Extraction and Mobilization: Chile's Forest Plantations and Indigenous Politics

• In Event: Community Mobilization and Environmental Politics: State, Society, and Industry

Abstract

Despite Chile’s reputation as one of Latin America’s most stable democracies and developed economies, long-standing tensions between the state and the Mapuche—the country’s largest indigenous community—have grown over time. Between 1990 and 2016, over half of the 2,619 conflict events between the Mapuche and the Chilean government have resulted in outright violence, leading to what the Chilean government now calls the “Mapuche Conflict.” Yet, these anti-state sentiments are not uniform among the Mapuche: political identification and behavior by Mapuche people is widely varied with some strongly identifying with the Chilean just as others actively reject it. In this project, I examine the variation in identity and behavior across the Mapuche. I theorize that state support for forestry plantations and their presence in rural communities helps to account for variation in state identification among the Mapuche. I contend that forestry subsidies have increased sentiments of marginalization and reduced material benefits for Mapuche rural communities, leading to resentment and anti-state sentiment and behavior. I therefore hypothesize that Mapuche-inhabited municipalities where the government provided more subsidies for forestry plantations should be associated with greater anti-state sentiment and behavior among the Mapuche. I provide evidence for this relationship utilizing unique municipal-level data on forestry subsidies that were distributed from 1978 to 1998 combined with survey and electoral data.

Author

• Vanessa Navarro Rodriguez, UC Berkeley