In the past decade, LatinAmericanPress.org reports, the Mapuche people have been routinely harassed by non-indigenous Argentines, private businesses, and the Argentine government, and many have begun moving out of their rural, ancestral lands to in the hope of creating a better life for themselves. In urban environments, the Mapuche are caught in poverty and isolated from their home communities. Since the late 1990s, the Mapuche have been trying to recover their ancestral lands from powerful corporations and landowners. Many of their problems stem from the Argentinean legal system’s refusal to recognize the Mapuche as an indigenous people. The National Institute for Indigenous Affairs, responsible for safeguarding the rights of the Mapuche and other groups, has been largely ineffectual. The body was of little aid to the Curicanco family last fall, when they were forcibly evicted from a plot they had attempted to reclaim from a British-owned corporation. Much of the land under dispute is in the province of Chubut, in Patagonia, where people individually and collectively are attempting to reclaim their land from the large corporations that have made inroads there. The settlement of outsiders in the area has led to a breakdown in the traditional structures of Mapuche society, including the way families and communities were organized and represented in government. The Mapuche are now starting to organize again, to prevent families from losing their land, and to continue their fight for their land and the prosperity of their people.
