The Mapuche women detained in Bariloche speak out: how the operation unfolded and how they are doing today.
“They came in shooting, they came in to kill. Nothing mattered, whether there were children, pregnant women, or elderly people,” says Celeste Guenumil, one of the detainees. Also heard are the voices of the machi Betiana and Romina, who was 40 weeks pregnant.
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BARILOCHE, Río Negro. “They came in shooting, they came in to kill. Nothing mattered, whether there were children, pregnant women, or elderly people,” says Celeste Guenumil, while holding her one-month-old baby at the Ruka Mapuche, the community center in Bariloche where she is under house arrest along with three other women: machi Betiana Colhuan Nahuel, Luciana Jaramillo, and Romina Rosas, who is 40 weeks pregnant. Two others, Débora Vera and Florencia Melo, remain in custody at the Bariloche Airport Police (PSA). The seventh detainee, Andrea Despo Cañuqueo, was released and acquitted yesterday (hours after this interview was conducted).
Celeste told Presentes about her experience of the operation on October 4, 2022, in Villa Mascardi, Río Negro . That day, around 250 members of the Unified Command—including federal and provincial forces—entered the Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu , a Mapuche community where, almost five years ago, the Argentine Naval Prefecture shot Rafael Nahuel in the back.
On October 4, Celeste recounts, “First they fired a shot and said, ‘ Get on the ground, get on the ground! ’ I was with my baby and my other daughter, and we immediately got on the ground. Two officers came and had their guns pointed at us. My baby has a little black crib that looks like a purse, and he started kicking it and said, ‘What do you have there? ’ He was kicking my daughter. I said, ‘ Calm down, it’s my baby . ’ He didn’t believe me and said, ‘What do you have there? Tell me the truth, what do you have there? ’ And he kicked him like this, and my daughter said, ‘No, she’s my sister.’ He opened the zipper and saw her face, and then, well, he calmed down a little.”
"There were two guys, who were, apparently, the bosses. They said, 'If they don't come down, kill them,' they said. The other assholes down and told them to calm down, 'fucking Nazis,' and one of them looked at him and said, 'Yes, with great honor.'
Machi Betiana tells what happened
Next to Celeste is machi Betiana Colhuan Nahuel, breastfeeding her four-month-old son. Both mothers were detained with their babies that day. “In my case,” Betiana says, “I was upstairs with the baby lying in bed, and I heard a strange sound. I immediately realized it was something someone had thrown inside the house. There was a 'beep beep,' and all I could think about was covering the baby's ears. The flash bomb exploded inside the house, followed by tear gas.”
Security Minister Aníbal Fernández said on Twitter that same day: “There hasn't been any kind of repression, not even a scratch.” Meanwhile, Betiana compares the operation to the one that ended the life of her cousin, Rafael Nahuel : “Although many of us already suffered an attempted eviction in 2017, which also involved a large-scale deployment, this one surpassed it. It was more intense, more violent.” According to the accounts, this violence was carried out on different people in different ways.
"They were playing a psychological game to take our babies away."
Celeste says that for them, the odyssey was just beginning. “We were cornered by soldiers, and they were taking us on foot along the road. They left us for I don't know how many hours until they put us in the Traffic. Everywhere we went, they searched us countless times, they stripped us, they searched our babies, our diapers. They searched everything, as if we had a bomb inside a diaper. I don't know what they were thinking. And when we were imprisoned there in the PSA, they filmed us 24 hours a day. They filmed us when we went to the bathroom. And the whole time we were afraid they would take our babies away. They played psychological games with that, with taking our babies away.”
They were never separated from their babies, but they were separated from their older children. Some members of the Lof were able to escape up the mountain, including minors. "We were in the mountains all day with those children," says a young woman, barely of age, who accompanied them.
“The ñukes (mothers) told them they had to go, and no matter what, climb up. We started to climb, and we heard gunshots, and we just ran. They never cried; they were very strong. Helicopters flew by, and the first thing they did was lie on the ground so they wouldn't be discovered. We heard gunshots, and they laid on the ground; they didn't want to be shot. In a way, they were already prepared for it. And that's the ugly part: children so young get used to that violence, or know what to do in those situations, when in reality the pu pichikeche (children) should be free in their territory, they should be playing.”
