The land claim of the Mapuches reaches half of the territory of the province of Río Negro

The almost

that are registered or in the process of registering in

maintain a formal land claim that

.

Only

claims around

as its own due to its ancestral presence in the territory, according to official records.

In the context of Mapuche claims, the families that have demanded the least territory from the State are around 50 hectares, but in general terms the

, they informed

in the Río Negro government, headed by

.

The provincial government led by Arabella Carreras registered claims by the Mapuches for between 8 and 10 million hectares.

The Peñi Mapu de Lipetren Chico community, located about 150 kilometers from Bariloche, a desert area but with enormous tourist and productive potential, claims 278,000 hectares.

It is one example among many.

Orders for more than 50,000 hectares are not strange either, they said in the province.

Currently, some 200 communities require from the province

distributed in different points that go from the Atlantic Coast to the Cordillera passing through the desert of Río Negro.

The province has 203,013 square kilometers, equivalent to about

, of which 12 million are productive lands, according to the latest National Agricultural Census.

The Mapuches claim that they own enormous extensions that include not only nature, such as mountains, lakes, rivers and glaciers, but also entire cities.

"Since Law 26160, intended for the indigenous survey, was sanctioned, in the province we have made a leap from approximately 40 communities to approximately 190, with the consequent territorial leap," explained to Clarín, Agustín Rios, Secretary of Government and

of Black river.

In this province,

has existed since 1988 , whose mission was to regulate this conflict.

Controversy over national legislation

The

of indigenous communities was sanctioned at the end of 2006. From then on, and in increasing numbers, new requests for land began to appear based on the "ancestral presence" of new Mapuche or Mapuche communities. /tehuelches.

The claim process is not overly complex even if final allocations take time.

According to the text of the law, it requires: a Socio-Community Questionnaire, a Historical Anthropological Report, a Legal Opinion or Legal Report and an Administrative Resolution.

Much of the information and the law can be found on a website of the

.

The Human Rights Secretary, Horacio Pietragalla, promotes the dialogue table with the Mapuche communities.

In Patagonia, when a group of families "perceives themselves" as Mapuche or Tehuelche or a mixture of both, or has elements to understand it in this way, they go to the Council for the Development of Indigenous Communities (CODECI), where they carry out their proposal.

From then on, a technical folder is opened that serves as the basis for sending a multi-professional group to the area where the family is located.

This group, according to official information from the

, is made up of geographers, anthropologists, administrators, lawyers, etc., among others, who determine what space to deliver to the community if necessary.

The INAI has the capacity to recognize these territories through the National Territorial Survey of Indigenous Communities Program (Re.Te.CI) created in 2007. A

.

The parameters that determine the geographic volume of a lof are elastic and not always clear.

"Basically it is about the stories and testimonies of people about where they lived. One says I had a house there and then I moved here, and that can cover a lot of territory," explained the Río Negro official.

Criticism for the policies of Kirchnerism

One of the

.

Mapuche or Tehuelche families in Patagonia can ensure that a territory belongs to them because of the transit that their animals made.

If a herd of the community had a distance of 1 or 100 kilometers, this lof is in a position to demand the dimension equivalent to this movement because it

.

One of the emblematic cases in this sense occurs in the Neuquén oil zone, where the Campo/Maripe community claims to have ancestral grazing and transit areas in the middle of the exploitation area.

"These conflicts are historical, they are not current. But they are not resolved. The State has not resolved to return land in any way," said Orlando Carriqueo, a representative of the Coordinator of the Mapuche Parliament of Río Negro, in recent radio statements.

"Before there was no private property and there were no limits: the Mapuche, Tehuelche, Ona, and Yamana peoples crossed the mountain range from one side to the other and they were ancestral, millennial paths. There was no territorial discussion," he added.

Carriqueo errs on this point, during the years that

was in power,

indigenous communities.

In 2017, according to INAI data, the indigenous claim in Argentina reached 8.5 million hectares.

Currently, it would exceed 12 million, although it is an estimate and would be much higher.

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