FROM THE EDITORS: In Puelmapu, Argentine Patagonia, Gloria Colihueque Catriman and her mother Isabel, almost 80 years old, both Mapuches, are facing dispossession by two mining and forestry extractivist entrepreneurs. Gloria is on trial for defending the land where they have lived for the past 22 years, which is also Mapuche’s ancestral territory. If found guilty, she could spend four years in prison. Below we reproduce a manifesto of the Indigenous Women’s Movement for Good Living supporting the Guardians of the ancestral Mapuche territory.
For more than twenty years, the Catriman Colihueque community has lived in the Laguna Larga area, bordering the Los Alerces National Park in Chubut, Patagonia, Argentina.
The landowners Alejandro Samame and Nahuel Serra filed a legal case against Gloria Catriman Colihueque, a community member, to imprison her and keep her lands.
The IAC (Autárquico Institute of Colonization and Rural Development) should have carried out inspections and verified the presence of Isabel and her family in the field before the sale of these fiscal lands. However, IAC did not do so.
Two worlds confront their rights:
Those who have been privileged because of systemic racism have been fed and enriched with impunity, claim their right to continue dispossessing, evicting, and criminalizing our people.
And our sister Gloria represents the strength and dignity of thousands of indigenous women who have embodied a silent and solitary resistance to preserve their right to land and identity.
They have accused the wrong person. Gloria Colihueque Catriman is a hardworking and humble Mapuche woman, guardian of her territory and her family.
These business people embody a model of a country that feels threatened, not by this humble lamngen, but feels threatened by a growing force embodied by the women of the planet, as well as the Mapuche people, and the generational renewal that no longer supports the dogmatic and genocidal structure of Julio Argentino Roca in any part of the territory.
