RESOLUTION on Mapuche Community

Case No. 27/2017: Inter- American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)

RESOLUTION on Mapuche Community

The Buddhist Tribunal on Human Rights,

Confirms that Santiago Maldonado, a member of the Mapuche RAM group, died in the context of a violent repression in the hands of Argentine governmental bodies against tribal peoples who are defending their lands reclamation;

Confirms that the order to violently repress this Mapuche group originated from the highest spheres of the Argentine State, such as the Ministry of Security and the Presidency of the Nation;

Confirms that the Argentine State is in total breach of Convention No. 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;

Confirms that the Argentine State violates the individual and collective human rights of the Tribal Peoples, denying them the right to their lands, health, justice and education, beginning to increasingly violently exclude and persecute these oppressed communities that have been historically subjected to genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity with impunity in Argentina;

Confirms it is in accordance with the sociologist Maristella Svampa in the fact that the Argentine government does not recognize the human rights of the aboriginal peoples, making an illegal and disproportionate use of the security forces;

Confirms the fact that during the burial ceremony of Santiago Maldonado, by means of a quasi mafia-like message, the Argentine State entered the Mapuche territory of the Winkul Mapu Community with the order to, once again, attack with violence the members of this community, resulting in several seriously wounded people and even killing the young Rafael Nahuel from behind, while the Mapuche community was performing vital ceremonies of spiritual initiation that are protected by the Argentine National Constitution;

Confirms that following the analysis of the public statements made by Minister Patricia Bullrich and President Mauricio Macri, it is evident that the murder of the young Mapuche Rafael Nahuel was an extrajudicial execution ordered by the highest spheres of the Argentine State in the framework of a military operation described by witnesses as a human butchery;

Confirms it agrees with Diego Morales, director of the Litigation and Legal Defense Area of the CELS (Centre for Legal and Social Studies) organization, in repudiating the Argentine government's attitude of militarizing the south of the country, which is rich in natural resources, in addition to the fact that it would be creating a false image of the Mapuche community as an armed terrorist group;

Confirms that although in Argentina the death penalty is prohibited, the main exponents of the Argentine government, such as its security minister, its vice president and its president, have publicly stated that the murder of Rafael Nahuel in Mapuche sacred land was a legal and legitimate action fully framed in the law, even stating that what the security forces do has not need to be proved;

Confirms that, incredibly, according to the Argentine government, its repressive and homicidal actions were a good way to act because in the polls most of the people would consider that the government acted well, ignoring the fact that looking surveys is the most illegal way to administer justice and life of society, developing a right-wing neo-fascist populism that to the aboriginal and tribal peoples is what the US government is to immigrants and refugees;

Confirms that the Argentine government is stigmatizing the Mapuche community, calling them "the violent" and even calling it a terrorist group, which would resemble the repressive policy of the Chilean government;

Confirms it agrees with the writer Pedro Cayuqueo in the fact that the governments of Argentina and Chile are negligent for failing to peacefully resolve the conflicts they have with the Mapuche communities, resorting to the violent way instead of using the diplomatic or political way;

Confirms that agrees with the National Aboriginal Pastoral Team (Endepa, in its Spanish acronym) of the Catholic Church in urgently calling on the Argentine State to stop its irrational use of the repressive system against aboriginal communities, which constitutes a violation of the fundamental rights of tribal peoples that have been established in the legal norms of human rights instruments at the local and international level;

Confirms its support to the statement of the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén where not only the Argentine security forces' repressive actions that murdered Rafael Nahuel are repudiated, but also the statements of the Argentine government are considered as Hate Speech and racial violence that do not call for coexistence and intercultural respect;

Confirms that in the context of Argentine history the homicidal way of actionning by the government constitutes a regression to the political violence and extrajudicial executions carried out by the last military dictatorship that killed around 10,000 people in the context of an alleged fight against terrorist groups;

Confirms that according to the Argentine government the alleged weapons of the violent group of the Mapuche community would be spears and firearms that were never found, showing that there is an attempt to demonize an oppressed minority that would lack any kind of weapons;

