The Undersecretary of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, addressed the seizure of two forest estates in the Carahue commune by the Arauco Malleco Coordinator (CAM) belonging to the so-called “territorial recovery process”; noting that the Executive will use all the legal tools at its disposal.
In the middle of his visit to Concepción, Monsalve indicated in emmol that “we understand the legitimate demand of the Mapuche people to recover lands that can be considered grant titles or ancestral lands, for that there are institutional channels (…) there are institutional ways to achieve that objective, therefore, usurpation is not the path that the government validates to resolve that lawsuit, and obviously it is going to use the legal tools it has at its disposal”.
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Along these lines, the undersecretary specified that the Government of President Gabriel Boric It does not have the protection of the law to arrest those responsible for this type of act, since the classification of the crime only implies fines as a sanction. However, he stated that the Carabineros were able to detain those involved in flagrante delicto, since they have 12 hours since the complaint was made, now it is up to the Public Ministry to order the eviction.
“The usurpations are regulated in the Penal Code, we must remember that the usurpations have a fine, those are the penalties regarding the usurpations. If the usurpation is without violence, the fine goes between 6 and 10UTM, and if the usurpation there is use of violence -which otherwise must be verified- is a fine of 11 to 20 UTM”, he explained.
Going deeper into the subject, Monsalve specified that in the current Penal Code, there is no “sanction of detention for the crime of usurpation. It is very important to say this regarding the actions that can finally be carried out. The action does not It will be the arrest and imprisonment of people, because that is not what is currently classified as a sanction in the Penal Code”.
Executive Tools
Faced with these impediments, the Undersecretary of State stated what legal tools are available against this specific fact. “The Government today has a tool to act that is to sue, the law establishes the possibility of acting against the Carabineros for flagrancy in the first 12 hours, not even government intervention is required for that, the complaint and flagrancy are required, that is, that the crime is in progress,” he said.
“After 12 noon it is up to the Public Ministry, which in that case has to order the eviction, and in that case the Ministry of the Interior concurs to collaborate with the decision of justice, through the police forces,” he added.
In addition, he maintained that the Senate is processing a bill that seeks to modify the penalties for this type of crime. “Today usurpation constitutes a crime, but with an extraordinarily low penalty and we are not interested in usurpation being the way to resolve conflicts, neither in the Araucanía Region, nor in any other place in Chile. Therefore, The Government’s position is that we are against usurpations,” he concluded.
