In Milei’s Argentina, Indigenous Rights Are Rolled Back
- Pass Blue
- Jun 15
- 6 min read
Subhanjana Das
Jorge Millán’s home in the small town of El Maitén in Argentina’s Patagonia was raided in February this year. “It was total madness,” said Millán, who belongs to the Indigenous Mapuche community and works at the local radio station, La Radio Comunitaria Mapuche Petü Mogeleiñ. His home was invaded by Argentine military border police officers, who, Millán recalled, told him they were looking for Molotov bombs, or anything that would start or accelerate a fire. “They arrived unexpectedly and violently,” he said in Spanish.
Millán’s house wasn’t the only one raided. It was one of many carried out in towns across the Chubut province, located in central Patagonia, targeting many Mapuche, the biggest Indigenous population in Argentina, where disastrous forest fires have leveled over 50,000 hectares of land (about 123,000 acres) and forced hundreds of Mapuche from their homes since December 2024 as well as areas in neighboring Río Negro Province. Besides record-breaking heatwaves and strong winds, a crippled fire management system and weakened environmental protections have wreaked even more damage.
Since coming to power in 2023, President Javier Milei — who maintains a denialistic stance on climate change — has defunded the National Fire Management System by 81 percent, severely limiting the country’s capacity to prevent and respond to forest fires in ecologically vulnerable regions like Patagonia. He has also downgraded the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, which responsible for national environment policy strategy and coordination, to an undersecretariat status; eliminated the fund that supports the landmark 2007 Native Forests Law to help regulate the use, conservation and restoration of Argentina’s native forests; and repealed the 2011 Land Law that regulates foreign-land ownership in rural areas to protect natural resources.
Milei has been toying with the possibility of Argentina dropping out of the Paris climate agreement and has denounced the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by consensus in the General Assembly in 2015 to end poverty and hunger and ensure gender equality worldwide by 2030 — calling them “nothing but a supranational government program that is socialist in shape.” In 2024, Argentina was the only country to reject the UN Indigenous Peoples’ rights resolution directed at strengthening access to justice, environmental protections and the preservation of their cultures and languages.
As the devastating fires raged across Patagonia, Milei’s government responded by doubling down on arrests, charging people with starting these fires. It declared Mapuche individuals and groups like the Ancestral Mapuche Resistance (RAM) “terrorists,” made multiple arrests in El Bolsón (Río Negro), Epuyén, Atilio Viglione and El Hoyo (Chubut) with unverified claims that have been met with skepticism and condemnation from the Indigenous community.
On the day Millán’s house was raided, Victoria Nuñez Fernández, a non-Indigenous community member who also lived in Chubut Province, was arrested on charges of setting fire to machinery in a ranch and detained for about two months. “They are trying to use this in order to persecute solidarity with the Mapuche people,” Nuñez Fernandez said, whose case awaits further investigation in court.
The Mapuche — which translates to “people of the Earth,” or “children of the land” (“mapu,” meaning “Earth” or “land,” and “che,” meaning people or children in Mapudungun) — are one of the 35 officially recognized Indigenous groups in the country. With a 300,000-strong population, they make up a big part of the 2.9 percent of Argentina’s people that self-identify as Indigenous. They are spread across Patagonia, inhabiting some of the most ecologically rich terrain of the country, which has long coveted foreign investment interest. Faced with evictions, criminal and terrorism charges, as well as discrimination, the community has always endured a highly strained relationship with the Argentine state.
Their struggle for autonomy centers around three issues: for the government to honor and respect the treaties signed with Indigenous communities; the return of their ancestral lands and territories; and political autonomy for their traditional authorities and institutions. According to the Mapuche, Milei’s policies and actions deny all three. (Argentina’s environment ministry did not respond to requests for a comment.)
“Terrorists disguised as Mapuches set fire to our Patagonia to extort the government and demand privileges. They will pay behind bars,” Mariano Cúneo Libarona of the National Ministry of Justice posted on X.
Along with disempowering environmental bodies and laws, Milei’s government has also weakened Indigenous protections that were introduced early in his presidency: he revoked the Indigenous Territorial Emergency Law recognizing the pre-existence of Argentina’s Indigenous people and protected them from being forced out of traditionally occupied lands; closed the Community Strengthening Program, which provided legal advice to Indigenous peoples and communities; and dissolved the National Registry of Indigenous Communities that determined legal personhood of indigenous people by identifying their population.
The Mapuche say that it’s a convenient triple ploy for the government: to distract from its inaction to quell the fires; criminalize the Indigenous people who have been protesting against destruction in the Patagonian region; and divert attention from foreign investment interests for megaprojects, such as mining.
“There are visionary interests behind the fires,” said Moira Millán, a Mapuche weichafe (meaning “warrior,” or “guardian”) from Corcovado whose house was also raided by the gendarmerie. “They want to implement megaprojects in Mapuche territory. But if you recognize the rule of law, you have to consult us. And that is going to be unfavorable for them. So, to remove us as objectors of extractivism, they have to delegitimize us and show us as criminals to the rest of the country. And with that excuse, they take away our rights.”
Plans of large-scale, multimillion dollar industrial and mining developments are underway in Río Negro and Chubut Provinces as Milei pushes his goals to create an ultra-open-market economy in Argentina, which has suffered from the world’s second-worst inflation — going from a peak of 300 percent in early 2024 to a current rate of 62 percent — after Venezuela.
The British-based Rio Tinto Company is set to invest in a new lithium mine at Salta; Argentina’s state oil firm invested $3 billion in a pipeline from the Vaca Muerta formation in northern Patagonia to a new export terminal in Río Negro; Patagonia Gold announced investments to advance gold and silver extraction in Chubut and Río Negro; and Pan American Energy (PAE) is set to explore “unconventional” gas reserves in the hydrocarbon-rich San Jorge Basin in Chubut. These are only a few examples of the many recent investments under Milei.
“With these land sales, the government is dispossessing ancestral peoples of their territories for the construction of hydroelectric dams, depriving them of their free and open use, and developing mega-real estate projects for tourism, with no benefit to the communities that live on the land,” Fany Llanque said. She is a member of the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversity for Good Living.
Experts and Indigenous communities fear that “it’s the worst situation in many, many years,” according to Juan Carlos Radovich, a social anthropologist at the University of Buenos Aires, whose work has focused on the Indigenous people for four decades.
“In the 1800s, during the Desert Campaign, there was a genocide to remove the Mapuche from Argentina,” said Carina Inés Fernández, communications manager at the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversity for Good Living. “We are living a second Desert Campaign, but now, instead of only going with the army, they are criminalizing the indigenous people with the judicial apparatus.” (The Desert Campaign was a military plan against the Indigenous.)
Moira Millán said: “It’s not just about the Mapuche. Environmentally, it would be devastating because Patagonia’s glaciers are a very important reservoir of freshwater, which is scarce in the global north. The Mapuches are fighting to protect a territorial space that has an impact on the global ecosystem of fundamental importance.
It’s like the Indigenous brothers of the Amazon who are protecting the planet’s lungs; we are protecting a freshwater reservoir through the glaciers. If people understood that the Mapuche people’s fight is to be the guardians of the water, there would probably be more support than we have.”
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