After spending the day fleeing from state forces, the children were able to escape into the night. Judge Silvina Domínguez allowed non-Mapuche people she trusted to enter and remove them from the territory. The young woman adds: “I believe no child should have to go through that situation. We walked quite a long way, uphill, we were dirty, cold, and hungry, but they still didn't give up. It's something we value greatly, and it helps us grow. We learned, and they learned from us.”
Transfers to Ezeiza
The following day, four detainees—who were neither nursing nor pregnant—were transferred to Buenos Aires, to Unit 31 of the Airport Security Police in Ezeiza. They were flown out during the early hours of the morning, without notifying their defense attorney.
Meanwhile, Romina, 40 weeks pregnant, was in the hospital with contractions triggered by the operation, under police guard . Between the forced transfers and an impending birth, comparisons with the 19th century are inevitable. Celeste, anticipating the idea that things have changed, states: “They always talk about rights, the rights of indigenous peoples. For us, it's always the same, from the time of the Conquest of the Desert until now, what our ancestors have been through. We're still living the same.”
Andrea Reile, defense attorney for four of the detainees, agrees. "Here, in addition to violating several constitutional guarantees that protect all prisoners, specific rights that protect women, children, and indigenous peoples have been violated," Reile told Presentes.
These rights violations also led to the resignation of the Minister of Women, Gender, and Diversity, Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta. In her resignation letter, she stated that both the imprisonment and the denial of release for all of them, especially a 40-week pregnant woman, the incommunicado detention, and the transfer of more than 1,500 kilometers from her place of residence, "constitute clear violations of human rights."
How are the detained Mapuche women today?
Faced with the enormous mobilization and condemnation of communities and organizations , both in Bariloche and Patagonia, as well as in Buenos Aires and elsewhere, on October 8, the Judiciary decided to bring back to Bariloche the four Mapuche women who had been taken to Unit 31 of the Federal Penitentiary Complex in Ezeiza, and also to grant house arrest to Betiana, Celeste, Romina, and Luciana. They are now housed in this group home, where the children run and play while their mothers try to sort the donations of clothing and supplies that have arrived.
They're breathing a little easier, but they're not free yet. The house is just meters from the Police Academy. They're still worried about the two Lamiens detained by the Bariloche Airport Security Police. They're also worried about those who escaped into the mountains and have been living in the open for a week, and about their sacred space, the rewe .
They all emphasize: what makes this community unique in all of Puel Mapu (eastern land, what is now called Argentina) is the presence of the machi .
"They attack the sacred space"
Romina says, “They came to our machi’s house and the rewe. They went directly to attack the rewe, the sacred space and our highest spiritual authority here in Puel Mapu . That’s where we started, right?” She speaks slowly, with the short breaths that accompany a pregnancy about to end. She proposes a purely imaginative exercise: “If we go to the Pope’s house and loot it, what are they going to do? Well, that’s what we’re going through. Our first right, our sacred space, is being violated.”
The protection of the rewe , the ceremonial space, is now a focus of community demands. On Monday, October 10, almost a week after the eviction operation, some thirty people gathered at the territory for a ceremony.
The entire area is still heavily militarized. On Route 40, the Federal Police and Gendarmerie maintain several deployments of vehicles and troops, and sometimes block traffic for a helicopter landing on the roadway. The Infantry is stationed inside the area. Seeing people getting out of their cars for the ceremony, they fired shots in the air and fired a tear gas canister as a welcome.
Fortunately, the situation calmed down quickly, and the ceremony proceeded peacefully. It was held on the shores of the lake because they cannot approach the rewe lonkos participated in the ceremony . Both emphasized the importance of joining forces at the sacred site and showing support from other communities.
However, the image of the ngellipún (prayer) on the shore doesn't appear in many media outlets. In the Lof, they have a clear understanding of the media coverage of the conflict. Machi Betiana explains: "The operation wasn't the beginning; rather, something had been happening long before, many days, weeks before, through the mainstream media. They play an important role, where they were implanting this terrorism."
Romina adds what she believes they're aiming for. "When a Mapuche demands a right, there are more and more weapons of war," she says. "Unfortunately, this is what's coming in the future, the war over water, on a general level, not just for the Mapuche people. After that, what will they get?" she asks. "We're always the bad guys, the terrorists. It's a political setup. They came to show us their strength. The threat, the helicopter, is all a setup to instill fear in the population. To say 'don't get involved,' those who fight like these, look how they end up, like us... Wherever there's a vindication or ancestral recovery , the same thing will happen."
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