Mallon

I wish to thank the participants in the Newberry Seminar on Latin American history, especially Christopher Boyer, Margaret Power, and Leon Fink for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. A much earlier version was presented as the 2006 Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where I benefited from the comments of Roberta Hill, Francine Hirsch, Tony Michels, Teju Olaniyan, Mary Louise Roberts, and Steve Stern. Peter Winn also commented on another version presented in Spanish at a seminar in Peru.

1. This summary of the first days of the Ránquil uprising is based on the following sources: Jaime E. Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 1934, Ránquil. Una revuelta campesina” (mas-ter’s thesis, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 1993), especially 104 – 16; “Informe del Subdelegado de Lon-quimay, Augusto Schweitzer M., al Juez del Crimen, Victoria,” July 8, 1934, Correspondencia Recibida, Archivo Nacional Miraflores, Santiago, Ramo Intendencia de Cautín, and “Informe Confidencial del Inten-dente de Cautín Alfredo Rodríguez Mac- Iver adjuntando documentación sobre los sucesos de Lonquimay,” July 17, 1934, Temuco, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 257 – 58, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 8, Issue 1

DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-044 © 2011 by Labor and Working-Class History Association

29

Victims into Emblems: Images of the Ránquil Massacre in Chilean National Narratives, 1934 – 2004

Florencia E. Mallon

On June 27 and 28, 1934, in the Andean region of Lonquimay, Chile, near the bor-der with Argentina, four linked attacks targeted the general stores and police post associated with the large estates of Ránquil and Guayalí, as well as the main houses on Guayalí and the neighboring fundo Contraco. In addition to sacking the contents of the establishments, approximately three hundred attackers killed a total of seven people, including three carabineros (military police). They also held an employee at one of the general stores hostage for several hours. Although they initially were armed with only sticks and knives, by the second day of the uprising the rebels had armed themselves with weapons and ammunition they found along the way, especially at the Guayalí police post.1

Word of these violent events reached the police station in Lonquimay in the early morning hours of June 28, when a pair of policemen returned from Ránquil. They had been sent to investigate the origin of “subversive proclamations” that had

2. “Informe del Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautín, Fernando Delano Soruco, sobre los sucesos de Lonquimay,” July 15, 1934, Temuco, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 257 – 58, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.

3. In addition to the sources cited previously, see also El Diario Austral, June 29, 1934, 1; June 30, 1934, 1 and 5; July 2 – 3, 1934, 1; and Patricio Manns, Las grandes masacres, Nosotros los chilenos 20 (Santiago: Edi-torial Quimantú, 1972), 52 – 58.

4. One exception to this statement, which has just been published and with a perspective quite dis-tinct from the one I develop in this essay, is Thomas Miller Klabock, “Ránquil: Violence and Peasant Poli-tics on Chile’s Frontier,” in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, eds., Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 121–59.

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been circulating for several days. According to the report submitted later by the pre-fect of carabineros, his subordinates had been informed by one of the farmers in the Ránquil area that an uprising was under way. Lieutenant Luis Cabrera, the com-mander of the Lonquimay office, immediately set out for the region with ten men, and by noon of that same day he was able to confirm that the Ackermann store had been attacked. From that moment, the rebels were on the defensive.2

To this day, we do not know exactly how many people participated in the rebellion nor the exact number of those who died during the repression. Estimates in the sources vary from three hundred to fifteen hundred participants, of whom sixty to three hundred fifty were killed. We do know that repression was massive and cruel, targeting the communities and peasant families of the region. Many people escaped by crossing the border into Argentina, struggling through the abundant snow that accumulated at that time of the year. Fifty- six alleged participants were tried and jailed in Temuco, and many families, who no longer had their main breadwinners, suffered additional hunger, illness, and death.3

Though little known outside Chile, even in the Latin American historiogra-phy about this period, the uprising and massacre that took place in the Lonquimay region in June 1934 has occupied an important place in Chilean historical narratives of the twentieth century.4 Whether as proof of the repressive power of an expand-ing state or as an example to show future peasant movements that it was possible for Mapuche and non- Mapuche people to unite under the auspices of the Left to reclaim their usurped lands, Ránquil has been a touchstone for Chilean narratives of moder-nity. More recently, at the beginning of the twenty- first century, intellectuals politi-cally committed to the Mapuche movement on the one hand and to a resurgence of the Left on the other have also found symbols and lessons in the events surrounding Ránquil.

During the ten years that I have been studying the Ránquil case, my own per-spective has changed dramatically. As a historian working on Mapuche themes across the twentieth century, from the beginning I was interested in the declarations in both the left- wing and mainstream presses that one of the goals of the uprising had been the establishment of an independent Mapuche republic. After reading Jaime Flores’s master’s thesis, the first work to question the extent of indigenous participation in the

5. The Mapuche people are subdivided into a series of regionally and landscape- defined subgroups whose names denote the particular region in which they live and the specific subsistence adaptation that is defined by the resources available in that particular microclimate. The name Mapuche designates the whole people, mapu meaning land or world and che meaning people. Pewenche, therefore, is the Mapuche subgroup that inhabits the region of the pewen, or araucaria tree, in the high Andes and whose subsistence adaptation includes seasonal migration into the lower valleys in the winter, the higher regions in the sum-mer, and the collection of the pine nuts produced by the pewen trees.

6. Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” 129 – 30; see also the list of those arrested that is included in “Informe del Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautín, Fernando Delano Soruco,” ibid., 1, and specifically Maripe, 6.

7. Periódico Mapuche AzkintuWE 1, no. 8 (2004): 7. See a more detailed analysis of this article in the last section of this essay, pp. 52 – 53.

Mallon / V ic t ims in to E mblems 31

rebellion, I wanted to confirm the lack of Mapuche- Pewenche5 participation and to understand why the association of the events with indigenous groups had emerged in the first place. Following the clues offered by Flores, I began to formulate an alter-native explanation for the uprising, based on the presence of a group of poor Chil-ean colonists who had mobilized to claim their rights to land under the terms of the National Colonization Law.

At the same time, however, I realized that attempting to prove the absence of the Mapuche- Pewenche people from the movement was neither the most important task nor an entirely viable one. The documents produced by the repressive forces note the presence among the rebels of the Mapuche- Pewenche leader Ignacio Maripe from the community of Ralco, even though we have no direct evidence that he participated in his role as lonko, or leader. On the list of those arrested, moreover, we find a group of individuals with at least one Mapuche last name, most of whom were laborers on the fundo Ralco. According to Flores’s calculations, they form about 15 percent of the total who were brought to trial.6

In the end, the more that I thought about the topic, the more I became con-vinced that an alternative narrative about Ránquil involved more than a rebuttal of the previous interpretation. Rather than simply searching for “the truth” of the events, it became necessary to explain why the uprising and massacre have served, over the years and for such different groups, as such a powerful symbol. The situation became even more complex when a few years ago the Mapuche newspaper AzkintuWE pub-lished a short article about Ránquil. Based on familiar interpretations from the most established leftist sources, this article reproduced the image of an alliance between peasants and Mapuches in the struggle for land and social justice.7 As I read this, a new question arose in my mind: how is the idea of unity between poor Chilean peas-ants and Mapuches represented by this vision of the Ránquil uprising and massacre different at the beginning of the twenty- first century, when the Mapuche movement for cultural and territorial autonomy is already more than twenty years old?

I have concluded that the Ránquil uprising and massacre have had a power-ful impact on the historical imagination of many diverse groups in Chilean political history precisely because the events can be integrated in multiple, diverse, and equally dramatic ways to extremely different versions of national history. In and of itself,

8. This paragraph is an attempt to summarize a very complex and conflictual situation that can be seen throughout the documentation in the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores between 1890 and 1910, when the Foreign Relations Ministry was still in charge of colonization for the frontier zone. For the case of Lon-

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the Ránquil case is a powerful one. In the midst of a cruel winter and after being thrown off their plots, a group of peasants rebelled violently and desperately against the landowners and an oppressive state. The leaders of the movement were killed in the repression along with an unconfirmed number of their followers. Many oth-ers escaped through the deep snow toward the border with Argentina or were taken prisoner and forced to march to Temuco under horrible conditions. As has happened many other times in Chilean national history, the government attempted to cover up its excesses, and Ránquil/Lonquimay became part of the litany of dramatic massa-cres suffered by the Chilean people. These general images are part of a shared history, no matter who tells it: the poor, tired of being abused, rise up and are converted into innocent victims. These elements are common to all narratives of the Ránquil case, but the interpretations of how and why this happened have changed a great deal over time, which in and of itself is an interesting subject for historical analysis.

In this essay, I contribute to the analysis of Ránquil in two ways. First, I revisit the events in the context of recent research and in light of new primary sources to rethink the place of the uprising, not only in Chilean history but also transnationally. Second, I place the different interpretations of Ránquil in historical context, not only to show how these have changed over time but also to identify elements that have stayed the same and possible explanations.

