Defending Territory, Demanding Participation Mapuche Struggles in Chile

by Diane Haughney

The center-left coalition known as the Concertacin used a multifaceted strategy to establish the terms of democracy and participation. Its legal reforms created a set of channels for citizen input but reserved decision-making power for the top level of the executive branch. The Concertacin government openly supported major development projects, characterizing them as necessary for national security and development, and along with corporate interests used neoliberalism as a political philosophy for defining modernity and as a legal framework for the expression of interests and rights. The current rightist administration continues to defend growth at the expense of indigenous rights. Mapuche communities find their collective interests shunted aside and recalibrated as sets of individual interests fewer and of less political significance than those of the nation as a whole. Legal reform has become an authoritarianization of law and policy making within a democratic framework. La coalicin centro-izquierda conocida como la Concertacin us una estrategia polifactica para establecer los trminos de la democracia y participacin. Su reforma jurdica elabor una gama de canales para la participacin ciudadana, pero reserv para la cpula mas alta de la rama ejecutiva el poder de la toma de decisiones. El gobierno de la Concertacin apoyoba abiertamente grandes proyectos de desarrollo, caracterizando a estos como necesarios para la seguridad nacional y el desarrollo, y, junto con los intereses de las grandes empresas, us el neoliberalismo como filosofa poltica para definir la modernidad y como marco jurdico para expresar intereses y derechos. La actual administracin derechista sigue defendiendo al crecimiento por encima de los derechos indgenas. Encuentran las comunidades Mapuche que sus intereses colectivos se ponen al lado en una nueva calca que hace de ellos conjuntos de intereses individuos, achicados y con menos significado poltico que los de la nacin en su total. La reforma jurdica se ha vuelto una autoritarizacin de la ley y la adopcin de normas dentro de un marco democrtico. Keywords: Chile, Democracy, Mapuche, Environment, Participation, Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism

Observers heralded the return to democratically elected government in Chile in 1990 as a triumph of civility and democracy over the violence of the military dictatorship. The center-left coalition known as the Concertacin promised growth with equityreducing inequality while supporting
Diane Haughney, a political scientist, received a Fulbright grant for dissertation research and lived in Chile from 1992 to 2000. She is the author of Neoliberal Economics, Demographic Transition, and Mapuche Demands for Rights in Chile (2006). She thanks the reviewers of Latin American Perspectives for their assistance in improving this article.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 185, Vol. 39 No. 4, July 2012 201-217 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X12441515 2012 Latin American Perspectives

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market-led, globally integrated growth. It also declared the participation of citizens a goal and central characteristic of its policy making. It aimed to bring poor and marginalized sectors of the population into the globalized economy and to promote the integration of indigenous peoples into the global economy without any loss of their cultural identity. The economic policies of the centerleft government did not differ markedly from those favored by the right. The parties of the Concertacin had come to accept the dominant role of the private sector in production and the distribution of wealth (Moulin, 1997; Roberts, 1998). Party elites considered indigenous peoples primarily as a marginal sector of the Chilean nation with distinctive cultural traditions, not as separate, distinct peoples with collective rights. Similarly, they viewed poor nonindigenous Chilean communities as needing special programs to make them successful microentrepreneurs in the global economy. The most numerous of Chiles indigenous peoples are the Mapuche, who represent 10 percent or 6 percent of the countrys inhabitants according to government censuses of 1992 and 2002 respectively.1 The Spanish conquistadors failed to conquer the Mapuche, and the crown recognized territorial autonomy for the Mapuche between the Bo-Bo and Toltn Rivers in south-central Chile, approximately 500 kilometers from Santiago. Not until 1883 did the army of the new Republic of Chile subdue the Mapuche, and over the course of the next 30 years the Chilean state relegated them to reducciones (reservations) under common title. From early in the twentieth century, Mapuche demanded the recognition of lands traditionally used but excluded from the reservations even as neighboring landowners took many reservation lands through violence and fraud. Mapuche mobilization recovered some of these reservation lands during the era of agrarian reform (1960s1973), but the Pinochet dictatorship returned those lands to their former Chilean owners and in 1978 decreed the subdivision of Mapuche communities into individual plots free to be sold in 20 years. Mapuche organizations reemerged to fight the decree, but ultimately nearly all communities were subdivided. The Concertacin made the protection of indigenous lands and respect for indigenous cultures part of the political reform agenda but rejected the new demands for collective rights to territory or political autonomy raised by some Mapuche organizations. The cases discussed below point to the deficiencies of the Concertacins reforms in indigenous and environmental legislation and the lack of citizen influence in the determination of government policies and priorities with respect to development. Through four administrations between 1990 and 2010, the Concertacin consistently supported major industrial and infrastructure projects over the objections of local communities and indigenous peoples. The current right-wing government continues to define development according to the interests of transnational corporations. Mapuche groups responded by demanding the right to define development priorities and mounting efforts to block specific projects that would disrupt their social relations and cultural practices by removing communities from ancestral lands used for subsistence and rituals and degrading or eliminating native plant species used in traditional ceremonies. The Concertacin enacted new laws with regard to indigenous peoples and the environment, but these laws failed to incorporate the demands of indigenous organizations and narrowed the scope of citizen oversight of

