Pressured to expand its agricultural base and territory, between 1860 and 1890 the Chilean government conquered and annexed what the Spaniards had been unable to for roughly 300 years: Mapuche land, south of the Bio Bio River into the Strait of Magellan. In 1860, a French lawyer who became a staunch advocate for Mapuche independence, Orelie Antoine de Tounens, was named king of La Araucania and Patagonia, a kingdom that the Mapuche claimed for themselves so as to protect their territory and identity from Spanish influence. Chile, of course, would not allow so much of its territory to be lost without a fight.
In 1862, King Orelie Antoine I was apprehended by the Chileans. Without their king, the Mapuche stuck to their cause and fought a guerrilla-style war against the Chilean military. But the movement was weakened by its lack of a strong leader or organizational cohesion, and in 1883 the Pacification of Araucania came to an official end. The Mapuches lost the war, their bid for independence, and much of their autonomy but not their territory. That would come later.
In the late 19th century, Santiago sought to govern the conquered Mapuche lands through several laws and decrees. Later, in 1979, the Chilean state, under military dictator Augusto Pinochet, enacted the 2568 decree and ceased to identify the Mapuches as an independent ethnic group and began to grant individual pieces of land to Chilean settlers in the Mapuche regions of Bio Bio, Araucania and Los Lagos. The move unsurprisingly stirred historical resentment and reignited the long-dormant conflict between the Chilean government and Mapuche indigenous groups.
Things improved after the fall of the military dictatorship. In 1993, the government of President Patricio Aylwin enacted the Indigenous Law, which among other things recognized the Mapuche as an ethnic group, granted them the right to protect their ancestral lands and awarded them restitution for some of the territory they lost under Pinochet.
But then a new flashpoint emerged in 1995. In order to construct an energy plant at the banks of the Bio Bio River, engineers planned to flood ancient Mapuche burial grounds. In 1997, after years of worsening tension, the Mapuche conducted their first attack in years, burning an Arauco Corp. truck in Lumaco that was transporting wood from a disputed tract of land. The objective was clear: recover ancestral lands and establish an autonomous state, to be known as Wallampu.
Despite the attacks since, the movement does not pose an existential threat to the state. The Chilean government is proficient in combating violent social movements. The bigger challenge will be justifying to the Chilean people and to the international community its use of anti-terrorism laws against Mapuche groups when not all are violent. Still, the Mapuche conflict is likely only to intensify in the years to come.
