uis Tralcal Quidel with his daughter. Cource: CiDSUR. All rights reserved
Last May 5, a local court in Temuco, Southern Chile, sentenced Luis Tralcal Quidel, José Tralcal Coche and José Peralino Huinca on charges of terrorism for setting fire to a large-estate house in 2013 - its owners, the Luchsinger-Mackay couple, who were in the premises at the time, died as a result. This was the second time the case was in the courts: in October 2017, the appeal court in Temuco had absolved eleven defendants of any crimes and dismissed the charges of terrorism.
The three men now sentenced to life imprisonment have already spent quite some time in jail as a result of both this and previous trials, most of them on charges of terrorism. Luis Tralcal, in particular, has been brought to court on nine occasions and even though he has been acquitted each time, he has spent several years in “preventive custody”. All three are community activists who have been leading local struggles for the restitution of Mapuche territory. They consider themselves defenders of land and water and they fight for the preservation of the Wallmapu (the ancestral Mapuche territory) from extractivism, predatory economics and grasping ways of life. Like many of their peñis (brothers and sisters) before them, they have been persecuted, harassed and intimidated by the country’s powers that be: the central government and its local branches, the judiciary, the police, and the mainstream media.
