The Cañio have always had to rely on their own and their neighbours’ support and resources, as the municipality of El Maitén has a long history of refusing to serve them, despite its obligation to do so. About ten years ago, the municipality’s neglect turned into a more active form of hostility, as it pushed ahead with plans to build a ski resort on the lof’s summer pastures, despite the Cañio’s objections, and in violation of their right to self-determination as a recognised Indigenous community.
One of the developers’ first attacks was the cutting down of a swathe of native forest on Cerro León. In the face of intense intimidation, harassment and racist abuse from the local authorities, media and the province, the lof Cañio continues to resist, accompanied by the local Mapuche-Argentine radio station, Radio Petü Mogeleiñ, which has a long history of supporting Indigenous – and other – struggles in the area. The Cañio have so far succeeded in preventing the project. But today, the mountains around their territory are in flames.
Contested territory
The Comarca is a region of stunning beauty, in which still pristine rivers cross the lush foothills of the Andes into the open plains of the Patagonian steppe. It is, unsurprisingly, home to varied types of tourism, including environmentally devastating forms of luxury tourism and land speculation, such as skiing. Billionaires from around the world have bought up mountain tops, access to bodies of water and the nascent of rivers.
The region is also contested territory, one of the fronts in Argentina’s ongoing settler-colonial war against its many indigenous peoples. Keeping the flames of colonial vitriol alive, numerous local politicians and their collaborators in some of the country’s biggest newspapers, notably Clarin, are today accusing the Mapuche of starting the fires.
The perversity of such a claim was denounced in a statement by neighbouring Rio Negro’s Coordinating Committee of the Mapuche Parliament, who stressed that “we as the Mapuche Tehuelche people are the ones making the greatest effort to protect the land from the developers’ greed which comes after the fires (…) and who defend territory against the extractivist claws of mining, hydroelectric and forest companies.”
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Manuela Zechner Saskia Fischer | Radio Free (2021-03-24T14:13:06+00:00) Patagonia is burning: the politics of fire. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/24/patagonia-is-burning-the-politics-of-fire/
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