Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

ARGENTINA: Benetton Wins, Mapuches Lose

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 1 2004 (IPS) - “Laws are for the ‘huincas’ (whites). For us, democracy has not yet arrived,” Mauro Millán, an indigenous leader from southern Argentina told IPS after a court ruling that reinstated to the Italian business group Benetton 300 hectares of land claimed by a Mapuche Indian family.

A judge in the southern province of Chubut issued a ruling Monday night against Atilio Curiñanco and Rosa Rúa Nahuelquir, a Mapuche couple that had occupied the land in 2002, living with their four children.

According to the decision, the Indian family must give up the land because it belongs to the Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino, owner of 970,000 hectares in the area and controlled by the Italian clothing giant Benetton.

The Mapuche family had presented a petition to the Colonisation Sovereignty Institute (IAC) of Chubut to settle on a public plot of land in the area that their ancestors had long inhabited. After six months of bureaucratic paperwork and no official response, they took over the land, ploughing and planting fields, repairing fences and raising cattle, in addition to building a modest house.

Curiñanco says his family presented a project in writing to the IAC and that the institute “gave its word” allowing them to settle the land in August 2002.

But two months later, a dozen police officers – armed and accompanied by dogs – showed up to kick the family off the land, located in the area known as Leleque. The officers said the land belonged to an estate of the Benetton group.

The company filed criminal charges against the family for resisting the eviction, and began another lawsuit to resolve the matter of who owned the land. The Curiñanco-Rúa Nahuelquirs rejected the Benetton group’s attempts to reach an out-of-court settlement.

Although they were acquitted of the criminal charges, they lost the case for continuing to live on the land.

Benetton spokesman Alberto Mazzucchelli said that “now the national and provincial governments will have to face the task of resolving the housing problem of the Mapuche community.”

“We are a company that primarily provides jobs,” he said.

The case initially had raised hopes among the Mapuches and turned into a test of recognition of indigenous rights as laid out in provincial law and in the constitution of this country of 37 million people, with an indigenous population of between 800,000 and two million, according to unofficial figures.

National legislation guarantees the Indians “possession and ownership of the lands that they have traditionally held” and assures that “these lands are inalienable.”

But justice authorities upheld the violent eviction of the Mapuche family in an operation that ended in their arrest and seizure of their plough and oxen.

And now they grant “definitive restitution” of the lands to Benetton, basing the decision on a property register dating back to 1896, when the Mapuches in southern Argentina fought off a military campaign known as “the conquest of the desert”.

In that offensive, thousands of Indians were killed by the army, which handed over the conquered lands to individuals of European descent.

In 1896, in the middle of the campaign, the 970,000 hectares in question – controlled by Benetton since 1991 – were “given as a gift” by the government to the Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino, a company of British origin.

The Mapuches say that grant should be investigated by the national Congress because that company itself was created at the same time the land was handed over.

“In the 19th century, Argentina opened the doors to foreign immigration, but they killed Indians like us, that is why the lands of Patagonia were given to the English with all of our communities inside it,” said indigenous leader Millán, representative of the Organisation of Mapuche-Tehuelche Communities.

He was referring to the disproportionate presence of landowners of British descent in southern Argentina, a region rich in sheep ranching, petroleum and natural gas.

Millán hoped for a ruling in favour of the Mapuches, which would have set a precedent for returning land to thousands of Indians who have been displaced to the bigger cities of the Patagonian region in search of work.

But that did not happen because “justice and the laws belong to the ‘huincas’,” he said.

Since before the Spaniards reached the Americas in the 15th century, the Mapuche (their name means “people of the Earth”) lived in the southern extreme of what is today Argentina and Chile

In Chile, there are currently around 1.5 million Mapuche, but in Argentina they number just 200,000, and 94 percent do not hold property titles to their land, according to a study conducted by the Catholic Church-based Equipo Nacional de Pastoral Aborigen, an indigenous pastoral commission.

“The Mapuche communities in Argentina were surrounded and pushed to live on the worst lands, the most arid and inhospitable. They were only allowed to occupy fiscal lands, and there has been no assistance to do the paperwork for definitive ownership as the provincial law calls for,” attorney Gustavo Macayo, representing the Curiñanco-Rúa Nahulequir family, told IPS.

In another case he was involved in, Macayo won a lawsuit against a magistrate for failure to uphold the law after he ordered the eviction of a Mapuche group. In those proceedings, Judge Eduardo Colabelli was removed from the bench for his frequent racist rulings and for completely ignoring the law.

While he was still serving as judge, Colabelli ordered the expulsion of the Curiñanco-Rúa Nahulequir family.

“Beyond this adverse outcome, we must follow up on the deeper issue. Still pending is an exhaustive study about the surrendering of lands that gave rise to a feudal system over nearly a fifth of Chubut province,” said Macayo, defender of the Mapuches and Tehuelches in several lawsuits related to land, discrimination and labour.

“Most Mapuche live in crowded conditions in the urban sections of the cities of Esquel, Comodoro Rivadavia and El Maitén, and are victims of constant evictions, which are often violent,” said the lawyer.

“Nonetheless, the state’s inaction is a given, it’s absolute indolence that leaves the field wide open for the big landowners to continue advancing,” he added.

The problem is more than a century old and will continue, because of the precarious legal status of the Indians with respect to their land, said indigenous leader Millán.

Our grandparents, he noted, were evicted from communal land, and our parents were employed at the estate of the Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino.

“Our people can only have access to fiscal lands without ownership titles. The titles are for the recent arrivals, whether they are Italians, Germans or Swiss, but we, who have inhabited these lands since the beginning of time, we don’t have that right,” he said.

Millán was indicted for protesting the evictions. In his opinion, the state only bothers to get involved when it is a matter of stripping the Indians of their rights, through police action and the courts.

“I always wonder, what will happen when a Mapuche family decides to exercise its right to return to its land and customs? It seems we don’t have that freedom. A lot is said about democracy and human rights, but for us, the Indians, that moment has yet to arrive,” he said.