Ránquil in Historical and Transnational ContextThe uprising and massacre that occurred in Ránquil and Lonquimay in June 1934 was a local, but not less important, culmination of the usurpations and abuses along Chile’s southern frontier that began in the 1880s with the military defeat of the Mapu-che people and the territorial expansion of the Chilean state. The resulting land and commercial speculations, as well as the negotiation of the international border with Argentina, divided Chilean national colonists and Mapuches even as both groups were affected negatively. The supposed political unity between Mapuche and non- Mapuche peasants that transformed the massacre into a broader symbol of popu-lar struggle was not a historical reality but instead the projection of political organi-zations in the 1930s, both Mapuche and non- Mapuche, that desired social cohesion among all the rural poor.

Between 1889 and 1910, the frontier region of Lonquimay witnessed a series of violent conflicts over land and resources between and among frontier entrepreneurs, Pewenche indigenous groups, and economically underprivileged Chilean settlers who wished to acquire plots of land on which to support their families. From the per-spective of the Chilean state as well as large landowners and poor colonists, this was a newly opened region where virgin forests, rumors of mineral wealth, and exten-sive pasturelands all promised prosperity.8 However, the situation of the Pewenche

quimay, I am basing my arguments on, among other documents, the following: “Expediente formado en base a la solicitud de Don Manuel A. Rios, entrega de terrenos fiscales en el Alto Bío- Bío,” case concluded on September 10, 1904, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1363, Archivo Siglo XX; the documenta-tion surrounding the concession of lands for foreign colonization given to entrepreneur Luis Silva Rivas, 1910, “Expediente formado por los conflictos entre la Concesión Silva Rivas y los colonos repatriados de la Argentina,” vol. 1364, especially pp. 21 – 29, Archivo Siglo XX; and in the same volume the request made by Luis Silva Rivas on March 21, 1911.

9. The situation of the Pewenche communities in this region was badly documented, because the more powerful individuals who committed the abuses were also the ones who controlled the information. An example of the violence committed against communities that protested the usurpation of their lands can be found in “Solicitud de Roque Hernández R. por los caciques de Lonquimay y el Alto Bío- Bío,” 1908, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1359, Archivo Siglo XX, which includes copies of two letters signed by thirteen caciques, one to the governor of the region and the other to the general inspector of lands and colonization. See also José Bengoa C., Quinquén: 100 Años de Historia Pehuenche (Santiago: Ediciones Chile América CESOC, 1992).

10. “Solicitud de 2.500 aspirantes a colonos nacionales al Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores pidiendo la repartición de las hijuelas prometidas,” 1901, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 986, Archivo Siglo XX.


indigenous communities was different, because their ancestral territory was not rec-ognized by the state and the dramatically reduced lands on which they were to be settled were not confirmed before the first crush of speculation was unleashed in the 1880s. Many Pewenche lineages thus found themselves squatting, without title, on lands now considered property of the state. Even the possession of a legal title, in the context of a distant national government and a local bureaucracy controlled by the rich and powerful, provided little protection. Buffeted among lumber speculators, livestock entrepreneurs renting fiscal lands, and landowners accumulating additional hectares, Pewenche caciques found that their complaints fell on deaf ears. After losing family members in confrontations with local police on the payroll of the large land-owners, several Pewenche communities ended up on marginally state-claimed lands while large landowners profited from the lumber, pasture, and other resources that had once been theirs.9

The conditions faced by landless Chileans along the frontier, while also extremely harsh, were different from those confronting indigenous people. In 1901, less than two decades after the final military defeat of the Mapuche, more than twenty- five hundred heads of household signed a petition to the Ministry of For-eign Relations, which at that point still handled land claims on the frontier. The 1898 National Colonization Law to which they referred, through which national colonists were entitled to plots of state- owned land, did not apply to the recently conquered Mapuche or Pewenche peoples. However, despite having a different legal right, the settlers had been unable to make good on their claims. Without the money to par-ticipate in the national auctions of state lands going on in Santiago, they wrote, they had been forced to work as inquilinos, or service tenants, on the large estates spring-ing up all over the region.10

Within this group of colonists, there was also a special community of Chileans deported from the Argentine province of Neuquén during the negotiations over the

11. The problems facing the Chileans deported from Argentina are detailed in “Providencia formada con la solicitud de Manuel Elojio y Salvador 2° y Alfredo Catalán Sáez, colonos repatriados de la Argen-tina,” began March 14, 1909, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1278, and “Solicitud de unos 20 colo-nos repatriados de la Argentina pidiendo tramitación de sus títulos,” received in Santiago on April 6, 1910, vol. 1278.

12. Sources on the foundation of the agricultural union include Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” 71, 73, who gets his information from the newspaper El Comercio, and documents concerning the union in Intendencia de Cautín, September/October 1929, vol. 279, Archivo Nacional Mira-flores, Santiago. See also Harry Fahrenkrog Reinhold, La verdad sobre la revuelta de Ránquil, ed. Edmundo Fahrenkrog B. (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1985), 28 – 33.

13. The process of parcelization, and the central role that entrepreneurs involved in the military cam-paign against the Mapuche played in it and in the accumulation of lands through national auctions, can be seen in the following documents: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1894 – 95, vol. 604, 231– 40; Notarios de Temuco, 1899, vol. 21, 881v – 884v (Bunster and Urrutia families); and, specifically for the Guayalí estate, Ministerio de Tierras y Colonización, 1930, vol. 64, Decreto 2243, attached document from the Ministerio de la Propiedad Austral, June 12, 1930, where the purchase of the fundo is noted and registered as having occurred between Martin B. Bunster and four Mapuche caciques in 1882, recorded at the office of the Con-servador de Bienes Raíces of La Laja, 32v – 34v.

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border in the 1880s. Despite having been promised plots of fiscal land, the majority had been unable to negotiate the intricate bureaucratic maze attached to a successful application.11 It was a community of aspiring Chilean colonists very much like these, demanding resources they felt were theirs as citizens of the Chilean nation, who orga-nized an agricultural union in 1928 on the Ránquil and Guayalí estates and would constitute the core of the 1934 rebellion.12

The desperation that drove these colonists to armed rebellion was the result of the abusive actions of the large landowners and investors in this frontier zone. It should not surprise us that these powerful speculators were the first to be heard by the government when they arrived in Santiago. They bought the recently demarcated land parcels at national auction and, in exchange for promises to bring colonists from Europe — who at the time were considered better prepared and more innovative than Chileans — they received enormous concessions of fiscal land. Although this fever for European colonization raged in many Latin American countries between 1880 and 1920, in the Chilean case we must remember that the recent military victory against a previously autonomous indigenous people had also generated the presence of a special national investor class that had already profited handsomely from contracts to equip the Chilean army during the “Pacification campaign.” 13

The concessions to colonization companies and the establishment of suppos-edly legal claims over recently demarcated lands ended up forming part of the same strategy of land accumulation for these investors. Especially in the Lonquimay and Alto Bío- Bío regions, these investors were able completely to box out all claims by less powerful groups, both Pewenche communities and poor Chilean colonists. A partic-ularly dramatic example of these tendencies was the family business of José Bunster, who had received the exclusive contract to feed the Chilean army during its cam-

14. The presence of José Bunster and his family in the frontier region is truly remarkable, much more so than I can detail here. His first center of operations was Traiguén, and from there he spread his invest-ments throughout the region of La Araucanía. For an introduction to the subject, see José Bengoa, Historia del pueblo mapuche, Siglo XIX y XX, 5th ed. (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2000), 258 – 60. Additional details about Bunster’s presence in Traiguén can be found in an article in the online version of El Diario Austral, April 1, 2004, www.australtemuco.cl/prontus3 (accessed November 24, 2010). Bunster’s own purchases of and speculation in land auctions are dramatically summarized in a document in Notarios de Temuco, 1897, vol. 11, 1622 – 27, where his legal representative registers slightly more than 17,463 hectares, located in the depart-ments of Angol, Collipulli, Traiguén, Mariluan, Imperial, Temuco, and Valdivia, as Bunster’s property.

15. Ministerio de Tierras y Colonización, 1930, vol. 64, Decreto 2243.16. This summary of the events is based on Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,”

60 – 77, and Appendix 1: “Carta Abierta de Juan Leiva Tapia al Presidente del Sindicato de la Comuna de Lonquimay, detallando su entrevista con el Presidente Carlos Ibáñez del Campo,” Intendencia Cautín, vol. 279, “Expediente sobre el Sindicato Agrícola Lonquimay,” August – October 1929, Archivo Nacional Mira-flores, Santiago.

17. The divisions inside the union are described by Fahrenkrog, La verdad sobre la revuelta, 33 – 38. Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” notes that the number of union members attend-ing the meetings also went down, perhaps due to these internal problems. See 75 and 135, n. 23.


paigns against the Mapuche.14 Among the properties that the Bunster family acquired through speculation was the Guayalí estate, one of the centers of the 1934 rebellion, which by 1930 had reached a size of slightly less than sixty thousand hectares.15 Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the promises of frontier prosperity became reality for only a very small part of the region’s inhabitants. But not all the excluded reacted in the same way.

