Indigenous communities along Argentina’s Río Chubut mobilize to conserve waterway

CHUBUT RIVER, Argentina — “The waters of this territory converge in the Río Chubut,” began the refrain of a caravan traveling across Argentina’s Patagonia region in the budding first weeks of February. “And like the waters, so too will our voices flow together to be heard.”

The group, made up of Indigenous Mapuche leaders, activists and anthropologists, journeyed along the 847 kilometers (526 miles) of the Chubut River. At each stop along the way, from the Andes to the Atlantic, they held meetings in Mapuche communities. They gathered voices, notes, exhortations and experiences — compiling them to understand what was happening to this river flowing through so many lives.

This trawün — “parliament” or “gathering for discussion” in the Mapuzungún language — addressed how to understand the watershed as a single entity, and how to work together to steward the river and the territory it feeds. Nothing like this had ever been done before.

Along the river, distances are large, telecommunications are limited, and these types of discussions are slow. But the value of a trawün is unequivocal, say elders.

“The way we do this is by looking each other in the eye,” said elder María Luisa Huincaleo. “If we have to travel, we have to travel, but we make decisions as a people like this, in trawünes, not over the telephone.”

Issues varied along its length — from El Maitén, where strawberry farming has led to a rapid increase in the use of pesticides and herbicides that end up in the waterway; to Cerro Cóndor, where residents worry about lingering aftereffects of the Argentine nuclear agency’s former uranium mine — but many common threads became clear.

First, that Indigenous access to both land and water, already limited, is diminishing. Second, that large-scale projects are being devised and implemented without the prior informed consent of local communities. And third, that Mapuche communities need to find a way to take a unified stance toward state decisions.

Loss of territory and livestock grazing areas near the river was visible right where the journey began near the headwaters in Río Negro province. The primary source stream on the slopes of Mount Carreras lies within the exclusive Baguales ski resort. The 4,500-hectare (11,100-acre) complex, where just 28 skiers per day are ferried by snowmobile or helicopter to virgin slopes, is owned by Abdulhadi Mana Al-Hajri, brother-in-law of the current emir of Qatar.

Just downstream, the area around the next source streams is in the process of being fenced off by Matar Suhail Al Yabhouni Al Dhaheri’s firm DIUNA, S.A. The multimillionaire businessman from the United Arab Emirates runs a 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) private hunting estate on the property, with red deer (Cervus elaphus) imported from Europe.

The Indigenous Consulting Council (CAI by its Spanish acronym), a Mapuche organization that represents a large number of communities, sued the provincial government in 2009 for recognition of their traditional territory. They claim that the original property titles awarded to the hunting estate were illegitimate and ignored the existing Indigenous population, but the suit has been bogged down in the court system ever since. Now the fencing project is moving forward nonetheless. Soledad Cayunao, a 38-year-old mother of three, is leading the resistance and facing criminal squatting charges for opposing it.

Fifty kilometers (30 mi) downstream, another problem emerges. Silvio Huilinao, the longko or head of the Vuelta del Río community, points to reduced access.

“Our community is made up of 35 families spread over several dozen kilometers, but we only have 500 meters [1,640 feet] of riverfront. The rest is all behind Benetton’s fences,” he said.

The Benetton Group, the Italian fashion house, owns 900,000 hectares (more than 2.2 million acres) — an area the size of Puerto Rico — in northwestern Chubut province, making it the largest private landholder in Argentina. In Fofocahuel, 60 km (37 mi) farther on, the caravan camped at the only spot where the community has river access, a mere 70 m (230 ft) of waterfront for a community spread across 15 km (9 mi).

“We filed the papers to officially register with the government as a community 21 years ago, and they said that would get us community title, but it’s never happened,” said Mario Martín, president of the Fofocahuel community. “So others keep chipping away at our territory, and they always take the productive places, the ones along the river.”

