies associated with neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile. In other ways, however, local elites actively reject multicultural values and demonstrate that racial hierarchies are thriving in the context of the conflicts. Thus, in a second collection of narratives, local elites forcefully deny or trivialise Mapuche existence, refusing to recognise the Mapuche's collective identity. In a third narrative, elites concur that for the Mapuche to survive, they must leave their culture and land behind. Here elites recognise Mapuche existence, but suggest that the solution to the conflicts entails rejecting the Mapuche past in favour of the Chilean future. Although these narratives are contradictory, they are not mutually exclusive in the discourse of local elites. The contradictions in how local elites talk about the Mapuche indicate the complex interplay of multicultural discourses filtering down from above, local elites' selective remembrances of Mapuche–Chilean relations in times past, and their own fears and desires for the future.Footnote 72 Altogether, the narratives suggest the obstinacy of local, socio-historical understandings despite official efforts to promote multiculturalism. In this way, local structures of racism are integral to how neoliberal multiculturalism is configured in contemporary Chile. While neoliberal policies and programmes respond to some Mapuche demands, the subjectivities made available by neoliberal multiculturalism are shaped by pre-existent structures and discourses of racism.Footnote 73
The terrorist narrative
Almost all local elites I spoke with used the concept of terrorism in describing the Mapuche. Daniel Hauri, the grandson of Swiss colonos, is accused of being in unfair possession of Mapuche land and is much despised for his heavy-handed ways (he is rumoured to have held Mapuche at gunpoint on behalf of the military at the time of the coup). Over the past few years, several buildings and crops on Hauri's land were destroyed by fire. After describing these events, Hauri asked, ‘If this isn't terrorism, what is?’ He used a human rights frame to discuss his situation:
If they have need, give them what they want, but give them what is theirs, what it corresponds to the state to give … don't do a hidden expropriation, coming to terrorise us, to take away our things … Anything can be done, but with respect, and respecting the human rights – that comes out so much these days, human rights, human rights, and we haven't had even half a human right, and that's what hurts most.Footnote 74
The use of the human rights frame represents the co-optation of a concept usually associated with the Chilean Left. It is particularly incongruous because many local landowners were associated with paramilitary groups that contributed to toppling the Allende government and the subsequent human rights abuses. Also interesting is the use of ‘expropriation’, which harkens back to agrarian reform. Hauri, like many others, opposed agrarian reform and cited it as the historical reference point at which these troubles started. While I do not want to minimise his suffering, his lack of reflexivity about his possession of land that was expropriated from the Mapuche and given to his ancestors is a sadly ironic selective remembrance.
The Mapuche-as-terrorist is a discursive construct that dehumanises the Mapuche and also serves to mobilise opposition to them at the local and national levels. Indeed, it was a landowner with national connections, Augustín Figueroa, a lawyer and minister of agriculture under former president Aylwin, who brought the first terrorism case before the courts for an arson attack on a house and 60 hectares on his 1,800-hectare property. And local elites were recruited by Senator Espina to contribute to the Senate report cited above, a key element in the push to criminalise the Mapuche struggle. The terrorist construction also intersects with historical factors. Not only was the anti-terrorism law designed to control leftists under Pinochet, but in addition, landowners have on several occasions announced to the media their plans to organise self-defence brigades – essentially paramilitary organisations – to defend their property. Most recently, in July 2009, the Comando Trizano announced its reactivation in response to Mapuche mobilisation. The group is named after Captain Hernán Trizano, who was charged with defending colono settlers at the end of the nineteenth century and was known for his brutal treatment of the Mapuche. The decision to use Trizano's name can be read as a symbolic re-enactment of the original colonial assault. Elites' construction of the Mapuche as terrorists at the local level provides the justification for the use of the anti-terrorism law at the national level. While local elites actively consent to and encourage the negative side of neoliberal multiculturalism (i.e., the consequences assigned to the terrorist/insurrecto), the following two categories demonstrate their resistance to affirmative multicultural values.