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major development projects. Local communities found that the new legislation did not provide space for meaningful influence on policy decisions. Instead it created a framework for nominal participation that allowed political elites and corporate interests to set policy priorities. Mapuche organizations seeking an effective voice on major industrial projects that would impact their communities invoked Convention 169 of the International Labor Organiza tion (ILO), which requires the free prior informed consent of indigenous peoples to projects on their traditional lands. The terms of the debate reveal that democratization does not become consolidated or end with the establishment of stable political institutions but is a process of state formationof struggle over government priorities, normative claims, and the scope of citizen power. The Concertacin used a multifaceted strategy to establish the terms of democracy and participation. First, its legal reforms created a set of channels for citizen input but reserved decision-making power for the top level of the executive branch. Within this conception of citizen participation, the 1993 law on indigenous peoples recognized indigenous communities, associations, and individuals but not peoples and therefore not their collective rights. It also created a national development agency, the Corporacin Nacional de Desarrollo Indgena (CONADI), with the mandate to protect indigenous lands. The 1994 environmental law (revised in 2010) allowed for citizen comment on proposed projects, but final decisions were made at the cabinet level by ministers who answered to the president. Second, the Concertacin government openly supported major projects on indigenous lands. Both Presidents Frei and Lagos characterized the Bo-Bo River hydroelectric projects as necessary for national security and development. Third, the government criminalized actions and demands for collective rights to territory and autonomy as threats to the integrity and security of the state. While using police and the courts against the more militant Mapuche organizations that called for collective political and territorial rights, the Concertacin also displayed an appreciation of cultural and ethnic diversity as long as that diversity did not challenge the traditional notions of nation, the unitary state, and corporate interests. This combination of sensitivity to cultural diversity and adherence to neoliberal policies that denied collective political and territorial rights has been labeled neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale, 2002; Haughney, 2008; 2011; Richards, 2010). The contradictions of this situation became more apparent as large corporate projects threatened Mapuche communities (Haughney, 2006; 2007). THE CONTRADICTIONS OF NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM Government officials characterized the 1993 reform of indigenous policy as development with identity and diversity within one nation under intercultural programs in education and health care. Yet indigenous development programs focused on poverty alleviation rather than a comprehensive review of land claims or local self-government. When the Mapuche organization Consejo de Todas las Tierras (All Lands Council) engaged in a series of peaceful land occupations during 19911992, the

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Concertacin charged 144 activists under the Internal Security of the State Law. Though the state agency for indigenous development did provide jobs, a cabinet official expressly stated that it was intended to be an agency of public service . . . not an organ of participation (Haughney, 2006: 90). During the second Frei administration (19942000), conflicts between Mapuche communities and corporations over logging and hydroelectric projects led to dramatic protests and harsh police repression. The slogan of the Frei administration was Law and Order, and national security was equated with the protection of the interests of large corporations. Mapuche organizations responded with peaceful mass protests, nonviolent land occupations, and continued claims to territorial rights and autonomy. The burning of three logging trucks in 1997 marked a new level of violence in police raids, aggressive surveillance of militant organizations, and efforts to imprison Mapuche activists. Mapuche organizations of varying political perspectives criticized the use of the Internal Security Law against activists as ignoring the injustice at the root of the conflict. Some hoped that the Lagos administration (20002006), as the first Concertacin government led by the moderate left, would herald a new receptiveness toward Mapuche demands, but the Lagos government instead targeted organizations that it considered subversive. Operation Patience specifically aimed at the Coordinadora Arauko-Malleko (Arauko-Malleko Coordinating CommitteeCAM), which engaged in occupations of lands long claimed by Mapuche communities and now often in the hands of large logging corporations. Major investment conglomerates with links to transnational capital dominate the logging sector, one of the countrys main sources of foreign exchange. The government used heavy force in searches and raids of Mapuche communitieshelicopters, busloads of Special Forces, and violent detentions, even of the elderly and young children. In 2003 an officer shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old Mapuche activist who was participating in a nonviolent occupation of a logging estate (Mella Seguel, 2007: 96100). The government invoked the Antiterrorist Law to detain Mapuche activists for extensive periods while the investigating judges gathered evidence and to pay secret witnesses. Lawyers and human rights groups pointed to the discriminatory use of the Antiterrorist Law, objecting that the burning of equipment, unoccupied buildings, and tree plantations did not constitute terrorist crimes. As a counterpart to the repression, the Lagos administration set up a presidential Commission for Historical Truth and a New Deal that recommended several political demands of Mapuche organizations: a constitutional amendment recognizing indigenous peoples (which had been withdrawn by the Concertacin because of congressional opposition in the early 1990s), ratification of Convention 169, which had languished in Congress for years, guaranteed indigenous representation in Congress, and a fund for reparations. The administration did not adopt any of these recommendations, although the proposal to amend the constitution to recognize indigenous peoples became a constant refrain in later presidential campaigns. Mapuche organizations objected to all these proposed amendments as not recognizing their collective rights as a people equal to but distinct from the Chilean people.

