TO THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION
Faced with the unfair and discriminatory sentence of three years 15 months determined last November 19, 2013 by a Chilean court against our community member JOSÉ ANTONIO ÑIRRIPIL PÉREZ, imputed in the year 2009 under the Anti-Terrorism Act, as a minor, for an alleged attack on the Estate Brasil, we, as the ÑIRRIPIL PÉREZ family of LOF MUKO denounce:
1) The false accusations made by the prosecution to the community members of our Lof, of having carried out terrorist attacks against estates in the area, that are the culmination of a long and sustained campaign of repression and persecution initiated after the just demands for the recovery of our ancestral territory. Thus, the State of Chile maintains the criminalization as a repressive strategy against our political and territorial claims, applying the Anti-Terrorism Act as a way to undermine our procedural rights and deny our access to justice, as demonstrated in this first sentence.
2) In 2010, after a prolonged hunger strike where José Antonio and other prosecuted community members of our Lof participated, the Chilean state pledged internationally the inapplicability of the Anti-Terrorism Act against minors. However, José Antonio Ñirripil was charged in 2009 as a teenager, prosecuted as such, and sentenced on November 19th having as SOLE PROOF the statement of a witness with protected identity who acted under the guise of paid informers, only made possible by a special law like the Anti-Terrorism Act. This witness acknowledged even to having been drunk at the time of participating in the alleged attack against Estate Brasil. Therefore, we denounce the failure of the Chilean State to comply with the national and international law, violating our most fundamental rights and procedural guarantees.
3) We denounce the biased and racist attitude of the judges who formed the subrogation of the Oral Tribunal that condemned our community member so arbitrarily and with a weak and induced proof. The presiding judge, Judge Mauricio Torres Contreras, having functioned first as a Prosecutor, was in charge of cases of persecution against Mapuche in 2006 [1], the judge Viviana García Utreras was banned in 2010 as a Judge of Warranty by the Court of Appeals of Temuco in the trial against 7 Mapuche community members [2], and the judge Francisco Boero Villagran, appears in 2006 as a plaintiff attorney for Forestry Mininco in trials against Mapuche community members in the region of Ercilla [3]. To this we add the lack of specialization of these judges in the application of the law in cases where minors are judged. [4]
4) For all these reasons we denounce the State of Chile for breaching its international commitments and the recommendations made by UN rapporteurs on the rights of indigenous peoples and human rights in relation to the implementation of the Anti-Terrorism Act as a way to criminalize and prosecute our territorial claims, and we also emphasize how the Chilean government continues to implement this law of exception against Mapuche minors through the use of evidence like the protected witnesses and paid informers.
5) We also denounce the discriminatory and racist actions of the State of Chile against our community members, criminalizing our fair territorial claims and maintaining against our communities a violent and repressive action, preventing our access to justice and the exercise of our rights and causing serious psychosocial consequences in our communities and our children, women and elderly. In the particular situation of our family, we have suffered persecution, discrimination and stigmatization of all our members, with particular emphasis on the severity of impact and traumatization of our children and the abuse and torture José Antonio was subjected to, BEING A MINOR, during arrests by the Police Department, added to the long period of incarceration in the CIP of Chol Chol, as a detention center for adolescents. At this point should be considered the severe psychological consequences caused by the preventive detention, which constitutes a form of deprivation of freedom.
Therefore, we call on the national and international civil society to demand that the State of Chile fulfills its commitments on the human rights of the Mapuche people and to speak out regarding the request for revocation filed with the Supreme Court, whose decision will be read next January 9, 2014. We emphasize that this new and unjust condemnation of our community member José Antonio Ñirripil Pérez, tried as a minor, also makes us distrust the effective implementation of procedural safeguards in the coming trials against our community members tried as adults.