Between 1929 and 1931, the Lonquimay Agricultural Union was able to take advantage of the political moment in Chile. Under the direction of Juan Segundo Leiva Tapia, a local high school teacher whose family was part of the community of colonists deported from Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, and with the participation of several small businessmen and shopkeepers in the region, this union convinced the then progressive and populist president, Colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1929 – 31), to parcel out a section of the fundo Guayalí among its mem-bers.16 Neither the formation of the union nor the promise of parcelization included the Pewenche communities, however, and the amount of land distributed fell far short of that needed to satisfy the requests of those who had applied through the union. This caused a rift within the union organization, between those businessmen and shopkeepers interested in limiting the number of applicants to assure larger plots and the more radical faction led by Juan Leiva Tapia that wanted to allow access to every-one who applied.17

The divisions within the Lonquimay union intensified with the overthrow of Ibáñez in 1931 and the rise to power of Arturo Alessandri in 1932, as the new gov-ernment began overturning Ibáñez’s more populist agrarian policies and reneging on all promises of further parcelization. With the backing of Alessandri, local land-owners allied with the military police stepped up their evictions and abuse of tenants

18. The information in this paragraph is a combination of material found in the following sources: Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” 87 –103, and Appendix 2: “Entrevista a Juan Leiva Tapia sobre su opinión de la FOCH y su relegación a Melinka,” 215 –18; Olga Uliánova, “Levan-tamiento campesino de Lonquimay y la Internacional Comunista,” Estudios Públicos 89 (Summer 2003): 173 – 223, especially 180, where she identifies the first contact between Leiva Tapia and the FOCH as occur-ring in 1933; and Elías Lafferte, Vida de un comunista (Páginas autobiográficas ) (Santiago: Talleres Gráficos Lautaro, 1957), 255 – 67.

19. “Informe Confidencial del Intendente de la Provincia de Cautín al Ministro del Interior sobre la Segunda Convención Nacional de la Central Socialista de Colonización,” November 14, 1933, Temuco, Min-isterio del Interior, vol. 8675, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17; 1 – 2, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.

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and their families, leading to the further radicalization of union leaders, especially Leiva. In 1933, Leiva sought entry into the Chilean Workers’ Federation (FOCH), then closely allied with the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh), and was one of the delegates sent by the FOCH and the PCCh to an antiwar conference hosted by the Komintern in Montevideo, Uruguay. By the time he returned to the province of Cau-tín, having been arrested upon returning to Chilean soil and sent into internal exile for his participation in the conference, it was November 1933.18

Available evidence suggests that, upon his return, Leiva was angry. In a con-fidential report to the Ministry of the Interior on November 5, 1933, the intendant of Cautín reported that Leiva had addressed the inaugural session of the Second National Convention of the Central Socialista de Colonización in Temuco and,

encouraged by the reception he received, he delivered an energetic and daring speech, saying among other things that the government’s colonization policy is a sham and a lie, and an attempt by the reactionary bourgeois government to further exploit and enslave the peasants and laborers who work their lands, and that this project does not meet the aspirations of those who work the land, but rather to the contrary turns everything over to foreign capitalists and especially to Chilean landowners, and that before anything else it is necessary to expel international capitalism which has absorbed all our national territory making Chile a foreign colony. He was continually interrupted by longlasting applause and ovations.

Leiva’s supporters became so impassioned, the intendant reported, that they threw stones at the head table and, when the lights were turned on and off, “threw Com-munist propaganda pamphlets, an example of which you will find enclosed.” 19

The enclosed eight- page pamphlet, printed in Santiago and entitled “IN DEFENSE of the Peasants’ Goal of Free Access to the Land: United the Peasants and Workers Can Seize the Land from the FEUDAL Landowners,” called for an alliance of all poor and middle peasants with sharecroppers, colonists, wage workers, and others against the government, the landowners, and the large merchants. “THE COMMUNIST PARTY is the only one that struggles for the true interests of the peasants,” the pamphlet proclaimed. The peasants could not achieve their interests alone, it continued. “They must do this with the workers in the city and united they will be a force able to annihilate the landowners, the imperialists and the bourgeoisie and establish a government of PEASANTS AND WORKERS that will make the

20. “POR LA DEFENSA de la Aspiración de los Campesinos al goce libre de la TIERRA: Unido [sic] los Campesinos y los Obreros pueden arrebatar la tierra a los terratenientes FEUDALES” (Santiago: Imprenta “La Crónica,” n.d.), included in Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17.

21. “Por el Gobierno de los Soviets y la República Araucana se han pronunciado los sublevados de Lon-quimay,” Bandera Roja 10, no. 14 (July 28, 1934): 1, clipping found in Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8680, Providencias Confidenciales, Archivo Siglo XX.


AGRARIAN AND ANTI- IMPERIALIST revolution, whose objectives are to turn the land over to the peasants and throw out the foreign capitalists who own the main industries, especially nitrates, copper and coal.”

The pamphlet then detailed the demands for which each rural sector, from sharecroppers to colonists to small and medium landowners, should struggle. It ended with a set of rousing calls to action and a “Viva” to Soviet Russia and was signed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chilean Section of the Commu-nist International.20 Seven months later, in the midst of a harsh winter and having just suffered eviction from the Guayalí estate, a desperate group of ex- tenants from that fundo, along with tenants from several of the other large properties of the area and with the support of Leiva and two other FOCH delegates, initiated the Ránquil uprising.

In July 1934, less than a month after the bloody suppression of the uprising, Bandera Roja, the official newspaper of the Chilean Communist Party, published an article claiming that the rebellion had been an alliance of peasants and tenants, Mapuches, and workers from the gold mines in the region. The three groups, the newspaper insisted, had presented a united front around the joint demands of “land and the Araucanian Republic.” The article continued, “The struggle in the south is a practical example of the combative alliance among peasants, tenants, workers, and Mapuches. But what gives this alliance its greatest importance, as a revolutionary manifestation, is that it was built not only with the purpose of immediate economic demands, but also with a profound political goal, which means a REVOLUTION-ARY SOLUTION to the present situation through the installation of a government of soviets.”

The article concluded with the following prediction: “We will make the most of the lessons learned, fertilized as they are with the blood of those heroic combatants, and we will take up the call that has been issued from Lonquimay to all the work-ers of the country.” 21

In this part of Chile’s newly opened southern frontier, between 1880 and 1934, several groups of migrants and refugees — the Pewenche, among them, homeless in their own land — found themselves caught in the interstices of a project of frontier expansion and national consolidation. As Jaime Flores has demonstrated, they were present, though not in equal numbers, among the individuals who were jailed for their supposed participation in the uprising. According to Flores’s numbers, these included those with a Mapuche last name (15 percent), agricultural laborers (40 per-cent), smallholders (30 percent), and miners (16 percent). However, the presence of these groups among those arrested does not necessarily prove a high degree of con-

22. Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” 129 – 30, and Uliánova, “Levantamiento Campesino.”

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sciousness or political coordination among them. In addition, as Olga Uliánova has clearly demonstrated and the confidential intendant’s report confirmed, the first con-tacts between the Lonquimay union and the Communist Party occurred through Juan Leiva Tapia during the second half of 1933. Uliánova’s research has also shown that two additional communist union activists had traveled to the region by early 1934 and most likely became involved in organizing and propaganda activities, especially an extensive leafleting campaign, in an attempt to connect with the emerging rural movement. These three leaders played a central role in the rebellion but did not rep-resent the deep or enduring presence of the Communist Party.22 Why, then, did the PCCh take this position? Recent research suggests that this position was neither a conscious fabrication nor a representation of the facts. Instead it was an answer to, and result of, a series of political tendencies and changes for which Ránquil — as image of a united and heroic people — served as dramatic symbol.

That the Chilean Communist Party turned the presence in the uprising of three activists close to the PCCh into the heroic precursor of a national proletarian

Bandera Roja, 10, no. 14 (July 28, 1934): 1, clipping, Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8680, Providencias Confidenciales, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago, Chile

23. See especially Olga Uliánova, “El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibáñez (1927 – 1931): Primera clandestinidad y ‘Bolchevización’ Estaliniana,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 67, no. 111 (2003): 385 – 436, and “Crisis e ilusión revolucionaria. Partido Comunista de Chile y Comintern, 1931–1934,” in El comunismo: otras miradas desde América Latina, ed. Elvira Concheiro Bórquez, Massimo Modonesi, and Horacio Crespo (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cen-tro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2007), 277 – 322.

24. For El Salvador, see two very different interpretations of how memory operated around the ques-tion of the massacre: Jeffrey Gould and Aldo Lauria- Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920 –1932 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Héctor Lindo- Fuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara- Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrec-tion of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). For Cuba in 1933, and the connection between the Komintern’s position of “class against class” and the soviets created, see Caridad Massón Sena, “La izquierda cubana en los años treinta,” Cuadernos Americanos 109 (2005): 43 – 57.

