MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile’s Catholic willing to help negotiate in Mapuche hunger strike

Bishop Alejandro Goic, president of the Episcopate Conference: negotiations but no mediation

The Chilean Catholic Church has agreed to help negotiate an end to nearly two-month long hunger strike by indigenous Mapuche prisoners, following an assistance request earlier this week from President Sebastián Piñera

The Mapuches are protesting the government’s use of Pinochet-era anti-terrorism laws to prosecute them as they demonstrate (sometimes violently) to recover ancestral lands, based on treaties and autonomy promises. The laws permit a number of things – masked witnesses; extended time held incommunicado and double prison sentences – that the Mapuche consider unfair.

Bishop Alejandro Goic, president of the Episcopate Conference in Chile, presented the Church’s terms for accepting the assignment on Thursday. “It’s true that no solution will be easy or rapid because the traditional methods, cultures, laws and different administrative norms make reaching an agreement difficult,” he said, reading a statement he prepared with the archbishop of Concepción, Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, and the bishop of Temuco, Manuel Camilo Vial Risopatrón.

The document goes on to say that, despite the barriers that exist, leaders from the Mapuche community and Chile’s government can and must reach an agreement based on their mutual respect for human life.

While the Church has agreed to help negotiate an end to the hunger strike, it has stated that it would not officially mediate the situation.

Evangelical churches, to which 40% of Mapuches belong, have also expressed interest in helping negotiate a solution to the protest. Emiliano Soto, president of the Round Table of Evangelical Churches, visited with the Mapuche prisoners last week.

Also visiting the prisoners were members of the Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Committee, including Dep. Sergio Aguiló of the Socialist Party (PS); Dep. Tucapel Jiménez of the Party for Democracy (PPD); and Dep. Hugo Gutiérrez of the Communist Party (PC).

By Kara Frantzich – Santiago Times