MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina: Ancestral Mapuche Resistance declared a terrorist organization

Since the measure halting evictions from what native groups claim to be their ancestral lands, wildfires have been on the rise in Patagonia, Bullrich explained

Argentina's Libertarian Government of President Javier Milei Friday declared the Ancestral Mapuche Resistance (RAM) a Terrorist Organization, so that federal security forces can adopt the proper measures as Lonko Facundo Jones-Huala, who has served a prison sentence in Chile for arson, has been speaking in favor of setting Patagonian lands on fire.

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said Friday that she believed the RAM was behind the ongoing wildfires in Patagonia. She also explained that the organization had been included in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to acts of Terrorism and its Financing (RePET).

The government considers the RAM a significant threat to national security and hopes to defund the organization by coordinating efforts against terrorism with national agencies. The Liberal administration also believes the RAM to be linked to Chile's Arauco Malleco Coordination (CAM). Bullrich also described the RAM as “a violent ethno-nationalist movement dependent on the PUEL MAPU Autonomous Movement.”

“This pseudo-Mapuche group attacked our sovereignty, setting fire to our forests and terrorizing our citizens,” Bullrich argued. “In our government, there is no place for the violent. To the violent ones who defy the law: their time is over. We will go against them to the last consequences,” she added.

Jones Huala, 38, has indeed claimed responsibility for various arson attacks but not for all of them. His actual influence within the Mapuche community has been questioned, with some considering him discredited. Jones Huala has defended “the sabotage and arson attacks on the infrastructure of the capitalist system, of the transnational corporations, of the landowners.” Alleged descendants of the Mapuche people, who allegedly inhabited parts of southern Argentina and Chile before European colonization, have been demanding the return of their so-called ancestral lands.

Since the repeal of Decree No. 805/21 halting evictions from usurped lands, forest fires in the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, and Chubut, have been on the rise, the Argentine authorities also noted. “In several cases it has been proved that they were started intentionally and, on the other hand, there are many complaints in this sense. Recently the fire, as a tool of pressure, was publicly claimed by RAM leader Facundo Jones Huala,” it was also argued.

Including the RAM in the RePET enables tools for defunding it and it also allows the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade, and Worship into the process.

However, Mapuche activist Moira Moillán claimed the “RAM does not exist, even though two or three hooded Mapuches say it does” and Jones-Huala's former Lawyer Gustavo Franquet told EFE that statements from the controversial group “were not definitive proof of the RAM's existence.”