Trivialisation narratives
Local elites utilise a complex set of narratives that denies, minimises or trivialises Mapuche existence in a variety of ways. Some respondents simply contend that the Mapuche were always few, and conclude that their claims on the land are thus unfounded. For example, Simon Baum, an elderly businessman and landowner, was irritated by academic and social concern for the Mapuche. He told me about a professor he met in the 1950s, who also was interested in the Mapuche. A friend of Baum's asked the professor why he didn't focus on Peru instead, where there was a major indigenous population. This question caused some conflict with the professor, who didn't think it legitimate. Baum did, however, and he repeated to me, ‘They're barely 4 per cent of the population here!’.Footnote 75 This was the final thought Baum shared before we parted. His point: why bother with the Mapuche, when they are such an insignificant sector of the population?
Other interviewees echoed Baum's view. Gastón Muñoz, a military man turned local historian, insisted that the zone was unsettled before the colonos arrived, and that it was important not to walk away with the idea that the Mapuche had lived there: ‘That smells more like a myth … it smells more like a legend to me. The truth is that this zone was occupied by families of Mapuche origin, but the quantity … wasn't so numerous’. He suggested that the Mapuche had done little to fight the Pacificación. He said he had ‘a discrepancy’ with the Mapuche; the fact that the state had conceded títulos de merced ‘to calm them down’ didn't mean that colonos and Chileans who came to reside in those areas had taken land from them, because ‘in the end, they were never the owners of these lands; rather, they only lived in an isolated way’.Footnote 76 Baum and Muñoz's words reflect a desire to eliminate the Mapuche from the social imaginary. Indigeneity is repressed in these narratives, allowing elites to think of the land as their own. This imaginary is the legacy of the invasion and settlement of the region at the end of the 1800s.
At other times, respondents recognised Mapuche existence but denied any historical basis to the conflicts. They remembered a peaceful, happy coexistence and expressed a desire to go back to the way things used to be. Hernán Rohrer, the son of a couple whose vehicles were set on fire, purportedly by Mapuche, put it this way: ‘This situation is producing a rejection of the indigenous people … But in the old days, we all shared together, and we didn't have any problems. We were the same’.Footnote 77 Others also contended that the conflicts were a recent phenomenon; they might have had small, neighbourly conflicts in the past, but nothing that suggested animosity.
This notion of sameness recurred often in my interviews. For example, in an informal conversation with a group of Rohrer's family members and friends, one woman exclaimed, ‘We've always been the same, and suddenly, they say, “we're different”’.Footnote 78 The frequency with which comments like this emerged suggests that they represent a collective fear of what recognising Mapuche culture and rights might mean in material terms, and a wish that difference could simply be willed away. Ultimately, however, this assertion of ‘sameness’ implies even more: that the Mapuche do not have a historical basis for animosity toward the colonos, that their demands for the land are illegitimate, that they were never culturally different or treated unequally, and that those making claims for territory and rights are not ‘real’ Mapuche.