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President Michelle Bachelet (20062010), a Socialist who had been a victim of repression under the military dictatorship, entered office with a pledge to reform indigenous policy and initiated a National Debate in local and national meetings of indigenous organizations and government officials. Some Mapuche organizations presented their own proposals. The Coordinadora de Organizaciones Mapuche (Coordinating Committee of Mapuche OrganizationsCOM) called for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution in which political and territorial rights for the Mapuche would be guaranteed. In April 2007 Bachelet announced five areas of indigenous policy: participation, rights, the urban indigenous, indigenous women, and education. Specific proposals included a new law on indigenous participation, a constitutional amendment to recognize the multicultural nature of the Chilean nation, ratification of Convention 169, creation of marine reserves for indigenous peoples, special territories for the Rapa Nui of Easter Island and for the island of Juan Fernndez, recognition of indigenous organizations as grassroots organizations in municipal governance, creation of a womens department in the CONADI, the pursuit of funding from the Inter-American Development Bank for urban indigenous cultural and economic development, inclusion of indigenous languages in elementary schools in areas of high concentration of indigenous population, and respect for ethnic diversity as part of the elementary and secondary school curriculum. Many of these initiatives were laudable and welcome, but they fell short of Mapuche demands for recognition of collective territorial and political rights. Under the Bachelet administration, Chile did finally adopt two international norms. In 2007 it voted to approve the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in 2008 it ratified Convention 169. The UN Declaration is symbolic, but the ILO Convention requires states to adjust their laws to conform to its principles. The key principle is free and informed consent to major projects on traditional indigenous lands. This principle has only once been cited in a judicial decision, one favoring indigenous rights in a dispute over water rights with a mining corporation in northern Chile (Larran and Schaeffer, 2010). Its adoption did not halt the construction of a waste pipeline to Mehuin, the dam projects in the Rivers region, or the third hydroelectric project in the Upper Bo-Bo gorge and does not address the disputes over land with logging companies. While the Bachelet administration promised reforms, it continued to target militant Mapuche organizations. No effort was made to rein in police violence. Rather than establishing a new pattern of relations with Mapuche organizations, the government stigmatized their demands as threats to national security. In 2006 police fatally shot 71-year-old Juan Lorenzo Collihun Catril and wounded two of his sons in a dawn raid in connection with allegations of the theft of animals in the municipality of Nueva Imperial. Military courts cleared the officers of responsibility. In 2008 police shot and killed 20-year-old Matas Catrileo Quezada, who was participating in the peaceful occupation of the Santa Margarita estate of Jorge Luchsinger in the municipality of Vilcn. The officer was found only to have used excessive zeal. When his family appealed a suspended three-year sentence, the Supreme Court upheld the lower courts ruling and affirmed military jurisdiction in cases of police

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violence in controlling social protests. In 2009 a Special Forces officer shot and killed 17-year-old Jaime Mendoza Collo while he was fleeing with others who had peacefully occupied the San Sebastin estate in the municipality of Ercilla (Cayuqueo, 2009). The officer was not punished. In the context of the repression, jailed activists began hunger strikes, demanding due process, the end of the use of the Antiterrorist Law, and recognition of their status as political prisoners. The first hunger strikes took place in 2003 and 2004 without much notice, but the strike during the first months of the Bachelet government in 2006 attracted wide attention. Demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, and Internet publicity brought national and international support for the strikers. Bachelet rejected their claim to be political prisoners, and efforts by leftists in Congress to end the strict terms of imprisonment and the use of the Antiterrorist Law against Mapuche protesters failed, lacking the support of the Christian Democrats and the right. Another hunger strike in 2007 was maintained for months and won more lenient conditions of confinement. Human rights organizations brought charges of lack of due process to the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2005, and when the commission found no change in the policy of the Chilean government it sent the case to the OASs Court of Human Rights in 2011. The Concertacins indigenous policy brought a new acknowledgment of indigenous cultures as part of a diverse national heritage and created a set of institutions and programs aimed at alleviating indigenous poverty. Nevertheless, it remained opposed to changes in the structure of the state and in neoliberal rights regarding natural resources and property. It rejected Mapuche demands for collective rights to territory and recognition as a people. In 2010 Chile inaugurated its first right-wing government since the military dictatorship. The government of President Sebastin Piera continues to combine repression with efforts to incorporate indigenous communities into the globalized neoliberal economy. Under his administration, domestic laws and regulations must be accommodated to Convention 169. Mapuche organizations fear that the administration will create a legal framework for consultation of indigenous peoples that allows them to participate nominally but not to block major development projects on their lands. Two cases indicate that the Piera administration will continue to persecute organizations demanding territorial rights. The Caete case involved the violent removal of Mapuche from an estate they had occupied. Thirty-four Mapuche were charged under the Antiterrorist law with assault on a government official and illegal occupation. The accused claimed that the assault charges were a setup and began what became an 87-day hunger strike for an end to the use of the Antiterrorist Law and a fair trial. The strike mobilized wide support and succeeded in having the government withdraw the charge of terrorism but not the evidence obtained under the Antiterrorist Law. Four prominent members of the CAM received sentences of 20 and 25 years. In early 2012 a forest fire on a logging estate in the municipality of Carahue resulted in the death of seven firefighters. The government immediately invoked the Antiterrorist Law and claimed that the CAM was responsible. The Ministry of the Interior began an investigation into

