Opinion • Claudia Hernández Aliaga • February 21, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Early in the morning of November 8, Julia Chuñil Catricura left her house on foot with her dog Cholito. She was heading to forested lands reclaimed by her community, where her cows, sheep and goats often get lost. She carried an axe and two sticks that she uses as canes. She said hi to her neighbor and told her she was heading out to look for her animals. 

She has not yet returned.

Chuñil’s disappearance hit hard in Wallmapu, the name of the Mapuche homeland. Chuñil, 72, is the leader of the Putreguel de Máfil Indigenous Community in the Los Ríos region, which is about 800 kilometers south of Santiago, Chile’s capital.

According to the Chilean state, the reclaimed land where Chuñil disappeared is part of a property known as “Reserva Cora Number One-A” and belongs to Juan Carlos Morstadt Anwandter, a forestry tycoon and descendant of German settlers and landowners in the area. 

Chuñil's family says that since 2018. people acting on Morstadt Anwandter’s behalf have been harassing her and attempting to bribe. In doing so, they were seeking to force the community to sell the land and then to leave. Chuñil rejected his overtures. 

Her community and family consider the businessman as one of the main suspects in her disappearance. Before she vanished, Chuñil told them, “If anything happens to me, you know who did it.” 

Land and disappearance 

Two days after her disappearance, Chuñil's family found unusual traces of a van in a nearby abandoned shelter, along with possible footsteps and marks made by her walking sticks and the cushion that she liked to sit on. 

“Our assumption is that they took my mom,” said Pablo San Martín Chuñil, her eldest son, in a short documentary put out to publicize the case. 

Chuñil is a papay, which means older woman in Mapudungún (the Mapuche language). She has five children and 10 grandchildren. She works in the fields, raising animals and tending to the native forest on land reclaimed by her community. 

Demonstrators have organized rallies in several cities throughout Chile and Wallmapu to demand that Chuñil and Cholito be returned alive. This popular pressure prompted authorities to apply the Escazú Protocol to the case in mid-January. This protocol seeks to guarantee an efficient investigation, since it concerns an environmental defender fighting for the recovery of Mapuche lands.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric spoke about Chuñil on Dec. 10 of last year, more than a month after her disappearance. “We’re not going to give up until we find her,” he said. However, her family indicates that prosecutors in charge of the investigation have not provided any information about the whereabouts of the land defender.

Chuñil's disappearance brings to mind the experiences of other female Mapuche land defenders. This includes Nicolasa Quintremán, who was murdered in December 2013 after fighting the construction of the Ralco power plant for more than a decade. There is also Macarena Valdés, who was killed in August 2016 after leading opposition to the construction of the hydroelectric plant on the Tranquil River. And there is Emilia Bau Herrera, who was killed in February 2021 for defending reclaimed land along Lake Riñihue.

Chuñil´s disappearance is one more example of violence connected to the extractive industries in Wallmapu. 

Reclaiming the land through direct action

Chuñil is president of the Putreguel Indigenous Community, which brings together 17 Mapuche families living in the rural areas of the Máfil municipality. The state formally recognized her community in 2014 through the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI).

More than a decade of Mapuche activism during the civilian-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989) prompted the creation of the CONADI in 1993. Their organizing challenged the dictatorship, demanded the restitution of Mapuche lands and the right to Mapuche autonomy and national self-determination. 

Following the founding of CONADI, the passage of Indigenous Law 19.253 created a legal mechanism for the restitution of territory. It allowed communities that possess historic land titles to legally acquire their territory through a complicated system of buying and selling in which the state first buys the land and then transfers ownership to the community seeking restitution. 

These historic land titles, called “Títulos de Merced,” are government documents recognizing Mapuche communities’s ownership over land which were expedited between 1884 and 1929. The titles only cover about five percent of Mapuche ancestral homeland.

In 2023, 30 years after the passage of the Indigenous Law, CONADI reported that the state has spent more than $730 billion on land acquisition. This has facilitated the return of nearly 300,000 hectares to Mapuche communities. 

However, a 2022 study by the Atisba agency indicates that if the state complied with the law, it would have to return twice as much land—644,000 hectares—where more than 400,000 people currently live. 

Gabi Marihuán, director of the CONADI in the Los Ríos Region where Chuñil’s community is located, pointed out last year that “there are demands for restitution practically throughout the entire region, where many of the municipalities have historic titles.” The Reserva Cora Número Uno-A property, where Chuñil was disappeared, is covered by a historic title.

The demand for reclaimed lands has overwhelmed the institutional system. This is not only because it requires financing and negotiation by the state, but also because of the sheer volume of land in question. 

Militarization and criminalization

Faced with a slow moving and overly complicated institutional process, many Mapuche communities have decided to take direct action to reclaim their territories. Putreguel was no exception. In 2015, families entered the Reserva Cora Número Uno-A property and set up a rewe, which is a Mapuche ceremonial space, and began to defend the land and protect its forest. 

By 2021, territorial recoveries in Wallmapu through direct action had become widespread. In response, the Chilean government under then-President Sebastián Piñera decreed a state of emergency in Mapuche territory in October of that year. 

The state of emergency, which allows for the militarization of the territory, remains in force to this day. President Boric has systematically renewed it, and it has done so with the approval of the Senate. It has led to the deployment of eight forward operating bases of the armed forces, the deployment of more than 1,400 military personnel and the installation of more than 100 checkpoints, primarily in the Araucanía region.

The repressive agenda of the Boric government goes well beyond the climate of hostility created by the permanent military presence on Mapuche land. 

Since March 2022, legislators have put forward more than fifty legislative initiatives. This includes the “anti-squatting” law, which criminalizes land occupations; the “trigger-happy” law, which increases the powers of the police; and an update to the Anti-terrorism Law that expands the definition of terrorism. Taken together, these laws demonstrate that a punitive, criminalizing zeal lives on in Chile.

Structural racism on the part of political and economic elites makes things worse. Mapuche communities are labelled terrorists and called violent rural people for taking back their land.

Chuñil's disappearance occurred in a context in which Chilean nationalists treat the Mapuche as an internal enemy. Their lives are threatened, and their demands for the restitution of their lands are roundly ignored.

The campaign for Julia Chuñil’s safe return continues. There have been rallies at Chilean embassies abroad, including in Argentina, Mexico and Spain. 

The Chuñil family is demanding access to the police’s investigative files and a meeting with Boric. “We’re going to keep looking for my mother. We’re not going to let her become one more disappeared woman,” said her son San Martín Chuñil.