25. For a more in- depth discussion of the context in which the Communist Party interpreted the Chilean 1931 sailors’ uprising, and its placement in the various mobilizations between 1931 and 1934, see Uliánova, “Crisis el ilusión revolucionaria.” According to Boris Yopo, between the PCCh’s two congresses of 1933, divided between the party’s Stalinist and Trotskyist factions, the second congress stands out because it was there that “the identity and subordination of the PCCH to the Third International was confirmed.” Thus, the politics of the third period and the “class against class” strategy “had an important effect on the internal politics of the PCCH, especially in the period between 1931 and 1934.” Boris Yopo H., “Las rela-ciones internacionales del Partido Comunista,” in El Partido Comunista en Chile: estudio multidisciplinario, ed. Augusto Varas (Santiago: CESOC/FLACSO, 1988), 373 – 99; direct quotations, 376.


revolution must be understood in the context of the dramatic changes going on in both the Chilean party and the Komintern between 1928 and 1935. As Olga Uliáno-va’s recent work has demonstrated, the Chilean Communist Party negotiated a dif-ficult contradiction between its own history of mass mobilization and electoral par-ticipation, on the one hand, and the conflicting calls for radical action and increasing political centralization in the world communist movement in the second half of the 1920s with the Komintern’s strategy of “class against class,” on the other hand.23 This strategy was initially adopted at the sixth congress of the Communist International in 1928, which was also the first congress at which Latin America was systematically discussed, and it was based on the notion that capitalism was entering its final crisis. This gave rise to the “third period” of communist struggle, during which the revo-lution was considered to be right around the corner. Communist parties throughout the world were urged to push the strategy of “revolutionary soviets” of peasants and workers. This notion of revolutionary soviets helped inspire Communist parties in various Latin American countries, including El Salvador (1932) and Cuba (1933), to participate in popular uprisings.24 In 1931, the failure of an uprising by Chilean sail-ors that was compared, within communist circles, to the Potemkin incident in Odessa was also interpreted and debated within the context of the “third period.” It is the same language of revolutionary soviets that we find in the Bandera Roja article cited previously.25

An additional factor in the Chilean case was the generalization, also at the sixth congress, of a debate on the treatment of oppressed races as nationalities with a

26. Resolution F, regarding the national and colonial questions, is reproduced in The Communist Inter-national, 1919 –1943: Documents, ed. Jane Degrab (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), II:497. For an overview of what was going on at this point, see especially Marc Becker, “Mariátegui y el problema de las razas en América Latina,” Revista Andina 35 (July 2002): 191– 220.

27. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

28. Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” Sci-ence and Society 70, no. 4 (2006): 450 – 79; direct quotation on p. 451.

29. Uliánova, “El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibáñez,” 435.

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right to national self- determination. This debate, which arose at the same time that the Soviet government was in effect creating new nationalities through census taking and territorial mapping, took on meaning through Komintern discussions on the role of Afro- descendant people in the Communist parties of South Africa and the United States. By the sixth congress (1928), however, when the Komintern turned its atten-tion to Latin America for the first time, discussions about national minorities and self- determination had become generalized. Indeed, one of the resolutions at the sixth congress in Moscow was precisely about the national question and the colonial prob-lem, emphasizing the complete equality of all races and nations, the need to improve conditions in all colonies and frontier zones, and the recognition of any nation’s right, regardless of race, to self- determination.26

Interestingly, this debate emerged in the Communist International at pre-cisely the same time that the complex and intricate process of drawing boundaries between nationalities within the Soviet Union was in full swing. As Francine Hirsch has recently demonstrated, Leninist notions of national self- determination coexisted uneasily, in this process, with the exigencies of state consolidation. The Russian eth-nographers called in to define and survey the diverse peoples of the empire, Hirsch additionally shows, had previously served the imperial regime and the provisional government and were thus deeply committed to European evolutionist principles.27 However, in the radicalized context of 1929, when the first congress of Latin Ameri-can Communist parties took place in Buenos Aires, it was the insurrectional implica-tions of national self- determination policy that dominated the conversations.

According to Marc Becker, Victorio Codovilla, leader of the Komintern’s South American Secretariat, commissioned José Carlos Mariátegui to write a reac-tion to the proposal made by the Komintern “to carve an Indian Republic out of the Quechua and Aymara peoples in the mountainous Andean Region of South Amer-ica.” 28 At this first congress in Buenos Aires in June 1929 — to which many delegates arrived directly from the founding congress for the Latin American Trade Union Confederation held in Montevideo the month before — Chileans were not repre-sented, in large measure because the fierce repression of the Ibáñez dictatorship had reduced their ranks and gravely weakened their party over the previous two years.29 As Becker makes clear, moreover, Mariátegui’s extremely critical reaction to the idea of an indigenous republic, as presented by Dr. Hugo Pesce, vindicated the impor-tance of class struggle and of the indigenous problem as essentially a land problem.

30. Becker, “Mariátegui y el problema de las razas en América Latina,” 200 –12. On Mariátegui, see also Alberto Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern (Lima: DESCO, 1980).

31. Uliánova, “El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibáñez,” 435 – 36.32. On Manuel Aburto Panguilef and the Federación Araucana, see also Florencia E. Mallon, “El

Siglo XX Mapuche: Esferas públicas, sueños de autodeterminación y articulaciones internacionales,” in Las disputas por la etnicidad en América Latina: Movilizaciones indígenas en Chiapas y Araucanía, ed. Christian Martínez Neira and Marco Estrada Saavedra (Santiago, Chile: Catalonia / USACH, 2009), 155 – 90.


Although there was intense debate around the issue of race in Latin America, and specifically on the idea of creating indigenous republics as a form of communist strug-gle in the region, no agreement was reached concerning a general policy on self- determination. Rather than reach a final conclusion, delegates left open the possibility that each national group could make the right decision at the local level.30

Chilean communists would soon loudly and dramatically proclaim their prog-ress in the application of the policy of indigenous self- determination, in part because it was between 1929 and 1933 that their party underwent what Uliánova calls “bolchevi-kization” and was brought more fully under the control of the South American Sec-retariat. As a result of the internal divisions and repression it faced during the Ibáñez dictatorship, Uliánova suggests, the Chilean Communist Party, despite its strong tra-dition of autonomy and mass mobilization, ended up toeing the Komintern line. “The South American Secretariat,” she writes, “becomes the only mediator of the Chilean CP’s relationship with the Komintern, promoting a new generation of leaders on the basis of their unconditional support for the political line of the SAS.” 31 Indeed, by late 1933, before the beginning of the Ránquil uprising, the pamphlet distributed by Lei-va’s supporters at the Temuco congress was signed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chilean Section of the Communist International.

However, to conclude that it was only adherence to the Komintern line that yielded a notion of an indigenous republic in Lonquimay would not give us a com-plete picture. The final ingredient in the complex alchemy that produced the heroic version of Ránquil came from the Mapuche movement itself. Between 1911 and the end of the 1920s, three Mapuche political organizations had formed with the purpose of defending indigenous lands and culture. Two of the three had the goal of integrat-ing the Mapuche into Chilean society through education and eventually privatizing indigenous lands. The third organization, led by Manuel Aburto Panguilef, was the only one to unconditionally oppose the division of Mapuche lands.32

Throughout the 1920s, Aburto and his Federación Araucana confronted the land problem from the perspective of cultural and territorial autonomy. Criticized by other more integrationist Mapuche leaders, Aburto sought out alliances that might help him find a solution to the Mapuche problem that privileged self- determination. A possible alternative that he explored systematically in the 1920s was a political coali-tion with the emerging popular movement, especially with the unions supported by the newly emerging leftist parties. In 1924, for example, the Federación Araucana supported Francisco Melivilu, a Mapuche leftist who successfully ran for Congress

33. “Resoluciones del XI Congreso Araucano de Raguintuleufu, diciembre de 1931,” reproduced in La derrota del área cultural no. 1 / 2005, vol. 1 of Anales de Desclasificación (Santiago de Chile: Laboratorio de Desclasificación Comparada), 102 – 103. Translation mine. The term Araucanian rather than Mapuche was in general use in Chile at this time, including among educated Mapuche.

34. Ibid., 102.

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on the Partido Demócrata ticket. FOCH delegates participated in several of the Fed-eración Araucana’s congresses, and a delegation from the Federación that traveled to Santiago in October 1929 to protest the division of Mapuche lands asked for support from the working- class movement.

It was precisely between 1929 and 1931, during the “bolchevikization” period, that the combination of an internationalist vision of revolutionary soviets, an antico-lonial policy of self- determination for oppressed nationalities, and the possibility of an alliance with the visionary Mapuche leader Manuel Aburto Panguilef yielded what must have looked like a winning revolutionary combination. In December 1931, the eleventh congress of the Federación Araucana resolved to push forward with a project for Mapuche autonomy linked to an emerging vision of leftist popular government. Indeed, the declarations concerning the Indigenous Republic were quite dramatic:

The 11th Congreso Araucano resolves: That its most deeply held aspiration is the creation of the Indigenous Republic where the Araucanian race can live according to its own psychology, customs, and rituals; own its own land, occupying the provinces where its one hundred and fifty thousand members can live (taking into account reserves for the growth of the population); develop an education system oriented toward its own welfare; and engage in self- government, creating its own progress and culture. This aspiration of our race will only be possible through an effective alliance among Natives, peasants and workers, the day that the Chilean working class in fraternal union with all of us conquers power and puts into effect its program of social justice.

