Summary

Since the colonial period, Mapuche resistance in Chile has taken on different shades, oscillating between periods of warlike conflict and little dialogue with the winka (non-Indigenous) authorities and periods of intense political negotiations. Although the Mapuche political world is shaped by individual, collective, and circumstantial interests, it is possible to identify, according to Mapuche historian Fernando Pairican Padilla, two main paths adopted by the Mapuche struggle in contemporary Chile: gradualism and rupturism. While the former path seeks dialogue with the institutional route to achieve the demands of the Mapuche people, recovering the diplomatic tradition of parliaments celebrated since the 16th century, the latter distances itself from the state and political parties, finding in traditional leaders and community ties the basis for political action. Although they adopt different political dynamics, both the gradualist and rupturist paths of the Mapuche movement aim to achieve autonomy, self-determination, and the reconstruction of Wallmapu (Mapuche country).

Throughout Chile’s contemporary history, it is possible to see moments of greater influence of gradualist or rupturist proposals in Mapuche political mobilizations. At the beginning of the 20th century, the first Mapuche organizations, such as Sociedad Caupolicán, Federación Araucana, and Corporación Araucana, demanded political recognition from the Chilean state and fought to recover their lands using the tools made available by the institutional system. From the 1970s onward, the failure of institutional mechanisms to resolve demands for territorial restitution resulted in Mapuche communities developing direct action tactics, such as corridas de cerco (a form of struggle characterized by the displacement of the fence separating Indigenous land from private property), strengthening the path of the rupturist struggle that would be followed by associations such as Ad Mapu, Consejo de Todas Las Tierras, and Coordinadora Arauco Malleco. The context of the first Constitutional Convention, between 2021 and 2022, can be interpreted as the culmination of the confrontation between the political action strategies adopted by the gradualist and rupturist paths of the Mapuche movement. While the leaders of the rupturist organizations rejected the work carried out by the Convention, interpreting it as a legitimizing instance of the colonialist state, the members of the gradualist movement considered the seats reserved for Indigenous parliamentarians to be an unprecedented possibility of inserting Mapuche onto-epistemological principles into the constitutional text.