Nevertheless, the assertion of sameness was often contradicted within the same conversation. For example, when asked about intercultural relations, Billy Montoya, a Euro-Chilean farmer outside of the conflict zone, painted a picture of mixture and coexistence that was imbued with hierarchy and difference. He insisted that relationships between Mapuche and non-Mapuche in the area had changed little over time because they have always been ‘mixed’, but also resented his Mapuche farmhands for calling him tu instead of usted.Footnote 79 Although not all local elites asserted sameness, and those who did often contradicted themselves, it is important to note the role that power – and status as the subject of the social world rather than its object – plays in this construction. Local elites can assert that the ‘mixedness’ of their region makes everyone the same, and they might even believe it, but as one Mapuche respondent pointed out, the Mapuche's lived experience of this mixedness – understood in biological or socio-cultural terms – is quite different. For them, that mixing of cultures, those social interactions, formed the basis for the despojo and the ongoing discrimination against them.Footnote 80
In contrast to the notion of sameness, colonos also fondly recount paternalistic moments when they ‘helped’ the Mapuche – by driving someone to the hospital, teaching them about cleanliness, or lending money that was never repaid. Helga Stein, for example, said her family never had conflicts with their Mapuche neighbours, and in fact, ‘My father taught them to cultivate the land’.Footnote 81 So here the Mapuche provide convenient evidence for the European farmers' benevolence and superiority. These references to better times past offer a competing history to the assertion that ‘the Mapuche didn't exist’. Nevertheless, even as they recognise the Mapuche through these tales of benevolence, colonos and Chileans trivialise the systematic inequalities that structure those relationships. They also insist on their own protagonism in the region. Many said, ‘When my family came here, there was nothing! We made this what it is today.’Footnote 82 This discursive turn reflects ‘the fantasy of terra nullius’.Footnote 83 Cash suggests that this collective fantasy involves the condensation of repressed memories and experiences of ‘conquest, violence, and appropriation’ into ‘a specific mode of thinking, feeling and relating that eclipses the claims to recognition of the indigenous other’. He argues that this fantasy is at the centre of Australian nationalism and ‘continues to organise the relations between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens within the discourse and practices of the nation’. I see a similar pattern in Chile, whereby this fantasy not only impacts state discourse and practices, but shapes the ‘selective remembrances’ and desires of local elites as well.
In particular, past conflict with the Mapuche is often erased from local elites' memories, which contributes to the latter's minimisation of contemporary conflicts. Few mention that many fundos in the area were expropriated in favour of the Mapuche under agrarian reform and then returned to colonos or sold cheaply to timber corporations under Pinochet (although many do say that the problems all started with agrarian reform in the 1960s, which they argue gave the Mapuche the idea that land occupations were acceptable). The erasure of past conflict leads many to blame the current conflicts on outsiders. When asked precisely which outsiders are responsible, they mention liberation theologians who planted seeds of upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s, Mapuche educated in exile and, especially, European NGOs with deep pockets and guilty consciences. This is where the ‘global’ seems to come into play in the minds of local elites, and it is perceived as a threat. They see Mapuche empowerment as a result of their global connections, and they resent it. Their insistence on ‘sameness’ and the absence of conflict in the past must be understood, then, as an effort to maintain their local privilege in the face of a changing transnational scenario. In this sense, the trivialisation narratives are filtered through historical memory as well as contemporary socio-economic context.
Indeed, colono farmers and other local elites are confronted with a free market system that seems destined to marginalise them and make their local power irrelevant. As the region faces competition from foreign grain and dairy producers, the livelihoods of small and medium-scale farmers (many colonos fall in the second category) are threatened. While a sensible option for Mapuche and colono farmers might be to form alliances as a manner of protecting themselves from the impacts of neoliberal agricultural policies, the entrenched racial ideologies of the region seemingly make it impossible for most colonos to reconcile their interests with those of the Mapuche. In embracing narratives of trivialisation, they choose instead to identify with the national conservative elite and continue to exercise their power in those ways in which they are able; hence, multiculturalism is perceived as a threat. This demonstrates the mutually constituting character of racial ideologies and the economic system; together, they create and sustain the acute situation in the region today.
At other times, local elites did not contend that the Mapuche were the same or insignificant in number, but instead trivialised them by saying that they have no culture. When asked what he thought of the new intercultural policies, Simon Baum answered:
What culture? I wonder what culture?! They talk about culture. Culture for me implies certain basic understandings. Of what? Well, to start, the oldest things: a religious belief. The first peoples, one of the first things that came out was to suspect that there was something greater up there … [The Mapuche] practically didn't have religious beliefs. Now what [else] could they [use to defend] themselves?! Culture? Language? Now [these] Mapuche medicines are appearing. These are tricks to keep them going …Footnote 84
In contrast to the state, which has integrated aspects of Mapuche culture into intercultural health and education programmes and even sponsors annual Mapuche New Year celebrations, many local elites asserted that the Mapuche are inventing culture in order to claim a right to land. They are trying to recover language or inventing words, and celebrating ceremonies they didn't before, and all of this is seen as manipulative by local elites. This is an issue for them because if the Mapuche do not have a culture, if they are indeed the same as other Chileans, then how can they deserve rights as a ‘people’?
