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COURAGE TASTES OF BLOOD
The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001
By FLORENCIA E. MALLON Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3585-6
Chapter One
IN THE FOG BEFORE DAWN: DECEMBER 1970
On 20 December 1970, before first light, a small boat moved slowly against the current, up the Imperial River. Sitting in the fog that always seemed at its densest before dawn, with baskets full of food and a few young children, a small group of women, and the men who were rowing, silently pondered what they were about to do. Since September, when in the Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío they had formed a committee to seek restitution of their lands, they had been preparing for what was about to happen. The majority of their group, men from the Mapuche communities of Ailío and Pichingual, with a few allies from the fishing town of Nehuentúe and some workers from the nearby fundo (large estate) of the same name, had left earlier and were walking along the road that ran from west to east along the bank of the river, from Nehuentúe toward the city of Carahue. The two groups planned to rendezvous about five and a half miles outside of Carahue and then proceed to occupy Rucalán, a landed estate belonging to Juan Bautista Landarretche Mendoza and his wife, VioletaMaffei Herrera. Doña Marta Antinao, wife of Heriberto Ailío, vice president of the Ailío Committee, was in the boat along with her small son Martín. She remembered that an aunt of her husband, doña Rosa Ailío, and her mother, doña Juana Ríos, were in the boat with her. "We got there," doña Marta explained, "and we walked onto the property; there was a big barn, and that's where we stopped and we formed a group right there."
The majority of the occupiers clustered together a short distance from the door of the landowner's residence, while a smaller group made up of don Ricardo Mora Carrillo, president of the Ailío Committee, don Heriberto, and a comrade (compañero) from the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Movement of the revolutionary left, or MIR) known only as Aquiles or Miguel approached the door and knocked. A few moments later they heard a woman's voice, probably that of a servant, asking who was at the door and what they wanted. Don Ricardo told her to inform the landowner that he and his companions had just taken over the property. The group waited in silence while the servant took the message to her boss.
A quarter century later, the participants in the takeover still remembered that dark and foggy moment, steeped in fear and expectation, as a symbol of both the promise and the danger of that time. Chile had just experienced an election-one that proved to be historic-in which a left-dominated coalition of political parties, after garnering little more than a third of the popular vote, had managed to install a Socialist president. People were expecting a radicalization of the agrarian reform instituted by the previous Christian Democratic government, and indeed on the very morning Rucalán was being occupied, the newly installed president, Salvador Allende Gossens, was en route to Temuco to preside over the closing ceremonies at a national Mapuche congress. Other land occupations had already taken place in the region, and the daily news was filled with the burst of mobilizations, almost the fever of agitation, that gripped the countryside. For the Mapuche and non-Mapuche peasants standing at the gates of Rucalán on that humid December morning, the pervading political climate had been a source of inspiration. One of the occupiers would comment a few weeks later that news about other land occupations had convinced them to move forward with their own plans.
At the same time, of course, the furor of mobilization had alerted and alarmed the landowning class. In the last months of Eduardo Frei Montalva's Christian Democratic government it was clear there was already a problem with land takeovers: by the time of the presidential election on 1 September thirteen landed estates in the province of Cautín had been at least partially occupied by peasants. The landowners, for their part, reacted by organizing to defend their properties; when the Popular Unity government took power there was already talk of hidden weapons on the area's landed estates.
This moment was also the culmination of a long process of social change and conflict in twentieth-century Chile. Beginning with the formation of the first workers' movement at the turn of the century and its alliance with emerging reformist and leftist political parties, the country had witnessed a series of attempts at social inclusion. Starting with the populist presidency of Arturo Alessandri in the 1920s, these attempts at social change, reform, and political opening toward the popular classes had generated moments of confrontation and repression. This first period of political effervescence ended in what has been called the "compromise state," a political compact that allowed for the legal electoral participation of reformist and leftist parties in the popular-front coalitions that, starting in 1938, would elect candidates to the presidency and the legislature. Although such a compact allowed for the partial incorporation of popular demands, the rural areas were in effect left out of the political agreements which privileged workers and popular urban sectors.
