The debt of the Argentine State towards the indigenous communities goes back from its creation to the present day. The strong determination on the part of State institutions to exclude and expel the indigenous communities that have inhabited these lands since ancient times is clear, through constant persecution, abuse, rejection of their identities, customs, languages and ways of living.
In this context of uninterrupted violations of their human rights, in 2013, the Movement of Indigenous Women for Good Livingby the hand of moira millanweichafe (warrior) and Mapuche activist.
The Movement began to gain notoriety in October 2019, by being present and firmly accompanying the vigil that took place from Wednesday, October 9 to Friday, October 18 of that year within the framework of the peaceful occupation that took place in the Ministry of the Interior, located in the Monserrat neighborhood in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. There, more than 20 self-convened indigenous women from different provinces met, such as Chubut, Formosa, Misiones, Salta, and Santa Fe. They were located in the entrance hall of the Ministry, where they spent nine nights, being assisted with food, blankets, and clothing. shelter from activists and residents of the area who expressed their solidarity and were welcomed to join the vigil.
Photo: Facebook Movement of Indigenous Women for Good Living
The then Minister of the Interior, Rogelio Frigerio, was required to receive the women and listen to their claims, which ranged from specific and urgent issues, such as the supply of drinking water for the Guaraní community in Misiones, to more structural issues such as the terricide problem. It is this particular demand that, given its complexity, the Ministry said they did not have the necessary powers to deal with it, ignoring that terricide is precisely the basis of the violence that is exercised daily by the State against indigenous women, their communities and its territories. It is clear that if State institutions are the ones who reproduce this violence, then they should be the ones with the necessary competencies to put a stop to it..
It was within the framework of this mobilization that Moira Millán stated: “It seems to us that it is not a question of ‘governments’, it is a question of a historically racist state. The politicians who come don’t talk about the indigenous people and the rights of nature, of the environmental people either. We are concerned that death continues to be perpetuated as a model of economic development”.
When Millán speaks of “death” he is referring to a type of specific systematic violence and for this he introduces a term that we mentioned earlier: “terricide”.
Millán explains terricide as the systematic extermination of all forms of life. This includes the ecocide, genocide, femicide, culturicide and epistemicide.
Always transferred to indigenous problems, reference is being made, first of all, to the destruction of nature, places sacred to them, including forests, wetlands, rivers and mountains. Second, it talks about extermination of native peoplesparticularly of your environmental leaders and of the indigenous women, who suffer murders, rapes and all kinds of abuses, mostly by the police and the repressive forces of the State, who are in their territories due to the militarization suffered by it, with the objective of evicting these peoples from their land and be able to set up their business. Finally, it also includes elimination and disqualification of indigenous culturedespising their ways of understanding the world and their ancestral practices.
In this way, what the term “terricide” does is connect the life of peoples, women, territories and nature, understanding them as a whole.
The Indigenous Women’s Movement demands that terricide be considered a crime against nature and humanity so that it is possible to criminally prosecute those who commit these crimes, whether they are extractivist companies or governments. The crime would not prescribe and those convicted would have maximum penalties.
Photo: Facebook Movement of Indigenous Women for Good Living
the causes for which the movement fights
Currently, the Movement is fighting for various causes, some of which are:
– The enactment of a wetland law that regulates, protects and conserves these territories, given that their destruction alters the wildlife that lives there and causes flooding. There is currently a project presented in the National Congress but, if it is not dealt with, it could lose parliamentary status at the end of 2021.
– The rejection of the felling of native forest in the province of Chubut that, since the beginning of July of this year, wants to be carried out with the aim of expanding a ski slope located in a rural area of the city of Esquel, going against the National Law for the Environmental Protection of Native Forests, sanctioned at the end of 2007, which prohibits the alteration of this area.
– Demand justice and that the culprits be identified for the fires that occurred in Patagonia, more specifically in the Andean region, for weeks in March of this year. These fires devastated more than 30,000 hectares, affected around 500 homes and it is suspected that they could have been intentionally set.