Introduction

Academic discussion has profoundly reviewed the effects of neoliberalism in Latin American countries, defined its origins and metropolitan directives, and even celebrated the programmatic responses that in some countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia have allowed a glimpse of interrupted neoliberalism—not without facing serious problems such as the severe crisis of post-Chavism and the conflicts of Evo Morales regime with some indigenous peoples and its recent setback in recent elections. Revising the case of the long and uninterrupted conflict between the Mapuche people and the Chilean state allows us to see in its extreme rawness the current struggle between global capitalism and the indigenous communities harmed by this system. Chile is not only an example of the strict implementation of the neoliberal model in the 1970s—the first major practical experiment of what would be called the Washington Consensus in the 1990s, which all Latin American countries (except for Cuba) signed to escape, under the guidelines of the IMF and the World Bank, from the decade of economic stagnation caused by the debt crisis in the 1980s. It is also an example in Latin America where a neoliberal state frontal attack on an indigenous people was perhaps forceful, focused, and effective: the so-called agrarian counter-reform of the Pinochet regime of 1974 and Law 2,568 of 1979, which repealed the continuity of land title deeds (Títulos de Merced). Even when the fall of the dictatorship and the return to democracy in Chile could open a scenario of hope for the Mapuche community, the reality has proved them wrong. Despite the opening of intercultural policies and improvements in the institutionalization of indigenous rights (with the enactment of Law 19,253 and the consequent creation of the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) in 1993) when faced with the protests and demands of the Mapuche people—particularly in regards to the recovery of ancestral territories—the state response continues to be that of the neoliberal model of imprisonment and violent repression.