The Resistance of Bare Life: Media Narratives on Mapuche Hunger Strikes in Chile

The current Mapuche movement emerges in the context of processes of globalization and modernization affecting Latin America. Since the 1990s conflicts have arisen between Mapuche communities and private companies, due to the development of economic mega-projects in Mapuche territory. The government role has been contradictory: while they promote politics of recognition in education and culture; politics of repression are used to suffocate Mapuche protests regarding those mega-projects.

The mainstream media narratives have constructed a particular framing of the conflict. Due to the lack of plurality of Chilean mainstream media, a critical discourse analysis of media discourses is fundamental to deconstruct how a particular narrative is imposed as the unique regime of truth. An alternative discourse has been developed by the ethnic media, which emphasizes an historical and contextualized reading of these confrontations and its consequences for Mapuche communities.

The paper compares the discursive formations underlining ethnic and media narratives regarding the Mapuche hunger strikes of 2008 and 2010. The media coverage of those hunger strikes provided a space for contestation of notions of ethnic and national identity. The analysis of these narratives brings to the forefront the concept of bare life (Agamben, 1998). The management of the ‘bare life’ of the Mapuche is at the core of the modern politics. The hunger strike becomes the only mechanism of resistance of those subjects reduced to the category of bare life. The application of the anti-terrorist legislation locates the Mapuche body outside the realm of law by creating this state of exception (Agamben, 2005) where bare life can be scrutinized and managed.

The comparison of the mainstream and ethnic media narratives shows how the Mapuche hunger strike has been constructed in contradictory terms. A critical discourse analysis problematizes notions of power, legitimacy, ethnic and national identity, involved in those media narratives.