Last Updated on October 5, 2013
As Rocio Alorda writes at Upside Down World, the neoliberal model of development is incompatible with Mapuche society. While the neoliberal application of anti-terrorism laws initially developed by the Pinochet dictatorship are now targeted at Mapuche political activists, the institutional suppression of resistance to neoliberalism is not aimed solely at indigenous communities.
It is, however, crucial to the neoliberal narrative that any challenge to the neoliberal model be characterized as terrorism, thereby demonizing indigenous activists who use direct action in opposing institutional action designed to suppress indigenous autonomy. With no institutional alternative to capitulation and assimilation, indigenous activists find themselves inevitably positioned as subversives of the neoliberal system, and thereby guilty of defending community property from a model that deems collectivism as the equivalent of terrorism.
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