A bike-riding course for women in Santiago. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

What does riding a bike have to do with women’s rights? According to the Chilean feminist group Macleta, which promotes cycling and a gender perspective on public transport, a bicycle is a powerful tool for social change.

Less than five percent of residents of the Chilean capital use bicycles for transportation (as opposed to recreation), and of that small minority, only 20 percent are women, according to a survey on urban transport in Greater Santiago published by the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, based on data from 2001 and 2006.

“In my house, riding a bicycle was something only for boys and men,” explained Magali Lagos, who has decided at the age of 46 to learn to ride a bicycle.

She first heard about the women’s bike-riding courses offered by Macleta two years ago, but was afraid of “making a fool of myself.” She finally worked up the nerve to give the classes a try just a few weeks ago.

“It’s hard to feel confident when you don’t know how, it’s pretty difficult,” she confessed to Tierramérica. She is not afraid of being on the street, but she is afraid of failing. She views it as a personal challenge, and if she succeeds, she plans to buy herself her first bicycle ever.

As well as serving as a means of transportation and recreation, “when you ride a bicycle, it’s like freedom itself,” declared Lagos.

It is this freedom that is the ultimate goal of Macleta, which is currently offering its seventh series of classes aimed at teaching women to conquer their fears and move around the city with a sense of ownership.

As Macleta coordinator Sofía López told Tierramérica, the group’s raison d’être is “the empowerment of women through bicycles.”

More than a hundred women have now taken part in Macleta’s courses, ranging in age from 18 to 68.

Some did not know how to ride a bicycle when they started the classes, either because they had never had one, or because they had suffered bad bike-related experiences in childhood.

Others “knew how to ride a bike, but didn’t dare to use it to get around because they were frightened of cars, or felt that they didn’t have the necessary skills,” explained López. “A lot of women want to ride a bike, but don’t think they can manage it.”

This is why one of the organisation’s areas of work is research. Using data and information about women, their fears and their motivations, Macleta is able to design teaching methodologies and strategies to successfully encourage them to overcome those fears.

“Learn to pedal” is the first level, for complete beginners, while “Get off the sidewalk” is aimed at women who know how to ride a bicycle but are too frightened to use a bicycle to get around the city.

“We believe that a bicycle, more than an end in itself, becomes a means,” said López. “A woman who starts to ride around on a bicycle is happier, she is more aware of the public space around her, she wants to occupy it, interact with other people… it promotes a kind of empowerment.”

Cycling is also a highly economical means of transportation, “and that also helps us contribute to greater justice, because on a bicycle we are all equal and we all move around the same way, and this ultimately benefits those who have less to invest in a means of transportation,” she stressed.

Transportation and its association with the severe air pollution in Santiago are among the main problems facing this city of seven million people.

The 2007 inauguration of the public-private Transantiago system spurred a wave of protests, because it failed to meet the real transportation needs of the city’s population or to tackle the problem of pollution, in addition to the high cost of fares, roughly 1.5 dollars.

Against this backdrop, bicycles offer enormous benefits for the city: they create no pollution, they help decrease traffic congestion, and they are silent. These advantages are recognised by the authorities.

In his year-end report last December, Transport and Telecommunications Minister Pedro Pablo Errázuriz announced plans to promote bicycle use, including the interconnection of bike lanes to create a 200-km network in Santiago and smaller networks in other cities, in order to “strengthen the use of this means of transportation that is non-polluting and accessible to everyone.”

But Macleta takes it a step further, insisting that public transportation policies must address the specific needs and demands of women, because women “are a distinct type of transportation user, like the elderly and children,” said López.

There are clear gender-related differences in mobility, she explained, noting that 40 percent of “trips” by women are made on foot, and more than 60 percent of the time they are moving from one location to another outside of the usual peak transportation hours.

This implies that much of the time, women “are not traveling for work-related purposes, but rather for reasons related to domestic tasks or their responsibilities as caregivers in the home,” she concluded.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

“It’s extremely serious, a full-blown environmental catastrophe,” environmentalist Sara Larrain told IPS, describing the impact of the fire that has been raging through the Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia since Dec. 27.

The flames, fanned by high winds, took hold in a remote, hard-to- reach area and ravaged 16,000 hectares of natural vegetation, which park authorities told IPS will take eight decades to grow back to its former state.

The zone is now on amber alert, following the forest fire red alert declared in late December by the interior ministry’s National Emergency Office (ONEMI) at the request of the state National Forestry Corporation (CONAF).

At least 200 workers are fighting the blaze in the affected area, including CONAF brigades, the armed forces and police. Volunteer “brigadistas” from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay have also joined the cooperative effort.

The Torres del Paine National Park, one of Chile’s major natural resources and a spectacular tourist attraction, is located over 3,000 km south of the capital city in the province of Última Esperanza in Magallanes region, between the massif of the Andes mountain range and the semi-arid Patagonian steppe.

Its total area is almost 200,000 hectares. It was declared a World Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1978.

The latest official report indicates that the fire has damaged native lenga or lenga beech (Nothofagus pumilio) and ñirre or Antarctic beech (Nothofagus antarctica) forests, matorral (shrubland) and steppe ecosystems. CONAF and tourist concession buildings have also suffered fire damage.

The blaze is thought to have been caused by the careless action of tourists; it started in the inaccessible Olguín mountains, close to the Grey glacier. From there the conflagration spread south along the banks of Lake Grey, to the Paine massif, where it split into two forks moving independently and erratically.

In some sectors the flames have been reactivated by winds, which can reach over 100 km per hour in that area, causing concerns about possible new wildfire outbreaks, and fears that the fire will not be completely extinguished until the southern hemisphere summer is over in late March.

In an interview with IPS, CONAF protected areas manager Eduardo Katz said that within the damaged area of over 16,000 hectares, there are zones of “total forest loss”.

“But there are considerable areas with partial forest loss, and we will have to see how the plant cover revives after the fire,” which will depend on the amount of available water, rainfall and temperatures, said Katz.

The first piece of good news was that it rained at least once a week in the second and third weeks of January.

“A lot of grass has sprouted up again with these latest rains, and this has helped to prevent erosion. It has also provided grazing for herbivores,” said Katz.

The Torres del Paine National Park contains close to 300 plant species, 126 bird species and more than 30 species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish, living in land habitats or in lakes, glaciers, the Pacific Ocean and rocks formed 150 million years ago.

“Fortunately, the two populations of large mammals in the park – guanacos (Lama guanicoe), a kind of camelid, and huemules (Hippocamelus bisulcus) or South Andean deer – do not live in the fire-ravaged zones but in adjacent areas,” and they were seen fleeing the holocaust and reaching safety, Katz said.

“We have found no evidence of any animals being killed in the fire,” he said.

A major concern is how long it will take for the damaged ecosystem to recover.

“Recovery in Patagonia, in Torres del Paine, is relatively slow,” the CONAF manager acknowledged.

After the last fire in the park, in 2005, recovery of grasslands took place quite quickly, so it is hoped on this occasion it may take less than a year.

But the outlook for the native forest destroyed in the present fire is much gloomier. For the lenga and ñirre trees “complete recovery could take at least 80 years,” Katz predicted.

He said natural recovery will be supported with an ecological replacement programme, planting seedlings and protecting them from herbivores and winds.

CONAF has some tools and strategies for forest fire prevention, action in emergencies and recovery, Katz said. But in his view, the best defence against such disasters is a strong commitment by visitors to care for and protect the park environment.

Katz emphasised that both park fires were started by human beings. “They were caused by careless behaviour, by people who failed to camp in the proper places or did not take precautions when making campfires. If they did things the right way, there should not have been any risks,” he said.

But Sara Larraín, a former presidential candidate and the head of Sustainable Chile Programme, an environmental NGO, criticised what she described as feeble state action to protect an area that is so important for the nation and for humankind.

“The state spends less than 1,000 pesos (two dollars) per hectare of protected reserve, for year-round protection and maintenance,” said Larraín. “The truth is there is neither the communicational capability nor the human resources to protect these areas.”

In Larraín’s view, “the forest fire in Torres del Paine shows we have learned nothing from the last fire,” which was also started by a tourist who broke fire regulations.

There have been no changes to the law or public policies since 2005 to prevent this kind of situation from recurring. According to Larraín, “this shows a total lack of political will by Chilean governments, of whatever political stripe, to protect our environmental heritage.”

“At present, we have no draft law and no progress… We have no legal framework to safeguard the protected areas,” Larraín complained. “The penalties under the native forest law date back to the 1930s, and they bear no correlation with the harm done.”

After the fire, rightwing President Sebastián Piñera announced the drafting of a new forest law to create new institutions and increase penalties for those responsible for starting fires, who under current legislation, passed in 1931, face no more than 61 days in prison.

A national fire protection plan may also be proposed, as well as a new institution to run it, and a special fund for action in emergencies.

But several environmental organisations are sceptical of Piñera’s announcements, especially while they remain mere words, without details of what the budget assignments will be.

So far the only suspect in the latest environmental disaster is an Israeli backpacker, Rotem Singer. He cannot leave the country for 90 days while legal proceedings last, and must report regularly to the public prosecutors’ office.

Chile's student protests are catching on throughout the region. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

By Pamela Sepulveda and - -
SANTIAGO, Nov 25 2011 (IPS)

In support of Chile’s ongoing student protests, and voicing their own demands, thousands of people took to the streets in more than a dozen cities in Latin America Thursday demanding quality public education.

Chile's student protests are catching on throughout the region. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

Some 10,000 protesters – according to the organisers – marched through the streets of Santiago once again demanding reforms of the educational system. And again, there was a crackdown by the anti-riot police, who arrested some 60 people.

The demonstrations in other cities in the region were peaceful, with the exception of an incident in Bogotá, Colombia where the police fired tear gas.

“Today is a very special day because we are marching throughout Latin America,” Esteban Miranda, president of the University of Chile law students centre, told IPS.

José Barrera, a civil engineering student at the Catholic University, said that what is happening in Chile “is an example of what education is like when it’s privatised, when it is no longer defended as a right of everyone.”

An education law enacted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet set off a process of decentralisation and privatisation that gave private schools free rein to pursue profit and use entrance exams to select their students.

The Chilean system is not just divided into paid private education and tuition-free public education, but is split into three: municipal schools run by local governments, which are publicly funded and free, state-subsidised private schools, and private schools that charge tuition.

Within the sphere of state-subsidised private education, students get free tuition at some schools, while at others families pay monthly fees, an arrangement known as “shared financing.”

The protest movement is calling for an end to the freedom of private schools receiving state subsidies to levy fees at will. Instead of the current system, under which administrators of these institutions rack up profits, the demonstrators want school fees to be invested in under-funded public schools.

