The territory is in dispute. “To the entire Argentine population – the call shared days ago on social networks begins – that is fed up with the RAM MAPUCHE, this is a call to make HOMELAND, protect our Patagonia and future, it is time to face these few parasites that are devastating the area, it is time for the people to rise up and get these people out once and for all.”
Presented as a faction of the National Patriotic Legion, the drafters of the proclamation give clear instructions: “When the few of the RAM are blocking a street, causing disturbances, or just being seen on the street, in our WhatsApp group the alert will be given, we will coordinate a nearby point and they will be removed”. Action – hate – is the way to preserve privileges.
“This did not appear out of nowhere –explains Nelson Ávalos, of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH) Northwest Chubut–, there are similar precedents. If they get organized as they say, we don’t know what can happen; not only with the Mapuches, but also with the rest because they decide what is right and what is wrong”. He mentions the crime of Elías Garay and the serious injuries of Gonzalo Cabrera in the Mapuche community of Quenquentrew, in November 2021: “That night, after Elías’s murder, there was a protest march; A group of armed gauchos on horseback came out of a party. With whips and knives they broke up the demonstration, chasing the people throughout El Bolsón. It was early morning and there were some hiding in shops so they wouldn’t be attacked. They even tried to enter the hospital where Gonzalo was hospitalized. Among those gauchos, who were congratulated by the Mayor of El Bolsón, Bruno Pogliano, there were municipal employees and political leaders, all friends of Joe Lewis”.
While Ávalos asked the El Hoyo police station to investigate the origin of the “ultra-right message”, from the National Directorate for the Promotion and Strengthening of Access to Justice they filed a complaint in Comodoro Py. “These calls are based on racial hatred –justifies the regional coordinator of Patagonia, Eduardo Hualpa–, on discrimination and on challenging state authority. This call is not new. Ranchers from Neuquén have been proposing similar things for years; in Chaco there is an organization that presents itself as Fuerza Criolla, the same thing happens in Formosa or Salta. They do not remain in a proclamation, but they call for concrete actions”.
Hualpa also highlights the strong link of these groups with referents of the PRO. He names Eugenio Burzaco, the former Secretary of Security during the Mauricio Macri administration who wants to win the mayor of Bariloche: “It was not the message of some crazy people, this hatred of the Mapuche people comes from before, fogueado by referents of the right as Patricia Bullrich or Miguel Angel Picetto. It is a network of politicians, landowners, lawyers and the media that point to the same internal enemy.”
On Thursday, the chief prosecutor of Río Negro, Betiana Cendón, received Nahuel Céspedes, general secretary of the Union of Press Workers of Bariloche and the Andean Zone (SiTraPren) to listen to his rejection of the persecution of Oscar Moreno, a renowned journalist and member of the Mapuche Tehuelche people, “who has had to put up with the unfounded accusations and subsequent criminal complaint by the lawyer Ernesto Saavedra” (see box).
“We press workers are no strangers to the climate of violence that began with the Macri government and continues with the eviction in Villa Mascardi,” says Céspedes, adding: “There are many people asking for Roca to return, who wants to send the Mapuches to Chile or directly kill them. We are all Mapuche in Bariloche, but the invasion of the racist discourse made the people themselves not recognize themselves as such. It’s a horrible situation.”