This Congress recommends to the Araucanian people that this aspiration be felt by all the Native people of Chile, teaching it to our children as a sacred cult so that in the not so distant future we are able to reach our own greatness and welfare.33

To this declaration we must also add the previous statement in the same reso-lutions of the congress, concerning a new form of political organization for the Mapu-che region, or Araucanía:

The 11th Congreso Araucano resolves: Foment the total Unification of our race in a single institution that should have within it all the current organizations, under the direction of an executive committee and that will have groups in all the different cities and throughout the countryside; give the institution the character of a class party, a revolutionary line of struggle and connect the indigenous social movement with the worker and peasant social movement.34

In addition, “the 11th Congreso Araucano, considering that the problems of land and education facing the Araucanian race are a real social problem that have a close rela-

35. Ibid.36. Ministerio del Interior, 1933, vol. 8675, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17, 1, Archivo Siglo XX.37. This reference was kindly provided by Thomas Klubock from his research notes on the fourteenth

congress of the Federación Araucana, Plom- Maquehue, at the end of 1934.38. “Juventud Araucana: Diario de la Federación Juvenil Araucana,” Trai Traico (Nueva Imperial),

December 27, 1935, in La derrota del área cultural/2005, 111 – 21; especially 117 – 18 for discussion of Lon-quimay.


tionship with the aspirations of the national proletariat, resolves: to keep a cordial and close relationship with the Federación Obrera de Chile, in its campaign to liberate the exploited classes.” 35

This enthusiasm for an alliance with the Left continued after the Ránquil massacre. Although the confidential report from the intendant of Cautín province concerning the Second National Convention of the Central Socialista de Colonización named Aburto Panguilef as one of its leaders and described Juan Leiva Tapia’s impas-sioned speech at the same convention,36 there is no direct evidence of the participation of Aburto Panguilef or the Federación Araucana in the Lonquimay uprising. Aburto Panguilef and the Federación clearly expressed their solidarity with the prisoners in the Temuco jail, not only in the declarations of the Federación’s congress in Plom- Maquehue37 but also in the new publication being put out by the Federación’s youth wing, the Federación Juvenil Araucana. In the December 1935 publication of Juventud Araucana, written by hand, we find among diverse references to class struggle and the need for ethnic militancy two pages specifically dedicated to the Lonquimay situation. One of these is a poem by the “proletarian poet” Mario Beltrán about the struggle in Lonquimay and the unity among Mapuche, workers, and peasants in their efforts to regain usurped lands. However, it is the second page that stands out. Under the ques-tion, “What is the International Red Aid (Socorro Rojo Internacional)?” we read:

International Red Aid provides help to the men who are taken prisoner, to those who are injured, deported, or sent into internal exile (relegados) as punishment for defending their bread, land, and rights. It helps the prisoner and his family and the families of those killed by the rich huincas (non- Mapuche) in these struggles. For example: it helps our persecuted and massacred brothers in Lonquimay. International Red Aid has taken the orphans of Lonquimay to Santiago, where they are going to school. International Red Aid will send 4 of these children to Russia.

When you join Red Aid, you receive moral and material aid if you fall in the struggle. Mapuche brothers, form Red Aid groups that can defend those who fall victim to the persecutions of the bourgeoisie.38

International Red Aid was founded in 1922 as a broad humanitarian aid orga-nization associated with and funded by the Komintern whose principal purpose was consciousness raising through solidarity and providing assistance to political prison-ers and their families. As an organization, it carried out some international solidar-ity campaigns in especially notorious cases of repression. Sometimes it participated in popular mobilizations, such as in the case of the 1932 uprising in El Salvador that

39. For the case of El Salvador, I base my arguments on Gould and Lauria- Santiago, To Rise in Dark-ness, and Jorge Schlesinger, Revolución Comunista (Guatemala: Editorial Unión Tipográfica Castañeda, Avila y Cia., 1946), especially 95 – 115. For Brazil, see John W. F. Dulles, Brazilian Communism, 1935 –1945: Repres-sion during World Upheaval (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). For the rest of the cases, see Robert J. Alexander, Communism in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957). I am grate-ful to Jeffrey Gould for first alerting me to International Red Aid.

40. Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista de Chile (Ensayo de historia del Partido) (Santiago: Editora Austral, 1965), 220.

41. An additional reference to International Red Aid appears in a memorandum from the Chilean Investigative Police concerning a meeting of the teachers’ union in Santiago on December 13, 1934, where delegate Cleofe Arriagada, who had made it to Lonquimay after the massacre, presented a report. Among the resolutions of the meeting is the following: “Bring at least fifty children, so that the Union, in coordina-tion with International Red Aid and the FOCH, can provide them with clothes and education,” Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8677, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 550, 2, Archivo Siglo XX.

42. “Fines del Socorro Rojo Internacional,” pamphlet reproduced by Schlesinger in Revolución Comu-nista, 211.

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ended in massacre. The organization had affiliates in a number of Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.39 In Chile, Hernán Ramírez Necochea points out that during the dictatorship of Car-los Ibáñez, a large group of communist women, “defying police actions and in the most rigorous clandestinity, played a major role in the collection of resources for Inter-national Red Aid and their distribution among political prisoners, those in internal exile, and their families.” 40

The existence of International Red Aid in Chile, and its participation in help-ing the prisoners from Lonquimay and their families,41 is therefore quite impor-tant. Although the organization had a connection with the communist movement, its members did not have to be affiliated with the Communist Party. “International Red Aid struggles to unify members of revolutionary organizations with the unorga-nized,” explained a pamphlet from El Salvador in 1932, “without taking into account the political or social affiliation or the race of the persecuted individual.” In fact, the same pamphlet emphasized that “International Red Aid struggles against the racial oppression suffered by Black, Native, and Chinese workers, as well as by members of other oppressed nationalities.” 42

When placed in an international context, it is apparent that the June 1934 events in Lonquimay and the debates surrounding their meaning over the next sev-eral years occurred at a time of dramatic changes in the Chilean Communist Party and the international communist movement. In such a context, we can better com-prehend the origins of the communist narrative about Ránquil, even as its content may not have been entirely correct from an empirical standpoint. To understand why this heroic narrative had such a long life in Chile, however, we must also understand the conflicts of the subsequent period, for this was the moment of transition from a “class against class” strategy to a politics of “popular front.” During these years, pop-ular insurrection gave way to a search for an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. Within the Soviet Union, the popular front position emerged at the same time as

43. Ricardo Melgar Bao, “La recepción del orientalismo antiimperialista en América Latina, 1924 – 1929,” Cuadernos Americanos 109 (January – February 2005): 11 – 41.

44. Yopo, “Las relaciones internacionales del Partido Comunista,” in Varas, El Partido Comunista en Chile, 378, and Uliánova, “Levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay,” 211–12.

45. These documents, which concern Chile, are in the Komintern archive and are reproduced in Uliánova, “Levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay,” 213 – 22.


Stalin’s policy of “socialism in one country,” a policy that won out against a broader vision of revolution that had been debated, according to Ricardo Melgar Bao, in the Komintern in the 1920s.43

In Chile, the change of policy occurred within the PCCh beginning in 1935. As Olga Uliánova and the Komintern documents about Chile have shown, the eigh-teen months following the Ránquil massacre were especially conflictual, not only within the Chilean Communist Party but also in the international movement. Accord-ing to Uliánova, even though the transition was fairly clear and quick at the level of the Komintern, in Chile there was a longer and deeper confrontation between the party faction supporting popular insurrection, on the one hand, and those who were call-ing for a policy of long- term political and trade- union organization, on the other. The conflict was so strong that a new international delegate was forced to intervene.44

For the purposes of our argument, it is important to emphasize that both fac-tions in the internal conflict could, from a logical point of view, use the Ránquil case to support their own position. Those in favor of popular insurrection could find in the uprising the proof they needed of the revolutionary potential of the Chilean popu-lar classes, a potential that would be wasted without an immediate call to revolution. From the opposing perspective, the easy defeat and repression of the Ránquil upris-ing could be attributed to the lack of a deeper process of organization, suggesting that it was necessary to continue organizing from a long- term perspective and wait for a more promising moment. Seen in this light, the heroic narrative of Ránquil as an example for the Chilean proletariat could be a weapon for either side in these inter-nal conflicts, because the “lessons” of Lonquimay, as seen in the documents for 1935, were used as proof by both factions.45

There is an additional irony if we look at these debates from a postcolonial per-spective. By constructing a narrative of the uprising that emphasized the unity among peasants, service tenants, workers, and Mapuches, the Chilean Communist Party was complicit with the landowners, the police, and the national government. Of course, while the landowners and the state constructed this unity as a justification for the repression of groups that were supposedly barbaric, the Left used the same narrative of unity, blood, and violence to elaborate a romantic vision of an alternative national community that, through heroic sacrifice, would finally be able to bring to power a socialist government. In both cases, and in a contradictory manner, these linear nar-ratives of national progress promoted a false image of unity among all the oppressed that marked the desire for but also the fear of revolution in Chile until 1973.