They also want public primary and secondary schools to be directly managed by the Education Ministry, instead of by local governments, because the decentralisation accentuated the inequality in education quality between rich and poor districts.

“Countries that see the Chilean model as an example, and that are moving towards privatisation, have to realise how harmful this kind of system can be for education in general,” he argued.

The march in downtown Santiago was supported by organisations of students from secondary schools, technical, vocational and arts institutes, as well as trade unions and teachers.

Luis Garrido, a representative of the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Educación (SUTE) teachers union, said the protest was against the rightwing government of Sebastián Piñera’s insistence on continuing to apply the logic of the market to the educational system.

“Capitalism is profits, business, buying and selling, and that is not what educators are about,” said Garrido. He added that the movement in which teachers and students have come together is demanding a “social transformation.”

The participants in Thursday’s march say the student protests have become a broader social movement that will continue to fight for structural changes above and beyond the educational system, such as reforms to the free-market, neoliberal economic system inherited from the dictatorship.

“We want to tell the Chilean government that even though this has dragged on, we can continue, because we are still strong,” Alfredo Vielma, spokesman for the Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios assembly of secondary school students, told IPS.

“We want to change the system, we want to change this life for a life that is much more fair, and return to free education,” he said.

Bogged-down negotiations

After six months of conflict, including more than 40 marches in Santiago and other cities around Chile, there is no sign of an agreement with the Piñera administration. The government says the debate should be left to Congress, which is currently discussing the share of the national budget to be assigned to education next year.

Presidential spokesman Andrés Chadwick said the demonstrations were “absolutely unnecessary.”

“If this really is about education, the march is completely gratuitous; it is only causing problems for people,” said the minister, who blamed Congress for the failure to reach a solution.

But the students said the conflict is not limited to the debate on the education budget, which is merely discussing whether to offer fewer or more scholarships or student loans, without addressing the need for reforms.

“What they are doing in Congress is whitewashing the system by providing a lot of scholarships. But they aren’t responding to our demands,” said Miranda. “What we want is direct financing of the institutions; we want free quality public education for all.”

The university student leader said the debate on the budget may make some progress, but the problems underlying the conflict cannot be solved by the same politicians who have protected the system for decades.

“We don’t agree that this can be resolved in parliament; we want it to be resolved by consulting with the citizens, through a plebiscite or people’s assemblies,” he said.

“The problem is Chile’s institutions, and education is a symptom of that larger problem,” said Loreto Fernández, president of the social science student centre at the University of Chile.

She told IPS “we need a more democratic country, where the voices of society are really heard. It can’t just be the same old political class reaching decisions between four walls.”

* With additional reporting by Helda Martínez in Bogotá.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Aug 25 2011 (IPS)

As students and teachers continue their massive protests in the streets of Chile’s cities, one of the most extreme methods of demanding higher-quality, free public education is the hunger strike being undertaken by 28 youngsters at secondary schools across the country, four of whom have not taken food for nearly 40 days.

Hunger strikers at a secondary school in Buin, near Santiago. Credit: Fernando Fiedler/IPS

The government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera, under heavy pressure from the ongoing demonstrations, is attempting to pass on responsibility for solving the crisis to Congress. Its proposals have so far been characterised as insufficient by the teachers and students fighting for radical changes to the education system.

To cap Piñera’s problem, social grievances have expanded beyond the issue of education, and Thursday was the second, and last, day of a nationwide general strike called by the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the main union federation, to demand structural changes in the political and economic system, that was also joined by 80 other social organisations and opposition parties.

The protest by students and teachers has lasted over three months so far, making it the longest demonstration since 1990, which marked the end of a 17-year dictatorship that in its dying days imposed the present education structure, which subsequent democratic administrations have left unmodified.

Education Minister Felipe Bulnes was particularly critical of the hunger strike, saying it “does not solve any of our problems; in fact, it only complicates the situation.”

Francia Gárate, an 18-year-old in her final year of secondary school, joined the hunger strike over a week ago and told IPS they were fasting “so that they take us seriously.”

“I would ask (Piñera) to realise that we are not playing games; he should wake up, because what we are doing is not a game, and we are prepared to give our lives for education,” Gárate emphasised.

She said at the moment she does not even want to think about what she will do when she finishes secondary school. “I’m in my final year, and obviously I want to go on studying; but if we can’t afford it, what can I do? We only have enough to get by on,” said the young woman, who lives alone with her father, a labourer at a factory on the outskirts of Santiago who earns less than 400 dollars a month.

Studying at a university costs at least 450 dollars a month in Chile.

In the face of the government’s lack of response, “the hunger strike will not be abandoned,” and any harm to the health of the participants “is entirely President Piñera’s responsibility,” Miguel Rebolledo, a spokesman for the Liceo Experimental Artístico, a secondary school in Santiago that focuses on the arts, told IPS.

On Wednesday, six students called off their hunger strike, but 28 students at schools across the country are continuing the protest.

According to José Horacio Wood, head of ANIDE, a children’s rights foundation, “hunger strikes are an extraordinary and extreme form of protest,” and are particularly risky for children or adolescents, like the secondary student strikers.

Concerns arise from the health hazards and the risk of fatality associated with the protest. But one must ask why children under 18 find it necessary to exert pressure by means of a hunger strike, he said.

In Wood’s view, Chile’s democratic system is failing, and the evidence is “the attitude taken by a government that has shown no sign of taking the proposals of secondary and university students seriously.”

“The state is to blame for forcing us to take extreme measures to make our voices heard,” María José Zúñiga, spokeswoman for secondary school students at Liceo A-131, a high school in the municipality of Buin, adjacent to the nation’s capital, told IPS.

The 28 students who are still refusing food were recently joined by three parents or guardians, and 22 university students.

The authorities say students will be able to pass year-end exams and be promoted to the next school class, in spite of the classroom days that have been lost, and have come up with a plan called “Salvemos el año” (roughly, Let’s pass the year).

They met with student movement leaders for a careful review of the bills the government proposes to send to parliament.

“Points that still need clarification will be reviewed as many times as necessary, and we will make sure this happens, so that all their queries and doubts are aired,” Minister Bulnes said.

The minister explained that the initiatives include a constitutional reform that would guarantee the right to a quality education, as well as a bill to increase student grants for the poorest 40 percent of society.

A system of combined student grants and loans, to cover up to 60 percent of the cost of tuition; the reduction of interest rates on state-approved loans from 5.6 percent to two percent; and strict enforcement of the law prohibiting universities from making profits are also necessary, he said.

The government proposes creating a Superintendency of Higher Education to oversee that prohibition, as well as introducing a bill to end the administration of public primary and secondary schools by local municipal governments, one of the main criticisms levelled against the present system, Bulnes said.

“As far as the government is concerned, these proposals have always been on the table. What is lacking is for other sectors to stop being so intransigent,” the minister complained.

But in the view of leaders of the education movement, the measures proposed by the Chilean government do not go far enough, and they lack the required guarantees.

Camila Vallejo, the main spokeswoman for the Confederation of Chilean University Students, said there are “many gaps” in the government’s proposals. To offer more grants and greater coverage is not an adequate response to “our proposal, which advocates moving towards free education,” she said.

Zúñiga, the secondary student spokeswoman, enlarged: “More scholarships, more loans, are no use to us, because students will only take on a heavier burden of debt. What we are really asking for is quality public education that is free for everybody.”

For his part, the president of the national Teachers’ Association, Jaime Gajardo, said the government proposals “are really calling on parliament, instead of social actors, to decide the issues.” He also criticised the lack of clarity over how exactly the state will take on a more active role in education.

While it is positive that the government is considering overseeing the question of profits in universities, there are uncertainties about how it will be monitored in secondary schools, as “the administrators of private schools are cashing in on resources that belong to all Chileans, and not a word has been said about that,” Gajardo said.

Excerpt:

The problems plaguing Chile’s education system are not unknown in the rest of Latin America, but are especially complex in this long, narrow country sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean.

Students protest in Santiago: the coffin symbolises the demise of “popular education”. Credit: Fernando Fiedler/IPS

On Tuesday, students and strikers demanding a referendum on education reform set up roadblocks in Santiago, including the central Alameda avenue. Police clamped down harshly on the protests, with water cannon and tear gas.

The protests by students demanding educational reforms, a constant feature over the past three months, have the government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera up against a wall and have surprised those who see Chile as a regional model of economic and political stability.

“It has to be understood that the problems in education criticised by the students, such as the segmentation of the system and concerns about quality, are problems not only in this country, but also throughout Latin America,” Daniela Trucco, an expert at the department of social development of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), told IPS.

What sets Chile apart from the rest of the region is not questions related to higher education, but the system for financing primary and secondary education.

“In most countries the education system is divided into public schools, which are free, and fee-paying private schools. In Chile, though, the system is split into three: the municipal schools run by local governments, that are publicly funded and free; state-subsidised private schools; and private schools that charge tuition,” Trucco said.

Within state-subsidised private education, students get free tuition at some establishments while at others, pupils’ families pay a monthly fee, an arrangement known as “shared financing.”

“It is by far the most complex financing system for education in the region,” said Trucco.

The Organic Constitutional Law on Education (LOCE), enacted by the late former dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) just one day before he stepped down, set off a process of decentralisation and privatisation of education that gave private schools free rein to pursue profit, and use entrance exams to select their students.

The government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) embarked on education reforms to sweep away the deeply unpopular LOCE, in the wake of an unprecedented wave of student demonstrations in 2006.

However, political pressures were brought to bear and the modified law passed by Congress in 2009 ultimately failed to dismantle the most unpalatable features of the education system.

The social protest movement is now calling for an end to the freedom of private schools receiving state subsidies to levy fees at will. Instead of the current system, under which administrators of these establishments rack up profits, the demonstrators want school fees to be invested in education.

Another demand is for public schools at primary and secondary levels to be directly managed by the Education Ministry, instead of by local governments. The LOCE law, which put public schools under the administration of municipal governments, accentuated the inequality in education quality between rich and poor districts.

Statistics on primary and secondary education access and coverage in Latin America indicate progress, said Trucco, but “in general the problem in the region is the bottleneck for entering tertiary education.”

In higher education, “coverage is much lower,” even though public universities are generally tuition-free in Latin America, she said.

Trucco pointed out that young people in lower-income sectors often need to work, and have attended public schools that do not always provide them with the necessary “quality of education required for entry to higher education, a problem that is generalised in the region, not just in Chile.”

In spite of the structural problems that plague Chile’s educational system, “it is one of the countries with the highest levels of school coverage and educational quality,” she said.

Children in Chile used to attend school either in the morning or the afternoon shifts. But full-time school days were introduced at all primary and secondary schools in 1997.

