Brutal repression of Mapuche—Chile’s native people—continues [Spanish] /Represión de Mapuches se agudiza

Miércoles 4 de agosto 2010
Los excesos de la Ley Antiterrorista
Por Loreto Soto, RADIO.UCHILE.CL
[This is an archival report on a conflict that has not been resolved. Read the addendum, too for an account in English of the same topic.]

Testigos sin rostro, largos periodos de prisión preventiva sin derecho a beneficios y condenas el doble de duras que las de la justicia ordinaria, son algunas de las restricciones que consagra la Ley Antiterrorista que es aplicada en la mayoría de las causas mapuche. Los expertos coinciden en que la invocación de esta ley para este tipo casos es una exageración y que sólo se utilizan para silenciar una protesta social.

Una de las principales demandas de los presos políticos mapuche que está en huelga de hambre hace ya tres semanas en las cárceles del sur del país, es que no se les aplique la Ley Antiterrorista en los procesos judiciales relacionados con sus reivindicaciones históricas.

Esta legislación, entre otras cosas, establece penas mucho más duras para los mismos delitos tipificados en el Código Penal. Y es que cualquier acción que tenga apellido de “terrorista”, automáticamente recibe un trato diferente porque, de acuerdo a la definición de Naciones Unidas, un acto terrorista es equivalente a un crimen de guerra en periodo de paz.

Pero además hace que los procedimientos judiciales sean mucho más complejos para los acusados, ya que “establece una serie de restricciones a las garantías del debido proceso”, indica el abogado experto en asuntos indígenas del Observatorio Ciudadano, José Aylwin.

De hecho, si una persona es procesada bajo esta legislación, se puede mantener el secreto de investigación por largos periodos. También permite la protección de los testigos, lo que da dado lugar a la utilización de testigos sin rostros que difícilmente pueden ser interrogados por la defensa, y admite la intercepción de las comunicaciones del imputado. Pero además, la ley Antiterrorista dificulta enormemente la aplicación de medidas cautelares distintas de la prisión preventiva, por lo que las personas procesadas son privados de libertad por mucho tiempo.

Y, precisamente, bajo estas condiciones son juzgados la mayoría de los casos que tienen que ver con el conflicto mapuche. Debido a las limitaciones que consagra esta ley, en algunas ocasiones, los acusados terminan siendo liberados sin ningún cargo, luego de pasar largos periodos en los recintos penitenciarios.

Emblemático fue el juicio de la documentalista Elena Varela, quien luego de un proceso de dos años, el requisamiento de su material de trabajo, su encarcelamiento y de ser acusada bajo la ley antiterrorista, fue absuelta por el tribunal oral en lo penal de Villarrica.

El caso de Luis Tralcal Quidel también es un ejemplo de los excesos de la aplicación de esta ley. El comunero fue acusado de participar en el incendio de predios forestales en Cholchol. Después de un largo tiempo en prisión preventiva fue liberado porque el Ministerio Público no lo pudo vincular con ningún delito.

Reformas a la ley, una decisión política

La ley 18. 314 o Antiterrorista fue promulgada el 16 de mayo de 1984 durante la dictadura militar. Sin embargo, fueron las reformas que se aplicaron durante el gobierno de Patricio Aylwin las que permitieron que se comenzara a utilizar para los conflictos que se presentaban con los pueblos indígenas en el sur.

Según indica el informe “Indebido Proceso: los juicios antiterroristas, los tribunales militares y los mapuche en Chile” elaborado por la organización Human Right Watch “frente a una situación en la que el gobierno militar había tratado esencialmente el terrorismo como un delito político o ideológico, las reformas de Aylwin eliminaron sus connotaciones políticas y lo tipificaron simplemente como un delito violento gravísimo contra las personas”.

Esta ley considera como crimen terrorista el homicidio, la mutilación, la retención de una persona en calidad de rehén, el envío de efectos explosivos, incendio y estragos; descarrilamiento; apoderarse o atentar en contra de una nave, aeronave, ferrocarril, bus u otro medio de transporte público en servicio; atentar en contra de la vida o la integridad corporal del Jefe del Estado o de otra autoridad política, judicial, militar, policial o religiosa, o de personas internacionalmente protegidas; colocar, lanzar o disparar bombas o artefactos explosivos o incendiarios que puedan causar daño y asociación ilícita para cometer cualquier de estos delitos. La mayoría de estos actos también tiene su correspondencia en el Código Penal.

