Jailed Chile Mapuches ready for 'confrontation' with state

Leaders of an activist group of indigenous Mapuche people in Chile told AFP from their prison cell Monday that they were ready for a "confrontation" with the state to reclaim their "ancestral" lands. "We don't want to negotiate with the government, we want our lands to be returned and, if necessary, we'll achieve that by way of confrontation," said Ramon Llanquileo, leader of the Arauco Malleco Coordination (CAM), in prison in Angol, some 430 miles (700 kilometers) south of Santiago. Llanquileo, 30, received an eight-year jail term last year, along with Jose Huenuche and Jonathan Huillical, for violence committed in 2008, including an attack on a prosecutor's convoy. Their leader, Hector Llaitul, received a 14-year sentence. The four however saw the main charge of terrorism dropped. Tensions have flared in the southern Araucania region -- a stronghold of the Mapuche minority of some 700,000 people -- since the radicalisation of the Mapuche movement following the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990. Authorities recently accused the CAM of starting forest fires which left nine dead and destroyed 120,000 acres (51,000 hectares). "We didn't set off the fires in Carahue (where seven firefighters died) and Quillon (where two civilians were killed), Llanquileo said Monday. The CAM does however claim occupying land and sabotaging some large forestry companies in the south of the country in recent years. "The CAM recovers Mapuche land but we don't attack people or provoke fires," Llanquileo said. The group's struggle was about "the defense of a people attacked and then discriminated against by the Spanish (colonizers) and then the Chilean state," which annexed large portions of southern lands at the end of the 19th century. The Mapuche are Chile's largest indigenous population, making up about six percent of the population.