By contrast, “most countries in the region do not have full-time school days, except in fee-paying private primary schools, and this is an enormous factor contributing to inequality, especially as the longer school day is so important for socially disadvantaged children,” Trucco said.

According to United Nations agencies, Latin America has very nearly achieved universal primary education, with 95 percent enrolment.

But there are still 2.9 million children not in school in the region. On average, 86 percent of children reach the final grade of primary school, while only 67 percent of children enter the education system at the appropriate age.

Inequality is still the bane of Chile’s educational system. “What happens when students leave middle school, what opportunities do they have, how do their life outcomes differ, do they go on to higher education, and how do they finance it: these are all problems that are on the agenda for debate, and they are much more complex” in this country, Trucco said.

Furthermore, Chile does not have a single university, or even a technical institute, that is completely financed by the state and tuition-free.

“Instead of schools and universities fulfilling the promise and expectation of reducing socially-constructed inequalities, what they are doing is reproducing them,” Trucco asserted.

This country’s substantial public spending on higher education thus benefits “those who are best off in society, because the less well-off don’t have access to the tertiary education system,” she said, which means this spending is highly “regressive”.

In Trucco’s view, public spending on education is not only essential but it should be used to ensure that young people from poor families gain access to higher education and derive benefits from state funding.

University and higher education fees are often higher than the national minimum wage, which is around 350 dollars a month.

Amid protests, demonstrations and strikes, the government announced on Aug. 1 a set of 21 “policies and action proposals for the development of Chilean education.” These include: writing into the constitution the right to a quality education; reversing the decentralisation of public education to the municipalities; updating teacher training courses and degrees; and reforming the scholarship system and the terms of university student loans.

In response, protest organisers called secondary and university students and teachers out on demonstrations Aug. 3, without government permission. The demonstrators were violently dispersed by the police, and over 800 people were arrested nationwide.

A night-time “caceroleo” (a protest consisting of noisily banging pots and pans) was then held in many streets in Santiago and other major cities, to protest the police action.

“The impression one gets is that the authorities aren’t interested in reaching a negotiated solution; instead of cooling down tempers, they are feeding the flames,” the head of the Observatory of Educational Policies at the University of Chile, Jesús Redondo, told IPS.

On Aug. 5 the protest movement leaders officially rejected the government’s 21-point proposal because, they said, the “neoliberal foundations” of the system are being upheld and private education is being perpetuated, without strengthening the public sector.

Demonstrators demanding education reform “are participating in a legitimate social movement that has the backing of the people,” said Camila Vallejo, president of the University of Chile Student Federation.

The government has not understood, and is reacting “with heavy-handed violence, and is denying people their constitutional rights,” she added.

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Jul 12 2011 (IPS)

Fear is growing among environmental and indigenous organisations in Chile over the possible appropriation of native seeds by foreign companies, opening the doors to transgenic crops and their negative impact on biodiversity.

Alarm arose because of several bills sponsored by the government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera, especially after May 17 when Congress ratified the UPOV 91 Convention, which grants patent rights over new plant varieties to those who have discovered, developed or modified these varieties.

The convention of the intergovernmental International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) is a revised version of a 1978 pact that Chile had already signed. Ratification of UPOV 91 was a requirement of the free trade treaties Santiago has entered into with Australia, the United States and Japan.

Congress began debating a bill to adopt UPOV 91 in 2009, but little progress was made until Piñera intervened and declared it an urgent measure in March this year, to accelerate its passage.

Social and environmental organisations warn that it may lead to dispossession of small farmers, loss of biodiversity and the introduction of transgenic crops.

“We asked for it not to be brought to a vote, but the government piled on the pressure, and the right generally supported it, because big companies want the Convention now, they want to start protecting their investments as soon as possible,” Lucía Sepúlveda, representing the Alliance for a Better Quality of Life/Pesticide Action Network of Chile (RAP-AL Chile), told IPS.

“Our genetic heritage is threatened,” Francisca Rodríguez, head of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), told IPS. “Our seeds are once again in danger. Only a small amount of them will remain, not even enough for reproduction; they will be left behind like museum pieces, testifying to yesterday’s reality.”

On the contrary, the UPOV 91 convention is nothing but beneficial in the view of ChileBio, a biotechnology industry association made up of Monsanto, Bayer, Dow AgroSciences, Syngenta and Pioneer, companies that research, produce, develop and sell genetically modified crops.

“An already existing system is being perfected. No new system or farming method is being introduced in the country,” Miguel Ángel Sánchez, head of ChileBio, told IPS.

He added that no change would be made in the “system of protection of plant breeders, nor in farmers’ costs, nor in the opportunity to appropriate traditionally used seeds.”

However, concerned by the possible effects of adopting the UPOV 91 convention and the absence of consultation with indigenous peoples, a group of 17 senators brought a lawsuit for its annulment to the Constitutional Court.

In the senators’ view, the Convention reduces farmers’ rights, violates property rights and endangers the traditional knowledge held by communities.

According to the Convention, a plant that is not regularly traded in the market or does not appear in an official register may be considered novel or distinct. Therefore, a company could appropriate the knowledge and biodiversity that are the heritage of small farmer and indigenous communities, without the need for legal expropriation or any compensation whatsoever.

On Jun. 24 the Constitutional Court dismissed the annulment petition. Nevertheless, the ruling said it was up to the government, Congress, municipal governments and other autonomous state bodies to establish appropriate mechanisms for carrying out proper consultations to determine whether or not an administrative or legislative measure directly affects indigenous people, and to protect native communities “from possible abuse.”

Given this scenario, the main concern is that Chile lacks “a regulatory framework to prevent these laws from allowing the plunder of our resources, because only the big companies are protected,” said Sepúlveda, the author of the book “Chile: La semilla campesina en peligro” (Chile: Peasant Seeds in Danger).

Manuel Torok, an agronomist with the government’s agricultural and livestock service, told a university forum that “anyone who wants to produce, offer for sale, import or export reproductive material will have to have permission from the rights holder.”

According to Torok, only 20 percent of the fruit-producing trees sold in Chile are protected varieties, but if the trend seen in industrialised countries is followed, in 10 years’ time the proportion will be inverted: 80 percent of the varieties will be protected, that is, the breeders will have exclusive rights, and only 20 percent of seeds will be freely available.

Environmentalists and indigenous peoples are also afraid that UPOV 91 will open the door to transgenic crops. At present, genetically modified seeds are produced in Chile for export, but their use on national soil is not permitted.

“Chile is the top producer country of transgenic seeds in the southern hemisphere, but they cannot be used here. The paradox is that we import produce grown from those seeds,” which means Chilean farmers are at a disadvantage compared to foreign producers, according to ChileBio, which belongs to the international CropLife network.

But entering the global transgenics production chain and devoting certain regions of Chile to growing genetically modified crops is “to risk enormous and irreversible contamination,” said Sepúlveda.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Jul 1 2011 (IPS)

“Today we need structural changes; we need to move towards a new model of education in Chile and to sit down to talks that include all of the concerned parties,” said Camila Vallejo, one of the leaders of the student movement that has the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera up against the wall.

Students take to the streets demanding educational reforms. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

The authorities “are using any tool at all to discredit and divide the student movement,” Vallejo, president of the Federation of University Students of Chile (FECH) and spokeswoman for the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH), told IPS.

The crisis in Chile’s educational system is no longer an issue affecting only students, as seen Thursday when more than 200,000 secondary school and university students, teachers, professors and representatives of more than 100 social, cultural, political and labour organisations marched down the main avenue in the capital, while thousands of people demonstrated in other cities around the country.

Two days earlier, Education Minister Joaquín Lavín had announced that the two-week winter vacation would be moved forward so the students on strike would miss holidays “but not classroom time” – a measure that was interpreted by the students as an attempt to intimidate them and weaken support for the movement.

The discontent over an educational system that deepens inequality has been growing for years. The movement is demanding structural reforms, and the students argue that these would require a new constitution, to replace the one imposed by the dictatorship of the late Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which is still in effect although it has undergone a few changes.

“Today our political institutions aren’t measuring up to this challenge; democracy in Chile is widely questioned, and a large majority of people are demanding respect for a right (to quality education for all) and are not being heard,” Vallejo said.

The president of the teachers association, Jaime Fajardo, told IPS that he hoped the government “will pick up on the signals sent out by a citizen movement that is in favour of public education, because today this is no longer just an issue of concern to students.

“This is a broad social movement for public education, and talks are needed, involving all of the concerned parties,” said Fajardo, alluding to the negotiations that the education minister attempted to carry out only with the deans of the country’s public universities, who rejected the offer because it was not supported by the rest of the educational sector.

The government is promoting a new educational reform based on the creation of public schools that would be centres of excellence, higher salaries for teachers, and an increased course load in language and mathematics, to the detriment of history.

The Chilean Observatory of Educational Policies of the University of Chile says the problem is that the underlying issues have not been addressed, either by this government or by the centre-left administrations of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy that governed the country from 1990 to 2010.

The root of the crisis, the experts say, is that the guiding principle of education in Chile is the right to property and freedom of education, or free enterprise with respect to education, and that the right to education is not enshrined in the constitution, which would make the state responsible for guaranteeing quality education for all.

“The underlying debate here is of what kind of education system we want, and of the need to redesign the system,” Fajardo said.

In addition, said the director of the Observatory, Jesús Redondo, what is happening now is not only a new outbreak of discontent over the educational system, which also occurred in 2006 when huge numbers of students demonstrated against the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010), but evidence of a new crisis of the neoliberal model that has subjected education and other rights to the laws of the market.

“The youth express what is happening in society,” Redondo said in a conversation with IPS. “The political class has failed to understand what was happening, they thought it was just a matter of money,” but the demands are not only coming from the students, but from the majority of society, which is fed up, he added.

He said a wound that never healed has been opened up again, because the response to the crisis of 2006 was insufficient, since although the Organic Constitutional Law on Education (LOCE) enacted by Pinochet just one day before he stepped down was repealed, it was replaced by the General Law on Education (LGE) in 2009 that did not essentially modify educational policy.

“The political leadership tried to resolve the crisis by means of a general law on educational funding…not on education,” said Redondo, a professor at the University of Chile, adding that the crisis emerged because “in this country, the right to education is not regulated; by contrast, education is a service subjected to the right to property.”

The 2009 law did not modify the role of the state in such a way as to reduce the heavy concentration of funding and better teachers in middle-class schools, and to improve conditions in schools in poor neighbourhoods, he said.

Nor did it reverse the process of decentralisation and privatisation of the Chilean education system ushered in by the LOCE law. The dictatorship-era law transferred the administration of public schools from the Education Ministry to the country’s 345 municipalities, and also permitted the creation of state-subsidised private schools.

