Attacks on Mapuche Communities as a Postcolonial Problem

In August 2017, Argentine federal security forces invaded a small indigenous

Mapuche community, Pu Lof Cushamen, in the province of Chubut in the south of
the country. The community was located on land privately owned by Benetton, the
multinational fashion company, which is the largest landowner in Argentina.
Responding to requests by the company to remove community members from the
land, the security forces reportedly locked up the women together with the children,
attacked the men and burned their things. Santiago Maldonado, a man who had
travelled to live in and support Pu Lof Cushamen, disappeared on the day of the raid
and was believed to have been taken by the federal forces. This essay will explain
that attacks on Mapuche communities are a postcolonial problem, by analysing the
roots of this attack, and the role of multinational companies and the Argentine state
from a postcolonial framework.

To understand the violence waged against the Pu Lof Cushamen, we need to

examine how Benetton’s ownership of the land is rooted in a history of colonialism
and its legacies. To do this, we need to look back to the nineteenth century. Although
Argentina (then Río de la Plata) declared independence from Spain in 1816,
historians such as Richard Gott describe Latin American states in the nineteenth
century as ‘white settler colonial societies’, which reflected the kinds of colonialism
existing in other parts of the world (Gott, 2007). From 1878 to 1885, the so-called
Conquest of the Desert, influenced by social Darwinist ideas, expanded the nation’s
frontiers for white settlers by violently seizing land from the Mapuche people, who
many historians think had lived in the region for up to 12,000 years (Hopkins, 2020).
This illustrates how, although now an independent nation, the modern Argentine
state continued colonial practices in relation to the indigenous population. This is
important to recognise when examining the role of non-state actors.

As well as the Argentine state, it is also clear that European finance and private
companies have been central to the contestation of land in southern Argentina. The
land now owned by Benetton was originally sold at a low price to a firm in London by
the Argentine state in 1889, as a gesture of gratitude for the British financial support
and supply of arms during the Conquest (Mascarenhas, 2006). After nationalising
the land in the 1980s, the government then resold the land in 1991 as part of a
neoliberal economic programme, in which a range of public assets and services
were privatised to European and North American investment. Mapuche ancestral
claims to the land continued to be rejected. Moreover, responding to the requests of
private companies the government became increasingly violent towards indigenous
communities located on those territories. Thus, the neoliberal model of the 1990s,
rather than recognise ancestral indigenous land claims, reinforced the links between
the expulsion of the Mapuche from their territory and private companies.

By highlighting these histories, we can characterise the relationship between, on the

one hand, the Mapuche people and their ancestral claims to Argentine territory, and
on the other multinational companies and the state. David Slater argues that a
postcolonial framework seeks to challenge Western discourses of modernisation,
civilisation and development, ‘by making connections with the continuing relevance
of invasive colonial and imperial power’ (2004: 20). Multinational corporations’
presence in the territory, supported by the coercive violence of the Argentine state,
therefore constitutes a colonial reality. Moreover, the public rhetoric of the
government and prominent politicians, describing the Mapuche inhabitants as violent
‘delinquents’ and ‘anarchists’, can be understood as racialised othering (Pannell,
2017). This is a common feature of modern discourse towards demographic groups
that are perceived as obstacles to progress and civilisation, and is not far removed
from the racist ideas driving the Conquest of the Desert. From a postcolonial
perspective, however, the Mapuche claim to the land, although not based on legal
ownership, may be just as legitimate as Benetton’s, and the greater violence clearly
emanates from the state.

This essay has attempted to understand the background of the 2017 attacks on
Mapuche communities from a postcolonial framework. By exploring the historical role
of the Argentine state reproducing colonial practices and the ownership of land by
private companies, it has subsequently challenged the notions of progress and
modernisation that is associated with the incursion of capitalist development.
Instead, it has identified how the recent raids on indigenous homes fits into a longer
an ongoing history of colonial violence, and the demonisation of Mapuche
community members by politicians reflects continuing discourses.
References:

Gott, R. (2007), Latin America as a White Settler Society, Bulletin of Latin American
Research, 26(2), 269-289

Goñi, U. (2017) Argentina activist missing after indigenous people evicted from
Benetton land, The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/08/argentina-santiago-maldonado-
benetton-missing-activist.

Hopkins, B.D. (2020), Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the
Making of the Modern State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mascarenhas, T. (2006), The Privatisation of Patagonia, New Internationalist,

https://newint.org/columns/essays/2006/08/01/patagonia/.

Pannell, J. (2017) Benetton in Patagonia – The Oppression of Mapuche in the

Argentine South, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, https://www.coha.org/benetton-in-
patagonia-the-oppression-of-mapuche-in-the-argentine-south/#_edn61.

Slater, D. (2004), Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South,

Relations, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.