Sin embargo, para el director del Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Diego Portales, Jorge Contesse, “el ex Presidente Ricardo Lagos fue el primero en entender que había una afectación de carácter terrorista al orden interno y que, en consecuencia, lo que correspondía era la aplicación de este estatuto especial que es la legislación antiterrorista que existe en Chile”.

En este sentido, el senador Renovación Nacional (partido de ultra-derecha—Eds) Alberto Espina recordó que la polémica “ley Antiterrorista como la conocemos hoy fue dictada íntegramente durante el gobierno de Patricio Aylwin. Es una ley promulgada en democracia y aprobada íntegramente por el Congreso”.

Finalmente, con la Reforma Procesal Penal se le dio la prerrogativa al ministerio del Interior, a las Intendencias y a los Fiscales para invocar esta criticada ley y, precisamente, los fiscales relacionados con las causas mapuche la han utilizado sistemáticamente.

Delitos menores, castigos desmedidos

Pero según Jorge Contesse en el caso de las reivindicaciones mapuche “no se cumplen los estándares para hablar de actos terroristas. Son hechos delictuales que pueden ser abordados desde el punto de vista de la legislación común chilena”.

El abogado agregó que “hay que recordar que en el mal llamado conflicto mapuche no ha habido muertos que no sean indígenas. Las personas que han fallecido han sido todas mapuche a manos de fuerzas especiales de Carabineros y en consecuencia, la utilización de esta legislación antiterrorista, lo que hace es distorsionar la utilización de la herramienta penal que legítimamente puede utilizar el Estado”.

En la misma línea, José Aylwin sostuvo que “no hay ningún argumento sólido que permita justificar la utilización de esta legislación especial para acciones de protesta social que, eventualmente en algunos casos, podrían ser constitutivas de delitos, pero que en ningún caso revisten el carácter de terrorista y que si se constituyen delitos, hay legislación ordinaria que permite su sanción”.

De hecho, el comité de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas ya ha llamado la atención a Chile por la definición vaga y amplia que existe de terrorismo en nuestra ley.

“Las conductas terroristas deben estar muy delimitadas, muy claramente tipificadas y en Chile tenemos una definición que todavía es muy amplia, que permite que sea invocada en situaciones de conflictividad social especialmente porque lo que está ocurriendo en la Araucanía es una situación de conflictividad social producto de reivindicaciones de los pueblos indígenas”, afirmó Contesse.

El académico concluyó que “en los casos en que se produzcan hechos delictuales, la ley chilena contempla remedios para ello en la legislación penal. Pero de ahí al salto cualitativo que es la invocación de la ley Antiterrorista, que hace paralelo lo que ocurre en Chile con la aplicación de bombas en España, con derribar torres en Estados Unidos, con estrellar camiones en Paquistán es, desde luego, una exageración”.

Excesos que tienen a una treintena de presos políticos mapuche en huelga de hambre para lograr que la cuestionada ley Antiterrorista no pueda ser utilizada nunca más en sus casos.

_________

Mapuche protests often meet with a violent police response. © Flickr user antitezo, Creative Commons license.

Survival International: Mapuche hunger strike continues
Posted by Terri Hansen on 9/16/10 • Categorized as indigenous peoples,land

Thirty-four Mapuche prisoners in Chile were nearing the seventieth day of a hunger strike by mid-September.

Their protest began to highlight the use by the Chilean government of anti-terror legislation to criminalize attempts by the Mapuche to recover their ancestral land. Although the Mapuche were only conquered in the 19th century after many years of resistance, most of their lands have since been confiscated by logging companies and wealthy farmers.

Several days ago four Chilean MPs who were visiting the strikers in jail announced that they were themselves joining the hunger strike.

The decision to prosecute the Mapuche under Chile’s strict anti-terror laws means that they can be detained indefinitely, tried in military courts, and receive far harsher sentences than would be the case in a civilian court.

In a belated response to the hunger strike, Chile’s President Piñera has proposed some modifications to the anti-terror legislation. The Mapuche, however, charge that these changes were planned anyway, and there is widespread suspicion that the government’s real motivation is to concede just enough to end the protest before Chile celebrates its Bicentennial on September 18th.

Chile ratified the key law on indigenous peoples, ILO Convention 169, two years ago, but has made little progress in implementing its provisions.

Further information (in English): Mapuche International Link. In Spanish: http://www.mapuche.info/.