Far from breaking with this model, the successive administrations of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy entrenched it by, for example, authorising state-subsidised private schools to charge families a monthly fee for their children’s education, known as “shared financing.”

The 2009 law did not resolve the core problems of the system, its deep inequality and increasing social segregation, did not improve public education, and did not end shared financing, critics complain.

It did set stricter conditions for the owners of state-subsidised private schools and created an agency to oversee the quality of education and a superintendency of education to act as a watchdog for the correct use of public funds.

“The state did not assume the rights of its citizens; it put them in the hands of the market,” which is leading to the exhaustion of the neoliberal model, of “a society that has not managed to write its own constitution, but has a constitution that was imposed on it, that is not of the people,” Redondo said.

That is also what the movement for educational reform is demanding, as shown by the enormous banner held up by the students, teachers and organisations taking part in Thursday’s march in Santiago, which read “For Chile, for Education, for a New Constitution!”

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, May 25 2011 (IPS)

“What is happening in Chile isn’t justice; it’s a pantomime, because under the anti-terrorism law, there is absolutely no way justice can be done,” José Venturelli, spokesman for the European Secretariat of the Ethics Commission against Torture, said on a recent visit to this South American country.

The controversial law that Venturelli was referring to has been used to try members of Chile’s Mapuche indigenous community involved in the long-running struggle for their right to land.

Ramón Llanquileo, José Huenuche and Jonathan Huillical, sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Héctor Llaitul, sentenced to 25 years, began a hunger strike on Mar. 15 in a prison in southern Chile, demanding a fair and impartial retrial.

The four Mapuche activists were not actually tried under the counter-terrorism law, which dates back to the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and has been widely condemned by the international community.

But although they were tried under ordinary criminal law, the case against them was built on the investigation carried out under the anti-terrorism legislation, and their recent conviction was based on the testimony of police officers and anonymous witnesses.

The four were found guilty of theft of lumber and attempted murder for allegedly attacking a prosecutor riding in a motorcade in 2008 in the southern town of Tirúa, 700 km south of the capital.

Ten activists arrested is the so-called “caso bombas” (bombs case) ended a 65-day hunger strike in April, held to protest an alleged frame-up and their trial under the anti-terrorism law. They were arrested for allegedly setting off 29 bombs in Santiago in incidents dating back to 2005. But most of the supposed evidence against them was thrown out by the judge.

Although the dictatorship-era law has been reformed several times, its critics, in Chile and around the world, say it is still a draconian measure used against Mapuche leaders and land right activists.

The Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, number nearly one million in this country of over 16 million people, and the struggle for their ancestral land in the south of the country has frequently pitted them against large landholders, logging companies and other private interests.

The law “has been modernised, but in terms that would make it appear that the state’s repressive apparatus must indispensably have an extreme mechanism” to resort to, lawyer Julio Cortés told IPS.

Legal experts say the law violates the right to the presumption of innocence and thus makes a fair trial impossible.

Under the law, prosecutors may keep their evidence secret, anonymous witnesses can testify for the prosecution, prosecutors may apply for powers to tap telephones and intercept correspondence, emails and other communications, suspects can be held for up to ten days before formal charges are brought, and detainees often face long periods of pretrial detention and disproportionately long sentences.

Another danger is double jeopardy, because some Mapuche detainees are tried for the same crime by the civilian and military justice systems, with the two sentences served consecutively, which is considered a legal aberration.

In a report issued last year on Chile, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) stated that without a clear definition for terrorism, the law grants officials wide discretion in determining what is terrorist behaviour.

Right-wing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera admitted that the law was flawed, but defended the need for it.

It is necessary “to bring our ant-terrorism legislation into line with the standards of democracies in the developed world, but that must not mean that we let our guard down against this cruel, merciless scourge, which is itself a grave violation of basic rights,” Piñera said in his annual state of the nation address on Saturday May 21.

“It’s true that after 2001 (the 9/11 attacks in Washington and New York), powers to combat terrorism at a global level increased…but in the case of this Chilean law, it allows crimes against property to be treated as terrorist crimes, which is disproportionate,” Cortés said.

The IACHR also criticises the use of protected or “faceless” witnesses, whose elimination was called for by independent, socialist and communist lawmakers in a new attempt to modify the law.

“The possibility of gathering evidence through protected witnesses and experts,” and of paying them for testifying, perverts the essence of evidence and impartiality and encourages accusations “in exchange for money and the fabrication of evidence,” says the parliamentary initiative presented in April.

Weapon against Mapuche protests

There are 49 Mapuche leaders and activists currently facing charges or serving sentences for crimes investigated or prosecuted under the anti-terrorism law.

The four hunger strikers have appealed to the Supreme Court to annul the ruling on the grounds that the trial was plagued with irregularities and that their constitutional rights were violated. The Court is due to hand down its verdict in June.

In the meantime, government spokeswoman Ena von Baer urged the hunger strikers to call off their protest.

“An autonomous decision was handed down by the courts, and it is not the government’s place to comment on legal decisions,” she said.

Mapuche and human rights groups say the arrests of native activists and their supporters must be understood in the context of the struggle for their land, which does not involve terrorist actions or illegal association.

Since 2008, the anti-terrorism law has also been used to try five members of the Mapuche community under the age of 18.

“Of course it is even more serious when conventions signed and ratified by Chile, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are disregarded,” José Horacio Wood, director of the ANIDE children’s rights foundation, told IPS.

All minors under the age of 18 must be tried in Chile under the law on adolescent criminal responsibility.

Law targets not only Mapuche protesters

The defendants in the “bomb case” denounce the same irregularities in the investigation and excessive periods of detention protested by the imprisoned Mapuche activists.

“What happened with the Mapuche defendants was basically a laboratory on how to apply this law in times of democracy,” said Cortés, the defence attorney in the “bomb case.”

The 14 suspects in that case – an anthropologist, university students, squatters, anarchists and former guerrillas who fought the Pinochet dictatorship – are accused of illicit terrorist association and of setting off 29 bombs. Ten of the defendants went on a 65-day hunger strike from February to April.

“The ‘bomb case’ would seem to be the ‘rigged’ or ‘setup’ case, because it turns out that it is hard to find any acceptable proof,” said Venturelli, referring to the more than 2,500 pieces of “evidence” presented by the prosecutors that were thrown out in the trial, including books on anarchy, fire extinguishers, bicycles, printers and newspapers.

Critics of the anti-terrorism law see it a dangerous instrument with the potential to be abused in the suppression of political dissent and protest, since it annuls the possibility and right to a defence.

“By means of the anti-terrorism law, they have managed to maintain pressure on any kind of protest,” said Venturelli.

The four hunger strikers have lost between 17 and 21 kilos since they began the hunger strike in mid-March. They are suffering from fever, severe muscle cramps and headaches, extreme weakness, and dizziness.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, May 23 2011 (IPS)

The HidroAysén hydroelectric project in Chile’s Patagonia region is causing “a credibility crisis for institutionality and (President) Piñera,” environmentalist Sara Larraín told Tierramérica.

The government is not funding a single clean energy project, says environmentalist Sara Larraín. Credit: Martín Katz - Courtesy of Programa Chile Sustentable

On May 9, the Environmental Assessment Committee of the southern region of Aysén approved the HidroAysén megaproject, a Spanish-Italian-Chilean joint venture involving the construction of five hydroelectric plants in Patagonia. The 2,750 megawatts of electricity produced by the plants will be transmitted along power lines that will cut through eight regions.

Protests were stepped up in a number of cities, including the capital, Santiago, where as many as 80,000 people took to the streets on Friday May 20 and faced a harsh crackdown by the Carabineros militarised police, who fired on them with tear gas and water cannons.

Some 50,000 people demonstrated on Saturday in the port city of Valparaíso, 120 km north of the capital, and tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in 26 other cities.

The government of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera supports the project, citing the need to double power production in the coming years in order to maintain estimated GDP growth of six percent annually.

But despite the green light given to the project, Sara Larraín, who was arrested and suffered police brutality during the protests, declares that the battle “is just beginning.”

Q: Why has the approval of the HidroAysén project sparked so much opposition? A: It affects the heart of Chilean Patagonia, one of Chile’s most important heritage areas, with five power plants that will generate 2,700 megawatts of electricity and carry it along 2,000 kilometers of power lines straight to Santiago and the mining operations in the Atacama region.

It think it is largely a matter of trying to clean up the country’s image for the international community.

Q: The government argues that the project approval respected environmental legislation. Why do you maintain that there were irregularities in the process? A: In the HidroAysén environmental assessment process, the procedure through which the authorities grant sectoral permits for projects, numerous irregularities have been committed since 2008.

First, a project for which there was no baseline information was submitted to the process. There were 2,000 observations from public agencies and 11,000 from citizen participation. A least four documents from government services were changed weeks before the vote.

The regional secretary of the Ministry of Environment was forced to resign, because he obviously couldn’t endorse a procedure like this. Four public officials who were supposed to vote had to disqualify themselves because of company-related conflicts of interest.

In addition, the observations made through citizen participation were not taken into account in the assessment. And on the morning of the day of the vote, Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter declared that this project should be approved.

So there are a whole series of irregularities that imply a violation of the rule of law, of the way transparent procedures should be carried out in Chile.

And this represents the failure of environmental institutionality, which has just been reformed through the creation of a ministry, a superintendency and an independent environmental assessment service, which demonstrated with this project that it is not independent.

Q: Is Chilean environmental legislation too weak? A: The problem here is the manipulation of environmental institutionality, because institutionality includes citizen participation, but here it was not taken into account and is not binding.

Q: How does HidroAysén impact the Chilean energy market and the need to expand the energy mix? A: This project is based on the monopoly on water rights held by Endesa Italy and Colbún (a former state-owned company that was privatised in 1997 and acquired in 2005 by the Chilean Matte Group).

On the basis of the rights they obtained under the Water Code established by the military regime (1973-1990) they are flooding two rivers in Patagonia: the Pascua and Baker Rivers.

In the meantime, since both companies already control a majority share of the central electrical power grid system, through HidroAysén they will come to control between 70 and 90 percent of electricity generation. This constitutes a private duopoly that cuts off access to the market for other actors who want to participate with other sources of energy.

Added to this, there are a series of campaign promises made by Piñera, such as raising the share of renewable energies to 20 percent by 2020, which are not being kept. The government is not funding a single project aimed at this goal. The result of all this is quite simply a credibility crisis for institutionality and Piñera.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, May 5 2011 (IPS)

Fisherfolk and indigenous people in southern Chile have petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in their 15-year conflict with Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (CELCO), a paper pulp company which plans to dump toxic waste in the ocean, and with the Chilean state for alleged human rights violations.