In fact, in the context of social mobilization and the electoral victory of the Popular Unity coalition in 1970, a new narrative of popular heroism emerged that

46. Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation- State in Chile, 1890 to the Pres-ent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), translation, 135 – 36, 311, n. 61; and my translation of addi-tional phrases from the original Spanish version in La Nación (Frazier, Salt in the Sand, 311, n. 61).

47. The Santa María de Iquique massacre is analyzed in Manuel A. Fernández, Proletariado y salitre en Chile, 1810 –1910, Monografías de Nueva Historia, no. 2 (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, Uni-versity of London, 1988), especially 64 – 65, where the author provides a carefully reasoned revision of exist-ing estimates of the number of dead, and in Frazier, Salt in the Sand, especially 117 – 57, where she addresses the ways in which the memory of this massacre has been structured. She includes an analysis of how the cantata commemorating the massacre was composed and also traces its popularity in the form sang by the radical folk group Quilapayún during the Popular Unity government.

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could also be reorganized and appropriated by a government interested in representing itself as both the result and the facilitator of mass struggle. This was clearly the mes-sage of President Salvador Allende’s May Day speech in 1972, when he associated the struggle and suffering of the Chilean people with his coalition’s victory at the polls:

The historical process of the people’s struggle . . . was marked with the sacrifice of thousands of Chileans in Ranquil [sic], in San Gregorio, in the Escuela de Santa María, in the Magallanes Workers’ Federation, in Puente Alto, in José María Caro. In other words, it has been this people’s struggle that has made possible the unity and within this a unified concept: to make possible the instrument necessary for the conquest of the Government and to advance to the conquest of power.46

Two of the examples provided by Allende in his speech had already been pop-ularized in the literary and cultural production that emphasized the heroic impor-tance of massacres: Ránquil and the massacre of nitrate workers at the Santa María school in Iquique. The second had been immortalized in the “Cantata de Santa María de Iquique,” composed in 1969 by the musician Luis Advis and premiered in 1970 by the musical group Quilapayún.47 The Ránquil case would also be the subject of several works during the Popular Unity years, including a historical essay, an in- depth journalistic report, and a play. Although they present the case from diverse per-spectives, all of them share one important element: in a time of revolutionary mobili-zations based on social class, they do not mention the question of Mapuche autonomy that was so important in earlier narratives.

In 1972, the Chilean magazine Ramona, associated with the Communist Party, which formed part of the government coalition, published a special report on the uprising and massacre entitled “Ránquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza” (“Rán-quil, between Blood and Hope”). Based on interviews with three survivors of the massacre, Ismael Carter and Emelina and Clementina Sagredo, the essay did not mention Pewenche participation, calling it a “massacre of peasants.” The survivors told a story of hardship and poverty, of not having enough land or enough to eat. A voice from the other side of the grave, belonging to one of the deceased victims, Rocart Hermosilla, was said to have remembered Juan Leiva Tapia as educated and part of a rich family with many sheep, but a communist. The testimonies also empha-

48. “Ránquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza, Crónica Especial de Lucho Abarca,” Ramona, no. 23 (1972), 24 – 28. I am grateful to Fernanda Villarroel for providing me with a photocopy of this article.

49. Ibid., 24.50. Ibid., 26.51. Ibid. See also Carter and Sagredo’s stories of survival, 28.52. Ibid.


sized the abuses committed by the military police, the amazing stories of survival amid blood and gore, and ultimately the article concluded that people’s suffering, the memories of the survivors, and the next generation would all now be vindicated by agrarian reform.48

In many ways, it was a tragic story; as the introduction to the article explained, “Today the Agrarian Reform arrives at this place, when the mountain winds have long since blown away the sound of the bullets and the dead will not see the land dis-tributed, the land for which they fought.” 49 Emelina Sagredo blamed Gonzalo Bun-ster, the son of José Bunster, for having such envy and a hunger for land that he could not simply sit by and let the smallholders and colonists prosper. “He was the guilty one,” she said, “He owned the whole region. He couldn’t stand by and leave those lit-tle pieces of new land in our hands.” It was landowner greed, supported by President Arturo Alessandri, whom Sagredo calls “the Butcher of the Moneda (Presidential Palace),” that led to the death of more than one hundred rebels.50

At its core, this version of the Ránquil events is a story of reconciliation between classes through the good offices of a democratic socialist government. After the gruesome details of survival — in Carter’s case, with five bullets in his body yet able to hold onto his horse until he got home; in Sagredo’s case, escaping through the snow to Argentina, pregnant, and nearly dying of hunger and exposure51 — the new era of the Popular Unity coalition brings redemption. A play about the Sagredo fam-ily, with the title of “The Ones Left along the Way” (“Los que van quedando en el Camino”), is being performed in Santiago and Emelina Sagredo is its star character. The role of Sagredo is being played by the actress Carmen Bunster, the granddaugh-ter of Gonzalo Bunster, the landowner responsible for the massacre. “Meanwhile,” concludes the piece, “the Agrarian Reform Corporation is getting ready to expropri-ate the fundos Huallalí, El Barco, and Los Guindos. Thirty- four years after the mas-sacre, justice is beginning to arrive in Ránquil.” 52

These two versions of Ránquil, the journalistic and the theatrical, share a tri-umphalist theme of victory and redemption — of the vindication of popular demands by a sympathetic government that finally had listened to its citizens — that fits well with the Popular Unity project. A historical essay published by leftist writer and musi-cian Patricio Manns in his book Las grandes masacres (1972) takes a much different approach. Manns wrote that Ránquil was an attempt at popular autonomy, a precur-sor of the guerrilla movements and revolutions of the 1960s. He also put Ránquil in a triumphalist narrative about the Chilean popular movement:

53. Manns, Las grandes masacres, 58.54. For more on this element, see Florencia E. Mallon, “Land, Morality, and Exploitation in Southern

Chile: Rural Conflict and Discourses of Agrarian Reform in Cautín, 1928 – 1974,” Political Power and Social Theory 14 (2001): 141– 93, and Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailio and the Chil-ean State, 1906 –2001 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), especially chapters 1, 4, and 5.

55. Flores Chávez, “Un episodio en la historia social de Chile,” 131.

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The events in the Alto Bío- Bío, Ranquil [sic] and Lonquimay . . . mark the awakening of the peasantry, and of their real incorporation into the active struggle. From that moment on [the peasantry] battles as equals and side by side with other proletarian sectors. Today, the battle for our final liberation, for the recovery of the land that was lost through blood, fire, and law, has incorporated the Mapuche element that can give us real lessons about organization and dedication in all corners of the peasantry. . . . Thus history teaches us that for each murder, for each expropriation, for each offense, ten men are awakened every day. And they awake with clenched fists, ready to fight.53

It is important to point out as well that Patricio Manns, though first and fore-most a musician and artist, an innovator in the famous new song movement in Chile and one of the founders of the Peña de los Parra in Santiago, was also associated polit-ically with the left wing of the Popular Unity government. When in exile in 1974, he formed the musical group Karaxu, two of whose albums, “Chile: Cantos para la resistencia” (New York, 1975) and “Karaxu Live” (recorded in the German Demo-cratic Republic in 1975), featured the logo of the more radical Movement of the Revo-lutionary Left (MIR). In contrast with the article in Ramona, which envisions popular victory through a connection with the government, in his 1972 piece on Lonquimay Manns presents a vision of popular agrarian mobilization and the incorporation of the Mapuche into a radical class struggle that corresponds quite closely to the perspec-tive on the countryside developed by the MIR.54

With the 1973 military coup and the subsequent Pinochet dictatorship, the Left’s triumphalist class narrative was badly battered. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 1980s, both in Chile and internationally, an identity- based indigenous move-ment strongly criticized the Left for its lack of attention to the specific demands of colonized peoples. In the 1990s, Mapuche leaders reclaimed the figure of Manuel Aburto Panguilef as the first visionary to have proclaimed the necessity of an autono-mous movement, though they strategically overlooked his years of coalition with the Left. In such a context, Ránquil lost its emblematic role as a symbol of class unity. In 1993, historian Jaime Flores minimized Mapuche- Pewenche participation, suggest-ing that “from the perspective of the Mapuche, both landowners and Chilean colo-nists had occupied their lands; therefore, their struggle was against the ‘huinca,’ that is, against the foreigner whatever the origin or social condition.” 55

Ironically, the indigenous theme in the massacre also got a new life in the 1980s as a contradictory symbol within new left- wing and right- wing narratives about the significance of the military dictatorship. In the first half of the decade, when resis-

56. “Actas” means “recorded minutes” or “recorded act or certificate.” The best translation of Manns’s title would probably be “Recorded Eyewitness Testimony from the Bío Bío region.” Fahrenkrog’s title is much easier to translate, simply “The Truth about the Ránquil Uprising.”