In a sense, sameness and difference operate simultaneously and reinforce one another in these trivialisation narratives. On the one hand, everybody is the ‘same’ and everybody gets along. Until recently (with the exception of agrarian reform), this could be believed because Mapuche reivindicaciones did not interfere with local elites' daily lives. But on the other hand, historically, the Mapuche were ‘different’ to the extent that they needed to be helped and civilised by the colonos. In both cases, this is reality as constructed by the local elites, and this, too, is the reality on which dominant understandings of the contemporary conflicts are built. Mapuche land claims, demands and activism are seen as illegitimate because they have no historical basis in the eyes of the dominant group. And in a sense, this is what makes the contemporary Mapuche movement so frightening – these Mapuche, so long treated as objects for Chilean and colono consumption (through their territory, their labour, etc.), are forcing themselves onto the social stage as subjects and demanding to be taken into account. Multicultural discourse is suspect, then, to the extent that it facilitates this behaviour by recognising the legitimate existence of the Mapuche. Local elites' refusal to ally with the Mapuche, their creation of self-defence brigades, their refusal to remember past conflict – all can be read as a way of resisting multiculturalism and clinging to enduring racial hierarchies.
There were a few local elites who contradicted these attitudes. This was especially true in areas of the Araucanía that had seen less conflict. For example, the left-leaning, middle-aged son of a well-known family disagreed with the notion that Mapuche and Chileans had always coexisted peacefully. Instead, he said, the Mapuche had often been taken advantage of by Chileans and colonos. As a local councilman, he saw multiculturalism as an opportunity, noting that if his town were to become known outside of the region, it would be because of the Mapuche. He thus embraced the new market-inflected multicultural discourses and advocated the development of ethno-tourism, observing that while he did not understand why, such prospects were appealing to European tourists.Footnote 85 Although such views were the exception, they do indicate the existence of an alternative reaction to neoliberal multiculturalism among local elites. By and large, however, the trivialisation narratives suggest a refusal among local elites to consent to the content of official multiculturalism. This rejection is rooted in enduring racial discourses as well as elites' desire to maintain their local privilege and power.
The assimilation narrative
Unlike the terrorist and trivialisation narratives, the third narrative speaks to the future of the Mapuche. Although many colonos are careful to note that those who burn fundos and occupy land are few in number, that most Mapuche are ‘good’, and that the land occupations and burnings probably initiated with outsiders, they suggest that the Mapuche need to change if they are to survive. They contend that the solution is to integrate. By this they mean that the Mapuche should get educated and be Chilean like everyone else. Nobody is stopping them from being Mapuche and not being poor, they say, and like the rightist politicians above, they claim that the big mistake is to assume that you need land in order to be Mapuche.
Like the narratives of trivialisation, the elites' views on integration reflect their resistance to multiculturalism. While at first glance it might seem that advocating integration coheres well with state-driven multiculturalism, elites tend to favour assimilation over programmes designed to incorporate and value indigenous language, culture and participation (though it could be argued that the state model also has assimilationist effects). When asked in a magazine interview what policy changes were necessary, Augustín Figueroa suggested that it was necessary ‘to recycle an important part of the Mapuche population and incorporate it into the active and productive life of the country’.Footnote 86 He proposed doing so through education, and added, ‘As far as the persons who aren't recyclable, we have to think about some form of subsistence subsidy, so the problem doesn't become so acute’. For Figueroa, Mapuche land claims are easy to dismiss, and the solution to the ‘Mapuche problem’ lies in education and ultimately integration. Figueroa's notion that Mapuche should be ‘recycled’ is offensive to many Mapuche and their advocates. Recycling is something we do with objects, not people. It involves throwing those objects away and making them into something else. Figueroa is advocating throwing away the Mapuche and reshaping them into productive citizens who will help Chile maintain its position in the global economy. His choice of language reflects the extent to which the Mapuche continue to be viewed as objects, less than human, a problem to be solved, and disposable.
