Argentina General Discussion 🇦🇷

[kaoras]

Would love to hear about the summary. Back then it took me a lot of time figuring out Argentina's politics

[kaoras]

My biggest cultural shock related to Argentina was seeing that they had the guy behind the Conquest of the Desert (and the process itself) in their money. In Chile, you couldn't put the equivalent guy in a half-cent coin without putting half of the country on fire.

[kaoras]

My biggest cultural shock related to Argentina was seeing that they had the guy behind the Conquest of the Desert (and the process itself) in their money. In Chile, you couldn't put the equivalent guy in a half-cent coin without putting half of the country on fire.

Why is that, I wonder? And who is your equivalent of Roca?

Cornelio Saavedra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelio_Saavedra_Rodr%C3%ADguez. Mind you, he has some conmemorative plaques in the towns he founded and used to have statues (I'm pretty sure most of them were destroyed during the unrest) and a town named after him (Puerto Saavedra, ironically one of the most left wings areas of Auracanía), but really, he isn't viewed as a hero or anything. Absolutely nobody cried about the destruction of his statues.

Unlike Argentina with the Conquest of the Desert, the Occupation of the Araucanía nowadays isn't seen in a favorable light. One of the founding myths of Chile is the resistance of the Mapuche against the Spanish and the fact they couldn't be conquered and remained independent well into the XIX century.  That chileans have the "blood of the araucanan warrior" is the most chauvinistic version of that. Chile, unlike Argentina also had significant mestizaje during the Colony and people who identify as Mapuche are around 10% population. The majority of people are at least somewhat sympathetic to their revindications.

Besides, I'm under the impression that Argentina teaches the Conquest of the Desert as an act of nation-building, very important for the progress of the country and whatnot. Here in Chile the Occupation of the Araucania is taught as something that happened, it doesn't have any mystic to it.

[kaoras]

Today, Macri gave an interview to La Nación. He mostly gives correct observations about incompetence of the current government, but, er, what the hell is this:

People go and invest. They have a sleeve [sic] and buy a flat in countries like United States where if someone occupies your flat, the judge doesn't ask you if you are South American. He asks for your papers and if you are the owner, he evicts them. Here, if you don't have a contact, a friend, they discuss whether to evict you or not. You get a fake Mapuche in the south and he steals your house, burns it down and the State supports him.

You won't be surprised to find out that he did a llegamos de los barcos three years before Alberto.

He's referring to the ongoing crisis in Patagonia where "Mapuches" arbitrarily seize land, clear cut the old growth forests for firewood, beat people up and torch buildings indiscriminately. I put "Mapuches" in quotes because most have basically no connection to the actual local tribes and are more akin to activist LARPers than actual natives reclaiming seized land. They aren't carefully identifying and demanding their ancestral land, they're taking whatever a 20 year old shaman on mushrooms identifies as "sacred land".

Regardless of Macri's past bozo eruptions he's right about RAM and the like.

What an absolutely tone-deaf post. You "could" describe every single machi (mapuche ancestral auhority) as someone on mushrooms. Machi don't have to be old, you become a machi by having prophetic dreams about it, usually, you come from a machi lineage but is not a requirement. I try to avoid looking at news of the conflict in Argentina because the standard discourse there is almost as racist as what you would hear from non-mapuche farmers in Malleco complaining about the indios and their evil human rights, but this strikes me as that some Argentinians have their stereotypes about mapuche having to be really old people living on remote mountain areas reductions not bothering anyone or else they are NOT REAL/are Larpers for benefits plus the other communities obviously not wanting to be associated with them by calling them fake. Also, your news article says nothing about it but in Chile at least they don't burn "Old-growth forests"; they burn forest plantations because they see them as extractivism that is going to leave them without water.

Mind you, I'm not defending the terrorist actions of that community whatsoever, but this paternalist discourse is exactly what led to the situation being so bad in Chile right now. For starters, the view of many Mapuche is that every land used to belong to them, so they have the right to take it. Land is the most valuable thing you can have according to their cosmovision and some also have the mindset that land is something unlimited and they can keep claiming it indefinitely. Some Mapuche communities also were expelled and relocated hundreds of kilometers from what their """actual""" ancestral lands would be and could hardly track them down. This mindset of the extremist groups is very problematic but you actually have to acknowledge what they are thinking to actually be able to deal with that.

This is honestly a very racist version of what the Chilean left used to say about the conflict at the other side of the Andes "oh, those are all montages to profit from insurance, REAL mapuches don't do that".

[kaoras]

Racist SNIP

And where did I said that it was a popular uprising with broad support or that their claims were right? I took issue with your extremely offensive characterization of machis as "someone on mooshrooms". If you are not going to engage with what I actually say, then abstain to comment on the topic.

Plus, please don't go over that rabbit hole of "where Mapuche came from" (which you are using to casually deny the crimes of the Conquista del Desierto btw). I'm sure you are going to eventually start spitting the racist and discredited narratives about how the Mapuche genocided the Tehuelche or something.