Dehumanization, through the media, as state policy, for foreign (and local) extractive interests.
When I told my friend Matías, a computer teacher and social communicator, he couldn’t believe it. His first response was to laugh. “You didn’t even know how to look up a word in the search engine and now you teach,” he complained. And he laughed again. No wonder. My generation (ours) was not born with a computer at home. Nor, in my case, did we have computers at school. In fact, 22 years after my first encounter with a desktop computer, I had to work with five different classes in a secondary school and discovered that none of my students knew how to use email, although they could interact with mobile phone applications; in other words, even digital natives communicate through processed computer recipes.
Needless to say, this limitation transcends age groups. It is a widespread statistic. And it is more pronounced in rural areas, but not exclusively. I think that in Argentina, for several decades, there has been a deep cultural and technological depth and a limited knowledge of this language by the general society, but this does not mean that we should claim that this phenomenon has a racial root or that it isolates or discriminates according to ethnic distinctions. That would be madness. Imagine the voice of an artificial intelligence (AI) driven technology product arguing: “I don’t respond to commands from ‘blacks’ and ‘Indians’”! Or signs on the doors of computer shops saying: “No technology sold to blacks and Indians”.
With a degree of judgment, one could argue that we are not far from that.
But it is well known that the imposition of a market product is done outside the will of the citizenry, as a business objective: to create a need, regardless of whether society has it. It could be a soft drink, a 65-inch LED TV, or a mobile phone with HD resolution. Who could go without a mobile phone today, even if it has a broken screen, a broken pin, a different brand of charger, or a case wrapped in black tape to prevent it from falling apart? Do people in the neighborhood (even in rural areas far from the city) choose to use technological devices, or is their use conditioned by the need to be in contact with family members, to complete formalities, to have a minimum of contact with the rest of the population?
Are the elements of technology and the “Indians” opposing representations? Are they part of the same chronological correlation? Or are they anachronisms? Who says, or who would like to think, that both figures belong to different eras and therefore cannot be together in the same story? Are they implausible in their relationship?
Indians” represent the past, technology the future! Indians” are backward, technology is progress! Indians” lie, soldiers (representatives of the fatherland) tell the truth! Indians” steal and usurp, landlords invest and strengthen the country! Brown “Indians” are foreigners, blue-eyed businessmen are locals! These sentences are some of the myths that are constantly reinforced in Argentina, and that lead in the same direction: to favor the voice and position of the victor, and the history of the colonists. Once again! As if it were an update of Windows, the digital platform of lies.
The presence of dark-skinned people disturbs and discomforts a section of the population. Worse still, it makes them sick to their stomachs to think that someone with these characteristics can interact with a state-of-the-art technological device. Carrying an iPhone, driving a jeep, filming with a Canon camera. For them, the only way to have them is to have stolen them. Imagine an Indian who is a rapper, a DJ, or a TV presenter. They get a stroke, a heart attack, or at least an arrhythmia.
The contradiction exists and is real: the new technologies are the materialization of extractives. Every machine that is produced has been made with some form of energy extraction from the earth. That is why the wise Mapuche grandmothers warn us to “stay away from technology”. This warning, however, does not exclude the possibility of having to interact with technology in the city, or, for example, the need to train people in the various fields of communication to counteract these suspicious communication myths.
“The man with the binoculars,” tweeted Patricia Bullrich on 17 February 2024. “They arrested the famous Mapuche with the binoculars in Bariloche in the Maldonado case,” replied the newspaper Perfil. “They arrested the ‘Mapuche with the binoculars’, the leader of the seizure at Villa Mascardi,” headlined Clarín.
The news was quickly reproduced, with almost the same headline, in other friendly media: Infobae, La Voz del Interior, La Brújula 24, Los Andes, La Gaceta, El Observador.
It was not so much a question of giving details of the case, but rather of reproducing and reproducing the implausibility of the protagonist. An implausibility that helps to construct a fictional, absurd, and grotesque character that provokes disgust, rejection, indignation, repudiation, anger, and violence in the reading public.
This exercise in behaviorist communication has been used before. It happened before the murder of Rafael Nahuel and the murder of Elías Garay. One only has to look up and read what the mass media in Argentina published in the days before the murder of the two young men.
A powerful and massive message was launched that could later justify a murder. If Matias Santana had committed suicide in his cell during his arrest, the reading public would have justified his death without asking themselves whether he had any reason to do so.
