Mulchén Massacre Memory Site: Fundo Carmen y Maitenes
by Organization of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared Persons in Mulchén
The Renaico River bore witness to one of the most terrible episodes in the region’s history of logging, and in Chilean history as a whole.
In the 1960s, as Chile’s agrarian reform began, the “Colonization Committee” (1), which was made up of loggers and other farmworkers in Malleco Province, received a number of plots of land for its members. After the Campesino Union Law of 1967 was passed (2), and the Unidad Popular government was elected in 1970 (3), tenant farmers—known in Chile as inquilinos (4)—mobilized to gain access to land. A portion of the land, which was not currently being used by its owners, was expropriated by the Agrarian Reform Commission and turned over to the National Forest Commission (CONAF) (5). Following the coup d’état in 1973, local landowners and administrators organized a joint civilian-military committee, whose members arrested and tortured the following workers between October 5th and 7th of that year: José Yáñez D., Celsio Vivanco C., Juan de Dios Labra B., Domingo Sepúlveda C., Alberto Albornoz G., Felidor Albornoz G., José Gutiérrez A., and Gerónimo Sandoval M. These men, who worked on three ranches known as El Morro, Carmen y Maitenes, and Pemehue, were later taken to the banks of the Renaico River and murdered.
Meanwhile, a different group of workers were murdered on the grounds of the Carmen y Maitenes ranch (fundo, in Spanish): Edmundo Vidal A., Miguel del Carmen Albornoz A., Daniel Albornoz G., Guillermo Albornoz G., Luis Godoy S., José Liborio Rubilar G., José Lorenzo Rubilar G., Manuel Rubilar G. y Juan de Dios Roa R.
Some of these logging and farmworkers were buried by their family members; others were buried by the local residents who found their bodies. Just a few days after these terrible murders, some of these bodies were exhumed by the military to cover up their crimes against humanity, in a maneuver known as “Operation Television Pickup.” (6)
In their fight to preserve the memory of what took place, the Organization of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared Persons in Mulchén had the “Mulchén Massacre Memory Site: Fundo Carmen y Maitenes” declared a National Monument in the “Historic Monuments” category.
This declaration was one of a series of symbolic reparations made by the Chilean state. The memory site itself can be found in the Malleco National Reserve, in the Araucanía Region. The Renaico River stretches from there to the neighboring Biobío Region.
For more information (in Spanish), see https://archivosdelamemoriamalleco.wordpress.com/
(1) Colonization Committee: after a number of workers and their families were kicked off government land when logging operations ended in the mid-1950s, they came together and collectively opposed their expulsion by occupying land illegally. When the agrarian reform went into effect in the early 1960s, these land occupations were legalized under the auspices of the Colonization Committee, made up of workers who distributed state-owned land. For more information (in Spanish), see: (https://www.monumentos.gob.cl/monumentos/monumentos-historicos/sitio-historico-matanza-mulchen-fundo-carmen-maitenes)
(2) The campesino union law, passed in 1967 under the presidential administration of Eduardo Frei Montalva, outlined goals for these unions: improving working conditions, creating formal work contracts, and supporting the efforts of agricultural workers to demand their rights through collective bargaining, ensuring employer compliance with social security and labor laws, and promoting the organizational, technical, and general educations of union members. For more information (in Spanish), see: https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/
(3) The Unidad Popular, or Popular Unity government (also known by its Spanish-language acronym UP), was an electoral coalition of left-wing political parties in Chile. The coalition’s presidential candidate was the socialist senator Salvador Allende, who was elected president on September 4, 1970. Following the coup d’état against Allende in 1973, the UP disintegrated, and by the 1980s it had disappeared entirely. For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Unity_(Chile)
(4) Inquilinos are Chilean tenant farmers who worked under a social and economic system inherited from the colonial hacienda system from the Spanish region of Andalucía, and more broadly, from feudal Europe. In Chile, the system of tenant farming was a response to the crisis of the colonial institution known as the encomienda, a fiscal regime instituted by the Spanish to compensate so-called “conquistadors” with the labor of colonized persons. For more information, see: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquilinaje
(5) The National Forest Commission, known by its Spanish-language acronym CONAF, is an autonomous institution that is part of the Chilean state, though originally it was created as a private corporation. Located within the Ministry of Agriculture, it administrates Chile’s forested land, contributing to the development of logging, fighting forest fires, and managing national parks and other protected areas. For more information, see: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_Forestal.
(6) “Operation Television Pickup” was the name given to a military mission aimed at illegally exhuming the cadavers of political prisoners and make them disappear. The operative was repeatedly carried out throughout the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, in order to maintain the legal impunity of the military and its civilian collaborators.