Chile police rebuffed in raid on carabineros barracks

SANTIAGO, Chile – Agents from the equivalent of the FBI in Chile were rebuffed Friday in an attempt to carry out a raid on a national police barracks as part of an investigation into the arrest of members of the country’s largest indigenous group, officials said.

Prosecutors accuse some members of the national carabineros police of altering evidence by creating incriminatory chats on WhatsApp, which were allegedly introduced into the phones after they were seized from eight Mapuche activists who were arrested in September and later released.

The detained Mapuches had been accused of co-ordinating attacks on churches and trucks as part of the so-called “Hurricane Case,” which was closed by Chile’s public prosecutor’s office Thursday for lack of evidence.

Officers of Chile’s FBI-like investigations police tried to raid the carabineros’ barracks in the southern city of Temuco on Friday but failed because the officers inside argued they needed an advance warning.

Mapuche means “people of the land” in their native Mapudungun tongue. Chile’s largest indigenous group resisted the Spanish conquest for 300 years, until military defeats in the late 19th century forced them into Araucania, south of the Bio Bio river, about 340 miles (550 kilometres) south of the capital.

The government then encouraged European immigrants to colonize the area. Most of the indigenous there now live in poverty on the fringes of timber companies or ranches owned by the Europeans’ descendants.

A radical faction of the Mapuche has occupied and burned churches, forest plantations and lumber trucks to demand the return of ancestral lands. But police have also been accused of violent abuses.

Marta Herrera, a spokeswoman for the national prosecutor’s office, said Friday the investigations police will attempt to carry out the raid on the carabineros barrack in Temuco, the capital of Araucania, as soon as possible.

Chile’s national prosecutor Jorge Abbott told reporters Thursday that “the records handed out by the carabineros to launch the investigation against the eight accused suffer from serious irregularities.”

Abbott also said the regional prosecutor in the Araucania region has opened an investigation into obstruction of justice.

Interior deputy secretary Mahmud Aleuy called on Chileans to hold off on any rushed judgments before the end of the investigation, while the head of the carabineros defended the force and criticized prosecutors.

“The situation described by the public ministry only shelters those people who have devoted themselves to causing fear and harm to a region in the country’s south,” Gonzalo Blu told reporters.