With far-right president José Antonio Kast presiding over Chile since March 2026, the country has seen a dramatic shift since the days of Gabriel Boric . Kast has taken a harder security approach to the Mapuche struggle in southern Chile , where Indigenous communities continue to contest State control over ancestral territories in Wallmapu . The conflict concerns land and extractive industries and competing notions of territorial sovereignty. The Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM) , an autonomist and revolutionary Mapuche organization, has been at the forefront of some of the most militant forms of resistance.
In this interview, exclusive for Foreign Policy In Focus, scholar and author Ethan Madarieta looks at the long history of Mapuche dispossession and the incorporation of land into Chile and Argentina . Madarieta argues that describing the struggle simply as a “land conflict” hides the actual differences in how Mapuche institutions understand the body and political authority. Further, he discusses Mapuche resistance and what peace and reconciliation might look like beyond the transfer of land parcels.
Daniel Falcone: Could you briefly describe your work and provide some contextual background on the Mapuche ?
Ethan Madarieta: My work starts from a deep engagement with the Mapuche language , Mapudungun, and its conceptual orders. My study largely focuses on the Mapuche peoples of Ngulumapu, or what is today named Chile , although any political understanding of the Mapuche Nation cannot be siloed within the borders of the nation states of Chile and Argentina. It should be noted that the Mapuche are a heterogenous Nation of peoples locally emergent, which is to say, the Mapuche are the Huilliche , the Pikunche , Pehuenche , Lafkenche , Wenteche, Nagche , and so on, each of a specific co-constitutive relation with the characteristics of a territory, or ad mapu / azmapu . The Mapuche Nation is a political unity that consolidated through Spanish incursion and occupation. Indeed, from 1641 to 1862, the Mapuche were “officially recognized as a nation with the concomitant rights to sovereignty and independence,” although they were still considered to be vassals of the Spanish Crown.
Bernardo O’Higgins , Chile’s Supreme Director that led the fight for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, acknowledged Mapuche territorial independence south of the Biobío River, using the language of Mapuche “ sovereignty ” from prior Spanish treaties. In 1862 Coronel Cornelio Saavedra convinced the Chilean National Congress to embark upon the massive genocidal campaigns known as the Pacificación de la Araucanía (Pacification of Araucanía) in Chile.
These campaigns led to the forcible occupation and incorporation of the Mapuche lands south of the Biobío River into the Chilean national territory. They were largely concurrent with the Argentine government’s Conquista del Desierto (Conquest of the Desert), the genocidal clearing and dispossession of the Mapuche territories across Argentina. These projects of elimination, some immediate and some attritional, though shifting and adapting in medium, have continued to this day.
Daniel Falcone: José Antonio Kast has taken a much harder “security-oriented” approach to the Mapuche conflict. What do you think the international media most often gets wrong about what is happening in Wallmapu?
Ethan Madarieta: The Kast regime’s “ security-oriented ” approach is an intensification of the previous government’s encroachment on Mapuche territories. The recent security reform proposals in the Agenda contra el Crimen Organizado y el Terrorismo , for example, is another instance of Chile’s project of surveillance and its ability to suspend civil liberties throughout its border territory. Its ability to declare a state of emergency in specific geographical areas for up to 240 days, even if not directly targeting the Mapuche, will likely also be used to increase surveillance across Mapuche territories.
A major problem, as I understand it, is that the view and labeling of “ the Mapuche conflict ” fundamentally misunderstands the Mapuche, mapu (the land and everything, all matter, the universe), and Wallmapu (the Mapuche territories that extend across South central Chile and Argentina from the Pacific to the Atlantic), and their relation. Because of this fundamental misunderstanding, Kast and all governmental regimes of the Chilean state misapprehend what is at the center of this so-called conflict.
The Chilean state, currently represented by the Kast regime , and much of the international media understand this as a conflict between a sovereign nation state and an Indigenous people who are a demographic minority, whose struggle today is different than that “lost” during the “colonial period.” This conceptual framing assumes the permanence and right of the Chilean and Argentine states to exist and thus the demand for resolution to the “conflict” whereby the Mapuche abide by the conceptual and political orders of these states.
By this logic, the fact and assertion of Mapuche territorial presence is taken as the root of the conflict itself, Mapuche resistance as acts of terrorism. This stance implies that if the Mapuche were to agree, as Pinochet notoriously stated, that “ Today there are no Mapuche, because we are all Chileans, ” there would be no conflict. What I argue is that this is not a conflict but an antagonism. Any “resolution” necessitates the destruction of one of the positions.
