Even after being sentenced to nine years in prison in Chile for crimes that are considered terrorist acts there,
Facundo Jones Huala
could have avoided major mistakes and finally be without so many problems with the law.
And maybe free.
His attitudes, his personal disorders, and even a social circuit linked to "addictions", only led him to a
long chain of entanglements
in which it became more and more complicated than it already was, sources who were at his side agree. .
To begin with, all those accused of the fire at the Chilean farm of Pisú Pisué, in 2013, which is the "mother" of their conviction in the neighboring country,
ended up acquitted
, except for one Machi (shaman) who
was
convicted as an accessory after the fact. facts.
Huala
decided to escape from Chile to Argentina
, he came and went through illegal steps as much as he could, and from there the Chilean justice began to demand his first extradition so that his process could be carried out.
They sent him in 2018 from the Esquel prison where they returned this Friday.
Facundo Jones Huala, arrested.
The facts
Its discovery by the Rio Negro police in El Bolsón, the latter at dawn, showed its condition.
Beyond the fact that he had dressed in a woman's skirt and blouse, he was in a total drunken state.
With one eye in compote.
Careless.
In Río Negro there is also talk that he would have consumed other substances, which this newspaper could not confirm.
Facundo Jones Huala, detained in El Bolsón
Interpol Chile's red alert to Argentina caused him to be placed in pretrial detention.
And in Chile a second extradition request is advancing because he is considered a "wanted fugitive to serve a criminal sentence."
A prosecutor requested it, now a judge has approved it, and he must be validated or not by the Court of Appeals.
The sentence in Chile is because, as reported by Interpol on January 9, 2013, around 11:00 p.m., Jones Huala along with two other subjects entered hooded and with dark military-type dyed clothes, with boots, and armed with pistols at the farm of Joaquín Biewer Piwonka, from Pisú Pisué, in the Chilean commune of Rio Bueno.
Biewer was at his house with his family group of four adults and four minors, including a baby.
Facundo Jones Huala leaving prison in January 2022 -
Once inside the country house, the activists tied up the caretaker Alberto Riquelme Paillan and another adult.
They forced them to leave the house and then they turned it on, spraying it with an accelerator, causing one of the rooms to be completely destroyed.
Unlike other violent Mapuche attacks in Chile, this time
there were no deaths.
As the journalist Gonzalo Sanchez recounted in
Clarín
, Jones Huala had arrived in the neighboring country in search of native, traditional medicine.
Born in Bariloche in 1986, the eldest of six siblings, he became radicalized until he became the leader of the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance (RAM), linked to the violent Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) of Chile, which mixes neo-Marxist and indigenistas who declared "war" on the Argentine and Chilean state.
Here they were supported by sectors linked to La Cámpora, former montoneros and anarchists.
After the Pisú Pisué fire, Jones Huala returned to Argentina through one of those illegal crossings that make the Andean border a sieve for the trafficking of arms, drugs and even wood.
And instead of following legal advice in Chile, Jones Huala lost an opportunity to go to court.
One year after Pisú Pisué, the Machi (shaman) Tito Cañulef and the Mapuches Alex Bahamondes and Fénix Delgado were acquitted.
They were represented by =the lawyer Karina Riquelme, who years later fought for him in the defense of Huala.
The defendants were acquitted after two and a half weeks of trial before the Oral Court of Valdivia.
Meanwhile, Machi Millaray Huichalaf was convicted as a concealer of the facts.
She accused her of keeping the attack items from her.
She was imprisoned for four months and she served her sentence in freedom.
At that time, Jones Huala was already considered a fugitive and a fifth attacker, the Mapuche Cristián García Quintul, who had not initially received notification for the 2014 trial
, later continued his trial, and was also acquitted in 2015.
Only Jones Huala remained in his adventures and decisions and in Argentina, he took the lead in the Mapuche rebellion, even becoming a media figure.
He was imprisoned for occupying Benetton land in Chubut.
At the time of him, the federal judge of Esquel, Guillermo Otranto, dictated the lack of merit for the land seizure and declared Chile's request null and void.
He maintained that the arrest had been irregular.
By then, Huala had a large following.
Among them the group of Santiago Maldonado, the young man who in 2017 drowned in the Chubut river in a persecution by the Gendarmerie after a protest on the road to demand the release of the leader of the RAM.
The death caused a harsh confrontation between Kirchnerism and the government of Mauricio Macri and his former Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich.
Once extradited to Chile in 2018 by a nod from Macri to his former colleague Michelle Bachelet, who requested his extraditions like governments of all political stripes in Chile, Huala faced the trial for which his fellow action members were acquitted.
In addition to six years and one day on the cartel for arson, they gave him three for illegal possession of weapons.
Huala was serving his sentence in a Temuco prison when, after several attempts by Riquelme, they gave him a conditional release.
He was running in January 2022. By then there was also an offer from the Argentine State, through the embassy in Chile led by Rafael Bielsa, they offered to serve the sentence in Argentina.
But already without the power of the early days, his first statements for parole were the least appropriate.
"The Mapuche revolutionary organizations have to continue on the path of sabotaging big companies," he began by saying before the microphones.
The enemies, he said, were "big transnational capital, imperialism, the oligarchy and the oppressive states at the service of all this national and foreign bourgeoisie."
And he finished off with the fact that he "did not" support neither the constituent process in Chile nor the Boric election "nor any of those sold out to this oppressive capitalist system."
Jones Huala was under the influence during his arrest.
Photo: Rio Negro Police
A month after leaving, when the Supreme Court of Chile revoked his probation, instead of fighting his situation through legal channels, he only warned that he was renouncing his defense and fled again.
And he entered Argentina through one of those illegal steps through which he always came and went.
“It was all a bad strategy.
Well, that we have achieved freedom was a very important legal achievement.
He was advised by his lawyer.
We do not know the reasons why they advised him that.
But it was bad advice."
look also
The Kirchnerist doctor Emilio Rachid left Lago Escondido, hidden in an ambulance and left the militants on Lewis's property
Facundo Jones Huala is transferred to the Esquel prison in the midst of a strong security operation