Today marks 50 years since Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état forever changed the course of Chilean history. His rule brought about years of egregious human rights violations, during which many Chileans were tortured, murdered or forcibly disappeared, and their bodies never found. The trauma still scars the population today.
Pinochet was removed from power in 1990 after 17 years of brutal military dictatorship, and as President Patricio Aylwin took office on 11 March 1990, he declared, ‘Chile doesn’t want violence or war; it wants peace’. Whilst Chile has enjoyed relative peace and human rights have generally been respected since 1990 compared with the 17 years preceding it, Aylwin’s words still ring true more than 30 years later.
Success wearing thin
Chile has largely been heralded for its stability for the last decade or so; prosperous and peaceful, largely untouched by the levels of violence experienced by other countries in the region. The Latin American success story is largely backed up by statistics, such as those of the Global Peace Index, which ranked Chile at 58 out of 163 countries for its levels of peace in 2023.
Despite this, violence has become far more common, and peace far more elusive, in some parts of Chile.
A centuries-long between Mapuche1 indigenous groups and the state over lands previously inhabited by the Mapuche has been increasingly characterised by violence since the 1990s. Mapuche community leaders are demanding that their culture and language be respected and that their ancestral lands, now owned by farms and logging companies, be restored to them. The lack of a government response to these demands acceptable to the Mapuche leaders has led to the formation of several organised Mapuche armed groups who envision an independent nation for the Mapuche people. These more radical groups are responsible for carrying out attacks on trucks and other private property in recent years.
In a 2021 interview with Al Jazeera, Pedro Cayuqueo, a Chilean-Mapuche journalist and former member of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM) Mapuche resistance group explained: ‘I can say very responsibly that 70 percent of the Mapuche people embrace the institutional solution. The more hardline, radical sectors, with all the legitimacy that they may also have, are a minority.’
The violence has intensified to the point that the region of Araucanía, where a large swathe of the Mapuche population lives, has been under a state of emergency since October 2021 and the military has been deployed by the government to provide security.
But attacks continue.
Particularly alarming to religion or belief communities is an epidemic of organised arson attacks which have left at least 60 churches or church institutions, such as seminaries, partially or completely destroyed in Araucanía and in neighbouring regions since 2015.
Accelerants have been used in most cases, indicating deliberate acts of arson, while pamphlets, signs or handwritten notes have been found at many of the sites making reference to the Mapuche separatist cause. The materials left behind clearly indicate that the churches are an intentional target.
These attacks have provoked fear in the country, and particularly in the regions affected, where they are very much a threat to freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), as they deprive their congregations, the majority of whom are Mapuche themselves, of a place of worship, where they can practice their beliefs.
Government response
Initially, the government was reluctant to recognise that churches were being specifically targeted, stating that arson was a common tactic used by separatists, and ‘many things get burned down.’ In spring 2016, however, high-ranking government officials publicly recognised that the attacks constituted a violation of FoRB. The government has launched investigations, but despite some arrests related to an attack on 9 June 2016, the church burnings have continued, with three churches destroyed in August of this year alone.
The attacks have targeted both Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches, and led Andrés Molina Magofke, former Provincial Governor of the Araucanía Region and a Member of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, to declare in 2018: ‘There is no country in peacetime where more churches are burned [than in Chile]’.
In November 2018 the government proposed plans to assist in the reconstruction of 30 Catholic churches and 12 Protestant churches. Similar plans were announced in 2017 but were never carried out. In June 2019 the Provincial Governor of the Araucanía Region confirmed 1.4 billion Chilean pesos (approximately £1.3 million GBP/$1.7 million USD) had been designated for reconstruction efforts, however local media reports suggested that administrative situations had slowed down the process.
In some cases, these delays led communities characterized by high levels of poverty to rebuild their places of worship using their own resources. It is time for the government to tackle the root causes of the conflict to ensure that its citizens are not deprived of a place to practice their religion or belief yet again.
A long road to peace
The victims of these attacks, those whose churches have been destroyed, are mostly Mapuche themselves. There has been speculation that those responsible are a small group supported by non-indigenous outside organisations associated with extreme anti-Western movements in other parts of Chile, or that elements from anti-Western groups have joined with the Mapuche separatist cause and are now pushing their own agenda. Communities of faith are a target because they are an integral part of a stable society, they promote community and unity and sustain the social fabric. Without legal recourse these communities will become increasingly vulnerable, defenseless and invisible.
Securing peace will likely be a complex endeavour. International human rights law states that a State must respect and uphold the human rights of its citizens, but the severity of violence and the high levels of fear in these regions inhibits many victims from filing legal complaints. This means they are not recognised as victims of human rights violations within Chile’s judicial system. They are also not recognised as victims by the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), because the aggression comes from non-state actors, nor are they able to seek the help of the regional Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS, since they have not exhausted domestic remedies.
With seemingly no-one willing or able to hear the case of those affected by the attacks on places of worship, a culture of impunity has been permitted to take root.
This is an issue across much of Latin America, as well as in other continents. In many areas, the systematic violence of non-state actors leads to the disappearance of rule of law. Non-state actors exert violence on innocent civilians to bring entire territories under their control and profit from activities such as drug trafficking and other illicit activities, as is the case in many parts of Colombia and Mexico.
Mobilizing the military will not stop non-state actors from gaining a foothold in society if the government does little to address policies that are driving the conflict in Chile. If these groups remain unchallenged, or if they are not challenged in the right way, they pose not only a threat to human rights, but also to security across the country and the stability of the government.
As Chile seeks to amend the constitution of the 1980s, written during Pinochet’s dictatorship, it is crucial that FoRB is guaranteed for all Chilean citizens without distinction. President Gabriel Boric must focus as a matter of urgency on combatting the pervasive violence in these central Chilean regions, prioritising the protection of vulnerable communities who continue to experience human rights violations at the hands of non-state actors.
Chile doesn’t want violence or war; it wants peace, but this will not come easy.
By CSW’s Latin America Deputy Team Leader, Emily Featherstone
- The Mapuche are an indigenous people who live in parts of Chile and Argentina and continue to try to reclaim their ancestral lands. ↩︎