To me, this destruction is precisely the goal of settler states globally, through genocidal campaigns and the insidious projects of elimination such as epistemicide (the destruction of knowledge of ways of being and doing), linguicide (the destruction of language and its intrinsic knowledge, political, and social order), territorial occupation, surveillance, and exploitation, forced citizenship, and incorporation into the nation state. These are settler colonial apparatuses intent on the outright elimination and transformation of the Mapuche into a demographic (read ethnic and racial) minority population, that is, into Chileans. Today the Mapuche continue the struggle began in 1641.
Daniel Falcone: In Land’s Language: On Mapuche Memory, Translation, and the Territorial Aporia (Northwestern University Press, 2026), you argue that the conflict isn’t simply about “land,” but about the profoundly different ways of understanding body and territory. Can you explain these distinctions politically?
Ethan Madarieta: Translation is never equation. Politically, it often functions as a mode of conceptual, material, and legal substitution. The Mapuche, some readers will know, are “ people of the land. ” Mapu can be translated as “land” and che as “person.” The two, land and person, are inseparable; the che is modified by mapu . But what this means requires understanding this inseparability from a Mapuche locus and thus asking what “mapu” and “che” mean , not their translation (land or tierra , person or persona ). You’ll notice I am using the singular, person, rather than the common translation of “people.” This is because “che” is singular and means person while “pu che” means people. One is developed into che through actions and knowledge, knowledge that emerges from millennia of being in and with a specific territory cultivated by specific structures of social and ecological relation. This che is thus, yes, a person, but it is also the quality of the position or role of a person, what it means to be a human being.
The che in Mapuche is this quality developed in relation to mapu . But mapu is not just land or earth, it is all matter, the universe, everything. For the sake of time, I will refer the reader to my book for a more detailed answer and close by saying that these distinctions in translation are political distinctions because of the fundamental epistemological mistranslation of the primary subjects of Mapuche politics: land and body.
The state’s “person,” meanwhile, is the citizen, perhaps the “human” of universal human rights , and the “land” is property, resource, potential capital, national territory, and so on. So, this antagonism I am talking about is not about, at least not solely about, “land” and the “rights” (conferred by the state) of “people.” It is, in brief, about the quality of being a human through the cultivation of the understanding of one’s roles in relation to the universe and responsibility to maintain balance and thus, a future.
Daniel Falcone: You write about Mapuche resistance not simply as opposition to the Chilean state but as a creation of an alternative way of life. What would Mapuche peace and reconciliation look like beyond transferring land parcels.
Ethan Madarieta: I am wary of framing Mapuche ways of knowing and doing as an “alternative way of life.” Mapuche peoples who live according to their philosophies and political orders are living a Mapuche way of life . It is not an alternative, but an ontological condition. What I describe in the book are the myriad ways that Mapuche inhabit space and practice relation that defy their territorial sequestration and occupation, their minoritization and incorporation into a Chilean national identity and its historical genealogy.
I argue that what you’ve called the “ transferring [of] land parcels ” by the state is still an act of coerced contingency on the existence of the state. The fundamental question for such “transfer” or “return” of land is: what is being returned and to whom ? The state can only “transfer” or “return” land as a delimited and legal property, as a territorial object to a minoritized population. This is much different than the reconstitution of Wallmapu by the Mapuche untethered to a semiotic or material/legal contingency upon the state. This is and has been happening in the establishment of autonomous territories and communities that refuse settler occupation and extractive capital while practicing Mapuche religion, medicine, knowledge, and political and social orders according to the form of the land in which these autonomy movements are emerging. While my personal political view on “ peace and reconciliation ” is clear in my textual and historical interpretations in the book, I cannot and will not speak for the Mapuche.
What I will say is 1) the Mapuche are not homogenous as a people or in their political views and 2) I do not believe a “reconciliation” that affirms the sovereignty of the Chilean and Argentine states while denying an equal and non-contingent Mapuche sovereignty across their territories—if one is to accept the political genealogy of such a concept—is the inevitable end or desired goal.
Daniel Falcone: So, this conflict is very difficult to resolve, correct?
Ethan Madarieta: I do not believe this is a conflict that can be resolved without the complete dissolution of sovereign states and global capitalism as the world’s central system for political and social order. I thus do not believe it is a conflict but an antagonism. I cannot name that “order” the world should then take but that it will require the centering of an ethics emergent from Indigenous knowledges —developed across millennia and thus cognizant of changes across millennia—about ecological balance and sustainability.
As Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM) co-founder José Huenchunao writes , “We are fighting to recover a common territory, where non-Mapuche families who understand and share our principles and ideals will also be able to continue living. Those who want to share our way of life and values will always be respected in our territory, they will have their space, they just must understand and internalize the codes of our culture so as not to cause a rupture in the social fabric of Mapuche life.”
The post The Mapuche Struggle Under the New Far-Right Chilean Government appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .
The Mapuche Struggle Under the New Far-Right Chilean Government
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