Fishing village on the Bay of Mehuín. Credit: Courtesy of Comité de Defensa del Mar

The company wants to lay a 40-kilometre waste pipeline from the pulp mill to Mehuín, including a 2-kilometre undersea extension, that would discharge the plant’s effluents directly into the ocean at a depth of 18 metres.

Small-scale fishers and people belonging to the Lafkenche (“people of the coast”) branch of the indigenous Mapuche community, living on the Bay of Mehuín, 800 kilometres south of Santiago, have been fighting the pipeline project since 1996.

In 2004 the company began discharging its effluents into the local Cruces river, but after a massive die-off and migration of black-necked swans (Cygnus melancoryphus) in the Anwandter Nature Sanctuary, in 2006 it resumed its original plan to build the waste pipeline to the ocean.

The Valdivia pulp mill produces 550,000 tonnes of pulp a year for export. In March, however, production had to be suspended due to the low rate of flow in the Cruces river, which fell below five cubic metres a second – the lowest limit established by the authorities for pulp production, which consumes enormous quantities of water.

Chile provides six percent of the 48 million tonnes of paper pulp traded on the world market every year. Last year, it brought in export revenues of 1.79 billion dollars. The forestry sector as a whole contributes 3.1 percent of GDP.

CELCO was granted permission to build the waste pipeline Feb. 24, 2010 by the Regional Commission for the Environment (COREMA), and it is expected to be completed in two years’ time. The population that will be affected by the project includes 20 coastal communities of Lafkenche people and small-scale fishers in Mehuín, Cheuque, La Barra and Mississipí.

Another 20 or so native communities further south and associations of fisherfolk with nearly 1,000 members, in neighbouring bays and inland areas, could also suffer harmful effects.

Eliab Viguera, spokesman for the Committee for the Defence of the Sea, the organisation of local people determined to prevent CELCO’s waste from polluting the ocean, told IPS: “The rights of indigenous communities here will be violated because their sacred ceremonial sites will be desecrated.” For example, the planned route of the pipeline would cut right across a native cemetery.

The Committee for the Defence of the Sea lodged appeals in the courts against the environmental permit granted by COREMA, and demanded protection for the integrity and lives of fisherfolk and Lafkenche people, and for the right of the native peoples to live on the coast, which is guaranteed under Chilean law. But the Supreme Court denied the motion.

“The violence unleashed in Mehuín was atrocious; many people were victims of criminals in the pay of CELCO, who harassed all those defending the ocean, without caring whether they were elderly people or children,” Viguera said.

He said that in the last few years, they have had to put up with everything from death threats to attempts to bribe them with money to give up their struggle.

José Araya, the coordinator of the Citizen Observatory’s intercultural programme, said: “They paid them to sign a cooperation agreement; then they made a payment to support the studies the company needed for its environmental impact assessment; after that they paid out more money when the environmental permit was granted; and in all probability they will make a further payment when the waste pipeline is completed.”

But the attempt to break up the resistance movement by divisive tactics only succeeded in wooing a handful of Mehuín fisherfolk, the sources said.

When all efforts to obtain justice in the national courts failed, the Committee for the Defence of the Sea took its case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), requesting urgent precautionary measures and a restraining order against any work related to the construction of the pipeline.

“The Chilean state must answer for the violations that have been committed here,” Viguera said.

Araya pointed out that one of the legal petitions has to do with the rights of native communities, who were not consulted over this project in their territory, as stipulated in International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which came into effect in Chile Sept. 15, 2009.

Official approval for the waste duct was granted four months later, and although the state had one year to bring Chile’s domestic laws and regulations into line with the requirements of Convention 169, not much progress has been made in that direction.

Araya told IPS that the petition before the IACHR emphasises “territorial rights, because the people involved are Mapuche and Convention 169 has not been respected; and also the right to life, because the environmental effects are harmful for communities that depend on fishing and ocean-based recreational activities.”

IPS contacted the Human Rights Directorate at the Chilean Foreign Ministry, which will represent the state before the IACHR, but it declined to comment.

CELCO, which owns five pulp mills in Chile and another in Argentina, has a record for polluting. Operations have had to be suspended at the Valdivia plant on several occasions because of judicial injunctions, among other reasons for exceeding its permitted production limit.

Discharge of effluents into the Cruces river, the cause of the die-off of swans according to research studies, was confirmed by the testimony of expert witnesses in late March at a civil action instituted by the State Defence Council (the agency responsible for the legal defence of the Chilean state) against CELCO for environmental damage.

The results “are quite conclusive. The company is responsible for the pollution, it exceeded its production limits and it withheld information from the authorities,” Araya said.

Under the circumstances, the Apr. 2 broadcast of a programme reflecting favourably on CELCO by Televisión Nacional de Chile, the country’s only public channel, caused outrage. The National Television Council (CNTV), the Chilean Association of Documentary Filmmakers and the State Defence Council expressed their disapproval of the programme’s one-sided portrayal.

CELCO later disclosed that it had hired the programme’s producer, Sergio Nuño, to make a separate documentary to present in evidence at the trial at which the company is being prosecuted by the State Defence Council.

While the fisherfolk wait and hope for the IACHR to take up their case, they are speculating that CELCO will not be able to build its pipeline because its environmental permit does not allow it entry to the sea. For this, it would have to obtain permission from the nation’s maritime authorities.

In spite of reiterated requests by IPS, CELCO declined to make any comment.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Feb 11 2010 (IPS)

As tensions mount in Chile’s Mapuche territories, the indigenous people have created a new legal defence body for cases involving resistance against the state, as they put little stock in the justice system for working out cases such as land disputes.

“Practically everyone in our family is in prison, and those of us who aren’t are subject to restraining orders that restrict our movements,” Antonio Cadín, “werkén” (spokesman) for the Juan Paillalef community 730 kilometres south of the capital, told IPS.

The Mapuche activist is serving a five-year sentence under which he is only locked up at night, for defiance of authority and disorderly conduct. His wife, Juana Calfunao, the “lonko” (maximum traditional authority) of the community, is serving four-and-a-half years on the same charges. Their youngest daughter, 12-year-old Relmutray, has applied for political asylum in Switzerland.

“There is ample evidence indicating that since her birth, Relmutray has lived in an environment of relentless police tension and harassment,” reads a document that the Mapuche International Link (MIL) submitted to the United Nations in 2008. “She has witnessed police brutality against her parents and her community as well as personally suffering inhumane, cruel, and degrading treatment.”

Relmutray is living with her aunt Flor Rayen, who has resided in Geneva since 1996 and is an activist and a human and indigenous rights researcher for the United Nations. The young girl’s asylum petition has the support of a number of human rights organisations around the world.

Cadín says his people are protesting against the neglect, discrimination and harsh treatment they have faced since the earliest days of the Chilean state, for which no solutions have been found in the 20 years of democracy that have followed the 1973-1990 dictatorship.

“There has been no recognition of our people’s political, social and legal structures; our traditional authorities have not been respected, and our territorial rights have not been recognised,” he said.

In order to fight for their rights and overcome the injustices they complain of, the Juan Paillalef community has coordinated with more than 20 other Mapuche communities to form the Defensor Jurídico Social Autónomo Mapuche (Autonomous Mapuche Legal and Social Defence unit).

The unprecedented legal defence body is headed by the traditional authorities, and is made up of “six lawyers and a multidisciplinary team that includes psychologists, a social worker, an anthropologist and a sociologist, to lend support to defence testimony in the courts when our people are on trial,” said Cadín, the coordinator of the Defensor Jurídico unit.

According to Matías Meza-Lopehandia, a lawyer with the non-governmental Observatorio Ciudadano (Citizen Observatory), the creation of the “autonomous” legal defence unit is an indication of the maturity of the movement for indigenous rights and autonomy.

“What it shows is that indigenous people are taking care of their own problems, and creating and strengthening their own organisations,” said the lawyer.

The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in Chile, numbering about one million people in a total population of 16 million. Nearly half of them live in the capital city, and the rest live mainly in the southern region of Araucanía, a roughly 10-hour drive from Santiago.

In this southern region, the ongoing struggle of the Mapuche for land that they claim as their ancestral territory has sparked conflicts, with activists staging land occupations and setting fire to trucks that extract logs from forests they regard as their own, on one hand, and rampant police brutality on the other.

Six arson attacks have occurred so far in 2010. Responsibility for four of them has been claimed by the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), a radical Mapuche organisation.

“We have no doubt that the police and prosecutors will succeed in catching these criminals and putting them behind bars; and we expect the justice system to punish them, as in all previous cases, to the utmost extent of the law,” acting Interior Minister Patricio Rosende told the press in response to the latest incident.

Four Mapuche, including a minor, were formally charged in January under the Anti-Terrorism Law for allegedly taking part in an arson attack. Another 23 Mapuche were ordered to appear before justice authorities to answer allegations of making threats and belonging to an “illegal terrorist association.”

But two lawsuits have also been filed by indigenous people against the authorities on the grounds of abuse. One is against members of the police, for allegedly torturing a Mapuche man from the Temucuicui community, and the other was lodged by the Mapuche Autonomous Legal and Social Defence unit against prison guards, for alleged torture and illegal coercion of a Mapuche woman from the Juan Paillalef community.

In Meza-Lopehandia’s view, it does not necessarily follow that the conflict in Araucanía has intensified, nor that all the incidents they are charged with have in fact been carried out by the Mapuche.

At present 52 indigenous people – who see themselves as political prisoners – are in prison, charged with acts of violence in pursuit of their demands.

Forty of them have been indicted or are serving sentences of up to 10 years for “terrorist” crimes, although according to Meza-Lopehandia, they never showed “disregard for human life,” and no one was ever killed as a consequence of their actions, as the term “terrorism” would imply.

In contrast, a military tribunal handed down only a two-year suspended sentence to the police officer who two years ago shot and killed Matías Catrileo, a young indigenous protester, during a land occupation.

Human rights groups complain that the Anti-Terrorist Law, issued during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of the late General Augusto Pinochet, should not be invoked against the Mapuche protesters.

Secret judicial investigations, the use of anonymous witnesses preventing legitimate and timely defence, longer periods of arrest on remand and doubly heavy penalties for those convicted are some of the Law’s draconian provisions.

Meza-Lopehandia said its provisions negate the principle of presumption of innocence, so that indigenous people are held in detention and “presumed guilty” even though often there is no evidence against them.

Another concern is that it lowers standards of practice and respect for basic rights on the part of police and prosecutors.

The logic behind the Anti-Terrorist Law is of “a criminal law for the enemy,” said the lawyer. “Suspects are dehumanised to the point that they are no longer persons with rights, so they can be tortured.”

