INoticias.CL | «The CONADI Trap»: How Land Purchase Systems Criminalize Mapuche Authorities

The State Forces You to Negotiate and Then Imprisons You: The Institutional Design of CONADI and Its Ties to the Criminalization of Lonko Guillermo Ñirripil.

Communities report that to access the Land Fund, they must reach out to landowners and negotiate prices, a task that the new criminal legislation transforms into «usurpation» or «extortion».

What the Chilean State regards as an administrative procedure has turned into an obstacle course leading to imprisonment for Mapuche communities. A thorough analysis of the indigenous land purchase process, regulated by Law No. 19,253 (Indigenous Law), reveals a lethal contradiction: the same institution that compels communities to contact and negotiate with private owners to access the Land Fund also leaves their leaders vulnerable, who are easily accused of crimes such as extortion or usurpation. The case of Lonko Guillermo Ñirripil Cheuquepan is the most dramatic realization of this structural trap.

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Article 20 of the Indigenous Law establishes a fund for Land and Water, managed by CONADI, aimed at subsidizing land purchases for communities. However, in practice—and at the behest of CONADI to «streamline processes»—communities are tasked with the prospecting work. They must identify properties, contact owners, inquire about their willingness to sell, obtain the Fiscal Appraisal Roll, negotiate informal prices, and then bring all that information to the community meeting for approval by a simple majority of its members. All this effort is required to advance with the land purchase process for those communities that possess an «applicability» document, which recognizes their right to claim such lands.

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In this context, the traditional authority becomes the public face of territorial demand. In doing so, they find themselves in a position of complete vulnerability against owners who may have no interest in selling, or who, as in the case of Lonko Ñirripil, utilize these interactions as a strategy. Various testimonies collected by the communities indicate that some landowners see the indigenous demand as an opportunity to inflate the price of their lands before CONADI, which offers significantly higher values than the market. They manipulate the community to have the property declared «priority,» and once the deal is in motion or when they want to defuse the pressure, they report the leaders for extortion, turning verbal negotiations into criminal offenses.

This modus operandi was uncovered during the trial against Lonko Ñirripil. The discussions he had with landowners, whether to talk about selling a property or to claim damages from environmental impacts caused by forestry operations (such as the death of animals), were the same incidents that the Prosecutor’s Office presented as constituting robbery with intimidation and extortion. «There cannot be extortion when the flow of money or negotiation is a strategy willingly designed and offered by the owner to facilitate a business with the State,» communities assert in their defense.

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The implementation of laws such as 21,633 (Usurpation Law) and 21,555 (which creates the general crime of extortion) has exponentially aggravated this risk. What was once a cumbersome but legally protected management process is now an act easily classified as a threat. The Chilean State, through CONADI, promotes direct and asymmetric contact, but punishes the weaker party in this interaction through its criminal courts. This contradiction has been brought to the attention of the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, urging an investigation into CONADI’s actions and its relationship with the wave of imprisoned leaders.

The signing communities demand a profound reform of the land purchasing system, calling for the State to assume direct responsibility in negotiation and acquisition without delegating a task to communities that exposes them to criminalization. As long as the institutional design continues to push traditional authorities into a minefield of power asymmetry and the absence of guarantees, cases like that of Lonko Guillermo Ñirripil will keep recurring, turning a rightful territorial claim into a criminal sentence.

La entrada «The CONADI Trap»: How Land Purchase Systems Criminalize Mapuche Authorities se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.