57. Fahrenkrog, La verdad sobre la revuelta, 25 – 26.


tance to the dictatorship was beginning to pick up, two books were published repre-senting completely opposite points of view: Actas del Bío- Bío, by exiled musician and writer Patricio Manns, who had also written the earlier Grandes masacres, and La verdad sobre la revuelta de Ránquil, by the eyewitness Harry Fahrenkrog Reinhold, who at the time of the events was a very young Canadian colonist.56 In both cases, the indigenous presence served as background for and point of origin of the narra-tive. In Actas del Bío- Bío, the narrator travels to the mountain region, to the house of an ancient Mapuche cacique by the name of Angol Mamalcahuello, to hear the truth about the events of 1934 and about the figure of José [sic] Segundo Leiva Tapia. In La verdad sobre la revuelta, Fahrenkrog begins his narrative with the happy and inno-cent solidarity of the Andean population, an innocence and solidarity broken by the usurpations and politicization of the new twentieth century. Let us analyze each text in a bit more detail.

Harry Fahrenkrog’s memoirs were written at the beginning of the 1960s, before the agrarian reform arrived to disturb Chile’s landowner- dominated balance of power but were not published until 1985 by his son, after the author’s death. In this sense, they contain an interesting double perspective. On one side, when the author wrote, he was a successful landowner, having bought several landed properties in the very region of the massacre. On the other side, at the moment of publication, the text presented an object lesson concerning what could happen again if the political conflict supposedly extirpated by the dictatorship were to return. La verdad sobre la revuelta, therefore, not only looks back nostalgically on a time of lost innocence but also sounds the alarm about international communism. “For Chile, they are times that will not return,” writes Fahrenkrog.

The land has been divided up, the population has been politicized, and today the thirst for money and power dominates; the hatred of those left behind for those who have gotten ahead, revenge, and violence, contrast dramatically with the feelings that used to predominate in those days, when in those isolated Andean valleys everyone, including those who felt defeated, still maintained a spirit of getting ahead and of healthy competition, combined with admiration for those who stood out.57

This remembered utopia was broken with the arrival of Juan Leiva Tapia, tool of the Communist Party and thus responsible for all the problems that ensued:

In this way we will demonstrate the radical change that was produced with the arrival in the valley of Juan Leiva Tapia, who destroyed all the moral values of the past, sowing class hatred and political ideas in the minds of the inhabitants who, until that point had lived as children, with the virtues and defects of all human beings,

58. Ibid., 26.59. Ibid., 49, 50 – 51.60. Between 1981 and 1983, precisely when Actas del Alto Bío- Bío was written and published, MIR

attempted to reenter the country by crossing the Andes clandestinely at Neltume, in the province of Val-divia, quite a bit south of Lonquimay. In December 1983, moreover, the Communist Party announced the creation of its own armed movement, the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, and generalized street pro-tests began against the dictatorship. For all of these events, see Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973 –1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

61. Patricio Manns, Actas del Alto Bío- Bío (Madrid: Ediciones Michay, S.A., 1985), especially 129 – 34, Anima Luz Boroa’s story of her rape.

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but who, given the dominant environment, worked hard to improve themselves, emphasizing their merits and minimizing their shortcomings.58

How were these utopian values of the past destroyed? Through an interna-tional communist conspiracy, with Leiva Tapia as its local representative. In addition to circulating false information to members of the Lonquimay agricultural union, according to Fahrenkrog, to make sure they were “discontented,” Leiva supposedly attended “the meetings of the Communist Party in Montevideo” where “June 24, 1934 was declared the date for an international Communist uprising, valid for all of South America.” At the last minute, the author explains, the coordinated uprisings failed, “but Leiva Tapia, who had come to personally lead the uprising in Lonquimay, did not receive in a timely manner the message to suspend the uprising until further notice, and for this reason, loyal to the international program, sent his men to take over the Lonquimay Valley, from where they would continue to Lautaro and Victo-ria, finally to meet up with the other rebel groups and conquer Chile for the Com-munist cause.” 59

The contrast between Fahrenkrog — who narrates the lost innocence of the poor at the hands of international communism — and Manns, who attempts to exca-vate popular heroism and associate it with the history of the Mapuche people, cannot be greater. Published when its author was in exile, at a time of renewed hope with the increasing protests against the dictatorship, Actas del Bío- Bío aims to reawaken the memory of popular resistance.60 The story opens slowly toward the uprising and massacre of 1934, as the narrator is taken into the confidence of Mapuche cacique Angol Mamalcahuello and his wife Anima Luz Boroa. “José Segundo,” the name they give Leiva Tapia, had lived in the house of the couple, and they ultimately wit-nessed his death. They were also witness to the abuses of the military police or cara-bineros, abuses that included the rape of Anima Luz Boroa by the wounded officer she herself had nursed back to health.61

What most stands out in this narrative, however, is the connection between the historical resistance of the Mapuche people and the Ránquil massacre. When Angol Mamalcahuello was arrested by the military police, his wife defended him, saying, “He has done all this because he is the cacique. . . . He could not overlook his

62. Ibid., 142.63. Ibid., 103 – 4.64. Manns, Las grandes masacres, 54 and 55.


obligations at a time of war.” 62 The most dramatic example of this connection occurs in a conversation between Mamalcahuello and the narrator in which the former ends up telling the story of Lautaro and connecting it to the figure of Leiva Tapia. The narrator reacts in the following way:

Descending toward the riverbed, Angol Mamalcuahuello [sic] for an instant forgets José Segundo Leiva Tapia. Or is he telling me the same story, repeated under the cover of other names, under the secret sign of a dusty palimpsest from another time? This is the most probable explanation. His latent obsession does not permit him to take much distance from José- Lautaro. . . . Rodolfo Lenz, the German philologist, already at the beginning of the twentieth century spoke of Araucanian memory, of their exceptional narrative capacity and, above all, of their ability to recreate events that were very distant in time that, in Indian recounting, seemed to have happened the day before. And what is even more surprising: these deeds, centuries old, undergo very few modifications in their difficult journey from generation to generation.63

In identifying Leiva Tapia with the figure of the legendary Mapuche hero Lautaro, also narrated in Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana, and placing the identification in the mouth of the wise cacique Mamalcahuello, Manns is creating his own palimpsest in which the heroic national resistance of the Mapuche people against the Spanish is identified with the struggle of leftist heroes such as Leiva. The idea is to create a long chain of heroic resistance to oppression — preserved and reproduced through Mapuche memory — that will ultimately culminate in justice for the Chil-ean people as a whole. In this context, it is interesting to note the differences between Manns’s short 1972 essay on Ránquil and this longer 1984 text. If in 1972 Ránquil, as “liberated territory,” was a precursor to the guerrillas of the Americas — “At that point Che was only seven years old,” 64 writes Manns — when the Actas are published, the ancestral struggle and memory of the Mapuche people have become the precur-sors of the Alto Bío- Bío conflict.

It is tempting to suggest that between 1972 and the mid- 1980s, the emergence of a Mapuche movement vindicating the presence of the Mapuche people in Chilean politics and in the resistance to the dictatorship had influenced Manns. In such a con-text, perhaps he was attracted to the association of popular struggle, newly ascendant in this second period, to a long memory and tradition of indigenous resistance. The problem with such an interpretation becomes clear in the concluding scene of the text, when Angol Mamalcahuello and Anima Luz Boroa, sitting together by the side of the river, begin to see the bodies of the massacre’s victims pass by as they float down the river. “We counted them the same way our young warriors count sheep when they can’t sleep,” says Mamalcahuello. He continues: “Later the day began to disap-

65. Manns, Actas del Alto Bío- Bío, 149 – 50.66. Translated as Memorial of the Night or Memorial to the Night.67. Patricio Manns, Memorial de la Noche (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998), 164.68. Periódico Mapuche AzkintuWE 1, no. 8 (2004): 1.

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pear downhill, the sunset bloomed first and then the night, and we could see noth-ing, we no longer could count, and then we held hands, leaned up against the tree, and we fell asleep.

“Asleep until today, sir.” 65

This image of perpetual sleep contradicts the notion of an awakening Mapu-che resistance. Another possible hypothesis is that when Manns wrote this text in the early 1980s, he had not yet completely understood the importance of the Mapuche movement. The problem with this theory is that when he published a modified ver-sion of the same text under the title of Memorial de la Noche in Chile in 1998,66 the concluding section reads as follows:

We counted our dead warriors like children count sheep when they cannot sleep, because they don’t like the night, because the day is full of miracles, because the prodigal events occur during the day. . . . Then the remains of the day began to fall, the sunset bloomed like a bright orange poppy, and then the night, like a black poppy, and we could see nothing, we could not go on counting. So we held hands over the water to help them down the river, so that one day they would know the ocean. Then we leaned against the tree once more, closed our dried out eyes, and we slowly fell asleep.

