Che Guevara passed through here in 1951, on his motorcycle “La Poderosa”. He crossed the Andes to Chile on the other shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi, at the beginning of the mythical journey through South America, and his conversion into the most beloved, and most feared, guerrilla in the world.
More than 70 years later, for the new Argentine vice president, Victoria Villarruel, and for Patricia Bullrich, security minister of the new libertarian-authoritarian government of Javier Milei, there is a new “internal enemy” in San Carlos de Bariloche: the groups of defense of the Mapuche indigenous people who claim historic land rights in southern Argentina.
Villarruel – closely linked to the most conservative sectors of the armed forces and the Catholic Church – usually describes indigenous people who occupy lands and claim their historical rights as “pseudo Mapuches” and terrorists. “One of the problems they face at the School are the usurpations of self-proclaimed indigenous groups,” she tweeted last Sunday, after visiting the Bariloche Military School. “(…) they usurp, subdivide and sell land that does not belong to them.”
But belonging and ownership of land in Patagonia – where 150,000 people define themselves as Mapuche – are thorny issues. Before the bloody military offensive at the end of the 19th century, known as the Desert Campaign, the Mapuche, Tehuelche and Ranqueles were the only inhabitants of this spectacular landscape of serrated peaks dotted with snow and wind-ruffled lakes.
In 1873, the Argentine government committed to “protect and protect the quiet and permanent residence” of the Mapuche south of the Neuquén River. It was one of countless broken agreements.
Now in Bariloche, colonized by ski resorts, golf courses, luxury hotels, country clubs and new luxury condominiums, any Mapuche presence is a nuisance.
A court order was needed for the Arelaquen Golf
In Villa Mascardi, 30 kilometers further south – an old Jesuit mission, now another tourist destination – the law came even later. A police-military operation authorized by Bullrich in 2017, when she was security minister of Mauricio Macri’s government, was used in depth against a demonstration in support of the occupation of a private plot in the Nahuel Huapi national park. The Mapuche Rafael Nahuel, originally from Bariloche, died from a shot to the back. Salvador Maldonado disappeared and his body appeared on the banks of the Neuquén River 90 days later, the same day as Nahuel’s murder.
In the trial, which ended last month in the neighboring province of Neuquén, of the five soldiers accused of killing Nahuel and firing more than 120 shots at the protesters, the judge ruled that they “exceeded the use of weapons.” But he denied that it was intentional homicide. Two other human rights activists were injured but their cases have not been investigated.
Villarruel’s visit “serves to warn Mapuche activists and guarantee the entire real estate business in the mountain range,” said Marcelo Cayumil, a human rights lawyer in Bariloche, who represents Rafael Nahuel’s family.
Milei repeatedly commits himself to defending private property in accordance with the philosophy of classical liberalism. This has fueled “a violent discourse against the Mapuche who occupy lands like Mascardi,” added Cayumil, in an interview held in the center of San Carlos de Bariloche. But “it is forgotten that our Constitution also defends community property.”
This concept of social and collective property – key for indigenous peoples – does not fit into the ultra-liberal ideology of the new president. Nor in the conservative ideology of Villarruel, who, before returning to Buenos Aires, visited Mauricio Macri, the former president and multi-millionaire businessman at his country club in Bariloche.
In the arid plains of Neuquén it is not tourism or country clubs that expel the Mapuche from their ancestral lands but oil. Since the discovery of the enormous value – up to 50,000 million euros – of the Vaca Muerta field, disputes have occurred between Mapuche villages and the state oil company YPF – already in the process of privatization, under orders from Milei.
Although the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs had ceded property rights to some indigenous communities in the oil zone, there will be no material here for a Martin Scorsese film about Indians enriched by black gold. Not at all. The Mapuche – who, in any case, oppose fracking in Vaca Muerta – will be the main losers in the bonanza.
The deaths of Maldonado and Nahuel – which sparked a wave of protests throughout Argentina in 2017 – are considered the result of a heavy-handed policy against Mapuche protests authorized by Bullrich itself.
Then a war was declared against the call to Mapuche Ancestral Resistance (RAM), described in an official report in 2017 as “a violent anti-nationalist movement” that commits “crimes against property, against public safety, against public order and against people”.
Villarruel – who has highlighted that “the vast majority of encroachments are on extremely productive lands” – blames “the RAM terrorists” for the forest fires last summer.
But for the defenders of the rights of the Mapuche in Bariloche, the “internal enemy” has been invented to justify the repression, they say. “They created a military command supposedly to eliminate it, but the RAM does not exist in Argentina; only in Chile,” he said. Rubén Marigo, another human rights lawyer, based in Bariloche.
There was a period of reconciliation and dialogue during the government of Alberto Fernández, when an agreement was reached that ceded some land to the Mapuches in exchange for the vacation of Villa Mascardi. But “now we expect a new phase of repression not only of the Mapuche but of other sectors as well,” Marigo said.
According to sources from the newspaper La Nación, Bullrich intends to strengthen the coordination of the police and the armed forces, as was done in the Macri Government before the murder of Nahuel and Maldonado. This is a “strategic plan in case the Mapuche conflict in the south escalates and there are attacks on the nation’s sovereignty.” This coincides with measures announced by the government to restrict the right to demonstrate.
In Bariloche, anxiety grows. “It is evident that they want to promote the presence of the armed forces to intervene in social conflicts, something that has never happened since the return of democracy in our country,” said Cayumil.
There are some signs that the new government may even want to escalate the conflict. Last week, Facundo Jones Huala, one of the Mapuche leaders, was extradited to Chile, where he will be tried for allegedly setting buildings on fire in the Chilean Araucanía. “One less terrorist,” Bullrich said of the extradition.
Milei often speaks of a liberal “golden age” at the end of the 19th century, when the meat industry turned Argentina into an export power. One of his heroes is the general and head of state Julio Argentino Roca who ruled between 1898-1904. In his first speech after assuming the presidency, Milei quoted Roca’s famous declaration: “The freedom of men and the aggrandizement of peoples” can only be achieved with “supreme efforts and painful sacrifices.”
But no historian would deny that the greatest sacrifice of Julio Roca’s glory years was that of the 20,000 Mapuche victims murdered in the military campaign or transported to the concentration camp set up on the island of San Martín. Others were exhibited in the Silver Museum, in Buenos Aires, like animals in a zoo. When they died they were skinned and their skeletons and skulls were put in display cases along with the scalps and ears.
The Desert Campaign served to empty the interior and south of indigenous people, and thus sell 42 million hectares at a bargain price to 1,800 landowners, mainly ranchers.
It is not surprising, then, that the Mapuche spokespersons have “a diametrically opposite view on General Roca and the generation of the eighties,” as explained last week by the cerquen (spokesperson) of the Coordinator of the Mapuche-Tehuelche Parliament. “In light of the first measures (by Milei), we are heading towards an even more complex situation than the one posed by Mauricio Macri’s government.”
The tension was already palpable during the Christmas holidays in San Carlos de Bariloche. The custom of placing a Christmas tree on top of the iconic statue of Argentino Roca in the central square has sparked protests from followers of Milei, Villarruel and Bullrich in the city.