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possible links between Mapuche organizations and other recent fires on tree plantations. The CAM denied any involvement. The mayor of Carahue blamed careless local residents making charcoal, and local police later detained two Chileans. Mapuche organizations and the Federation of Forestry Workers criticized the lack of safety equipment for the subcontracted firefighters. In addition they pointed to the vulnerability to fires of monoculture tree plantations that suffer from insect pests in a hot, drought-plagued summer and the fact that when a pest-infested tree plantation burns, logging corporations can recoup their losses through insurance. ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATION AND INDIGENOUS INTERESTS The 1994 environmental law established a framework of norms and procedures for evaluating the social and environmental impacts of large-scale projects. These procedures allowed government agencies and local communities to inspect plans, make recommendations, and propose additional mitigation of impact and compensation. In actual cases of review, however, top ministers made the final decisions regarding project implementation and mitigation (see Latta and Cid in this issue). Technical advisers who recommended major modifications and local communities that opposed projects found that their participation and recommendations lacked the leverage to change top officials development priorities (Haughney, 2006). Government officials tended to portray local communities objections as those of a minority that should yield to the interests of the nation. In fact, some environmentalists found Article 8 of the 1980 constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to live in an environment free of contamination, more useful in litigation than the Concertacins environmental law. Under the law, corporations (or the government in the case of public works) were required to present studies of the impacts of proposed projects. Corporations endeavored to release as little information as possible about projects until the impact study was submitted to the environmental agency. They put pressure on individual landowners to accept relocation, often aggravating existing divisions within communities. These efforts displaced conflict from the corporation to the communities, and in many cases corporations succeeded in undermining claims that such projects posed a fundamental threat to local ways of life. When militant opponents of projects used civil disobedience, Concertacin officials responded with police repression, further dividing project opponents from local bases of support and solidarity by raising the costs of opposition. In the Rivers region of south-central Chile, transnational energy corporations have proposed several hydroelectric dam projects in the foothills of the Andes.2 The area is known for the spectacular beauty of its lakes, rivers, dense temperate rain forests, hot springs, snowy mountain peaks, and small farms and towns. Local communities rely on tourism and small-scale farming, with tourism a major supporter of local businesses during the summer months. The seven lakes area is an official Zone of Tourist Interest. The area also contains the Temperate Rain Forest of the Southern Andes Biosphere Reserve, recognized by UNESCO in 2007, and the conservation priority

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site Mocho-Choshuenco. The hydroelectric projects will fragment and in some places significantly alter native forest and riparian habitats, threatening endemic and endangered native species. In addition, the projects will impact a number of Mapuche communities. The population of the municipality of Panguipulli, location of most of the proposed projects, is 45 percent Mapuche. The Empresa Nacional de Electricidad S. A. (ENDESA), now controlled by the Italian energy corporation ENEL, owns the rights to 67 percent of the rivers with hydroelectric potential in Chile. It built the controversial Bo-Bo dams and, with the energy corporation Colbn, affiliated with the Grupo Matte, has proposed five major dams in Patagonia that have provoked widespread protest. Chiles booming mining sector fears shortages of energy, given the nationalization of natural gas companies in Bolivia and Argentinas occasional suspension of delivery of natural gas and oil to Chile. Corporate and government officials have often warned of the need to increase energy supplies to maintain economic growth. ENDESAs Neltume project repeats many of the problems of the Bo-Bo dams: insufficient attention to biodiversity loss and degradation, failure to consult all affected indigenous communities, and inadequate mitigation measures. THE NELTUME HYDROELECTRIC PROJECT The Neltume hydroelectric project will create a 490-megawatt (mw) plant to generate 1,885 gigawatts by capturing the waters of the Fui River and transporting them via an underground pipe for 10 kilometers to a subterranean hydroelectric facility by Lake Neltume. The plant will alternately raise and lower the volume of water flowing into the lake, seriously impacting native species of flora and fauna. The project will also flood indigenous lands and the site of an important religious ceremony (the Nguillatun). The Nguillatun, held over several days, usually to pray for a bountiful harvest but sometimes to seek the goodwill of the spirits in times of hardship, brings together several indigenous communities, reaffirming alliances and friendships. The ritual is associated with a specific geographic location and the specific deities linked to it. ENDESAs proposed relocation of the site ignores the meaning attached to a particular place. While the Mapuche communities have received cultural influences from Chilean schools and from members who live in urban areas and while the Christian churches have won converts, they still maintain their cultural traditions. ENDESA first submitted an impact study for the Neltume project in early 2010 but withdrew it after receiving many criticisms from government agencies and the public. It submitted a revised version in December 2010 under the newly amended environmental law. One important clause of the new law specified that state agencies should promote the adequate conservation, development, and strengthening of the identity, institutions, and social and cultural traditions of indigenous peoples, communities, and persons and must conform to the norms of international conventions that Chile has ratified. The impact study dealt, however, with only two of a number of Mapuche communities. It proposed to relocate 6 families identified as directly affected in the Juan Quintuman community to adjacent land