In October 2009, the representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in this country, Gary Stahl, made an appeal “for a halt to the violence involving children, whichever side is responsible for it,” after meeting with three government ministers to convey UNICEF’s deep concern over grave reports of police brutality against Mapuche children.

Many indigenous people have lost all faith in the state and in the public defenders they are offered, and instead seek independent defence counsel of their own, like the kind the Autonomous Mapuche Legal and Social Defence unit will provide.

“There are no guarantees of due process in these trials manipulated by the state,” Cadín, the coordinator of the legal defence unit, told IPS. “We are persecuted by state police, and the state appoints both the prosecutors and the public defence lawyers, who operate within a system and comply with a political model that favours vested economic interests in this country.”

Prospects under a new government

Mapuche organisations do not believe that state policy will be any different under the incoming Sebastián Piñera administration, which they expect will continue to deny their rights, although they do fear increased repression and use of the Anti-Terrorist Law. Rightwing president-elect Piñera, who will succeed socialist President Michelle Bachelet in March, may undermine Mapuche ways of collective organising as a strategy to quell the protests, activists say.

He has said that his land policy will focus on individual subsidies rather than recognition of collective rights, which could further fuel the conflicts.

Piñera also plans to restructure public institutions devoted to indigenous affairs, in order to make them more efficient, he says.

But “no change can be made to institutions dealing with indigenous peoples nowadays without consulting native peoples themselves,” said Meza-Lopehandia, referring to International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 which came into force in Chile in 2009.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur for the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, expressed concern about the use of the Anti-Terrorist Law and about the violence in Araucanía, among other issues, and called on the new government to respect international law on indigenous peoples’ rights.

According to Meza-Lopehandia, certain steps are essential, such as “demilitarising Mapuche territory, issuing an amnesty for the prisoners,” and acknowledging and asking forgiveness for “not only the atrocities committed 100 years ago, but also those that have been perpetrated in the last 20 years.”

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Feb 9 2010 (IPS)

Criminal law should not be used against freedom of expression, nor to silence community radio stations in Chile, say activists and journalists in response to closures of community radio outlets in this South American country.

Seven community radio stations were closed down in 2009 for broadcasting without a licence and allegedly interfering with telecommunications – offences that carry penalties ranging from fines and seizure of equipment to prison terms, under Chile’s law on telecommunications.

“No more community radio stations should be silenced by applying criminal law to freedom of expression,” Juan Enrique Ortega of the non-governmental organisation Education and Communication (ECO) told IPS.

Radio Sin Tierra (Landless Radio) is one of the broadcasters that has been silenced. It was set up by local people and students who work as volunteers at the Peñalolén station, in a low-income neighbourhood on the southeast side of Santiago.

“I have been charged for simply communicating, for exercising my freedom to communicate with the rest of the community,” Fidel Galaz, one of the broadcasters at the closed radio station, told IPS.

“Everyone has the right to communicate, whether or not they can afford to pay Subtel,” he said, referring to the Subsecretaría de Telecomunicaciones (Subtel), Chile’s telecoms regulator, which grants broadcasting licences.

The licence fees are beyond the reach of this community radio station and of many others.

ECO says that it costs about 2,000 dollars in Chile to obtain a licence, and points out that there are no subsidies to promote community stations and equal access.

Galaz turned down a deal offered by the prosecution as an alternative to facing trial: if he pled guilty and stopped broadcasting, he would not have to do time in prison.

In his view, that would mean deserting a collective project, and consenting to the radio station being silenced. If he is convicted, he risks a heavy fine and a sentence of up to three years in prison.

Demanding a halt to what they say is criminalisation of radio broadcasting is one of the planks of a social alliance comprising the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), the Chilean Peoples’ Media Network (RMP), the University of Chile’s School of Journalism, ECO and Corporación La Morada, a leading women’s organisation.

The head of AMARC’s Latin America and Caribbean office, María Pía Matta, told IPS that “state coercion and the enforcement of criminal law in these cases is, in our view, backwards.”

Matta emphasised that by criminalising community radio broadcasting, Chile “is failing to meet the international standards subscribed to by all Latin American governments” in the American Convention on Human Rights, in effect since 1978.

During her visit to Chile in September 2009, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Catalina Botero, said that “criminal law is not intended to prosecute” those who set up community stations.

“Criminal law is intended to prosecute murderers, thieves, fraudsters,” but not communicators, she said.

In Latin America, only Chile and Brazil still treat unlicenced broadcasting as a criminal act.

The communicators’ organisations and community radio stations are demanding the repeal of Article 36 b) of the General Telecommunications Law, a legacy of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which criminalises unlicenced broadcasting.

Issued by Pinochet as a supreme decree in 1982, its purpose was to clamp down on and silence opposition media outlets.

Twenty years after Chile’s return to democracy, the outgoing government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet has only just now seen fit to send a bill to Congress to eliminate the criminalisation of community radio broadcasting without a licence.

“The government has promised to prepare and send a single-article bill to modify the current law, so as to eliminate prison sentences for these offences,” said government spokeswoman Pilar Armanet.

The bill is to be sent to Congress in March, after the southern hemisphere summer recess.

On Mar. 11, Bachelet will hand over the presidency to Sebastián Piñera, the rightwing billionaire who won the Jan. 17 runoff election.

Therefore, unless the executive branch requests urgent treatment of the bill in Congress, the measure may be lost among the new government’s legislative priorities.

AMARC’s Matta said there is no certainty about what Piñera’s position on the issue might be.

And even if prison sentences are eliminated for broadcasting without a licence, the seizure of equipment and levying of fines would still stand.

A report on broadcasting in Chile, produced by RMP and ECO and released in December, shows that nearly all the legal actions against community radio stations were brought by members of the National Association of Radio Broadcasters, which represents the interests of private commercial broadcasters.

According to RMP, this is persecution with ideological overtones, which seeks to impose a free-market perspective that sees communication solely as a business, and causes harassment of community broadcasters and their treatment as criminals by the justice system.

This persecution “means people involved in community media are being tracked and monitored, in order to report them to Subtel or directly to the Public Prosecutor’s Office,” Paulina Acevedo, a member of RMP, told IPS.

The community broadcasters got some news in January that raised half a cheer, when Congress approved a law creating “community broadcasting services”, which will benefit about 400 community radio stations that currently hold licences as “minimum-coverage” broadcasters.

The bill, awaiting Bachelet’s signature, legally recognises the radio stations as providing social and community services, offers some technical improvements, like increasing their permitted power from one watt to 10 watts, and extends their licence periods from three years to 10 years.

RMP, made up of more than 50 community media outlets, regards the new Community Radio Law as a step forward, but points out that the development of these media will be restricted, since they are confined to a small segment of radio frequency which limits the number of possible concessions.

It also expressed concern over the requirement that radio stations be certified as bona fide “community” broadcasters by the Division of Social Organisations in the Secretariat-General of Government, because this gives the government of the moment discretionary powers over their licencing, opening the procedure to possible abuses and arbitrariness.

ECO’s Ortega said the problem is that there is little public awareness that the right to communicate is an essential human right. “To raise awareness on this and guarantee freedom of speech, communication must be democratised, and this law does not do that,” he added.

The new law restricts community radio stations to a segment equivalent to only five percent of Chile’s radio spectrum. Community radio activists had lobbied for one-third of the spectrum to be allocated to community broadcasting, as has been approved in other Latin American countries.

The social organisations and community broadcasters have asked the outgoing government to hold a workshop, with broad participation by civil society, to discuss criteria for drawing up the regulations that will determine how the Community Radio Law will be applied and enforced.

This mechanism could fine-tune the regulations so that they are appropriate to the reality of community media, and also push for the repeal, before Mar. 11, of the article that applies criminal penalties to community broadcasters.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Feb 3 2010 (IPS)

Trade unions and non-governmental organisations in Chile are worried that rightwing billionaire Sebastián Piñera’s election as president will mean setbacks in terms of social policy and respect for labour and social rights.

Statements by the conservative president-elect, who triumphed in the Jan. 17 runoff vote, with regard to overhauling state-owned enterprises to boost efficiency and adopting policies aimed at increasing economic growth, sparked concern among the labour movement, environmentalists, indigenous peoples’ associations and other social organisations.

His campaign pledges also worried the centre-left “Concertación” or Coalition for Democracy, which lost its hold on power for the first time in 20 years.

To judge by the Harvard-educated airline magnate’s pro-business campaign platform, strikes, protests and social tension will increase over the next five years, Álvaro Ramis, president of the Chilean Association of NGOs (ACCION), told IPS.

Especially given the fact that part of the Chilean right still identifies with the 1973-1990 de facto regime of late dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who died in 2006. Some 3,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared and nearly 30,000 were tortured under the dictatorship.

“I believe there is an emotional aspect (in the NGOs’ concerns), awakened, for example, by seeing ‘Pinochetistas’ in Piñera’s rallies justifying and legitimising human rights abuses,” said Ramis.

There are fears that such influences and the president-elect’s neoliberal positions will lead to a major conservative shift in policy direction in areas like education, health, labour, the environment and women’s and indigenous rights, which in Ramis’s view would bring increased social unrest.

Activists say one of the most vulnerable areas is labour. Trade unionists are concerned that the future administration will not only turn a deaf ear towards workers’ demands, but could even roll back acquired rights.

“One thing they will do for sure is speed up the move towards labour market flexibilisation. I believe we will see setbacks there,” said Ramis.

The Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), Chile’s largest labour federation, announced that it planned to fight, “with all our strength, against anything considered harmful to what we represent.”

Diego Olivares, president of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), another union federation, told IPS that the labour movement must be prepared to face two possible scenarios: either that Piñera will make good on his call for unity and cooperation, or that “he will try to reverse or roll back achievements and progress made particularly in the world of labour.”

In Olivares’ view, the challenge is for the country’s trade unions to have the capacity to present a united front.

“To confront a government of business leaders and the right, the trade union movement cannot be divided. We at least need to have mechanisms for coordination, joint action and a united front, in order to best deal with the dangers and whatever situations may lie ahead,” said the labour leader.

Chile’s trade unions are pushing for laws that would strengthen the labour movement by guaranteeing freedom to organise and collective bargaining, and paving the way for automatic unionisation.

CUT, meanwhile, said in a communiqué that it did not rule out protests if the new government fails to show a willingness to build agreements, and fails to respect the labour movement.

“The Piñera administration will follow two practices that will be huge barriers to overcome: repression and patronage – which means that forming part of the opposition will not be as easy as it might appear at first glance,” said Olivares.

Social and labour organisations have little confidence in Piñera’s frequently repeated calls for unity and the construction of agreements. They believe that if they do not back the president-elect’s policies and measures, no negotiation will be possible, and any expression of protest will merely be put down by the authorities.

