Santiago de Chile.- Hooded men burned the early hours of this Friday almost twenty vehicles on a farm in southern Chile, where a territorial conflict between the State, radical Mapuche groups and large foresters has existed for decades.
The Investigative Police (PID) reported that the sabotage occurred in the town of Los Lagos, located in the Los Ríos region, almost 850 kilometers south of Santiago.
«In the place, an indeterminate group of subjects enters the premises of the Tricam construction company, intimidating the guard, to later set fire to various machinery. An adjudicatory canvas was found in the place,” Felipe Godoy, PDI inspector, told the media.
The canvas contained the message «Away with arid and forest. Release Nelson Queupil Tranamil Cáceres and PPM. No to the bioceanic highway” and was signed by Liberación Nacional Mapuche (LNM), one of the radical groups operating in the area.
The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Chile, reclaim the lands they inhabited for centuries, before they were forcibly occupied by the Chilean state at the end of the 19th century in a process officially known as the “Pacification of La Araucanía”. and that now belong mostly to forestry companies of powerful economic groups.
In this context, incendiary attacks on machinery and properties and roadblocks take place almost daily, and shootings with fatalities also occur periodically.
The Chilean government decreed in May of last year the state of emergency in La Araucanía and other areas of southern Chile and Parliament has been extending it since then, but the opposition is calling for it to be extended to the Los Ríos region.
