Weichafé
Jones Huala
has an eagle look.
He was born in Bariloche in 1986. He is the son of an English farmer and an indigenous activist.
He was educated on the idea of dispossession, on the concept of the exiled aborigine who must fight to recover the territories that were taken from his ancestors.
He considers himself a
Weichafé (Warrior)
and his enemies, he says, are the huincas (white) capitalists.
Some define him as an anarchist.
But the bulk of the Mapuche collective, which inhabits the provinces of Neuquén, Chubut and Río Negro, has stated on several occasions that they do not agree with his methods of action and claim.
According to indigenous publications, he first came to Chille in search of traditional medicine.
He was being treated by a machi (healer) when
she declared a "war of fire" on Argentina and Chile
.
Immediately afterwards, he founded the Resistencia Ancestral Mapuche (RAM) group, a faction that promotes the armed struggle to forge a Mapuche nation in Patagonia.
Jones Huala, when he led the RAM (Mapuche Ancestral Resistance).
Photo: Mario Quinteros
In 2013,
his runaway story began
.
He escaped from the house where he was serving house arrest after being convicted of setting fire to a ranch in Valdivia.
It is said that after trying to set fire to a policeman, he crossed the Andes on foot and ended up in Argentina, in an area of rivers and mountains that end in the uninhabited steppe.
Before long, the RAMs started attacking him.
Escalation of fire through communications on social networks, another of its fields of ideological action, the RAM group has adjudicated almost all the facts for which they face complaints in Justice.
“Throw gasoline up to two meters away.
That the fire does not reach them but that they are so scared that they do not dare to denounce us”.
That was the order that Jones Huala gave two years ago to one of his accomplices the night the Neumeyer refuge was burned, in the Nahuel Huapi National Park.
The two men they wanted to scare were local employees and they left them tied to trees.
They also burned road machinery.
They maintained that all that land belonged to them.
The violent incursions continued in the ranches of the Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino Limitado, owned by Benetton.
The RAM face complaints of all kinds for setting fires, stealing cattle and attacking employees
-Mapuches, at the time- of the same company with firearms.
They also attacked machinery belonging to magnate Joe Lewis.
But, without any discrimination, they also attacked ordinary civilians, workers surprised in the middle of the inhospitable immensity.
In December 2014, in the middle of the dark night, three hooded men armed with Molotov cocktails stopped a truck coming along Route 40, made the driver Luis Rastellini get out and set the vehicle on fire.
Another truck that was coming behind managed to turn around and escape while they fired at it with incendiary bombs.
Rastellini had to be treated for the blows they gave him.
Some time later, he pointed out that the attackers claimed to belong to the "Mapuche Resistance."
On October 3, 2015, five hooded men broke the windows into the house of a vendor from one of the Benetton ranches.
The man rested with his wife and his three children.
They threatened them with firearms and asked the employee to leave the house.
They made him walk to a frozen river and forced him into the water for hours while being shot nearby.
They stole cell phones, broke the VHF equipment the victim used to communicate, and destroyed the covers of his vehicle so that he could not call for help.
Esquel Chubut 5-29-16 When Jones Huala (center) was arrested and released, they wanted to extradite him to Chile.
In the photo audienceFoto Diario Jornada - FTP CLARIN jones huala.jpg Z DFeldman feldman chubut Jones Huala annulment of the request for extradition promoted by the Chilean justice against Mapuche activist extradition trial mapuche activist
In November 2016, three armed men broke into the premises of a strawberry-producing company at dawn.
They were attended by a night watchman, who was asked to leave "or we will kill him."
They told him that they were going to destroy the sheds because that activity was contaminating the land and they identified themselves as “Resistance against contamination”.
They completely burned a shed with agricultural machinery.
The owner of the firm, Luis Loncón, also a Mapuche surname, is convinced that Jones Huala was in that group.
Some versions maintain that the RAMs received international financing through foundations and NGOs.
They were also linked to former Kurdish militiamen, who entered the country legally from Europe and met them in the South.
“I am in prison for being a militant and a symbol of the resistance of my people
, for having expressed what thousands of Mapuches and other communities think,” Jones Huala said from prison in 2017.
huala facundo jones huala
After being extradited to Chile, the Mapuche leader was
sentenced to 9 years in prison
for illegally carrying firearms and for having been found guilty of a fire that occurred in 2013 at the Pisu Pisué farm, in Río Bueno.
Since 2018 he has been imprisoned in the Chilean Temuco prison, and since then there have been numerous protests to demand his release that dotted the Argentine rift and caused conflicts within the ruling party itself.
Then would come the release, the reversal of that decision of the Chilean Justice and the subsequent fugitive status since February 2022.
look too
Jones Huala's hours before his arrest and a photo with skirts that became a viral meme
Aníbal Fernández compared the arrest of Jones Huala with the death of Santiago Maldonado and pointed out Patricia Bullrich: "She never understood anything"
