CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Mapuche Struggle in the New Far-Right Chilean Government

Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

With far-right president  José Antonio Kast presiding over Chile since March 2026, the country has seen a dramatic shift since the days of Gabriel Boric. Kast has taken a harder security approach to the Mapuche struggle in southern Chile, where Indigenous communities continue to contest State control over ancestral territories in Wallmapu. The conflict concerns land and extractive industries and competing notions of territorial sovereignty. The Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), an autonomist and revolutionary Mapuche organization, has been at the forefront of some of the most militant forms of resistance.

In this interview, exclusive for Foreign Policy In Focus, scholar and author Ethan Madarieta looks at the long history of Mapuche dispossession and the incorporation of land into Chile and Argentina. Madarieta argues that describing the struggle simply as a “land conflict” hides the actual differences in how Mapuche institutions understand the body and political authority. Further, he discusses Mapuche resistance and what peace and reconciliation might look like beyond the transfer of land parcels.

Daniel Falcone: Could you briefly describe your work and provide some contextual background on the Mapuche?

Ethan Madarieta: My work starts from a deep engagement with the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, and its conceptual orders. My study largely focuses on the Mapuche peoples of Ngulumapu, or what is today named Chile, although any political understanding of the Mapuche Nation cannot be siloed within the borders of the nation states of Chile and Argentina. It should be noted that the Mapuche are a heterogenous Nation of peoples locally emergent, which is to say, the Mapuche are the Huilliche, the Pikunche, Pehuenche, Lafkenche, Wenteche, Nagche, and so on, each of a specific co-constitutive relation with the characteristics of a territory, or ad mapu / azmapu. The Mapuche Nation is a political unity that consolidated through Spanish incursion and occupation. Indeed, from 1641 to 1862, the Mapuche were “officially recognized as a nation with the concomitant rights to sovereignty and independence,” although they were still considered to be vassals of the Spanish Crown.

Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s Supreme Director that led the fight for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, acknowledged Mapuche territorial independence south of the Biobío River, using the language of Mapuche “sovereignty” from prior Spanish treaties. In 1862 Coronel Cornelio Saavedra convinced the Chilean National Congress to embark upon the massive genocidal campaigns known as the Pacificación de la Araucanía (Pacification of Araucanía) in Chile.

These campaigns led to the forcible occupation and incorporation of the Mapuche lands south of the Biobío River into the Chilean national territory. They were largely concurrent with the Argentine government’s Conquista del Desierto (Conquest of the Desert), the genocidal clearing and dispossession of the Mapuche territories across Argentina. These projects of elimination, some immediate........

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