He galloped, like a plainsman, to the top of a mountain and could see from above the violence of a group of gendarmes who unleashed their fury against
a defenseless Santiago Maldonado
.
His binoculars didn't let him doubt.
The troops sent by the national government dragged the young man by the hair and put him in a kind of Unimog stationed almost on the bank of the Chubut River.
Maldonado was loaded into the vehicle and was never seen again.
Agitated, at the top of the hill, he managed to escape and that is how a few months later Matías Santana, who would go down in history as
“the Mapuche of binoculars”
, told all this in court.
A total lie
.
There was no hill, nor any height, but a barren plain, as Patagonia usually is at that point on the map and also was in August 2017. There were no angry gendarmes.
No binoculars
.
Neither does unimog.
There was the river cutting through the dry plain and Maldonado was running towards the course of the water, about to swim to begin that crossing that would mark his end.
Santana, who was arrested this Saturday in Bariloche after spending more than a year on the run, was charged with false testimony.
Even so, he managed to remain free and remain linked to the extradited Facundo Jones Huala, with whom he established a relationship during the occupation of the Benetton lands in Colonia Cushamen.
In parallel, he linked up with the Nahuel-Colhuan clan and from 2018 onwards he became an active participant in the taking of Villa Mascardi.
Five years occupying lands illegally, with full political coverage
.
Santana, like the rest of the usurpers, enjoyed the assistance of a protective state, which condoned the crime with
subsidies and support
of two types: logistical, based on the supply of food and various supplies, and legal, embodied in the figure of lawyers. with a past in the Montoneros Organization.
Santana was not always a radicalized Mapuche militant.
Until 2014 he could be seen
playing papi futbol
in Esquel as part of the "28 de Junio" team.
He was looking for his destiny.
It could be said that he found it in the arms of Betiana Colhuan, the machi who glimpsed the promised land, the young woman who had
the vision that guided the Mapuches to the area where they consummated the usurpation
.
They fell in love.
They formed a couple.
They had two children.
They installed a rewe, a sacred site, meters above the house of Diego Frutos, one of the many neighbors from whom they tore the house.
It was precisely Frutos who Santana
threw a stone directly in the face
.
Frutos went to ask them, countless times, to please return his property.
On one of those occasions, a drizzly and cold day on Route 40, Santana looked at Frutos with fury and attacked him with the piece of flagstone.
Santana, upon being arrested this Saturday.
Santana had climbed the mountain on October 4, 2022 along with other leaders of the group.
In this way,
they escaped the eviction that the National Gendarmerie
had to carry out by order of Aníbal Fernández when Kirchnerism no longer had any more arguments left to remain passive in the face of the usurpation.
There are those who believe that the leaders of the takeover were allowed to escape and that the women ended up detained, almost as a bargaining chip, with house arrest.
Nobody ever looked for them
during the remaining time of Alberto Fernández's Government.
The mountain area entered into a kind of inertia.
It is true that the seizures had ended, but just as much as the ruling party had built a new protection fence so that the Mapuches would not end up imprisoned.
That ended with the change of command in Argentina.
Santana, in a photo from 2018. Photo Mario Quinteros / Archive
Perhaps for this reason,
the news was confirmed by the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich
, who shared the scene of his capture on social networks.
"Matías Daniel Santana, one of the leaders of the usurpations in Villa Mascardi, fell. He was a fugitive and with an arrest warrant since 2022," she said.
"He who makes them, pays for them," the minister concluded and said that the man was arrested in Bariloche after a long investigation.
Federal forces had been carrying out
silent and incisive monitoring
.
In recent days, videos of the machi walking through the fairs on the outskirts of Bariloche had been known.
The Mapuches themselves, according to close sources, knew that no one was protecting them anymore.
Santana's hours were numbered.
This Saturday, early, he was arrested when he was traveling on Onelli Street, 20 blocks from the Civic Center, after leaving his partner at one of those fairs.
The police approached him and asked for his documentation and upon verifying his identity they confirmed that there was an arrest warrant against him.
When he saw the arrival of the federal troops,
he was unable to escape and allowed himself to be detained
.
There was no llanero epic, no gallops or evasion.
Now, he is in PFA custody.