Photo courtesy of Cosecha Roja. All rights reserved. This article is being been published as part of the partnership between Cosecha Roja and democraciaAbierta. You can read the original article here.
Each winter, with the first frost, the shepherds of the Suyay Leufu Lof (the basic social organization of the Mapuche, Huilliche and Picunche peoples) of Los Molles, in Mendoza, descend from the mountain range, herding goats towards the fields in the plains. The community has inhabited these lands for many generations but they lack title deeds. A group of businessmen claim them as their own. In May this year, the Mapuche managed to stop a court-ordered eviction relying on the protection afforded by the Indigenous Territorial Emergency Law, which suspends eviction proceedings and establishes the territorial survey of more than 1.500 communities across Argentina. The period of validity of the Law expires on November 23, 2017. If it is not extended, many of these communities will be left unprotected and many could lose the lands where they have been living since ancient times.
Two weeks ago, the conflict of the Suyay Leufu Lof reached Buenos Aires television. That was 22 days after the “disappearance” of Santiago Maldonado in the midst of the repression by the Gendarmería of the Mapuche in Chubut. TV host Eduardo Feinmann interviewed businesswoman Rosita Aldao, who accused native families of forming an "armed organization". "RAM seizes land in Malargüe", said the graph on the screen (RAM is the acronym for Ancestral Mapuche Resistance, an alleged guerrilla group operating in Argentina and Chile), while Feinmann accused the Mapuche of being "terrorists" and "usurpers."