Confirms that although the Argentine government considers that the Mapuche community is incurring political violence, so far the only two dead people of the conflict have been members of the Mapuche community when suffering the armed repression in the hands of the Argentine government;

Confirms that due to the governmental consideration of the murder of Rafael Nahuel as a legitimate action, this aggravated homicide would also be an extrajudicial execution that would have the intellectual authorship of the Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and the President Mauricio Macri;

It confirms that most of Argentine presidents use to feel that they own the country and feel they have impunity to do what they want, even though this violates national and international law;

Confirms that from the extrajudicial execution of Prosecutor Nisman a limit has been crossed and the Argentine State has returned to carry out illegal murders with total impunity, which is a sad fact that is totally demonstrated with the murder of Rafael Nahuel;

Confirms that after the extrajudicial execution of Rafael Nahuel, after learning that federal judge Gustavo Villanueva was negotiating with the Mapuche community, the Argentine government declared with impunity that it would not accept any illegal or anti-juridical order issued by the judge, who was seeking that the security forces enter the Mapuche territory without firearms;

Confirms that the murder of Rafael Nahuel was not a mere case of disproportionate use of force in the repression of protests and land evictions, but rather that this homicide is part of a systematic criminal plan of the Argentine State to attack the integrity and self-determination of tribal peoples, even guaranteeing impunity for the members of security forces to commit extrajudicial executions, to which President Mauricio Macri considers a legal and legitimate act, thus perpetuating the former Argentine antidemocratic regime of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Aboriginal communities by drip;

Confirms the fact that the Argentine government considers the Mapuche communities as violent groups that do not recognize the Argentine law, the State and the Constitution, when actually the very Argentine government would be that which does not recognize the International Human Rights Treaties incorporated into its own National Constitution;

Confirms that it is in agreement with the National Round Table for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue regarding the existence of a historical dispossession of all the tribal peoples of Argentina, to whom their pre-existence is ignored and are considered as mere minority groups;

It confirms that the physician Ramón Chiocconi has not only been a direct witness of the wounded Mapuches and of the fact that the Mapuche community is suffering social segregation for centuries, but also being witness of the important spiritual value that for the Mapuche people their territories represent, confirming that according to the Argentine government the Mapuche community is an illegal group just because of wanting to recover their ancestral territories, even though the Argentine law allows the community to be able to recover them;

Confirms that the Mapuche community denounces the fact that the Argentine government is trying to privatize some national parks, so that the intention of the tribal communities would be to safeguard those sacred spaces harmonically;

Confirms that the way how the Argentine government acts is violating the most fundamental human rights, such as the right to life, the right to culture and the right to peace, so that it deserves the strongest repudiation on the part of the international community;

Confirms that in 2015 the Buddhist Tribunal on Human Rights has already sentenced the Argentine State for violations of the human rights of the Tribal Peoples, which should be validated by international organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights;

Confirms that the Mapuche Ancestral Resistance (RAM, in its Spanish acronym) group is not a terrorist organization but a community that fights for the rights of the Mapuche people through direct action techniques, whose use of this resource is due to the desperation and impunity suffered by this oppressed community, whose rights are systematically violated;

Confirms that the Buddhist Community condemns all types of violence, resorting to the powerful weapons of humanitarian ethics, compassionate wisdom and active contemplation to cope with injustice;

Confirms that Tribal Peoples are not the original owners of the lands, but rather are in fact the genuine guardians of Mother Earth, existing as an integral part of the lands instead of existing predatorily like most of the States of the world;

Confirms that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has ignored violations of the human rights suffered by the Buddhist Community, is required to act urgently and with all the instruments of law to stop the violent and criminal conduct of the Argentine government, safeguarding the right to life and the right to peace of all the tribal peoples of Argentina.

Always with a spirit of reconciliation (maitri),

Master Maitreya Samyaksambuddha

Judge and President of the Buddhist Tribunal on Human Rights

December 7th, 2017