Train in Chile Derailed, Engineers Shot

Unknown persons on Tuesday derailed a freight train in the southern Chilean region of La Araucania, in the so-called Mapuche conflict zone, and then fired on the engineers and tried to burn the cargo and the railcars.

According to the police report made available to reporters, the incident occurred about 5:30 a.m. (0930 GMT) between the cities of Temuco and Concepcion after a group of unknown persons removed the bolts holding the rails to the ties causing 45 railcars on the train to run off the tracks, damaging 11 of them.

After the accident, the two engineers got off the train to examine the damage but unknown gunmen then began firing at them, so they returned to the train and took refuge in the engine.

Police determined that the attackers doused the cars that went off the track with fuel but they were unable to set them on fire.

The top municipal official in the southern town of Malleco, Erich Baumann, called the derailment “a very serious attack” and said that the government is studying whether to apply the Antiterrorist Law against those responsible for it.

The prosecutor in charge of the case, Ricardo Traite, said that this was an act of violence “without precedent in the area” and confirmed that among those suspected of carrying out the deed are Mapuche Indian groups because of the slogans the engineers heard being shouted and from evidence the attackers left on the scene.

The Mapuches, who number 600,000 in a country of 16.6 million, are Chile’s main Indian tribe.

The basis of the conflict between some Mapuche communities and the Chilean state is the Indians’ claim on ancestral lands.

In La Araucania, Chile’s poorest region, the Indians occupy about 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres), just 5 percent of the lands they inherited from their forebears and one-sixth of the territory owned by forestry firms, which have suffered several attacks of various sorts in recent years.

Published in Latino Daily News