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(15 hectares for each family) and 13 families from the village of Puerto Fuy to new homes in town. As mitigation for impacts on the Mapuche communities and local villages, ENDESA promised funds for the improvement of a local rural medical clinic and rural schools in the villages of Puerto Fuy and Neltume, a new sports field, small scholarships for students, five years funding for cultural workshops in Mapuche communities, funds for community projects, and the relocation of the Nguillatun site (ENDESA, 2011). Disagreements over how to deal with the situation led to the division of the Juan Quintuman community, with opponents of the project forming a new community that the impact study does not mention. Local Mapuche residents already felt threats to their cultural traditions and livelihoods: Now the hills have no water; everything is dry . . . because all the spirits left, the lord of the water, the spirits of the hills, they all left (Irenia Punulaf, Inalafquen); In the winter, we are flooded by the rise of the Cuacua River, which overflows naturally with the rains, and if the dam project is approved we dont know what will become of us (Carlos Curianco, president of Antonio Curianco community in Reyehueico) (Mancilla and Rojas, 2011). The regional office of the CONADI criticized the impact study for mentioning only a loss of tranquility and giving no specifics on the projects impact on traditional economic, social, and cultural relations deeply rooted in specific localities. It also pointed out that the Nguillatun site was used by more than the two communities mentioned in the report and that many in these communities believed that the project would affect them negatively. The CONADI also faulted the study for giving no details on who was consulted and how the consultation was conducted or whether the communities would accept relocation of the Nguillatun site and for asserting without any further evidence or discussion that the changes in the indigenous communities ways of life would not be irreversible. The regional division of the Environmental Ministry called attention to the projects location in a national biodiversity site and a world biosphere reserve and pointed to incomplete data on the presence of critical species, lack of plans for monitoring impacts on flora and fauna, and vagueness concerning the restoration of vegetation and the relocation of faunal species. The regional government tourism agency objected to the impact on local businesses. The regional division of the Ministry of Energy and Mines pointed out the existence of a major geologic fault in the project area that was not adequately addressed in the study. Although the environmental review process allows public comments after the environmental impact study has been formally submitted, small, remote, and dispersed communities are at a disadvantage. Residents must often travel for several hours to a regional capital city to read the study, and thus local communities receive information about projects in a piecemeal fashion and find it difficult to participate in the comment phase of environmental review. Because of the large number of projects proposed for the area, communities tend to concern themselves with the specific projects affecting them. They feel an urgent need to respond to a particular project (indeed, the evaluation process dictates a case-by-case response); demanding an end to all of the projects remains a slogan rather than a negotiating position. The distances between homes and difficulties in transportation make coordination among local actors difficult. Most Mapuche in these remote communities do not have their own vehicles and must rely on rural buses, ride horseback, or walk.

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Nevertheless, since 2007 Mapuche communities and organizations have been constructing new organizations to bring together communities of the area and have worked with environmentalists and other opponents of the dam projects. One Mapuche leader, Francisco Caquilpan, explained the goals of the organizational work in this way: Our struggle has two streams, the defense of our territory and the change of a system. The Mapuche struggle to reconstruct themselves as a people, as a national society. . . . We do not mean separatism. We are part of this territory, but we are conscious that we need to construct a just, fraternal, plurinational, multicultural society, a democratic society (Iiguez, 2008). Environmental organizations from the municipality of Panguipulli, the Mapuche umbrella organization Parlamento de Koz Koz, and the Fundacin Huilo Huilo, which is in the business of ecotourism, submitted criticisms of the impact study and presented their objections to the municipal government and to the regional environmental commission. Mapuche leaders convened assemblies of local indigenous communities to inform residents and staged demonstrations in the regional capital city of Valdivia and in the municipal capital of Panguipulli. Some Mapuche criticized ENDESAs and the governments evaluation process as not complying with the requirement of Convention 169 for the prior informed consent of representative institutions of indigenous peoples (Mancilla and Rojas, 2011). Community leaders bring a challenge to development defined by transnational corporations. The demonstrations and criticisms of the impact studies raise the issue of cultural and environmental values that are claimed by collectivities, not individuals. Nevertheless, the laws and processes for evaluating impacts conform to liberal notions of rights and fail to address the systemic nature of impacts, whether on human cultural communities or on ecosystems. The evaluation process does not mandate the consideration of territorial impacts or cumulative impacts, although the new law includes the concepts of sustainable development and strategic development. The Bo-Bo dams set a precedent for treating indigenous communities as composed of individual landholders rather than as collective communities. The energy corporations claim that their projects will benefit the country as a whole, hoping to use the legal framework for expropriation that ENDESA used in the Upper Bo-Bo to implement hydroelectric projects. Moreover, the corporations and the Piera administration claim that the opportunity for citizen comment in the impact-assessment process is sufficient to comply with Convention 169. This process has strict time limits, however, and lacks any arrangement to guarantee that indigenous communities are able to follow traditional methods of deliberation and decision making. MEHUIN VS. CELCO In the late 1990s, local organizations of Mapuche communities and small Chilean fishermen launched boat blockades to prevent impact studies of Maiquillahue Bay, near the fishing villages of Mehuin, Queule, and Mississippi, viewing the studies as first steps in a virtually automatic approval process. Mapuche coastal communities extract seafood and seaweed from the sea and participate in organizations of artisanal fishermen alongside their Chilean