Others question whether the Mapuche can be habilitated at all. One colono, Jorge Luchsinger, explains why, in his view, returning land to the Mapuche is a worthless endeavour: ‘The Indian has never worked. The Mapuche is predatory, he lives from what nature supplies, he doesn't have intellectual capacity, he doesn't have will, he doesn't have economic means, he doesn't have income. He doesn't have anything.’Footnote 87 Luchsinger's idea is that if they don't work, they don't deserve the land they are reclaiming.
Carol Nagengast notes that ‘the discourse of work has historically been an effective instrument of state control, an instrument whereby certain sectors of society have been deprived of essential aspects of their humanity through the work of others’.Footnote 88 In fact, the concept of ‘work’ informs many elites' efforts to delegitimate Mapuche demands for land and other reparations. Perhaps the most repeated assertion in my interviews was that the Mapuche ‘dejan la tierra botada’ (‘leave the land messy and abandoned’), which was taken as proof that the land policy was a failure. Others, like Hernán Rohrer's mother, went further: ‘They destroy everything that is given to them’.Footnote 89 When I told an English missionary who has lived in a small town in the Araucanía (far from the high conflict areas) for several decades that I thought the encroachment of the timber companies and the fact that many Mapuche communities no longer had access to water was extremely unjust, her response was, ‘Yes, but you also have to change their laziness’.Footnote 90 Daniel Hauri argued that the Concertación's policies were what made the Mapuche lazy.Footnote 91 Martin Rahm, a local politician and lawyer, opposed affirmative action and the Indigenous Law because they only benefit leaders who ‘live off being leaders’ and are ‘super unjust precisely for the enterprising people, for the good Mapuche, for the hard-working Mapuches, and for the Mapuches who want to move forward, who are evidently the majority’.Footnote 92 Mapuche demands for land and special programmes are thereby construed as the antithesis not only of hard work, but also of looking to the future. A forward-looking Mapuche, in this vision, is one who becomes Chilean. In this way, elites reject the notion of a multicultural future.
When non-Mapuche farmers and elites interpret Mapuche claims as the product of laziness, revisionist inventions or leftist conspiracies, they are resisting a challenge to their views on the social order. Their narratives show that the discourses that shape political decision making as well as elites' remembrances and everyday relationships in the Chilean south today are deeply rooted in a history of economic and political depredation. That history differs in important ways from today's global economic situation, but the discourses about race and ethnicity shaped by that history actually facilitate the economic conditions that Mapuche communities are facing today. That is to say, elites' historically rooted racist discourses allow them to attribute the conditions in which Mapuche communities find themselves to flaws in their nature and culture. In this way, elites are able to avoid reckoning with the structural inequalities that have benefited them at the expense of the Mapuche.
Local elites' views are crucial to understanding the continuing subordination of the Mapuche in Chile. On the one hand, through their connections with regional and national politicians, local elites have contributed to shaping the punitive policies associated with neoliberal multiculturalism. On the other, it is the history of denying and minimising the Mapuche that allows this to happen without greater outcry. Whereas they directly support the terrorist construction, local elites' narratives of trivialisation and assimilation represent their rejection of multicultural values. Multicultural programmes and policies represent a break with the past erasure of indigenous peoples in Chile, and it is this that local elites are reacting against. This rejection may not affect the content of official multiculturalism, but it does indicate the elites' refusal to consent to it on the ground. To engender the subjectivities necessary for the success of the neoliberal project, state-driven multiculturalism requires both punitive policies that sanction the terrorist and multicultural ones that reward the indio permitido. Through their refusal to consent to recognition and their active construction of the Mapuche as terrorists, local elites call into question the potential success of the neoliberal multicultural project, and thereby contribute to the shape it takes in Chile.