In an arid region, river access is crucial. According to the Provincial Water Institute (IPA by its Spanish acronym), the government agency that manages water resources, annual rainfall around the headwaters amounts to 800 millimeters (31.5 inches), but that falls to 200 mm (8 in) just 50 km east, before dropping to “negligible” across most of the province after that. The river and its tributaries are the only lifeline across the dusty steppe.

Getting consent

Every day at the break of dawn, in each community, before the trawün began, the caravan held a ceremony.

Along the entire journey, participants stressed the need to recover traditional knowledge about caring for their water lifeline, particularly from elders.

“We know if the river is healthy by paying attention to the nien ko [water spirits], and caring for them means respecting the way we do things,” said Segunda Huenchunao, an 82-year-old member of the Vuelta del Río community. “You never use a shovel around springs, for example — only your hands.” Ancestral practice came first, every day.

Where communities have held on to their ancestral territories, they fear the arrival of large-scale projects that don’t include them in decision-making. Near the town of Gualjaina, the IPA has plans to dam the Río Lepá, a tributary of the Río Chubut. The idea dates back decades, but Eusebio Antieco, of Lof Newentuaíñ Inchíñ (Lof in the Mapuzungún language means “family” or “community”), said he learned only by chance one day that it was finally going ahead.

“I found this guy walking along the river in our territory and asked him what he was doing out there. He said, ‘I’m just out breathing some pure air, since I live in the city and the air is much nicer out here,’” Antieco said. “Well, a few minutes later a whole bunch more people come by ‘breathing pure air,’ and it turns out they were from the IPA surveying for the dam, but didn’t want to tell me.”

Plans for the dam show a relatively small reservoir, 31.8 hectares (78.6 acres), smaller than the reservoir in New York City’s Central Park, but Antieco points out that it would flood his community as well as a cemetery where his ancestors are buried.

The assessment made at all of the caravan’s meetings is that the lack of information is intentional. In July 2023, then-governor of Chubut province, Mariano Arcioni, announced that the provincial government planned to build a biomass fuel plant in El Maitén, between Mapuche territories and the river. It would chip material pruned and thinned from pine plantations for use as fuel to generate electricity in three small towns not on the national grid — Gualjaina, Paso de Indios and Corcovado — replacing the diesel generators currently in use.

“A project like this could be beneficial or it could be awful for the locals. The thing is we don’t know,” said Aymará Bares of the Mapuche community radio station Petú Mongeleíñ (“We’re Still Alive”), which hosted the caravan in El Maitén. “Ever since the governor announced it, we’ve been asking for more information, but they won’t tell us any details.”

Javier Cañió, a member of the Lof Cañió near the proposed site, reported being hounded by government officials about the project: “They want me to come talk to them, because then they’ll say, ‘We met with the Mapuches,’ but I’m just one person. An informal chat with one guy is not the way prior, informed consent” — a constitutional requirement for any project affecting Indigenous communities — “is supposed to work.”

According to the provincial forest department, in addition to saving $3 million per year in diesel, the biomass plant is part of a strategy to reduce the dry plant matter that acts as kindling during forest fires. The project is currently awaiting a reshuffling of authorities and $15 million to $18 million in financing in order to proceed.

Ultimately, both the biomass plant and the dam are small examples compared to what might be coming down the pipe, say participants.

Matías Antieco is the newly appointed Director of Indigenous Peoples for Chubut province, a department representing the government, not Indigenous communities. He said he was unaware of any concerns relating to either the proposed dam on the Lepá or the biomass plant in El Maitén. When it comes to conflict over land access, he said the only thing the department can do is work with both sides to mediate an agreement; the department has no decision-making power.

In this regard, Antieco clarified that his office “is here to work with the communities, but it’s not our role to intervene in those situations.”

Looming over Chubut province is the persistent push to legalize open-pit mining. A prohibition on open-pit chemical leach operations was passed in 2005 after massive public protest (including a referendum in the town of Esquel, where 82% of voters rejected mining authorization). But successive governments of various parties have tried to repeal the ban, and tensions around the possibility of open-pit mining always runs high.

