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Chilean police allegedly fired buckshot at indigenous Mapuche children during clashes, and then beat and sexually abused the children after their arrest. The indigenous community, in response, has made an international demand for the human rights of the Mapuche people, who have faced decades of forced evictions, discrimination, and waves of violence that have intensified in recent months.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3C5446165ED2CA73&feature=plcp&utm_source=buffer&gl=US&buffer_share=d784c
The incident occurred after 12 indigenous Mapuche activists were evicted while occupying forestry plantations, and injured activists were treated at a local hospital. During a community protest outside the hospital, a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old were shot and arrested by Carabineros, Chile's uniformed police. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a statement reporting the alleged abuse of the children, including that they "allegedly...were beaten and sexually abused."
Violent arrest and police brutality fueled by discrimination are serious violations of the human rights of the Mapuche.
One million Mapuche live in the southern regions of Chile, mostly in small subsistence-farming communities. During Chile's dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, more than 90 percent of Mapuche land, which once spanned over 10 million hectares, was seized by the government to be occupied by forestry companies who serve the expansive paper industry. Recently, Mapuche have taken action against land owners and Carabineros to exercise their right to their ancestral lands.
Both the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recognize the right to ancestral land as a human right of indigenous populations, both as communities and as individuals. Ancestral land is critical to the survival of Mapuche cultural practices, in which the land is Mapu and they are Mapuche, the caretakers of the land. Forestry companies' decision to drastically deplete the resources of the Araucanía region pose a serious threat and have sparked the tensions between Mapuche, Carabineros, and the land owners themselves.
For more information on the current situation in Araucanía and the Mapuche people, please visit the following links:
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/08/08/chile-announces-plan-to-improve-living-conditions-of-the-indigenous-mapuche-peoples
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/08/06/abuse-of-chilean-indigenous-peoples-questioned-by-human-rights-organizations
http://www.unpo.org/article/14649
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/124878
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ansurintcl11&div=3&g_sent=1&collection=journals