Implications for Imagining the Multicultural Nation
My findings suggest that in order to understand neoliberal multiculturalism, we must examine how it is constructed, and this may vary depending on the particular national context. They also suggest, however, that it is not enough to look at macro-level social processes alone. Examining the perspectives of local actors demonstrates that the transition to a neoliberal multicultural nation is multifaceted and, sometimes, contested. It also shows that the form neoliberal multiculturalism takes is a product of a particular history in a particular place. Local interactions and attitudes are shaped by national and transnational processes and discourses; at the same time, the way in which neoliberal multiculturalism plays out is, in part, a product of local histories, attitudes and relationships. Understanding neoliberal multiculturalism depends on examining the transnational, the national and the local, and discerning how social forces at each of those levels interact with, reinforce and depart from one another.Footnote 93
It is not only the state that participates in the process of subject formation; other social forces, including the media and local elites, play their part as well. A significant factor in constructing the Mapuche as terrorists is the construction of the Chilean ‘self’ as victim. Constructing the Mapuche as terrorists lets the state, local elites and timber company owners ignore past and present racism and elide the fact that they may be in unjust possession of Mapuche land. Constructing the Mapuche as terrorists also permits the state and elites to avoid addressing what many believe are legitimate claims to the preservation or recuperation of Mapuche territory, biodiversity and worldview. An issue that merits national discussion and a political solution is instead criminalised. Defining the Mapuche as either authorised or terrorist provides the ideological justification for neoliberal development goals. At the local level, contradictory narratives justify the elites' efforts to hold on to their social and economic dominance in the region and allow them to avoid contemplating the legitimacy of Mapuche claims, reflecting a lack of consent for the multicultural project.
In his discussion of the possibility for indigenous reparations in Australia, Cash notes the need for psychological change as well as ‘a transformation in the social imaginaries, or the ideologies, that give a particular form to and thereby support specific social identities – be that the national subject or the reconciling subject’.Footnote 94 In the case of Chile, then, transformation needs to happen at the level of the discourse and practices that determine Chilean nationhood in the contemporary world – overtly shaped by neoliberal multiculturalism – as well as at the level of local social relationships – still conditioned by the legacy of settler colonialism. I hope to have demonstrated that both of these levels are problematic. Neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile is shaped by transnational and national priorities in the context of the global economy, as well as by socio-historical processes particular to Chile. It is a form of governmentality, and plays out in the daily experiences of people at the local level. Thus far, neoliberal multiculturalism has done little to challenge dominant racial hierarchies in the Chilean south, and indeed, multicultural reforms have not been directly aimed at transforming the subjectivities of local elites. This should hardly be surprising, given that the rationale behind neoliberal multiculturalism is less about changing racial hierarchies than it is about creating self-governing indigenous subjects that will not challenge the political-economic goals of the state. And yet, the lack of focus on local elites makes it difficult to generate consent for multiculturalism among them, just as the lack of official response to Mapuche claims for self-determination and territory makes achieving any sort of reconciliation or reparations extremely unlikely. Local elites resist multicultural discourses – often virulently – based on their own memories and understandings of social relationships in the region. They do so in order to maintain their position at the top of the local hierarchy, a position that is threatened by neoliberal globalisation as well as changing discourses about race and ethnicity. Their discourses and memories contribute to the distinct form that neoliberal multiculturalism takes in Chile. The case of the Araucanía demonstrates that persistent ‘cultural disagreements’, with important material consequences, continue to limit possibilities for social change.Footnote 95 Whether the new policies initiated by Bachelet or the global economic crisis will lead to a change in this scenario is yet to be seen.