They also fear the use of patronage or clientelism as a form of containing or deflecting the discontent.

“Piñera is going to have well-stocked coffers and abundant foreign reserves, and he’s going to create a system of cash payments (starting with the “bono marzo”, a stipend to be paid to four million Chileans at the beginning of the school year in March), which will have a major social impact. But that could be used as part of a patronage-based system to generate a new kind of support among the poor for the Piñera administration,” said Ramis.

Another disadvantage faced by Chile’s social movement is that it is not as united as it has been in the past.

“We have a strong tradition, a long history of struggle. But we also have to acknowledge that the social movement is weaker now, which will hamper its ability to stand up to the government,” said the activist.

He said the strength and cohesion of the social movement were undermined by a weakening of the social fabric and by the headway made by neoliberal economic policies since the dictatorship, but also by the very growth and consolidation of such movements over 20 years of centre-left Concertación governments.

In addition, the continued reliance on free market policies since the restoration of democracy drove changes in society that fomented individualism, to the detriment of collective values and social ties, Ramis said.

The president of ACCION said “commodified human relations now predominate, personal interests take precedence over collective interests, and consumerism has won out.”

The fragmentation of the social movement and the growth of individualism that Ramis referred to can be seen in the labour movement, as a mere 11 percent of all workers in this South American country are unionised, and collective bargaining takes place in just 9.6 percent of all companies, according to the Dirección del Trabajo, the government’s labour office.

Moreover, the trade union movement is divided, with four labour federations: CUT, the UNT, the Central General de Trabajadores (CGT), and the Central Autónoma de Trabajadores (CAT).

Another concern is a bill that has the support of the rightwing alliance – made up of Piñera’s National Renovation Party and the Independent Democratic Union – and of some factions in the Concertación, which could provide tools to clamp down on protests and stifle dissent.

Social organisations say the bill, which would regulate demonstrations, would criminalise protests by making demonstrators and groups liable for any misconduct or damages that may occur.

There are also questions about how much civil society is respected, given that effective citizen participation is not guaranteed under Chilean law – a problem that NGOs have already complained about under the Concertación, reflecting a certain level of mistrust towards the coalition.

Civil society has its hopes pinned on a bill that looks set to be passed after nearly three years of debate in Congress: the law on citizen associations and participation, which would set a standard for civil society participation in the state, with the aim of strengthening democracy.

However, because of the slow progress the bill has made through Congress, it will most likely be Piñera, rather than Bachelet, who will be faced with either signing it into law or vetoing it, after he takes office in March.

In this period of uncertainty, the challenge facing NGOs today is the need to rework their ties with the various social and political actors, according to Ramis.

But he warned against the danger of being co-opted by the political forces.

“One of the dangers is that (the political forces) will not be willing to back social mobilisations. But an even worse danger is that they could be co-opted, which would undermine the role that civil society groups must play,” he said.

There is broad agreement, however, that social movements must work together more closely and not fall into the temptation to hold constant, fragmented protests and demonstrations, but join together in a united front in order to deal more effectively with a scenario that promises to be far less favourable than it has been over the last two decades.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Sep 15 2009 (IPS)

The Chilean parliament has approved the creation of a national institute for human rights, another step towards fulfilling the human rights agenda of the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet.

The new National Human Rights Institute (INDH) will keep a constant watch to make sure that torture, political killings, executions or exile never happen again in Chile, minister of the presidency José Antonio Viera Gallo told the press.

The announcement was made the same week that Chile commemorated the 36th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 1973 military coup d’état which ushered in a 17-year dictatorship.

The INDH will be an autonomous public-law corporation, charged with drawing up an annual report on the state of human rights in the country and making recommendations to guarantee that they are universally enforced and respected.

It will also propose measures for the protection and promotion of human rights, while working to bring national laws, regulations and practices into line with international treaties that Chile has ratified.

In addition, it will promote actions to locate and identify the remains of the 1973-1990 dictatorship’s victims of forced disappearance. Some 3,000 people were killed and disappeared, 35,000 were tortured, and thousands went into exile during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

The new Institute will be run by a nine-member board, two of whose members will be appointed by the president, two by the Senate, two by the lower house of Congress, one by the deans of university law schools and two by non-governmental human rights organisations.

“We can say that the human rights agenda has been practically completed during the Bachelet administration. Today Chile is a state party to all the international mechanisms for respecting and safeguarding human rights,” Viera Gallo said.

Civil society organisations welcomed the creation of the INDH, but warned that some of its regulations fail to ensure the autonomy essential to its work.

Hernán Vergara, a lawyer and head of Amnesty International-Chile, told IPS that the Institute needs to be given functions and powers that guarantee its impartiality and transparency.

Bachelet has promised to exercise a form of veto that empowers her to amend a draft law after it has been approved by Congress. Amendments introduced at this stage must be returned to parliament for ratification.

Bachelet wants to modify four areas of the law, including restoring the Institute’s authority to bring court action for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Although it was included in the original bill, this provision was eliminated in its passage through the Senate.

“We welcome the creation of the Institute, although we will wait and see what amendments the executive branch makes, in terms of greater autonomy and the composition” of the Institute’s authorities, Vergara said.

He said that in the bill as it stands, most of the members of the Institute’s board are to be named by the executive and legislative branches – a questionable arrangement that makes the board both judge and plaintiff, and overly dependent on the government of the day.

“So what guarantees would there be if someone wants to bring a complaint about possible human rights violations or non-compliance occurring within the state?” he asked.

According to Viera Gallo, if the president’s proposed amendments are confirmed by parliament, the government hopes to promulgate the law in November, when the INDH will finally take shape.

Another aspect of the executive amendment to the INDH bill, highlighted by Vergara, is the reinstatement of the independent National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated and pronounced on cases of forced disappearance during the military regime, and of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture.

These commissions were established for specified terms, now expired, after Chile’s return to democracy. The official reports of their findings allowed the state to document the crimes committed by state agents during the dictatorship.

Based on the combined information from both reports, the state recognises that over 30,000 people were victims of crimes against humanity committed during the de facto regime headed by Pinochet, who died in December 2006 without ever having been convicted in a court of law.

But associations of victims’ relatives and human rights organisations claim this figure does not reflect the real magnitude of the persecution and the human rights violations perpetrated by the armed forces.

“We have always believed in the possibility that some people, for different personal or family reasons, did not testify before the commissions. Therefore we think there are still people who do not feel that any reparations have been made to them in relation to violations committed by state agents,” Vergara said.

When the law is finally passed and the new Institute set up, the two commissions will be reinstated for six months to register new complaints.

On Sept. 11, throngs of people participated in ceremonies marking the anniversary of the coup that overthrew former socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973) with floral tributes, banners reading “Allende Lives”, photographs of victims, loud cries for justice, candles, music and poetry.

But as on previous anniversaries of the coup, hooded protesters blocked streets and set fires in poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Santiago, and clashed with the police. One young man, 23-year-old Alexis Rojas García, was shot in the head and died during the disturbances. It is not clear who fired the bullets that killed him or whether he was participating in the roadblocks.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Mar 20 2009 (IPS)

Although agricultural exports are among the most productive and steadily growing sectors in Chile, rural women continue to face precarious jobs, low wages, little access to land and the growing dominance of agribusiness.

Alicia Muñoz, president of ANAMURI. Credit: Courtesy of ANAMURI.

Four hours later, the highway into Los Cristales, a farming town of 2,600 people located 330 km from the capital, turns into a dirt road.

In the town itself, there is only one paved road.

Large apple orchards and fields of wheat or potatoes for export, along with public offices and large houses scattered here and there give way to small family plots next to modest homes and low-income housing complexes with little surrounding land.

“It’s not easy to have a bit of land here. I have a tiny little plot,” Los Cristales resident Miriam Guzmán told IPS. “But not everyone has access to a little plot of land to grow their own crops. I was lucky to inherit.”

The land where Guzmán grows her family’s vegetables and a few crops for market is part of an inherited field that was divided between her and her three siblings. Her portion, where she grows mainly onions, potatoes and tomatoes, is 1,000 square metres in size. She is saving up to build a house with the aid of a government subsidy for rural housing.

“It’s not even big enough to raise some livestock. My siblings already have their homes. But since I don’t have mine yet, I’m taking full advantage of the land in the meantime, because when I build my house, the land area is really going to shrink,” said Guzmán.

Lack of access to land is especially a hurdle for women. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) stresses the urgent need to provide equal access to land in order to strengthen global food security.

Lack of security in terms of land tenure, ownership or use is one of the main obstacles to an increase in agricultural productivity and income for rural women, says the United Nations agency, whose regional office is based in Santiago.

The National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), which groups around 10,000 women farmers, says the Chilean state has yet to respond fully to their demand for equal access to land and for solutions to the specific social and economic problems they face.

“Very little land is in the hands of small farmers, because they were driven under during 17 years of dictatorship,” the president of ANAMURI, Alicia Muñoz, told IPS.

Muñoz pointed out that the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet rolled back the redistribution of land that had been carried out under an agrarian reform programme by the government of president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), after the socialist leader was overthrown by Pinochet.

Today, nearly 19 years after Chile’s return to democracy, most of the country’s farmland is in the hands of agribusiness interests.

The process was described as the “empresarización” (roughly, the “businessation”) of the Chilean countryside, in an “analysis on the ownership of agricultural land from a gender perspective”, drawn up by the Agriculture Ministry’s Office of Agrarian Studies and Policies (ODEPA).

Although only 11 percent of all rural properties are owned by the business sector, 64 percent of farmland in Chile is in the hands of private companies.

The distribution of land is determined by the market in this South American country of 16.5 million people, where only 13 percent of the population is rural.

Since it was adopted by the dictatorship, the neoliberal free-market model has prevailed in Chile, say analysts.

In an interview with IPS, Alfredo Apey, head of agrarian policies in ODEPA, said “many companies have acquired land and are getting involved in agribusiness: vineyards, fruit exporting companies, and limited liability companies…which is not necessarily good or bad.”

The problem, he said, is when companies, which are more efficient in terms of productivity and production, crowd out small farmers and leave them with less and less land.

And that is precisely what small farmers are worried about, especially in the face of a global economic crisis whose impact on a sector that is highly dependent on exports has just begun to be felt.

The debts that built up last year as a result of harvest loss caused by severe drought could be compounded by new debts that will ultimately drive more small farmers off their land.

In that case, “it has a negative effect from the cultural point of view,” because it affects social and economic equilibrium and fuels the rural exodus to urban areas, said Apey.

Women without land

The business community’s growing control over land has created additional hurdles to women’s access to rural property, studies show.