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neighbors. Their protests against the waste-effluent pipeline proposed by the logging company Celulosa Arauco y Constitucin (CELCO) of the Angelini conglomerate emphasized the loss of livelihoods for both Chileans and Mapuche if the bay became contaminated. These protests persuaded CELCO to route the pipeline into the Cruces River, which feeds the wetlands of the Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary. The nature sanctuary has the highest level of protection under Chilean law and treaty-level protection under the Ramsar Convention because it is habitat for migrating birds.3 CELCOs plan violated these restrictions. The CELCO paper pulp plant began operation in 2004 in San Jos de Mariquina, near the city of Valdivia and the nature sanctuary. A few months after the plant opened, nearly all of the endangered black-necked swans that had flocked in thousands to the wetlands disappeared from the area. The disappearance of the swans, so emblematic of innocent victims, sparked mass demonstrations, new impact studies, and a temporary shutdown of the plant by court order. Although some Mapuche communities near the nature sanctuary were affected, the focus of the protests was the damage to the sanctuary and the need for stronger government institutions to protect the environment (see Seplveda and Villarroel in this issue). In response to the public outcry, the court ordered CELCO to suspend operations for a time and then allowed the plant to resume at 80 percent of capacity, increased to 100 percent by 2008. The government environmental agency, the Comisin Nacional del Medio Ambiente (CONAMA), ordered CELCO to search for a new pipeline route. CELCO chose to route the pipeline once again to Maquillahue Bay. As before, a coalition of Chilean and Mapuche organizations sought to block preliminary studies for the pipeline. This time, however, CELCO managed to divide organizations of local Chilean fishermen and Mapuche communities. In October 2007, some of the members of the fishermens organizations agreed to CELCOs promises of money in return for helping to gather data for the impact study (Aylwin, 2008). Pipeline opponents claimed that some of those who signed agreements with CELCO could not read what they had agreed to and that others who signed were not locals and did not work in Mehuin (Dirigentes mapuches, 2007). Boris Hualme, a Lafkenche and the leader of the Comit de Defensa del Mar (Committee for the Defense of the Sea), said that 70 percent of the local residents opposed the pipeline and charged CELCO with supporting vigilantes who threatened project opponents. Activists denounced attacks on their organizations buildings and physical threats and charged that unidentified individuals had fired upon them while they were trying to prevent studies in the bay area. They also criticized the government for not taking forceful action to ensure peace or investigating these disturbances. In 2008 the Bachelet administration passed a law establishing a framework for recognizing the traditional use of coastal areas by indigenous peoples. Law 20.249 reflected years of effort by Mapuche communities along the Pacific coast to gain recognition of their customary use of marine and coastal areas threatened by legislation allowing private interests to obtain concessions of marine resources and fishing rights. It created a process for recognizing customary use by indigenous communities, but this recognition did not