Pan American Silver has poured millions of dollars into exploring the Navidad project in central Chubut for around two decades, hoping to extract silver and lead. Sites where smaller-scale mines used to operate are places people suspect may be targeted for reopening at an industrial scale. These include the former uranium mine outside Cerro Cóndor, and Mina Las Marías, on land now controlled by Al Dhaheri, just a few kilometers upstream of Lof Cayunao.

The change of both provincial and federal administrations has communities on edge across Patagonia. Javier Milei, the newly inaugurated president, is pushing pro-business libertarian policies that Mapuche leaders worry will green-light, fast-track and deregulate large extractive projects. The new administration modified or repealed around 300 laws in a single decree, and sent hundreds more to Congress as a single legislative package — many impacting Indigenous territories.

In Río Negro province, the legislature just revamped the law governing land use, which makes it much easier for the provincial government to remove Indigenous communities using eminent domain.

And Patricia Bullrich is back at her old post as minister of security. In her new term, she expanded the authorization for security forces to use lethal force, and unsuccessfully proposed legislating any group of more than three people in the street to be an illegal gathering.

“What we see now is that lots of these laws are being rolled back; the current administration wants to take us back to the legal regime of the ’30s,” said Ana Ramos, an anthropologist at the National University of Río Negro and founder of the Study Group on Subaltern Memory (GEMAS). She and four other anthropologists with GEMAS traveled with the Mapuche caravan.

“There were land grabs of all kinds. There were massive evictions, hustlers would swindle people into debt and then confiscate land, you name it. And the Mapuche were described as lazy, or liars, to justify it.”

Strategic decisions

In nearly every meeting along the river, participants expressed the need to stake out a unified position toward the government.

“The issue is that most of the time, we don’t even find out about what’s happening upstream or downstream,” said Segunda Huenchunao, the Vuelta del Río community elder. “We have very little contact even among those of us that live along the same river. That’s why this caravan is so important, to talk to everyone along the way.”

But it’s hard to make decisions through a string of meetings. So a month after the caravan finished with a dawn ceremony where the river meets the sea, a large gathering was held with representatives from as many communities as possible.

High on the agenda was the inclusion of Indigenous people in the province’s new Indigenous Affairs Committee. A court ruling in late 2023 forced the provincial government to set up the five-member committee, but Chubut, unlike the nearby provinces of Río Negro or Neuquén, has no centralized Mapuche organization. Communities have always prioritized their autonomy and avoided handing representation over to a select few.

If the state is to create an Indigenous Affairs Committee, participants agreed to join forces and demand that members be appointed through a participatory process involving Mapuche communities across the province.

When asked about concerns raised at the trawün, Matías Antieco, Director of Indigenous Peoples for Chubut province, said the department has to get “all the communities to one place and then they can decide who will be on the Council,” but also noted that there is not an established time frame for when this will occur.
Communities will also make a renewed demand for community titles to prevent the continued attrition of territory, and insist on prior, informed consent for large energy and natural resource projects.

At every step, emphasis is being placed on reinforcing the Mapuche way of doing things.

“We can talk about legal details or specific government positions, but in everything, we need to revitalize our Mapuche kimün [traditional knowledge],” said Luciana Jaramillo from the Fofocahuel area, “to know why we do things the way we do them. Why we work as collectives and not as individuals, why we treat the river as a living spiritual entity and not just a physical resource.”

All of these movements will take time, but the river caravan set off a movement to get more communities working together. In April, a large gathering will be held in Cushamen, home to the greatest concentration of Mapuche residents in the province.

“The river starts off as a trickle, but as it travels, it gathers strength,” said Soledad Cayunao, the activist facing prosecution for her opposition to the hunting estate. “So it is with us.”

Banner image: Segunda Huenchunao of the Vuelta del Río community near El Maitén. Image by Denali DeGraf.

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