Read the original story at Survival International. Read related story at Indian Country Today. See also, At the roots of Mapuche resistance

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US media seeks to legitimize Ryan’s extreme-right agenda

By Patrick Martin, WSWS.ORG

Ryan: Standard-bearer for the right. Next we might hear he can also walk on water.

The corporate-controlled US media, both conservative and liberal, has largely praised the selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as the Republican candidate for vice president. In the midst of the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, the media has seized on Ryan’s selection to insist that the central issue in the elections is not unemployment or poverty, but the deficit.

The response on the right was predictable, given that the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and other standard-bearers of ultra-conservative politics had been demanding that the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, choose a far-right running mate.

Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of a publishing empire that includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, gushed on Twitter that Ryan was an “almost perfect choice” and declared, “Now we can choose between Greek and US dream.”
Murdoch’s enthusiasm is understandable, since the budgets Ryan has drafted for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would funnel trillions in new tax cuts to the super-rich at the cost of the destruction of Medicare, Medicaid and other social safety net programs.

More revealing is the respectful, even friendly, treatment accorded Ryan by pillars of the liberal media establishment. Time magazine headlined its report, “Romney Goes ‘Bold’,” saying that the Republican nominee had “turned to a rising star whose fiscal vision dazzles the right…” Eight months ago, Time named Ryan one of its four runners-up for “Person of the Year” for his role in drafting the 2011 House Republican budget that would privatize Medicare.

The magazine wrote at the time that Ryan had become “the most influential American politician” because he had “managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America’s rapidly rising public debt.” It continued: “He brought an ugly issue out of the foggy realm of think tanks and blue-ribbon panels and dropped it into the middle of the national debate in time to define the next presidential election.”

Here Time reveals the real significance of the Ryan selection, regardless of the effect it has on the outcome of the Romney-Obama contest. Once again, the Republican Party is setting the agenda for the corporate-controlled two-party system, pushing official bourgeois politics further to the right, whoever is inaugurated next January 20.

Even more pernicious is the commentary in the New York Times, which sets the agenda for the liberal wing of the US political establishment. The Times carried four separate columns Tuesday praising the Ryan selection and portraying it as foreshadowing a turn towards serious debate in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Under the headline, “Saving Private Romney,” foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen wrote that by selecting Ryan, “Romney has provided a spark” and insured a serious political debate “that is no less than the United States deserves.”

He continued: “I applaud the Ryan pick because it places front and center what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has called the greatest long-term threat to America’s national security: its debt.”

Business columnist Joe Nocera hailed the selection of Ryan as “do I dare say this?—good news for lots of people,” who would energize both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, for opposite reasons. “But, most important, it seems to me that the Ryan pick creates the potential for the country to have the debate, in a national election, that it needs to have about the size and role of the federal government.”

Nocera praised the vice presidential candidate: “Ryan is, in many ways, the perfect Tea Party standard-bearer. He is likable, engaging, wonkish and smart… What sets him apart is that he is the rare politician who has been willing to put meat on the bones so that everybody can see what he has in mind.”

Liberal columnist Frank Bruni was more critical of the substance of Ryan’s policies, but praised the packaging, writing, “Ryan has precisely the kind of styling and clearly defined brand that Romney lacks. It’s striking… What Romney stands to gain most from him isn’t a swing state or two. It’s driving lessons.”

Ross Douthat, one of the conservative pundits in the Times stable, completed the foursome, with a blog posting headlined “Why Moderates Should Like Paul Ryan” that was even more effusive than the commentaries of Cohen and Nocera.

Douthat claimed that Ryan had rebuffed those in his own congressional caucus who had opposed offering any alternative to the $700 billion in Medicare cuts incorporated into Obama’s health care legislation—cuts the Republicans claimed to oppose in the course of their demagogic campaign in the 2010 elections. Ryan not only pushed through his own far-reaching Medicare privatization scheme, he offered a plan for Social Security “reform” (i.e., privatization and benefit cuts) which his own party decided not to embrace, at least until after the next election.

“To the extent that there is a plausible Republican response to the Obama agenda, he’s the biggest reason it exists,” Douthat added, concluding, “As a presidential candidate, Romney picked his running mate the way he probably made hiring decisions as a businessman. Out of an array of qualified applicants, he picked the man who’s done the most impressive and important work.”