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supplant concessions already granted to (for example) commercial fishermen. Under the law, indigenous communities or associations had to prepare an administration plan for a specific area and a management plan for the marine resources to be exploited and could lose their rights if the resources were depleted. Once the CONADI and the Subsecretariat of Fishing had verified the existence of customary use and a lack of overlap with existing concessions and an intersectoral committee had approved the plans, the Subsecretariat of Fishing and the community would sign an accord. The new law did not, however, serve as a bulwark against the CELCO project. Indeed, the administration took a bystander position with respect to objections and protests of the local communities while pushing ministries to approve the project. The Senates Environmental Commission did pay a visit to the community to investigate reports of violence, but no such visit occurred to investigate locals concerns about water quality and loss of livelihoods in small-scale fishing and tourism. In any case, the Senate commission lacked the legal authority to block approval of the pipeline route or any other project. In February 2010 the Rivers division of the national environmental commission approved the pipeline into Mehuin. The Araucana regional council objected to the approval on the basis that the project affected the adjacent Araucana region as well, but this was the first time that it had voiced an opinion and the comment period had long since ended. Local opponents of the pipeline announced that they would submit a complaint to the Human Rights Commission of the OAS. The problems in Mehuin speak to the fragility of grassroots organizations that oppose large-scale industrial projects. Strong, united opposition that bridged differences among local Chilean fishermen and Mapuche communities had had stunning success in blocking the pipeline for the San Jos pulp plant in the 1990s, but the protests did not halt the construction of the plant. Their tactic of preventing impact studies of the bay led the corporation to route the pipeline to the nature sanctuary to avoid further delay. Later investigations revealed that CELCO had also saved expense by simply not implementing the tertiary treatment of wastes before dumping them into the Cruces River. While its blatant disregard for the environment and underestimation of the public response backfired, CELCO ultimately succeeded in getting approval for a pipeline to Mehuin. In the 1990s Mehuin had seemed to be the relatively rare case of a strong, locally organized, strategically astute grassroots movement. Current divisions among the local organizations, however, indicate that victories of grassroots organizations do not necessarily lead to the empowerment of local communities or to new levels of solidarity and unity. What may be more typical is exhaustion and the weakening of internal bonds due to the tremendous strains of such conflicts. Rather than strengthening local communities, long, tense struggles may leave them wounded. The mass protests over the contamination of the nature sanctuary spurred action to revise the environmental law but did not succeed in changing the states support for corporate interests over the interests of local communities and indigenous peoples in development conflicts. This is not to say that actors remained isolated from each other and unconcerned about the conflicts not in their backyard. Indeed, web sites show alliances among organizations of

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fishermen, environmentalists, Mapuche, human rights organizations, and other organizations of local, regional, and national scope. Nevertheless, corporate influence did shape the struggle over the reform of environmental legislation. Membership in the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) required a revision of the environmental law but not an overhaul of the economic model. Social mobilization attracted the attention of political elites but could not lessen state support for corporate interests. Ultimately, political elites established the terms of the new environmental norms and institutions. As Latta and Cid and Seplveda and Villarroel argue in this issue, the 2010 modification of the 1994 environmental law still limited citizen participation and allowed corporate pressures to dominate the definition of development priorities. Although the law specified that the identity, customs, and traditions of indigenous peoples should be conserved and strengthened in accord with international norms, that requirement could be ignored or reinterpreted. Similarly, the creation of a Ministry of the Environment did not necessarily endow the ministry with the political leverage and budget to enforce protection of natural resources. Local populations livelihoods and indigenous peoples claims to territorial and cultural rights were subordinated to growth. Yet the sheer number of threats to indigenous communities and to the environment promoted coordination among actors and raised the level of demands. Representatives of organizations from Mapuche communities in the Andean area threatened by the hydroelectric projects and from the coast, as well as urban organizations, marched in Valdivia in September 2011, demanding that Convention 169 be respected, that CELCO be forced out of the region, that all the planned hydroelectric dams in the territory be stopped, that ancestral rights to water be returned, and that traditional authorities and Mapuche organizations be respected and warned that no more invasions of ceremonial spaces would be permitted (Pailln, 2011). In May 2011 massive protests in various cities throughout Chile against the approval of the proposed dams in Patagonia showed the high level of rejection of the industrialized model of growth. PRIVATE INTERESTS, SOCIAL CLAIMS, AND GOVERNMENT PRIORITIES Ideologically and institutionally, for the Concertacin government neoliberalism provided the legal and philosophical framework for the expression of interests and rights. Local Chilean and Mapuche communities found their collective interests shunted aside and recalibrated as sets of individual interests fewer and of less political significance than those of the nation as a whole. Political elites and corporate power benefited disproportionately from these projects and determined not only the outcome of specific struggles but also the very meaning of development and national policy priorities to achieve it. Through four administrations the Concertacins acceptance of multi cultural diversity fell short of Mapuche demands for recognition of collective rights. In the view of the Concertacin, the nation could only be the Chilean nation, and its indivisibility was understood as coterminous with the

