The Chilean Ministry of Justice is analyzing the feasibility of creating a prison compound exclusive for inmates members of Indigenous villages.
“There is a group of parliamentarians from both the opposition and the ruling party who have already formally proposed to us the possibility of a penitentiary establishment for people who are serving sentences and who are part of the Mapuche town. We are evaluating it,” he explained. Chilean Undersecretary of Justice Jaime Gajardoin statements to the newspaper Third.
It indicated that the Government is reviewing the costs of this measure “and if it is indeed possible within the framework established by ILO Convention 169 (International Labor Organization)”, referring to the specific rules for compliance with the Rights of indigenous peoples.
“There must be security for the inmates, their families and also for the gendarmes, and thus end the riots in the streets of the cities where the prisons are currently located,” he said.
This announcement comes months after the Chilean Minister of Justice, Marcela Rios, meet with deputies from different benches in the framework of prison benefits granted to indigenous community members, while discussing the administrative transfer of inmates who were on hunger strike in the angol prisonIn the south of Chile.
Last November, at least three trucks and seven forest machines were destroyed in an arson attack in Lautaroin the region of the araucaniascene of a territorial conflict that confronts indigenous communities, extractive companies and the Chilean State in the southern zone.
The action would have been claimed by the Arauco Malleco Coordinator (CAM), one of the most important radical organizations of the Mapuche movement that advocates for the “autonomy and territorial control” and promotes a political line of “national liberation”.
The events were recorded in the founded San Luisin the Coihueco sector next to the Galvarino route, where police officers arrived in armored vehicles to control the situation, according to local media reports.
In the area it would have been found a cam canvas alluding to the 25th anniversary of his political action, which began in Lumaco in December 1997 with a arson attack against forestry trucks.
In La Araucanía and other areas of southern Chile, there has been a territorial dispute between the State, some Mapuche communities and forestry companies that exploit lands considered ancestral by the indigenous people.
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 which are now mostly owned by forestry companies.
In this context, incendiary attacks on machinery and properties are frequent, and the conflict has cost the lives of a large number of Mapuche community members at the hands of State agents, also registering the death of police officers and hunger strikes by indigenous prisoners.
(With information from Europa Press and EFE)
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