The government of President Sebastián Piñera has come in for a drubbing from the Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos (INDH), an official body created two years ago to monitor the authorities’ performance in the area of human rights. Prominent among its criticisms, as last year, is police violence. The problems it highlights are still continuing, particularly in the Mapuche heartland in the south.
The INDH’s annual report, Situación de los Derechos Humanos en Chile 2012, was delivered to the President and made public on 10 December. It does acknowledge progress towards a culture of human rights in Carabineros, the paramilitary police, thanks to the creation of a human rights department and such initiatives as the installation of video cameras and the posting of observers in police vans.
This notwithstanding, the INDH concludes from its review of anticrime policies. complaints of police violence and recourse to the state security law (Ley de Seguridad del Estado) that Chile has ‘a series of laws, policies and practices [that conprise] an inefficient security system’ which can undermine the protection of basic rights. Policies based on increasing the severity of punishments and granting greater powers to the state’s forces of order and security, it says, create ‘a field of arbitrariness’ manifest in the incidents of police violence, overcrowding of prisons, and ‘vague and broad’ definitions of criminal offences, as in the antiterrorist law — which establishes ‘exceptional procedures’ that affect the right to due process and violate the principle of equality before the law.
On the specific issue of police violence the report condemns the ‘irregular and disproportionate use of anti-riot shotguns’ and highlights the ‘worrying’ number of complaints about ‘sexual aggression’ against women in demonstrations. The INDH says that in 2012 this violence has mainly affected vulnerable sectors of society, such as women, minors and Indians.
Asked to comment upon the report, interior minister Andrés Chadwick said, ‘We pay attention to the Carabineros’ obligation to use force as the law stipulates, that is, proportionately. We’ll look into this and talk with the General of Carabineros, because they are always very willing, if there is any observation or reservation about some situation that could be considered an excessive use of force, to correct this.’ On the use of the antiterrorist law Chadwick said that this was ‘a law that has full democratic validity in Chile’.
Slow motion
The difficulty of setting things right in this area was brought to the fore later in the month when two jailed Mapuche inmates of Angol prison, Héctor Llaitul and Ramón Llanquileo, reached the 40th day of a hunger strike demanding a review of their sentences. The two, who are leaders of the militant Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) and proclaim themselves political prisoners, were convicted in March 2011 of attacking a public prosecutor and assaulting a farmer, and sentenced, respectively, to 25 and 20 years imprisonment.
They then staged a hunger strike that lasted 86 days before the supreme court reviewed their case and reduced their sentences to 14 and 8 years. They sought a second review, on the grounds that they had been tried twice for the same offences (once by a military court, once by a civilian one), and demanding a second reduction of their prison terms, to 11 and 4 years. This was turned down by the appeals court in Concepción and the case is now again before the supreme court.
Another Mapuche held at Temuco prison, Leonardo Quijón, began a hunger strike on 27 November after a court in Collipulli turned down his request for release on bail. Quijón had been accused of taking part in the 1 September murder of a farmer by several masked persons. He turned himself in two days later claiming that he had not been involved in the crime and he was remanded in custody. Quijón and four other Mapuche inmates then went on a hunger strike which ended with Quijón being hospitalised with a heart ailment.
Up to the time of writing, the prosecutor in charge of the case had not taken a statement from Quijón, despite having been ordered to do so by the judge, nor ordered DNA tests which his lawyer says would exonerate him. Back in 2009 Quijón was charged with involvement in a clash with Carabineros (in which he was injured by shotgun pellets) and the torching of two buses. The government, invoking provisions of the antiterrorist law, had based the cases against him on the statements of unidentified witnesses; the court acquitted him on both charges.
In a separate case, on 12 December the supreme court reversed the ruling of a court in Angol that had sentenced Mijael Carbone Queipul, spokesman for the headman of the Temucuicui community, to seven years imprisonment for the ‘frustrated homicide’ of Carabineros officers in May 2011 and for having fled arrest. The supreme court said that the arguments invoked in the ruling lacked foundation and flew in the face of the rules of logic (no witnesses had identified Carbone). A retrial has been ordered.
Two recent attacks
Meanwhile, violence by Mapuche militants reared its head again. On 20 December near Cañete in the southern department of Bíobío, the historic northern border of Mapuche territory, unidentified raiders entered a forestry establishment in the early hours and set fire to a container. On two others they left graffiti with slogans of the CAM.
Not far from there, at about the same time, a group of four masked people entered a forestry estate, shot dead the caretaker and injured his wife, then set fire to their house and a depot.
The governor of Bíobío, Víctor Lobos, said that no evidence had been found to connect the two incidents, and the public prosecution service said that there was no evidence connecting the second attack with any Mapuche group active in the area. Chief national prosecutor Sabas Chahuán has announced the appointment of a team of four public prosecutors to head the investigation into the attacks.
On 25 December several online services carried a communiqué signed by the ‘resistance’ groups of the CAM, the Órganos de Resistencia Territorial CAM (ORT-CAM), repudiating reports by a number of news media that attributed the second, murderous, attack to them. It said, ‘This is an isolated event that has nothing to do with our methods.’ A day earlier officers of the police’s special investigations brigade in Temuco arrested three Mapuche suspected of having carried out a string of armed robberies from rural houses. In one case the robbers, always masked, set fire to the houses and vehicles parked next to them.
* The INDH report is available at: http://www.indh.cl/informe-anual-situacion-de-los-derechos-humanos-en-chile-2012/
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