If the countryside had been left out of the compromise state, the Mapuche people had been even more marginalized. Starting in the 1920s, Mapuche organizations formed by the urban-educated sons of the Mapuche leaders who had negotiated "peace" with the Chilean state had begun to support an integrationist agenda. With regard to the land, many of these leaders were in favor of the division and privatization of Mapuche land-grant communities because they saw this arrangement as an attempt to keep the Mapuche separate from Chilean society and economy and thus to discriminate against them and prevent them from progressing. Thus Manuel Manquilef, the first Mapuche congressman, when elected in 1925, introduced a bill to divide indigenous lands. His efforts bore fruit in Law No. 4,169, known as the first Indigenous Lands Division Law, approved by Congress on 29 August 1927, and signed into law on 4 July 1928. The legislation's most important provisions were that any single member of a Mapuche community could request the division of its lands, and that before such division could take place the legal boundaries of the land grant needed to be confirmed according to the original land title (título de merced) issued by the Chilean government. As we shall see, the need to confirm the original boundaries of the land grant as part of the process of subdivision was what inspired the community of Ailío to present a division request in 1930, when what they really sought was the restitution of the lands usurped after the original members of the community had already received their título de merced.
At the same time, however, neither the legal division of Mapuche communities nor the revindication of Mapuche territory within the limits established by the Chilean state during the process of resettlement at the end of the nineteenth century, presented a viable solution to the increasing rural poverty the Mapuche people faced in the twentieth century. For this reason, some leaders began to consider the possibility of an alliance with the left that could confront the Mapuche land problem as part of the larger agrarian problem in Chilean society as a whole. The class alliance option, however, even as it opened the possibility of a coalition among "all the rural poor," closed the more specific option of ethnic restitution, that is, restitution to the Mapuche as a people. Not only during the earlier Popular Front period and the emergence of the trade union left (1920s to 1950s), but also in the more radical new left mobilizations of the 1960s, the emphasis on class exploitation and class alliance predominated. Even during the Popular Unity government, when for the first time the parties of the left dominated the coalition, agrarian policy reached out to peasants first and foremost as members of an exploited social class. This policy did not change even within the more radical left, that is, in the MIR and its peasant front, the Movimiento Campesino Revolucionario (Revolutionary peasant movement, or MCR), where the Mapuche were especially active and militant. The MIR's regional program of struggle recognized that the Mapuche peasantry had a distinctive history of exploitation because of their experience as a colonized people, but the regional committee concluded nevertheless that the class struggle unifying the so-called "Chilean" and Mapuche peasantries was a more "advanced" stage of struggle and thus a more desirable goal. The radical left of the 1960s, therefore, continued to subscribe to a "civilizing project" whose ultimate goal was to educate the Mapuche in the politics of class.
With all its limitations, the agrarian reform project initiated by the Christian Democrats and radicalized by the Popular Unity government was nevertheless the first instance in the twentieth century in which the poor Mapuche peasantry could envision a real possibility of getting access to land. Together with other poor peasants, they initiated a wave of revindication, mobilization, and land invasions that, in conjunction with the other popular mobilizations of the time, brought the Chilean state's model of gradualist change into crisis. In September 1970, when the presidential elections yielded a slim plurality for Allende, the dominant classes were already living in a state of constant tension, fearing that the stability of the society they had always known was about to fall apart. The events of the next two years would progressively deepen and intensify these fears.
In addition to the tensions in Chilean society as a whole, there was at that moment a significant difference of opinion within the Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío, one of the most important moving forces behind the takeover of Rucalán. A few days after the presidential election in 1970 a land committee had been formed in the community that included participants from several surrounding communities as well as laborers from nearby landed estates. Meeting at the house of don Martín Ailío Porma and his son Heriberto Ailío Pilquinao, they had first discussed recuperating Ailío's lost lands, 45 hectares out of their original grant of 130, that had been usurped by a local landowner. One of the first actions the group agreed on was running the fence on two medium-sized landowners who, over time, had ended up in possession of the community's original lands. But it quickly became apparent that such an action would not solve the problems of all the committee's members, since not all were part of Ailío and in any case the poverty of so many could not be relieved through the recuperation of only 45 hectares. Thus they began to consider a broader alternative, which almost by definition had to involve the takeover of a local estate.
