Chile’s population rejecting a proposed constitution on September 4 will hit hard one group: Indigenous people, who are socially and economically disadvantaged, thanks to generations of land dispossession and invisibility in Chile’s political landscape. Carole Concha Bell reports.
Between former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s terror laws being used to criminalize Mapuche elders and activists, the United States and the United Kingdom arming Chile’s security forces, and the failure of international agencies to treat the Mapuche conflict with urgency, the West appears complicit in the genocide of the Mapuche people.
A group representing Chilean exiles in Australia has written an open letter to Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne, expressing its dismay at revelations Australia may have collaborated with the United States in the events that led to the removal of democratically-elected Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende.
In a stunning election that was centuries in the making, a 58-year-old Mapuche academic named Elisa Loncón took the helm of a strategic political body in Chile.
Abortion campaigners in Chile have been heartened by the recent legalization of abortion in neighboring Argentina and are currently presenting a bill for the decriminalization of abortion. But with a pro-life government and Senate inherited from the Pinochet regime (1973-90) any amendments to the existing law will be hard won.
The coronavirus pandemic increases concern for Mapuche prisoners, as the Chilean state responds with militarization.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019