What all of these journalistic paeans evade is an honest presentation of the impact the House Republican budgets drafted by Ryan would have on working people in the United States. The proposals advanced by Ryan would wipe out social programs on which tens of millions depend: nearly 50 million on Medicare, an equal number on Medicaid, and millions more for whom food stamps, home heating assistance and other programs are the difference between subsistence and destitution.

On Medicaid alone, for example, the Ryan plan called for $700 billion in cuts over the next decade, which would require, according to a Kaiser Foundation analysis, throwing 14 to 19 million people off the program, many of them children. Ryan’s pledge to impose a ceiling of 3.75 percent of gross domestic product for all domestic non-entitlement spending would require a 92 percent reduction in programs ranging from education and housing to mass transportation and environmental cleanup.

While these draconian measures would be applied to public social spending, the Ryan plan calls for another $5 trillion in additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, on top of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that are now scheduled to expire on December 31.

In the avalanche of commentary and coverage since the Ryan selection was announced Saturday, very little notice has been taken of the many similarities between the Obama health care program and Ryan’s program for the privatization of Medicare. Both center on the use of state-run exchanges in which individuals buy private insurance with government-issued vouchers.

This mechanism serves two purposes: guaranteeing a vast and profitable captive market for the giant insurance companies and placing a ceiling on the amount the federal government spends on health care, shifting the costs and risks to individual families.

While the media—and the Obama and Romney campaigns—claim the Ryan selection means a substantive debate over social policy, the reality is that there is no significant difference. Both factions of the capitalist political establishment agree that spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs must be drastically slashed, and both embrace the perspective that the working class must pay for the crisis of American capitalism.

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The Kochs whitewashed: the bullshit of Newsmax

Matters of Opinion—Explorations of the right-wing ideology
We think this is total baloney, especially coming from the Koch brothers, but we’ll let our readers decide for themselves.—Eds

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Breaking News from Newsmax.com

Charles Koch: Why We Fight for Economic Freedom
In nations with the greatest degree of economic freedom, citizens are much better off in every way, writes Charles Koch in an op-ed published on Newsmax. One of America’s most successful businessmen, Koch serves as the chairman and CEO of Koch Industries. A strong critic of President Obama’s policies, Koch warns of the insidious, unchecked growth of U.S. government today. “When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything,” Koch writes, “because no one will be producing anything.”

Charles Koch, head of Koch Industries, Inc., calls for more economic freedom and more prosperity for all Americans and says big governments “are inherently inefficient and harmful.”

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In 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I attended an economic conference in Moscow.

Like my father during his visits to the U.S.S.R. in the early 1930s, I was astonished and appalled by what I saw.

Simple necessities, such as toilet paper, were in short supply. In fact, there was none at all in the airport bathroom stalls for fear it would be stolen. Visitors using the facilities had to request a portion of tissue from an attendant beforehand.

When I walked into one of Moscow’s giant department stores, there was next to nothing on the shelves. For those shoppers who were lucky enough to find something they actually wanted to buy, the purchase process was maddening and time-consuming.

Although the government provided universal healthcare, I never met anyone who wanted to stay in a Soviet hospital. Medical services might have been “free,” but the quality of care was notoriously poor.

Reality Check

My experiences in the Soviet Union underscore why economic freedom is so important for all of us.

Nations with the greatest degree of economic freedom tend to have citizens who are much better off in every way.

No centralized government, no matter how big, how smart or how powerful, can effectively and efficiently control much of society in a beneficial way. On the contrary, big governments are inherently inefficient and harmful.

And yet, the tendency of our own government here in the U.S. has been to grow bigger and bigger, controlling more and more. This is why America keeps dropping in the annual ranking of economic freedom.

Devil’s Bargain

Citizens who over-rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self-respect are destroyed.

It was President Franklin Roosevelt who said: “Continued dependence on [government support] induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

Businesses can become dependents, too. If your struggling car company wants a government bailout, you’ll probably have to build the government’s car – even if it’s a car very few people want to buy.

Repeatedly asking for government help undermines the foundations of society by destroying initiative and responsibility. It is also a fatal blow to efficiency and corrupts the political process.

When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything.

Cronyism

Under the Soviet system, special traffic lanes were set aside for the sole use of officials in their limousines. This worsened driving conditions for everyone else, but those receiving favored treatment didn’t care.

Today, many governments give special treatment to a favored few businesses that eagerly accept those favors. This is the essence of cronyism.

Read the rest of this piece on Newsmax.com: Charles Koch: Why We Fight for Economic Freedom
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