And this is a turning point that cannot be transferred: to focus all the attention on some of those involved, to put them on the ropes, to limit their ability to respond. Subjecting them to silence and defenselessness. To protect, in the same exercise, the opponent, the rest of the protagonists: be they businessmen, politicians, or members of the country’s security forces.
Even if you read carefully, you can see how, in the same exercise, the newspaper “La Voz del Interior” takes up another reprehensible myth for the same cause: that Santiago Maldonado drowned himself.
How many media have listened to or read the position of the Mapuche youth and their lawyers? Conversely, how many media outlets repeat the alleged violence of the Mapuche? Better still, where has anyone read about the presence, acquittal and/or responsibility (or not) of Luciano Benetton in the murder of Santiago Maldonado? “Nobody called him as a witness,” Sergio, Santiago’s brother, told me. Is it notorious that during the media coverage of Santiago Maldonado’s case (even to this day), he has not been mentioned, as if he had a communication armor to protect him?
“Matías Santana is being detained days before the appeal for the enforced disappearance of Santiago Maldonado, as was the case in 2017 when the testimony of Witness E was compiled without our presence,” warned Sergio on the X platform.
While members of the Mapuche community are even required to provide blood samples and historical documents to prove that they are part of the territory they claim, Luciano Benetton has been exonerated of all guilt and suspicion from day one. He has never been questioned or even asked how he came to have access to almost a million hectares. He has not been asked to produce any documents, to make any public statements (either his own or those of a spokesman), or to testify in court. In Argentina, the tone of Luciano Benetton’s voice is unknown to us.
The magnifying glass used to investigate the murder of Santiago Maldonado is tainted, built on myths, stereotypes, and corruptible tendentious discourse. A visible and tangible media campaign.
Imagine the police officers who are holding Matías Santana right now. Imagine all the ideas that must be going through their heads after seeing and reading the various reports that have been massively published about the “Mapuche of the binoculars”. Imagine all the forms of denial and rejection that these agents of the state have to deal with inside the police station, whether they are proven or not.
They must want to line up to honor the homeland, they must want to do justice to Santana’s body. Because they don’t even see him as a person, but as a sacrificial figure that will save the people.
An Indian is killed to save the people from a greater threat! This seems to be the reasoning of Patricia Bullrich, the Patagonian Unified Command, and the background of the anti-terrorist law.
Like the civilian lynchings, where the protagonists, after seeing countless news reports about armed robberies of banks, country houses, and warehouses, end up beating to death a boy who tried to steal a pair of used trainers or a piece of wire.
Ezequiel, the boy with the wires in Rosario, if he wasn’t killed by the power lines, he was lynched. And not because people are bad, or because they have a malicious gene in their blood that prevents them from understanding, comprehending, and being empathetic to those who suffer, to those who are at the bottom of the privileged ladder, but because there is a media work -strategic-behaviorist- that precedes the violence that they use as a form of justice.
A kind of ethnic-discursive cleansing that is delegated to civilians to turn it into a public act, a verbal and physical stoning.
The public first reacts (on social media), then supports (with public demonstrations), and finally justifies (when the stigmatized person has already been killed).
In this context, it is much more likely or plausible that a Mapuche will appear to have committed suicide in a cell or murdered in the middle of a forest than that the same Mapuche will be seen running a media outlet or that those responsible for his death will be investigated as criminals.
Therefore, what the mass media are proposing is that the Mapuche should always be under suspicion. And once this suspicion is accepted, the Mapuche themselves are linked to a series of denotative qualifiers.
Death, murder, fire, violence, robbery, usurpation, lie, persecution, falsehood, refugee, and terrorist are some of the words that make up the semantic field with which the Argentine media describe the “Indian”.
On the other hand, the magnifying glass, the binoculars, the compass, and the rifles (Remington) are elements (visual signs) that constitute and evoke the semantic field of the colonist-invader-conqueror.
This is why there is also a disproportionate symbolic war in our society, in which we, the “Indians”, rarely have the opportunity to react, to make abuses visible, to be a trending topic on social networks.
But even in this disproportion, and with the weapons of the oppressor-invader (cameras, mobile phones, computers, voice recorders), we fight. It is not and will not be the first time.
In any case, we are following an ancient legacy begun by Leftraro. And even if the truth tries to be manipulated, there will always be someone among our people with the eyes of a condor, the feather of a choke, or the flight of a bandurria to counter the offensive discourse proposed by the oppressor.
