It has not been easy.
After two months in power, the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, turned it around to his strategy to tackle a historical problem that, until now, no government has been able to solve.
A strong critic of the deployment of the military in the conflict zones in the south of Chile where the Mapuche communities claim land as part of an ancestral claim, Boric decided this week to militarize.
It did so by decreeing a “limited” state of exception that in practice implies authorization for the military to guard routes and highways in the region of La Araucanía and in the neighboring provinces of Arauco and Biobío, epicenter of a crisis of security that has worsened in recent weeks.
“It is evident that in recent times we have had an increase in acts of violence on the roads, we have witnessed cowards attacks”, said the Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches, on Monday night.
“We have also seen extended roadblocks, which put free transit at risk and cut off supply chains, increasing the cost of living in the most backward areas of our country”, he added, referring to the mobilizations of carriers demanding greater security measures.
The decision is politically complex, given that in his presidential campaign Boric had assured that if he came to power he had no intention of renewing the constitutional state of emergency that his predecessor, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera, had decreed in October of last year and that , after several extensions, was valid until March.
While the harshest voices accuse him of having betrayed that electoral promise, the more moderate ones argue that this new state of exception is not a replica of the measures taken by Piñera, since he is only focused on the protection of public roads and does not establish military operations in indigenous communities.
The “Plan B”
In recent weeks the president of 36 years tried to get Congress to pass a “intermediate state of exception”, a new legal formula that allowed the deployment of the military to guard the roads, without having to resort to the declaration of a constitutional state of exception.
But the proposal, which did not get the necessary votes (and neither did not even have the full support of its own coalition), ended up being rejected.
It is that in some sectors of the Chilean left, the use of the military, even if it is only to protect public roads, is seen as a policy that threatens democracy and respect for individual freedoms.
It was in this context that finally, in the absence of an intermediate formula, the government made the decision to apply this “Plan B”, which does not give the Armed Forces the power to control people or accompany the police forces when enforcing court orders, but in any case uses the same legal tool previously applied to deal with the problem of security.
A contradiction?
With the eroded citizen support and the demands of truckers and forestry workers to reinforce security in the area, the government made the difficult decision to send the security forces.
“It is a measure that it arrives late, but at least it arrives”, said the governor of Araucanía, Luciano Rivas, in statements to the local press.
“They waited 18 days to make this decision and in these 50 days we had 122 attacks“, affirmed the regional authority, defending the management of the previous government.
In dialogue with BBC Mundo, Fernando Pairican, historian and academic from the School of Anthropology of the Catholic University of Chile, argues that there is a sector of the Mapuche movement that has decided to resort to violence to vindicate their demands.
“There are two streams. A disruptive path that seeks self-determination, which is outside the State, and which seeks to achieve autonomy from territorial control. The other is a gradualist path that, in order to achieve autonomy, occupies institutional spaces.”
Although the administration of President Boric, he points out, “has shown greater willingness than other governments to be able to develop a dialogue, they persist in its coalition political parties that have been the architects of a policy of criminalization of the Mapuche”.
That is why , he affirms, “there is a contradiction within the government”.
Part of the political fissures in the coalition have been expressed in cases such as that of the Minister of Social Development, Jeannette Vega -the authority in charge of indigenous issues-, who had publicly opposed the state of emergency and a few days later had to give her support to the president.
Or the negotiations in the that the Communist Party participated, which, at first, was against the idea, but finally ended up aligning itself reluctantly.
The problem of public safety
When he came to government, Boric opted to focus on political dialogue, but after a wave of acts of violence, the The road became increasingly difficult.
So much so, that when Minister Siches traveled to the area for the first time, she was greeted with shots fired into the air.
Those who live in those territories have had to deal permanently with roadblocks, burning of trucks, shooting of hooded men, property seizures and police operations in communities punished by poverty, a scenario to which are added complaints from international organizations about human rights violations.
Opinions about who are ultimately responsible The swords of the violence have become increasingly polarized, while the authorities try to find a formula that allows them to achieve a basic political consensus to advance their objectives.
According to Claudio Fuentes, an academic from the School of Political Sciences of the Diego Portales University, President Boric’s decision “is made in the midst of an escalation of attacks on property and at a time when public opinion is very sensitive to security issues“.
“This scenario has pressured the government to give more forceful responses to the issue of public security in the country, not only in La Araucanía”.
A public opinion with high expectations that apparently has lost patience quite quickly, when the rejection a his management in the surveys exceeds 18%.
“People want to see results on the public order agenda”, says Marco Moreno, director of the School of Government of the Central University of Chile.
“The government has had to resort to the available tools to try restore public order in an area of high complexity due to the demands of radical groups installed in the region”.
In recent weeks the government has accelerated a package of measures related to the conflict in the area.
Among them, the request for a special prosecutor for the area to investigate crimes such as drug trafficking and wood theft, the creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, the participation of the United Nations in the dialogues with representatives of the Mapuche people and the delivery of more resources for the return of lands and the financing of public works.
But since the Mapuche people do not have a single representative, but are organized through different community leaders, the task remains daunting.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss our best content.
- ? Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
-