Mapuche terrorista. Pervivencia de estereotipos del siglo XIX en la construcción de la imagen del “indio” como otro/extranjero en la coyuntura de la Argentina actual.

Abstract

The image of the wild and uncivilized “indian” shaped by traveling artists since the XVI century, was continued by the discourses of the XIX century, that were consolidated with the so-called “generation of ‘80”, for being useful to its objectives of territorial neo-colonization towards The inside of the country. The idea of the Mapuche-foreigner is thus constructed, marginalizing it from the ideology of national identity. The dispute over the land was since then a never-ending battle intensified in the current conjuncture. This article seeks to show that, together with the harassment and persecution of the Mapuche sector, which takes on significance after the death of Santiago Maldonado, those stigmatizations that are now strongly dimensioned and distorted by the mass media are refloated; focusing otherness on the image of the foreign-separatist-terrorist Mapuche, activating discriminatory features well installed in the common sense of a part of the population.