Seventy-five percent of the owners of family farms are men and only 25 percent are women, who own just nine percent of Chile’s farm and forest land.

The inequality in the distribution of land has not changed in the last 10 years, said Apey.

Associations of women farmers complain that this inequality is rooted in a patriarchal culture and that the state has done nothing to generate more equal access to land.

Although ANAMURI says Chilean governments have favoured agribusiness over small farmers, the group acknowledges that President Michelle Bachelet, in office since March 2006, has at least expressed concern over the situation of rural women.

For his part, Apey pointed to several government initiatives aimed at eradicating gender inequality, such as measures to improve women’s access to credit and to irrigation and forestry programmes.

He also mentioned policies like government purchases of land to restore the property of indigenous communities, and initiatives to help the rural population stay on their land and continue to carry out their traditional activities.

“For us it is important, not only to recuperate land, but to keep people, especially the smallest-scale farmers, from losing their property as a result of the inequalities of the productive processes,” said Apey.

“That is why there are credits and development and technology transfer programmes to support families” who depend on small-scale farming for a living, not only to help them continue to practice subsistence farming, but to strengthen and expand their activities, he added.

ANAMURI’s Muñoz recognised the advances made by the Bachelet administration, including measures like providing training for rural women, but was critical of the government when it came to the question of access to land and support for small-scale farmers.

“The government supports big business, which does not care if it goes bankrupt today or tomorrow, because the government will come running to bail it out,” she said.

By contrast, “small farmers who own half a hectare of land are not subsidised,” even though they are most vulnerable to the phenomenon of climate change and to price swings, she added.

Guzmán from Los Cristales agrees that greater facilities are available to those who own more land. “But then they start suffering losses. So women, for example, do not dare to get into debt, because the products used here in the countryside are extremely expensive, and if you have a bad season you end up indebted more than ever,” she said.

Low incomes for women farmers

Chile is seen as an example of macroeconomic stability and social advances. But for women in rural areas, the statistics are much less impressive.

The poverty rate in Chile dropped from nearly 40 to 13.7 percent between 1990 and 2006, in both urban and rural areas. But the National Women’s Service reports that rural women are among the most vulnerable social groups, as are female heads of households.

According to researchers at the Latin American Centre for Rural Development (RIMISP), it was not the agricultural growth of the last 15 years that brought down rural poverty levels in Chile, but the diversification of work in the countryside.

The reduction of rural poverty was largely due to the diversification of income, by means of non-agricultural jobs, alternative income-generating activities, and government assistance, RIMISP reported in 2008, in a study on the “agricultural boom and persistence of rural poverty”.

Last year, forestry and farm exports grew 23 percent, to total earnings of 8.4 billion dollars, in a year when exports overall expanded just 0.2 percent, and even fell by eight percent in some industries.

But rural women did not share the benefits of the boom. In fact, their wages have not grown in 20 years, ANAMURI reports.

Female rural workers earn 67 to 150 dollars a month – far below the official minimum monthly wage of 265 dollars. In addition, most of them work at least part of the time in the informal sector, without job contracts, health coverage or payments into the social security programme.

“I work for a small farmer. Right now I am harvesting beans from Monday through Saturday, for eight hours a day, from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon,” Guzmán told IPS.

She earns 10 dollars a day – 240 dollars a month. But that is only during harvest time, from November to March.

“This work is really bad for women,” said Guzmán. “It’s really hard, heavy work. Generally you work in large fields, or for companies. And it’s bad, because the season is short and if you don’t take advantage of it, winter comes and there is no work.”

She gets by the rest of the year working as a domestic in nearby towns, where she earns even less.

The vegetables she grows feed her family and earn her “a few pesos” on the market, says the 32-year-old Guzmán, whose partner is unemployed and who wants to build a house before they have children.

Muñoz said that in ANAMURI’s view, it is the agribusiness and agroexport model that has devastated the countryside and reduced the number of small farmers.

The solution, she said, would lie in a change of model, in order to enable traditional family farmers to help design their own farm and food policies, to move towards food sovereignty, and to underscore the need for a land reform programme once again.

“The current model does not favour small-scale production or distribution of food; on the contrary it destroys the environment, generates labour precariousness and devalues agricultural labour and the work of rural women,” said Muñoz.

Excerpt:

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Feb 23 2009 (IPS)

“They burst in aiming machine guns at us. They found him in the hallway, they grabbed him by the hair, they threw him on the floor and they beat him up,” Ida Huenulef told IPS, describing the arrest of her son Miguel, the first indigenous Mapuche activist to be charged under the Anti-Terrorist Law by the government of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

Protest march for the freedom of Mapuche prisoners. Credit:

Miguel Tapia Huenulef was arrested in front of his entire family, who were held at gunpoint and intimidated during the violent operation in the middle of the night of Feb. 11.

“I went to get my daughter and they pointed a machinegun at her head, and when she picked up her little daughter, another carabinero came and pointed his weapon at her little head,” said Ida Huenulef, describing how the police treated her 20-day-old baby granddaughter.

Miguel Tapia Huenulef, 45, was arrested as a suspect in an arson attempt perpetrated in January on an estate called San Leandro near the town of Lautaro, in the region of Araucanía, over 600 kilometres south of Santiago.

He was also wanted for his alleged involvement in an attack on the Public Defender’s Office in Temuco, the capital of Araucanía, in December 2008.

Rural Araucanía is the heartland of the territory claimed by the Mapuche as their traditional land and is the centre of indigenous activism. (The word Mapuche itself translates as “the People of the Land.”)

The police reported finding weapons, including a nine-millimetre submachine gun with two ammunition clips, as well as ingredients for making bombs and several marihuana plants.

The Tapia Huenulef family and Mapuche organisations say Huenulef is being harassed, and the weapons discovery was a staged event designed to incriminate him, just because he is an indigenous person.

“No, nothing at all, nothing of the sort. They say my children had assault weapons, what do you think, who would do such a thing, living with their family and with children in the house, and keep weapons in the home!” Miguel’s mother exclaimed.

She added that the police did not find anything in the bedroom, “because they left, the carabineros went away without having found a thing. And later on I saw people passing by carrying backpacks and other luggage.”

Enrique Antileo, a spokesman for the indigenous organisation Meli Wixán Mapu (“The Four Corners of the Earth” in the Mapuche language, Mapuzungun), told IPS that the raid on the house is an example of the repressive policies of the authorities.

“It was a set-up, they planted the weapons, we can swear to that. We will support the family through thick and thin. This is the continuation of a policy to repress the Mapuche social movement,” Antileo said.

THE ANTI-TERRORIST LAW

Interior Minister Edmundo Pérez Yoma told the press that the case had all the hallmarks of a terrorist organisation, “consequently we are going to apply all the appropriate measures; in fact, we are going to invoke the Anti-Terrorist Law.”

A week after his arrest, the Tapia Huenulef family had still not seen Miguel, who was being held incommunicado and had been transferred to the Araucania region, they were told by the authorities. They were not aware of the Interior Minister’s statements.

The Under-Secretariat of the Interior and the regional government of Araucanía told IPS that a criminal prosecution under the Anti-Terrorist Law, signed by Under-Secretary Patricio Rosende, had indeed been presented in court, but they declined to comment further.

This is the first time the administration of socialist President Bachelet has used the Anti-Terrorist Law against a Mapuche. The controversial law was created during the military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) in order to hound political opponents. It extends the powers of the police and the justice system.

“During her electoral campaign, (Bachelet) promised not to use this law in cases involving members of the Mapuche people,” said Rodolfo Valdivia, the co-director of the Observatory on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (ODPI).

The Mapuche people’s struggle in support of their demands is not an act of terrorism, Valdivia told IPS. “In actual fact, there is no organisation for the purpose of sowing fear among the population, there is no organisation that would commit those crimes defined in law as terrorist crimes,” he said.

“We are not surprised that the Bachelet administration, in collusion with powerful economic interests, should resort to arbitrary laws to try to contain the Mapuche protest movement,” Antileo said.

The Anti-Terrorist Law is one of the legacies of the dictatorship drawing the heaviest criticism from indigenous organisations and human rights groups.

In recent years, the Chilean state has received recommendations for reviewing its legislation and policies in relation to the demands of the Mapuche people from a number of bodies, such as Amnesty International, ODPI, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous People, Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

PERSECUTION AND HARASSMENT

“There is a growing trend to criminalise Mapuche protests in general. The Mapuche people, when they protest, have historically been silenced in the most violent ways imaginable,” Valdivia said.

The government denies harassment, and does not acknowledge the existence of Mapuche political prisoners, as indigenous organisations allege. Human rights observers take the opposite view.

“From the point of view of human rights, of course there are (political prisoners). They are in jail because of their way of thinking, because they want autonomy and want the autonomy of the Mapuche people to be recognised,” Valdivia said.

Activists recognise and appreciate the steps Bachelet has taken toward securing constitutional recognition of Chile as a multicultural state, and the many education and health initiatives that benefit original peoples.

But the government’s response to the historical demands of the Mapuche people, including their territorial claims, remains lukewarm. Their demand for autonomy – recognition not only as a particular culture within the country, but as a Mapuche nation with political and territorial rights – is disregarded, and when conflicts arise they are treated by the justice system as criminals.

According to the Meli Wixán Mapu organisation, more than 40 indigenous people are imprisoned, either pending trial or following conviction in cases related to their collective demands. About 500 Mapuche have been prosecuted since the country’s return to democracy in 1990. In the organisation’s eyes, they are political prisoners.

“They are not criminals, they have not committed armed robbery or rape or anything like that. All they have done is take action within the framework of our people’s movement to reclaim our rights,” Antileo said.

In Valdivia’s view, the recent acquittal by a court of Avelino Meñaco, a “lonko” (traditional Mapuche authority) from the Pascual Koña community, illustrates the flimsy grounds of the practice of bringing criminal charges against Mapuche activists.

After eight months in jail, Meñaco was acquitted of the charge of attempting to set fire to a lakeside cabin, thanks to expert defence by lawyer and former judge Juan Guzmán, famed as the first judge to prosecute Pinochet on human rights charges upon the former dictator’s return to Chile after over a year of house arrest in London.

“There is evidence of a certain amount of persecution, because the authorities are seeking criminal convictions against Mapuche ‘lonkos’ and leaders. But as soon as the criminal justice system takes over, it finds that there is no proof on which to convict them, and so in several cases they have been declared innocent,” said Valdivia.

According to the 2006 National Socio-Economic Characterisation Survey, 1,060,786 people, equivalent to 6.6 percent of the Chilean population, identified themselves as indigenous people. Of these, 19 percent had incomes below the poverty line, that is, they were officially regarded as poor or extremely poor. The Mapuche make up 87 percent of the country’s indigenous people.

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