Last week, the Argentine government blamed a hearth that has consumed greater than 7,000 acres of a national park in Patagonia on arson by an armed indigenous group often known as the Resistencia Ancestral Mapuche (RAM).
The Mapuche, an indigenous community who’ve lived for generations in a territory now belonging to Argentina and Chile, have long been at odds with governments and businesses, often over land rights, environmental concerns, and fears of forced assimilation.
Despite the presence of Mapuche Christians, for a period of years, members of groups like Weichán Auca Mapu (WAM) and Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM) targeted quite a few churches. The variety of torched congregations reached greater than 80. The government struggled to arrest and prosecute the attackers.
But after several intense years of terror, slowly the situation appears to be improving.
“We will proceed to bear witness to the gospel,” Abelino Apeleo, an Anglican bishop in Araucanía and in addition an ethnic Mapuche, said in 2017, within the thick of the situation. “We should apply the teachings of Jesus: to forgive, to have mercy, and to like our enemies. At some point they might need our help, and we shall be there for them.”
Answered prayers?
In 2016, Elías Fuentealba witnessed WAM members burn down the small Pentecostal church he pastored in Niagara, a city within the southern division of Araucanía.
“The day of the arson, we gathered and prayed outside the church, ‘Lord, you give, and you’re taking away. Blessed be your name,’” Fuentealba told CT. “When we finished praying, the police told us that, nearby there, that they had caught some suspects of the crime.”
The five gunmen were charged with being members of WAM; at that time, the group had already claimed responsibility for several arson attacks against Catholic and evangelical churches and schools within the region of Araucanía. WAM’s attacks on churches often got here with demands, though ones that the majority congregations were unable to reply to, akin to the discharge of Mapuche prisoners or the return of Mapuche land, which the Chilean government annexed within the Nineteenth century.
The arrest of the Niagara suspects was the one such intervention in the entire church arson cases and these actions initially encouraged Fuentealba’s flock. But the federal government didn’t prosecute as harshly as Fuentealba had wished; it dropped the terrorist charges and sentenced just two of those five initially arrested to 10 years in jail for “common arson.”
In 2021, after serving just two years in prison, they were granted early release on parole.
“We are law-abiding people, however it was hard to appreciate that the federal government only met with the perpetrators, and that justice didn’t work for us victims,” said Fuentealba, who added that he and a few church members were threatened and intimidated through the trial.
‘Because it’s foreign’
Araucanía in southern Chile has the highest percentage of Mapuche (1 / 4 of all those over age 14) of any of Chile’s 16 regions. For greater than 300 years, the Mapuche controlled the southern bank of the country’s second-largest river, the Biobío, which runs through the region. Except for just a few Franciscan missions, which were largely accepted by the indigenous people through the Spanish period of that area, the Mapuches avoided Western colonization until after Chile gained its independence in 1818. When the brand new government sought more centralized control, it began to forcibly assimilate and displace many in the neighborhood.
While nearly all of Mapuche converted to Catholicism prior to now, today evangelicals make up 35 percent of the population, largely attributable to the efforts of Nineteenth-century Anglican and Methodist missionaries, who delivered health care, education, and the gospel to indigenous communities. Many also converted because of this of the Chilean Pentecostal movement within the early 1900s.
While most Mapuche live peacefully amongst non-indigenous Chileans, WAM and CAM have led different land occupation protests, road blockades, and attacks on forestry firms, including burning machinery. But in 2016, their targets became churches, which, beyond their religious purposes, also often served as schools, meeting places, and shelters for those fleeing natural disasters. Many belonged to the poorest sectors of the poorest region in Chile and were attended by Mapuches themselves.
“What they need is territorial control,” Patricio Santibáñez, president of Araucanía’s trade association, told CT. “They don’t want the kids going to highschool, so that they burn the faculties down. They don’t want people going to church, so that they burn the churches. It is to subdue the population in that area.”
The Institute for Economics and Peace ranked Chile at No. 17 on its 2023 Global Terrorism Index.
