The Chilean president Gabriele Boric landed this Thursday Mapuche area, in La Araucanía, during his first visit to the region since taking over the presidency in March. His arrival was framed in a series of violent incidents, which began before the arrival of the president and in the refusal of his presence.
Boric landed at La Araucanía airport, in the municipality of Freire, to begin a two-day tour, during which he will visit Temuco, Angol, Villarrica and Lonquimay.
The visit includes a large safety device. It is estimated that around 300 police officers have been assigned to the president’s guard.
But, as in March, when a delegation from the Interior Minister traveled to the region (attacked by gunfire on their way to a meeting in a community), the violence sets the pace for this new visit.
As a prelude to Boric’s arrival, new arson attacks occurred in the region on Wednesday just hours before the presidential visit.
An indeterminate group of subjects set fire to a building and vehicles in the Bajo Meco sector, in the municipality of Lautaro, in the south of the country.
Boric has arrived seek answers to violence who live in the area and also to respond to the requests of the Mapuche ancestors for the restitution of lands.
Before the trip, Boric listened to concerns from lawmakers in the region focused on the issue of security.
The bench of the National Renewal on the right will ask Boric to declare the Arauco Malleco Coordinator (CAM), whose founder has been detained since September for inciting violence.
Congressman Jorge Rathgeb told El Mercurio newspaper that, along with the state of emergency enforced in the region, it must also accelerate “other measures that sleep in Congress, such as the usurpation law, intelligence, the theft of agricultural inputs. , because so far the topic of the theft of wood has been successful ”.
His peer Miguel Mellado will ask “once and for all increase the contingent of soldiers and carabinieri in the area”.
extortion of farmers
He said “we’re at the end of the year, the crops are comingWhere does the extortion of farmers come from and the pressure to pay a certain amount of bribes in order to get what is the product of their labor during the year and do it to produce.
Senator from the ruling Democracy Party, Jaime Quintana, warned that “no visit from a single president resolve automatically the problems that exist there “, but he appreciated the trip and noted that” I hope that in this visit I can give an answer to those needs in which there is a conflict and require dialogue and a political solution “.
CAM calls to fight
While the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, assured that the new attack in La Araucanía “will not prevent the presence of the president”, CAM called for the government’s strategy to be “repudiated and fought”which, he said, “obeys the interests of the oligarchy”.
Tohá said that “we still have no way of assessing whether (the attack) is related to a reaction or to the creation of a climate resulting from the upcoming presidential visit that we have been announcing for a long time.”
He immediately added that “what we can say is that there is no doubt that this will not prevent the presence of the president and that is not why he has waited for this date to make the visit”.
He explained that the delay has to do “with the preparation of the conditions to have a substantial visitno one doubts that the president goes to the region just to say ‘I’ve already been there’ “.
The CAM instead argued that the visit “is part of a strategy of the current government, which seeks to legitimize itself against sectors that accept the institutional crumbs of a system in crisis. His trip to Wallmapu is due to the interests of the oligarchy, in power economic groups that are directly confronted with the Mapuche cause, since under their government the structures of domination against which we have historically fought have worsened.
Source: Ansa
ap
Source: Clarin