Asleep until today, sir.67

The first thing we notice is the slight differences between the two texts. In the first, the dead are not identified as Mapuche but are instead generic victims, whereas in the second, the dead are Mapuche warriors. Another difference in the second text is that the goal of holding hands is solidarity with the dead, to help them down the river to the sea, which is also not the case in the first version. Given these differences, the impact of the same last line is even more dramatic: the Mapuche are asleep until today. For Manns, as a writer of the Left, the political connection between the Left and the indigenous movement remains the most important message until the present day, because neither can prosper without the other.

A very different perspective on the Ránquil events emerges from the writings of Mapuche intellectuals. In July 2004, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Rán-quil uprising, a large headline appeared on the first page of the Mapuche newspaper AzkintuWe: “Up in the Cordillera” (“Arriba en la Cordillera”), an unmistakable refer-ence to a hit song by Patricio Manns of the same title that was released in 1965. The introduction to the “special report” read: “Seventy years after the Ránquil massacre, Pewenche communities in Lonquimay continue to face off against landowners and the government in their struggle for the land.” 68 Turning to the continuation of the story inside the issue, we find an article about the situation of several Pewenche com-

69. Ibid., 5 – 6; direct quotation on p. 6.70. Ibid., 7.71. Ibid. In his report about the “escape of prisoners”— one understands that, in fact they have been

shot “while escaping”— Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Delano Soluco mentions Ignacio Maripe, who sup-posedly escaped on July 5, 1934: Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencia Confidencial, no. 257 – 58, Parte no. 1492.

72. “Ránquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza,” 28.


munities located near the town of Lonquimay that, in an effort to recover lands they considered theirs, confronted landowners and police. The article concluded with a quotation from the werken (spokesman) Nibaldo Romero Cañumir, representing the Pewenche organization: “In the Lonquimay region the situation has become unsus-tainable. They have us cornered like rabbits, they have us all in the hills, pushing us further up all the time. That’s why we are going to continue struggling, we will not lower our arms, because we know whose land it is that we stand on: this land belongs to our people, it is Mapuche land.” 69

On the next page of the same issue, the same reporter, Renato Reyes Matus, has an additional article on the Ránquil uprising and what he calls “seventy years of forgetting.” If we analyze this article in relationship to the rest of the issue’s content, several elements stand out. One of these is the emphasis placed on the historical con-tinuity of state repression and the dispossession of Mapuche lands. Reyes’s description of the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century — “they were cornered ever higher up into the mountains” — powerfully echoes the words of the werken Romero. Equally interesting, however, is Reyes’s introduction to his article, where he writes that the Ránquil uprising was “perhaps the one and only time” that “Mapuche- Pewenche and poor Chilean peasants” were unified in a single movement.70 This contrasts dra-matically with leftist versions that have seen the unity between poor peasants and Pewenche people in the Ránquil uprising as the beginning of the organized popular movement in the countryside. Instead, Reyes presents this moment as the only one in which such unity was achieved, leaving aside the entire rural social movement during the agrarian reform of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.

Another important element in Reyes’s article, which also echoes other writ-ings on the same events, has to do with the charges of torture against the participants. Ignacio Maripe, writes Reyes, lonko or leader of the community of Maripe, supported the rebels. As a result, when he was arrested “he was savagely tortured while still alive, his eyes gouged out, his tongue cut off along with his ears, until he died.” More than five hundred participants, Reyes continues, were killed; “the women left in the improvised camps were raped and eradicated forever, along with their children, from the region,” and many of those arrested never made it to Temuco.71

The rape of women is also part of Manns’s narrative in Actas del Alto Bío- Bío. The torture and physical mutilation is a more general theme as well. In the 1972 Ramona article, Clementina Sagredo, Emelina’s sister, says that their brother José Rosario also had his ears, nose, and testicles cut off.72 In Fahrenkrog’s text, the admin-

73. Fahrenkrog, La verdad, 53.74. “Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautín al Ministro en visita, dando cuenta de los eventos de Lon-

quimay,” no. 257 – 58, parte no. 1490 (July 15, 1934), Temuco, 6, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providen-cias Confidenciales, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.

75. In addition to Fahrenkrog’s memoir, see Gonzalo Vial Correa, De la República Socialista al Frente Popular (1931 –1938 ), vol. 5 of Historia de Chile (1891 –1973 ) (Santiago: Empresa Editora Zig- Zag, S.A., 2001), 368 – 75.

76. The Web site can be accessed at archivochile.com. Miguel Enríquez was the legendary founder and leader of MIR, the most radical of the leftist organizations in Chile during the Popular Unity govern-ment, and died in battle against the Chilean military police during a raid on his safe house after the Sep-tember 1973 coup.

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istrator of the fundo Guayalí, taken prisoner by the rebels, suffers this fate: “they took out his eyes, cut off his nose and tongue, and finally castrated him before killing him.”73 In a powerful mirror image of Reyes’s account, a police document recounts that it is the same cacique Ignacio Maripe who mutilated the dead body of Luciano Gainza, who had been renting the fundo Contraco.74 Though there is no further empirical confirmation of these forms of torture by either side, and we cannot equate the forms of violence committed by the rebels with those committed by the repres-sive forces, the repetition of the same images speaks to the horror the events caused to both groups. Especially because of the generalization of these accusations, it is par-ticularly important to reflect on the role such images of abuse have played in all the existing narratives about these events.

Conclusions: Images of Torture, Abuse, and Innocent Victims in Chilean National NarrativesAs we have seen, the Ránquil uprising and massacre has served as a touchstone for many stories about what the Chilean nation has or should have been. For the Left, it has served as a symbol of the Chilean people’s revolutionary spirit, beginning as an emblem of the revolutionary soviet and the indigenous republic during the Komin-tern’s “third period” and later serving as a precursor to the peasant movement dur-ing the years of agrarian reform and the Popular Unity government. For the Right, it became a symbol of state consolidation and the loss of popular innocence caused by international communism.75 More recently, for Mapuche intellectuals and activists, Ránquil has served as a metaphor for the enduring usurpation and resistance of the Pewenche people. In recent years, and as part of a new academic interest in the topic, the Web page of the leftist Centro de Estudios Miguel Enríquez- Archivo Chile has brought together different analyses of Ránquil from historical and social- movement perspectives.76

Despite their many differences, I suggest that, with the exception of the right- wing perspective, all these narratives share a very important characteristic: in the same story of resistance by and abuse of the poor — Mapuche and non- Mapuche peas-ants, in different combinations — they seek an origins myth, or the mise- en- scène, of a desired national unity. As symbol of a profound political desire, whether from the

77. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).


Left or from the Mapuche movement, for an alternative national community, Rán-quil still has great political purchase.

In this sense, the Ránquil massacre takes its place in Chilean history alongside the other massacres of the twentieth century. As already suggested, the presence of these in history, especially Ránquil and the Santa María de Iquique school, became especially important during the Popular Unity years as part of a national narrative articulated by the Left. The two cases share many elements: the poor rising up against injustice; the violent reaction of the powerful and the resulting abuse of the innocent, including women and children; the attempted government cover- up; and finally, the many different estimates and debates concerning the number of deaths. In addition, both cases inspired artistic works that narrated heroism and tragedy from a popular perspective, helping to tell a story of popular sacrifice in the formulation of a unitary leftist national project that finally would take state power.

If the role of massacre as emblem in twentieth- century Chilean history is indeed powerful, we may also wish to reflect on how the remembrance of victims, and debates over the meaning of incidents and patterns of collective victimization more generally, have been potent ingredients in many narratives of political and cul-tural identity and of national belonging across the world. It is beyond the confines of this essay to delve deeply into this complicated and painful history, but suffice it to say that the debates and conflicts are often as much about the meaning attached to the events as they are about the empirical facts of the events. As the work of Alessandro Portelli has shown, misremembering and debates over memory are often produc-tive entry points or clues into the deeper conflicts and anxieties attached to historical memory in a particular society.77

This is clearly so in the case of the Ránquil massacre. The location of Rán-quil along the frontier, in the region historically belonging to the Mapuche- Pewenche people, gives it a unique quality that makes it stand out in the twentieth century and into the contemporary period. Even though the character and degree of Mapuche- Pewenche participation has been increasingly debated, along with the nature of Com-munist Party participation, Ránquil continues to occupy a privileged place in the Chilean imaginary. It is here where the dreams of unity among all the poor and marginalized can be realized, beyond the abusive presence of an expansionary state, beyond the barriers created by the “Pacification” of the Mapuche people. Every time the poor rise up — be they peasants demanding land during the agrarian reform or more recently Pewenche communities demanding the restitution of their ancestral territory — once again, “up in the cordillera,” we witness a recreation of that powerful drama that unfolded one snowy June nearly eighty years ago.

Mallon

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