Photograph Source: Ministerio Bienes Nacionales – CC BY 2.0

Some 40 people form a circle on the dusty, late-summer grass. Following days of uncertainty and fear, cut off from most forms of communication, families from Mapuche communities in Argentina’s Chubut province gather to talk about what happened to them on Feb. 11.

At 7 AM that Tuesday, hundreds of Argentina’s armed provincial and federal police forces raided their homes, smashing windows and destroying belongings. The special forces, wielding assault rifles, held men, women and children at gunpoint for more than ten hours.

During their day of terrorizing Mapuche families, police took cell phones and computers, leaving the communities—spread over miles at the eastern base of the Andes—cut off from each other. They confiscated books and farm tools, forced indigenous men, women and children to give DNA samples, semi-stripped young women and photographed tattoos and other body markings, manhandled elders, and separated young children from their parents while forcing toddlers to witness the violence against their mothers. In the twelve simultaneous strikes, police also broke into a Mapuche community radio in El Maiten, Radio Petu Mogelein, and destroyed vital communications equipment.

These communities, often just a handful of indigenous families that survived the bloody campaigns of genocide and displacement throughout Argentina’s colonial history, are the now the target of a new offensive under the “anarchocapitalist” policies of Javier Milei. The repression aims at stripping them of the little they have left of their ancestral territory and placing it in the hands of some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest billionaires.

Trawun, testimony

Outside one of the homes that was raided, Mapuche community members described the violence. A few international journalists and representatives of regional human rights organizations observed the trawun—a community gathering to share information, repair the community and plan strategy. We strained to hear the words of their testimonies as the wind whipped through a stand of poplar trees.

An 84-year-old elder pushed up his sleeve to show bruises from being thrown to the ground and cuffed by police. Young women described being forced to lie face down on the floor for hours and as police intimidated them with their guns. Children witnessed scenes of brutality that will mark them for life.

For hours the security forces refused to present a judicial order or inform indigenous families of the reason behind the violent invasion of their homes. Authorities finally presented a judicial order, signed by judge Jorge Criado, who was formally accused of racial discrimination against the Mapuche in a 2020 case, to investigate a vandalism attack Jan. 18 in Estancia Amancay 80 kilometers away.

Police arrested Victoria Núñez Fernández, a 37-year-old member of the Lof Pillan Mawiza who has lived with and worked with the Mapuche community for years. Witnesses and evidence from GPS records prove that Núñez Fernández was miles from the scene at the time the equipment was set on fire, but the judge ordered 60 days of house arrest as government authorities continue to declare her guilt.

Forest fires as a smokescreen

Since they began in December, Argentine government propaganda has blamed the Mapuches for forest fires that have burned more than 50,000 hectares of mostly national forest land in Patagonia. It’s a triple ploy– to distract from the role of climate change and government negligence in the fires, to divert attention from real estate interests waiting to take over land for megaprojects, and to criminalize the indigenous people who are the last the remaining bulwark against the mass exploitation and destruction of one of the world’s largest freshwater and forest reserves.

“It’s so outrageous that we should be blamed when actually the Mapuche community has always done everything to protect life here. We´re part of the territory that we defend, and we’re going to protect the life of the river, the life of the mountain, the life of the forest”, Evis Millán of the Lof (community) Pillan Mawiza told me in an interview at her ranch by the river.

“We would never set fire to it. This set-up that the government of Chubut is carrying out with the national government has a clear objective–to name an internal enemy to cover up the criminalization and eviction of the Mapuche........

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