Folk-singer Victor Jara, murdered by Pinochet’s troops in 1973, had planned to record an album, telling the story of the 1934 massacre of peasants and Indigenous Mapuche and Pehuenche at Ránquil. He never completed the project and in the following decades repression has claimed new victims whenever the interests of large landowners were threatened.
LAB author and film-maker Marcos Colón travelled to Temuco to speak about listening to Indigenous knowledge. The conference listened. But Wallmapu asked whether listening is enough, whether reporting is extraction, whether audiences and their institutions are changed, and where commitment and responsibilities should lie. This is a shortened version of a longer article. I arrived […]
Tony Corden reviews Katia Chornik’s book about the relationship between music, politics, memory, and human rights.
Debates on impunity for people convicted of heinous crimes against humanity are acquiring a new urgency in Chile, where the Senate has approved a measure which would allow convicted prisoners over the age of 70 to serve their sentences under house arrest, or have them suspended. Trials and judgements reached in Germany and Holland may provide relevant parallels.
Venezuelan poets in exile tell Piotr Kozak about their experiences of leaving their home country, their conflicted feelings towards it, and the promise and sadness of their lives abroad.
This article is reproduced from OpenDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You can read the original here. Extremist candidate José Antonio Kast seems best placed to take advantage of the fragmentation and shift to the right in Chilean politics A few years ago, Cristopher Rojas would have been an unlikely political organiser. […]
Chile’s Mapuche people hoped for better things after the election of Gabriel Boric in 2021. The extension of the Estado de Excepción has signalled a return ‘to the old discourse of the internal enemy’.
Amid industrial pressure and legal rollbacks, a grassroots women’s network fights for ancestral marine rights and cultural survival in Chile. ‘If they take the sea from us,’ says Mapuche-Huilliche spokeswoman Ingrid Echeverría Huequelef, ‘they kill us culturally. Without it, we are shells – empty, without a soul.’ Along Chile’s vast coastline, Indigenous women are fighting […]
For nearly four decades, residents of Arica, Chile, have lived with the toxic legacy of imported industrial waste. After repeated legal defeats and government inaction, a group of mothers has stepped forward to demand justice. Mamitas del Plomo (Mothers of Lead) is a grassroots foundation born from these mothers’ grief and their determination to protect […]
Nearly 40 years ago, 20,000 tonnes of Swedish mining waste were dumped on the edge of Arica, Chile. Laced with arsenic, lead, and mercury, the sludge poisoned neighbourhoods and scarred generations. Authorities moved the heap but never removed the danger — or compensated its victims. Today, the toxic legacy fuels poverty, migration, and gang violence […]