Not all members of the community, however, agreed that a takeover was necessary. Although the majority was in agreement, several considered the strategy foreign to local practice, which had always involved struggle through the courts and staying within the law. These same individuals thought that a takeover would not turn out well because it was not an action taken "in a good way." Among those favoring direct action, on the other hand, there were strong criticisms of the legalistic strategies used up until then. People talked of the poverty suffered by the younger generations, of the half century of legalism that had yielded no results, of the need to find another strategy. The founders of the Ailío Committee also felt they derived support from the radicalization of class-based politics and from the MIR, the political party that best represented this radicalization. Several members of the committee had joined the MCR. The takeover of Rucalán was supported by the MIR and was carried out with the help of a mirista.
Even more important than a debate over legalism, therefore, was the conflict being lived in Nicolás Ailío at the end of 1970 over the proper strategy for Mapuche restitution. Since the end of the nineteenth century, when the Chilean army finally managed to defeat the Mapuche people, the Chilean state had handed over reduced quantities of land to Mapuche communities between the Bío-Bío and Toltén rivers. Under the highly appropriate name reducciones, these land-grant communities, registered under the name of their cacique (logko, or head, in the Mapuche language), had received legal title to these land grants that were called, as noted above, títulos de merced. Supposedly these documents gave legal protection to the indigenous individuals originally settling there and to their direct descendants, and even though the land was held in common it was distributed in individual usufruct to heads of household. In practice, however, local state institutions tended first of all to protect the rights of non-Mapuche property owners, and little was done to preserve the interests of indigenous communities. In such a context it is not surprising that, according to the historian José Bengoa, the largest usurpations from within the títulos de merced took place between 1900 and 1930. As happened in Ailío, these usurpations frequently occurred during the first decade after a community received its original title, and the first generation of indigenous settlers also was forced to fight for the restitution of lands within their grants that had been taken illegally by national and foreign colonists.
This first generation of Mapuche settlers in land-grant communities was forced to reorganize their internal system of authority and leadership. Before their military defeat, the Mapuche people were structured politically in a decentralized way, through a combination of lineage-based marriage alliances and a fairly complex and flexible relationship among territory, kinship, and identity. The reducciones fragmented and restructured the broader lineage and kin systems known as aillarewe and, in many cases, actually invented smaller and more isolated units. These communities, organized around a so-called original cacique who was supposed to have clear relations of kinship with all those who settled with him, were often partially created by bureaucrats during the very process of settlement. Whether composed of relatives or wandering war refugees or some combination of the two, these Mapuche communities managed to become new spaces of solidarity and cultural preservation. The original caciques listed on the títulos de merced became the logkos of their communities, and their sons and grandsons inherited the obligation to resolve internal conflicts while mediating between their communities and the state or larger society. Other original settlers and kin also had important roles to play, since all members of the community had more or less the same obligation. In addition, people labored to re-create the broader lineage and territorial linkages, the aillarewe that had existed before military defeat, by establishing connections with surrounding reducciones. The exchange of women through marriage between neighboring land-grant communities helped strengthen cultural, socioeconomic, and kinship ties.
In the community of Nicolás Ailío, the original settlers and their children and grandchildren took very seriously their obligation to look after the interests of their community. Don Domingo Millamán Ailío, head of one of the original families, presented the first usurpation complaint in Temuco in 1908, only five years after the título de merced had been granted. Twenty-two years later his son Andrés Ailío began the legal process of division of community lands in order to receive restitution of the same forty-five hectares previously usurped. Another Domingo Ailío, son of another settler family, attempted to reopen the same legal file in 1939. And don Martín Ailío Porma, son of the "late Nicolás" registered in the título de merced, inherited the mantle of leadership from his father, maintaining Mapuche rituals, seeking the restitution of community lands, and attempting to rescue his community from the grip of poverty. As part of this broader effort he joined his son Heriberto Ailío in the agricultural committees of the 1960s, seeking a new solution through political organization and agrarian reform. His children Eduardina, Heriberto, and Robustiano Ailío Pilquinao, grandchildren of the original cacique, became leaders of the third generation, while don Antonio Ailío Currín, son of don Andrés Ailío, kept alive the memories of the original struggles against usurpation, following in the footsteps of his father by insisting on the restitution of the original hectares.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from COURAGE TASTES OF BLOOD by FLORENCIA E. MALLON Copyright © 2005 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
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