“To measure the severity of the conflict on this area, we’re talking about no less than 25 highly serious criminal acts per 30 days. Sometimes we’ve reached almost 60,” said Santibáñez.
Many Mapuche consider they’re the rightful owners of the land now owned by businesses and the federal government. They also resent what they see as a relentless infiltration of a foreign culture, which has coincided with the decline of the normal Mapuche identity.
According to community leaders, a lot of these tensions got here to a head in 2015, when the federal government forcibly evicted a Mapuche community occupying lands belonging to a Catholic monastery near Lake Budi. In retaliation for that, “[The radicals] began to say, We are going to burn all of the churches!” said Fuentealba. “But there’s also a deeper issue, where evangelical Christians are sometimes seen as enemies of traditional Mapuche culture.”
Christian leaders often forbade Mapuche converts from participating in indigenous religious practices or ceremonies and openly condemned cultural facets that they felt endorsed occultism or violated the Bible. Though these measures were meant to assist recent Christians grow of their faith, many Mapuche who held on to their traditional beliefs saw these restrictions as dividing their community and separating Mapuche Christians from their heritage.
For radical Mapuche groups, the whole lot from the skin is taken into account an “invasion” of their culture, religion, and territory, said Joel Millanguir, a Mapuche Christian who serves because the Anglican bishop of Araucanía.
“They see the gospel as an intrusion; and since it’s foreign, they reject it,” he said. “Those who perform these attacks are a recent generation of Mapuche leaders who’re unaware of the nice work that the churches have done on this area.”
This polarization has made it harder for Mapuche Christians to each practice their faith and take part in their culture.
“Churches are based in Mapuche communities where terrorist groups operate,” said Stephan Schubert, an evangelical in Chile’s Chamber of Deputies whose district represents a part of Araucanía. “This has restrained among the most extreme violence, however it poses a challenge for many who are evangelical Christians, because they don’t engage in a few of their pagan practices.”
But not all of the animosity toward Christians is unjustified, said Omar Cortés, a former Protestant pastor who now leads the National Office of Religious Affairs.
Christian organizations have a “burden of colonization” and a “history of demonization” of Mapuche spirituality.
“Radicalized groups looking for to attract more attention to their demands resort to attacking churches,” he explained.
‘Face to face’
Santibáñez currently sees a parallel between his country’s situation and that of other countries in Latin America.
“I find similarities with what happened in Colombia, with the FARC. On the ideological side, it also resembles the extremism of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. But finally, it mixes in organized crime, like drug trafficking, lumber theft, animal trafficking, and vehicle theft,” said Santibáñez.
In response to those attacks, the federal government has issued a state of emergency in Araucanía and has dispatched soldiers to protect important roads. Santibáñez notes that in recent times, land seizure crimes have significantly decreased.
“But not armed attacks and arson,” he said.
Nevertheless, Chile has never appeared on Open Doors’ World Watch List, which identifies the highest countries wherein it’s most difficult to be a Christian. And in recent times, though protests and violence have continued overall, attacks on churches have develop into far less frequent, due to the mediation of Christian leaders. The last arson attack on a church in Araucanía occurred in August of last 12 months when one group began a hearth that destroyed quite a few parts of a town.
Still, despite the general decrease in attacks, “only a few people have been detained and convicted,” said Millanguir, the Anglican bishop.
Schubert would love the Chilean National Congress to appropriate more cash for security in Araucanía.
“We face a violation of the human right to freedom of faith, he said. “And the state of Chile has done almost nothing to forestall this.”
Regional funds allocated from the national budget for terrorism victims could be used to rebuild churches, says Cortés of the National Office of Religious Affairs. But that was not the case for Fuentealba’s Pentecostal church in Niagara, which as an alternative relied on the funds of community members and international Christian organizations to rebuild—which it sought to do immediately.
“We ensured that our recent constructing was entirely manufactured from solid and fireproof materials,” Fuentealba told CT.
And despite the fear faced in 2016, he says his congregation has not been frightened by the violence.
“We don’t hate them,” he said, referring to the Mapuche attackers. “We want them to be converted and someday talk over with them about Christ nose to nose.”