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political communitythe state itself. The unitary character of the state was linked to the homogeneity of the nation. Most politicians of the left, center, and right considered indigenous peoples to suffer from economic marginality rather than from the loss of their political rights as peoples. Those who accepted multicultural diversity in Chilean society considered integration into the global economy the most effective way to reduce poverty. Another barrier to the recognition of collective rights rested upon the neoliberal concepts of rights. Although Kymlicka (1995) has argued that liberalism accepts the principle of minority rights to language and culture, neoliberalism places the individual (whether a person or a legal entity, such as a corporation) at the center of political and economic life. Neoliberal philosophy deems the individual to be the source of creativity, efficiency, and productivity and views collective or state ownership of property as prone to inefficiency and corruption. Neoliberalism considers exceptions to equal rights for individuals as at odds with the basic notion of equal justice for all. Advocates of neoliberalism argue that the retreat of the state to the position of night watchman ensures freedom from tyranny and arbitrary rule and promotes initiative and creativity. This formal equality, however, hides entrenched obstacles to the exercise of individual rights and ignores the claim that certain rights inhere in collectivities and can only be exercised collectively. The right to practice ones culture and language is enjoyed socially, not in isolation. Moreover, culture and language become relics without economic resources. The right of self-determination is most obviously collective, but other rights claims also have collective or communal foundations. Recognition of rights to water, biodiversity, and the integrity of ecosystems conflicts with the treatment of natural resources and geographic space as commodities that private property holders can defend against others. Neoliberalism recognizes the individuals right to legal ownership of natural resources, water, subsoil minerals, and coastal areas. This legal framework ignores the potential for problems caused by the commodification of elements of local ecosystems, which threatens the integrity of those ecosystems and the lifestyles and cultures of the communities that use them. The Chilean state legally holds ownership of subsoil minerals and water in the name of the nation, but it grants concessions to private actors to explore for, extract, and develop the productive potential of these resources. During the military regime, the dictatorship altered laws to promote private-sector exploitation of these resources and eliminated much of the states regulatory and supervisory role. It also removed the states legal power to set use priorities or to recognize noncommercial uses of water such as those that protect ecological or cultural values. The Concertacin maintained this neoliberal framework, and the current rightist government remains com mitted to neoliberalism as key to Chiles growth and modernization. The environmental law and recent changes in the water code do not alter this basic policy. This legal framework allows oligarchical economic interests to appropriate resources designated as national for private profit. It reduces the power of the state to promote the sharing of benefits derived from the exploitation of natural resources or to ensure their conservation. Concessions to exploit water

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or subsoil minerals create private property rights to resources that are integral parts of environmental systems. Aggressive extraction of natural resources depletes and degrades ecosystems, and current law does not defend them against this. Furthermore, most indigenous communities and small landowners do not hold rights to subsoil minerals, and many do not have water use rights, since land title gives ownership only to the surface area (Haughney, 2006; Toledo Llancaqueo, 1997; 2006). Although Convention 169 codifies the ownership of resources on and underneath the surface of indigenous peoples traditional lands, it has not been fully tested in Chilean courts, and courts may still rule in favor of corporations on the ground that projects benefit the nation as the Supreme Court did in the case of the Bo-Bo dams. The convention also requires consultation with indigenous peoples to gain free and informed consent when major projects impact traditional lands. The Piera administration is currently formulating this institutional process, but indigenous organizations object that the process does not comply with international norms regarding indigenous rights. These organizations fear the creation of a legal framework that allows restricted indigenous participation in order to permit approval of major projects and the subversion of the intent of Convention 169. CONCLUSION The Concertacins strategy facilitated the imposition of industrial and infrastructure projects over local interests. The social and environmental review process constrained the participation of affected communities and disregarded technical recommendations when they impacted corporate profits. In this way, the Concertacin simplified and reduced the evaluation of such projects to narrow, economistic criteria. The approval process did not take into account other values, local livelihoods, indigenous cultures and rights, or ecosystem integrity. Under the current rightist administration, corporate interests continue to determine development, claiming to bring benefits to the whole nation but consolidating oligopolistic control of resources and profits. Public debate over development strategy as a whole and the impacts of specific projects is displaced from the policy-making process despite formal inclusion. Indigenous rights claims are beyond the pale criminalized when raised as collective economic and political rights or domesticated as equivalent to respect for social diversity subordinated to the larger society. Legal reform has become an authoritarianization of law and policy making within a democratic framework. NOTES
1. According to the 2002 census, 33.5 percent of the Mapuche reside in the Araucana region, followed by 30.2 percent in the metropolitan region of Santiago and 16.5 percent in the Lakes region (which in 2002 encompassed also the current Rivers region). At the local level, many of the rural municipalities in the Araucana, Rivers, and Lakes regions and in the coastal province of Arauco and the highland area of the Bo-Bo are majority Mapuche. These rural municipalities

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have some of the highest levels of poverty in Chile. Mapuche of the coastal area are known as Lafkenche (People of the Sea), those of the mountains as Pewenche (People of the Pewen Tree), and those south of the Toltn River as Huilliche (People of the South). 2. These projects of large Chilean investment conglomerates associated with foreign capital include the hydroelectric projects of SN Power (Norwegian capital) through the corporation Trayenko: Reyehueico (34 mw), Pellaifa (108 mw), Liquie (118 mw), and Maqueo (400 mw) and ENDESAs projects of Neltume (400 mw) and Choshuenco (25 mw) in the Rivers region and El Portn (320 mw) and Steffen (365 mw) in the Lakes region. Additionally, Colbns hydroelectric project Central Angostura in the Upper Bo-Bo violates the agreement between the Lagos administration and Mapuche families that ended the conflict over the Ralco dam. Lawyers have submitted a complaint to the OAS. 3. The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and wise use of wetlands signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. Chile has nine wetlands designated as of international importance under the treaty. The Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary, Chiles first, was established on July 24, 1981; the other sites were designated after the Pinochet dictatorship. Worldwide, there are 1,739 sites and 158 parties to the treaty.

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