MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

RAM strikes again in Argentine Patagonia

RAM pamphlets were scattered all over the area

The Mapuche Armed Resistance (RAM) Group has claimed responsibility for Monday's burning of the Forestry offices in the Argentine province of Chubut, with pamphlets of the radicalized organization scattered all over the area.

The signs were found by the firemen who went to extinguish the flames in the place where the incident occurred, which took place along Road 40 in the town of El Hoyo.

The message was: “The Mapuche national reconstruction, for our dead in Ruf Wichan, for the P.P.M. and the persecuted.”

Although firefighters tried to contain the flames, the fire completely engulfed the establishment. Opposition leaders and local intellectuals asked the national government last week for “an urgent, proportional and effective institutional response” to put an end to the violence of the RAM group in Patagonia.

In a public request, they warned that their actions have “the objective of contradicting national sovereignty and undermining the peace and security of the citizens living in the mentioned Argentine region.”

They also addressed “the circumstances of the commission of those criminal actions”, which have as a modality the group operation, “with evident offensive power, with the deployment of weapons and inflammable substances and with total disregard for human life, the physical integrity of persons and material goods”.

“The objective pursued by the RAM organization would be made up of a series of 'ancestral claims,' among which would be the 'recovery of lands' that, according to the unilateral criteria of the aforementioned organization, 'belong to the Mapuche ethnic group',” they indicated.

RAM leader Facundo Jones Huala is still at large after being released from jail in Chile.