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The "rebellious grandmother": who is the Mapuche woman who manages the taking of El Foyel and has a hostage family?

2020-10-18T18:30:55.519Z


Blanca Rosa Gallardo Calfú is 70 years old, with 9 siblings and countless grandchildren, nephews and cousins. She is considered an untitled "machi" and practices curanderismo in the toughest neighborhood of El Bolsón. Justice asked for her capture and she takes refuge in the field that her lof occupies.


Claudio Andrade

10/18/2020 3:19 PM

  • Clarín.com

  • Society

Updated 10/18/2020 3:19 PM

It is expressed in a very soft tone, as if on the verge of breaking into a cry, and at a barely audible volume.

Blanca Rosa Gallardo Calfú

(70) does not need to raise her voice to be heard by dozens of people who consider her word a natural law.

For her 9 siblings and countless grandchildren and cousins, Blanca

has been touched by the luminous finger of Mapuche wisdom.

Blanca is the natural leader of the lof that occupied a field of almost 400 hectares in El Foyel last Thursday, about 80 kilometers from Bariloche and 46 from El Bolsón.

His figure is widely known in El Bolsón where he

has practiced quackery for decades in the most dangerous neighborhood in the town.

Meanwhile, inside the camp, the Soriani remain resisting the Mapuche “siege” in one of the houses.

They cannot leave or enter the property and, according to Clarín, they have food for several days before the situation becomes untenable.

The members of the Gallardo Calfú lof block the income and

refuse to withdraw

from a territory that they claim as ancestral.

This Friday the prosecutor Francisco Arrien declared the taking illegal and required the capture of Gallardo and Juan Carlos Oyarzo, who appear as references of the usurpation.

However, the judge in charge of the case, Ricardo Calcagno,

suspended the expulsion measure

until he took a statement from Gallardo and Oyarzo.

This Monday the prosecutor Arrien will present in a hearing in the courts of El Bolsón the challenge to the refusal of Judge Calcagno to carry out the “urgent” eviction, based on the original request of the prosecution.

In addition, the Rio Negro provincial legislator, Juan Martin (Together for Change), reported that he will request the impeachment of the same Guarantees judge.

Martín headed to the take on Saturday where he spoke with neighbors,

the police and some members of the Soriani family. 

With the arrest warrant in progress, the grandmother is hidden inside the enormous mountain range, it is rumored in the area.

The special COER group of the Río Negro police awaits instructions to enter and

detain her by force.

Gallardo's influence over his extended family and the town's more humble society is such that officials in Río Negro would fear that a police attack would unleash unwanted violence.

Faced with this, the government of Arabela Carreras prefers to wait for the result of prosecutor Arrien's challenge before proceeding with the specific arrest of Gallardo.

Although she does not have the title, Gallardo

exhibits all the characteristics of a machi or spiritual leader of the Mapuches.

She has knowledge of indigenous medicine, knows the Mapuche customs and moves like a matriarch whom the men of the family follow without hesitation, they explain in the area.

In the Cordillera

the only machi in exercise is Betiana Colhuan

(19), the benchmark for the violent occupation of Mascardi, 35 kilometers from Bariloche.

But the young woman is not really considered "machi" by a part of the Mapuche community.

The Mapuche take in El Foyel

“We, our community, are not going to move from here.

It took us a lot to get back to our territory after the scam they did to my dad that left him on the street, "said Gallardo.

In 2002, she was prosecuted by the Río Negro justice for having performed an abortion at her home on a young woman who ended up being treated at the El Bolsón hospital due to a serious infection.

According to the judicial investigation, the environment in which the procedure was carried out did not observe the necessary hygiene conditions.

Gallardo was sentenced to two years in effective prison

by the First Crime Chamber under Judge Ramos Mejías.

With this painful history in her past, Gallardo has not stopped practicing as a healer in the harshest neighborhood of El Bolsón.

The neighbors say that criminals who flee from justice usually hide there.

"Not everyone is there," says a villager.

Gallardo has his house in San José on

a plot of 560 m2 that was granted to him in 2018 by the Deliberative Council of El Bolsón.

By then, the grandmother had been living in the space for years without documents that would legally qualify her as the owner.

A common situation in the mountain range and that affects thousands of people.

From the beginning of the capture, Blanca was located in front and in the center of the around 50 people who occupied the property of the Soriani family.

She became the spokesperson and spoke to the local media each time.

Dressed in a salmon-colored blouse, the woman called from the entrance of the field to other Mapuche communities to join her claim.

In return, he

offered the collaboration of the Gallardo-Calfu in future Mapuche usurpations.

"We want people to know, to listen to us that we are in our territory and that they know that they also have their rights in their territories that they come to help us, so that we can also help them one day to their territorial recovery," said the consulted grandmother. for his outpost in El Foyel.

At the end of this brief speech with a cell phone in her hand, she received the shouts of support from all her family members, who at this point made her a Mapuche heroine.

The referent also warned that they are receiving help from the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs.

Clarín confirmed that they have sent the occupants food, water and that they communicate through a satellite phone.

Blanca embodies the virtues that the "Mapuches" and "Araucanians" (as the indigenous people in Chile were called during the Spanish Conquest) consider priority in a leader or cacique.

One of them is absolute determination: the Araucanians preferred to impale themselves on stakes or hang themselves with mutilated hands rather than kneel before the Spanish, according to the classic "La Araucana" by Alonso de Ercilla.

Another is the silent, humble temper of the head of the family, but one that can precede the storm.

That is why its monotone tone should not confuse those who listen to it, they say around here.

Blanca has already announced that she will not leave the territory that they consider to be under the influence of the Gallardo Calfú since 1880 when their ancestors settled in the Cordillera.

In the wildest areas of Patagonia, Mapuche and Spanish surnames intertwine, forming a special cultural unit.

It is that many of its inhabitants live in the almost exact limit between Chile and Argentina

in which the mountains, the rivers of the thaw, the green valleys extend.

The environment in which some Mapuche communities proliferated before the arrival of the Spaniards and that the new international tourism turned, for some 30 years, into a powerful focus of attention.

The so-called criollos, among whom baqueanos abound, can choose between being more “national” than Mapuche or vice versa.

There are no obligations in this regard, it is a known fact for rural inhabitants.

Nobody presses about it.

But those who perceive themselves as “Mapuche” (beyond having less dark skin and having a Spanish surname as a result of miscegenation) understands that there is a “debt” on the part of the national states towards their culture.

And

that debt is in principle territorial.

On this occasion, and according to the sayings of the members of the lof, Sixto Gallardo Calfú was scammed by Miguel Soriani in 1980. Soriani worked in a sawmill in El Foyel where he came into contact with the Mapuche for the first time.

Miguel, they say from the lof, would have traded the field to Felix for a house in El Bolsón.

A fact that never really materialized, Blanca accuses today.

GS

Source: clarin

All life articles on 2020-10-18

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