The Antagonism in Wallmapu: A Settler State's War on Mapuche Ontology

Introduction: Beyond the ‘Conflict’ Narrative

The situation in southern Chile, in the territories known as Wallmapu, is typically framed in international media as a ‘Mapuche conflict’—a land dispute between the Chilean state and an Indigenous minority. This superficial framing, as elucidated by scholar Ethan Madarieta in a recent interview, dangerously obscures the brutal reality. What is occurring is not a conflict to be resolved within the existing political order, but an existential antagonism. It is the latest chapter in a centuries-long project of elimination waged by the settler-colonial states of Chile and Argentina against the Mapuche Nation. The election of far-right President José Antonio Kast in 2026 has merely intensified this project under the guise of ‘security,’ exposing the violent core of the nation-state when confronted with a civilizational polity that refuses to vanish.

Historical Context: The Genocidal Foundations

The facts are stark and bloody. As Madarieta outlines, from 1641 to 1862, the Mapuche were recognized as a sovereign nation. This recognition was systematically destroyed. In Chile, the so-called ‘Pacification of Araucanía’ (Pacificación de la Araucanía), launched in 1862 under Coronel Cornelio Saavedra, was a genocidal military campaign to forcibly incorporate Mapuche lands south of the Biobío River. Concurrently, Argentina’s ‘Conquest of the Desert’ (Conquista del Desierto) served the same murderous purpose. These were not isolated historical events but the foundational acts of these nation-states, built explicitly on Indigenous dispossession and death. The Mapuche resistance that began in 1641 has never ceased; it has only adapted to the shifting modalities of state violence, from overt genocide to the insidious attrition of linguicide, epistemicide, and forced assimilation.

The Kast Regime: Security as a Tool of Domination

President José Antonio Kast’s ‘security-oriented’ approach, including proposals like the Agenda contra el Crimen Organizado y el Terrorismo, is a modern veneer for this ancient project. The ability to declare prolonged states of emergency in border territories is a legal mechanism designed for territorial control and surveillance, directly targeting Mapuche autonomy. By labeling Mapuche resistance as ‘terrorism,’ the Chilean state, like all imperial projects, criminalizes the very act of existence for those who defy its ontological authority. This mirrors the global pattern where the West and its ideological progeny use the language of law, security, and counter-terrorism to suppress civilizational sovereignty, from Kashmir to Xinjiang to Wallmapu.

The Core Antagonism: Land vs. Mapu, Person vs. Che

This brings us to the heart of the matter, where Madarieta’s analysis is most piercing. The international media and the Chilean state fundamentally misunderstand the struggle because they insist on translating Mapuche concepts into their own impoverished vocabulary. This is not a conflict about ‘land’ as property or resource. It is about mapu—the universe, all matter, an inseparable relation. It is not about ‘people’s rights’ but about che—the quality of being a human developed in profound, cultivated relation to mapu.

The state recognizes only the citizen and the property-owning individual. Its ‘peace’ is the peace of the graveyard, where the Mapuche agree, as Pinochet infamously demanded, that “we are all Chileans.” Its ‘reconciliation’ is the surrender of Mapuche ontology to the logic of the nation-state and global capitalism. As Madarieta correctly identifies, this is an antagonism where any ‘resolution’ necessitates the destruction of one position. The settler state’s entire apparatus—its legal systems, its educational policies, its economic models of extractive capital—is intent on that very destruction: the transformation of the Mapuche from a sovereign political nation into a managed demographic minority.

A Global South Perspective: Imperialism’s Universal Blueprint

From a committed Global South and anti-imperialist standpoint, the struggle in Wallmapu is a familiar and heartbreaking story. It is the story of how Western epistemological and political frameworks, specifically the Westphalian nation-state model, are imposed as the only legitimate way to organize human life. Civilizational states like India and China, with their own ancient and complex relationships between land, people, and cosmos, understand this imposition intimately. The hypocritical ‘international rule of law’ championed by the West never questions the right of Chile or Argentina to exist as states born of genocide, but it constantly questions the right of the Mapuche to exist as Mapuche.

Where is the outrage from the so-called international community over the ongoing linguicide and epistemicide? Where are the sanctions for Chile’s violation of the Mapuche’s right to mapu? The silence is deafening because the project in Wallmapu is not an aberration; it is the logical extension of the colonial worldview that the US and Europe have exported globally. This same worldview uses Christianity and conversion as tools of control, just as it uses the language of human rights to suppress alternative humanisms, like that embedded in the concept of che.

The Path Forward: Centering Indigenous Knowledge

The interview concludes with a powerful vision from CAM co-founder José Huenchunao, who speaks of a recovered common territory where those who share Mapuche principles can live. This is not exclusionary but foundational—a society built on specific, land-emergent codes and ecological responsibility. Madarieta is right to be wary of terms like ‘alternative way of life’; it is the Mapuche way of life, an ontological condition. The so-called ‘transfer of land parcels’ by the state is a paternalistic farce, a coerced transaction that reaffirms state sovereignty over what it defines as property.

True peace and reconciliation cannot be brokered by the very entity that is the source of the violence. As Madarieta argues, it may require the unthinkable (to the Westphalian mind): the dissolution of the sovereign state as the supreme political authority in those territories and a reckoning with global capitalism. The future must center the Indigenous knowledges that have cultivated ecological balance over millennia. The Mapuche resistance is thus not a backward-looking struggle but a profoundly futuristic one. They are fighting for a future where humanity is defined not by citizenship or consumption, but by relational responsibility to the mapu.

Their fight in Wallmapu is our fight. It is the frontline against the homogenizing, extractive, and genocidal logic of neo-colonialism. To stand with the Mapuche is to reject the imperial lie that there is only one way to be a nation, only one way to be human. It is to affirm the right of all civilizational peoples of the Global South to their own territorial, epistemological, and ontological sovereignty. The antennas of our solidarity must be tuned to Wallmapu, for in their resistance echoes the hope for a decolonized world.