The renewed hunger strike of fifteen political prisoners of the Mapuche resistance movement in Chile has reached a highly critical stage. The prisoners are members of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), a movement that is involved in direct action to recover ancestral lands in order to protect Madre Tierra from spoliation by logging companies and big business latifundios.
The weichafe ecowarriors also identify by their Spanish acronym PPM (Presos Políticos Mapuche). They have been in a protracted struggle for political autonomy and protection of their wallmapu homeland from destructive commercial exploitation. But the Chilean state, under the supposedly leftist government of Gabriel Boric, insists on criminalizing the CAM and stigmatizing any action for national liberation as terrorist.1
Four weichafe commenced a hunger strike on November 13, 2023, and have since been joined by two other groups of PPM. Their two central demands are:
The annulment of the political and unjust convictions without evidence against CAM political prisoners and the right of due process. Their conviction of at least fifteen years imprisonment was not based on evidence but on racist profiling.
Better conditions of detention, respecting their collective rights as Indigenous people, including the implementation of communal modules in prisons. The Chilean state should respect ILO Convention 169 regarding the cultural relevance of the deprivation of liberty of Indigenous peoples.
Doctors advise that once a hunger striker goes beyond sixty days without food, their internal organs begin to collapse and they are in imminent danger of dying. As at time of writing, January 29, 2024, the first group of strikers are seventy-nine days into their protest.
The families of the political prisoners, especially women, have led the resistance outside the prisons, called for demonstrations and a week of protest. They write:
“We confidently await the ruling on the appeal for annulment on February 9 this year and we will be attentive to the political and racist maneuvers of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the government of Gabriel Boric.”
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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