Chile's top court overturns ruling freeing Mapuche leader Facundo Jones Huala
Last edited Sat Feb 19, 2022, 03:52 AM - Edit history (1)
16-02-2022 10:57
Supreme Court in Chile overturns ruling granting parole to controversial indigenous leader, who has been behind bars since 2018.
FACUNDO JONES HUALA. | CEDOC/PERFIL
Chile's Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a ruling by a lower court granting parole to Mapuche leader Facundo Jones Huala, who was sentenced to six years in prison for arson and illegal possession of weapons.
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Following his arrest, then-Argentine president Mauricio Macri ordered his extradition after the Supreme Court upheld Chile's request.
The regions of Biobío, Los Ríos and La Araucanía in southern Chile have seen several arson attacks on private properties and trucks by radical indigenous groups in the context of a centuries-old conflict in which the Mapuche are demanding land that they claim as their ancestral right and which the Chilean state handed over mainly to forestry companies.
The first inhabitants of Chile and part of Argentina, the Mapuche ("people of the earth" in their native language) number some 700,000 on Chilean soil, out of some 17 million inhabitants of the country.
More:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/chiles-top-court-overturns-ruling-freeing-mapuche-leader-facundo-jones-huala.phtml
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Benetton in Patagonia – The Oppression of Mapuche in the Argentine South
August 9, 2017 COHA
By Jack Pannell, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
On January 10, 2017, two hundred Argentine gendarmes (a federal security force) attacked the Pu Lof (community) of the Mapuches. The group has been occupying land owned by Benetton in the province of Chubut as part of the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance (RAM). A report by Amnesty International states that the security forces committed, “acts of violence and repression […] including beatings, use of batons, women having their hair pulled, and harassment of children in the community.”[ii] Later that day the local police raided the native community for allegedly stealing animals. The following day, police conducted a second attack on another nearby Mapuche community, firing lead and rubber bullets, which resulted in ten injuries, including a member of the community having his jawbone shattered.[iii] [iv] On August 1, the gendarmerie raided the Pu Lof again, with a member of the community, Fernando Jones Huala stating, “They locked up the women, together with the children, in a security box, beat them and burned all their things: mattresses, blankets, toys, they burned everything.”[v] Santiago Maldonado, who was supporting the Pu Lof, disappeared on the same day when he and other protesters clashed with police.[vi] As of publication he remains missing.
Benetton, the global Italian fashion brand, currently owns 2.2 million acres of land in Argentina, an area the size of Puerto Rico. This makes the company the largest private landowner in the country.[vii] It uses the land for livestock, farming, prospecting, fossil fuel extraction, and logging.[viii] The events of January were not the first incident between the state and Mapuche on Benetton land. Despite this, Benetton, which acquired the lands in the late 1990s, claimed on its website in 2010 that the company has, “found itself unwittingly involved” in an issue dating back over 100 years, implying no complicity on the part of the corporation.[ix] Regardless of Benetton’s purported innocence on the issue, it repeatedly has demonstrated a disregard for the rights of the indigenous people when it asserts its right to private ownership is paramount to the Mapuche’s antecedent claims. The Argentine state is also highly complicit in the rejection of indigenous rights, ignoring established legal precedents and actively demonising these groups as criminals to justify their violent oppression. All of these factors have resulted in a situation in which the Mapuche are denied their rights to their ancestral lands, which are enshrined in the Argentine Constitution.
The Origins of Benetton’s Ownership – A History of Genocide and Neoliberalism
To understand the current situation it is important to examine the origins of Benetton’s vast landholdings. The Conquest of the Desert is the most blatant example of the Argentine State’s long-term oppression of the Mapuche. Many historians believe that the Mapuche have lived in Patagonia since 11,000 BCE .[x] The Argentine State seized those lands from the Mapuche in the late nineteenth century. From 1878 to 1885, Argentine forces, led by the notoriously anti-indigenous future president Julio Argentino Roca, conducted “The Conquest of the Desert,” an ironic name, given that the land in question was both fertile and populated. The primary objective was to claim the territory for Argentine agriculture. Racial and social Darwinist ideas were used in order to justify the expulsion of up to 15,000 indigenous people from their lands.[xi] The attacks marked the first true assertion of state power over the Mapuche in Patagonia. The conquest was largely underwritten by British funds, and the Argentine troops were armed with British-made rifles.[xii] As a result, much of the conquered land was awarded to the Argentine Southern Land Company Ltd, based in London, in 1889.[xiii] The company was nationalized in 1982 and renamed Compañía de Tierras del Sud Argentino S. A. (CTSA).[xiv]
During the 1990s President Carlos Menem undertook a neoliberal overhaul of the Argentine economy. One of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism is the privatisation of government services and properties. This manifested itself in the mass privatization of state-owned land.[xv] Menem encouraged rich Europeans and Americans to buy cheap Patagonian land. Among those who purchased land were notable international figures including Sylvester Stallone, Ted Turner, Jerry Lewis and George Soros.[xvi] In 1991 the government sold the CTSA, and all the land it owned, to Edizone Holding International, a company owned by Benetton.[xvii] The company purchased the land for $80 million USD, a fraction of its current value.[xviii] This sale is important to chronicle the oppression of the Mapuche in Patagonia as it established that it was not only the state that held more power than the Mapuche, but also private corporate interests.
More:
https://www.coha.org/benetton-in-patagonia-the-oppression-of-mapuche-in-the-argentine-south/
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You may remember a huge fashion advertising campaign in the US, called "The Colors of Benetton" which appeared in the mid-1990's, before Christmas one year, as they rushed an array of gorgeous cashmere sweaters to the market in a fabulous rainbow of brand new colors not seen before, they were exquisite, perfect, mellow, unusual pastels. Little did I know about the company, for crying out loud! They are monsters. More people should know about them by now.
