In this thesis, I interrogate the relationship between the intervention of private security guards in tree plantations and the emergence of the figure of the ‘Mapuche terrorist’ in the Central-South of Chile in the late 90s. The work is...
moreIn this thesis, I interrogate the relationship between the intervention of private security guards in tree plantations and the emergence of the figure of the ‘Mapuche terrorist’ in the Central-South of Chile in the late 90s. The work is based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Araucania region, mainly Collipulli, in which I carried out a historical ethnography of the private security company Organism of Private Security Alfredo Rodriguez (Organismo de Seguridad Privada Alfredo Rodriguez, Osepar). This partly entailed participant observation in Collipulli, interviews with former security personnel and members of Mapuche communities, as well as archival work with press material and court cases.
Employing the extended case method, I focus on the case of the arson at the Rucañanco estate house in August 1999, that prompted the utilization of exceptional legislation (the Law of Internal Security of the State) against leading Mapuche activist. I expand out from the arson to context to consider its local context of conflict between various non-state violent actors (chapter one), its representation in media (chapter two), and the judicial aftermath (chapter three). Throughout the thesis, I consider other cases, in which private security guards were present in local context and in which exceptional legislation was utilized or discussed against Mapuche (namely the Temulemu and the Cuyinco cases).
The main argument I have presented throughout this thesis is that the intervention of private security in local conflicts over territory contributed to the securitization of the Mapuche movement by escalating local conflicts through law-transgressive practices of harassment (hostigamiento), being camouflaged as forest firefighters in media, and enjoying impunity in the justice system. This altogether made particular counter-attacks by
Mapuche on private security guards appear excessively violent and motivated the use of exceptional legislation by local political authorities against the Mapuche movement based on the attacks. This, I argue, was key to the consolidation of the figure of the Mapuche terrorist.
Throughout the thesis, I draw on securitization theory as put forth by the Copenhagen School, who argue that security is best understood as a performative speech act. These authors argue that what comes to be understood as a security threat does so through a discursive process, in which securitizing actors in ‘securitizing moves’ – state and non- state – successfully declare a specific imperative community (the referent object) as existentially threatened. The security threats presented as threatening to the referent object do not exist independently of, but is performatively constituted through, this very articulation.
I show, however, that the securitization of the Mapuche movement was as dependent on performative silences as performative speech acts, this especially in regards to private security. Guards were camouflaged as firefighters and the practices of harassment that escalated local conflicts were not investigated or tried in the legal system. In relation to this last point, and following the emic notion of montajes, I argue that we might think of securitizing moves, not through a neatly separated division between performative speech acts and outside conditions of ‘threatening objects’, but as a bricolage of different discursive objects that have a unstable relationship to that which is signified. Through my analysis of the case of Rucañanco, I show how biased patterns of state sanction and impunity served to legitimize certain narratives over others. These factors contributed to establishing the Mapuche movement as an existential threat, and conflated the interests of the forestry industry with those of the entire Chilean nation state.
