LMT #141: Panguipulli Forest and Timber Complex (COFOMAP), Los Ríos, Chile – Robinson Silva Hidalgo
Robinson Silva Hidalgo
Austral University of Chile-Valdivia
For the spanish version, just click here.
The Panguipulli Forest and Timber Complex (COFOMAP) was a large forestry company, managed by its workers and owned by the State of Chile. More than 3,000 people and their families lived and worked on its 400,000 hectares. This territory in the mountains, located between the municipalities of Panguipulli and Futrono, in the current Los Ríos region in southern Chile, was progressively occupied by families from the nearby regions of Valdivia and Araucanía. In particular, by landless Chilean peasants and workers, who were employed in the forest operations that developed massively since the 1930s.
In the context of employer abuses related to issues such as fair wages, lack of social services, prohibition of forming unions, among other labor mistreatments, organized workers created COFOMAP through land occupations during the summer of 1970-1971. As part of the negotiations with the newly installed government of Salvador Allende, the government decided to create a publicly owned company co-managed by workers (six delegates on the Board of Directors) and government representatives (two delegates on the Board), along with an executive director appointed by Allende.
In the territory, they founded towns, schools, sports and health facilities, creating a social structure that the events of September 11, 1973 dramatically broke, with the military coup and the overthrowing of the government of Salvador Allende. From that moment, a brutal counterinsurgency process was developed, beginning with the military occupying all the properties and settlements of the Complex, imposing curfews, detention and imprisonment, using torture, and disappearing and summarily executing dozens of workers and leftist militants. The repression in the region was due to the process of politicization of the workers and the example set by the co-management of their union organizations with the state to advance a socialist administration of the company. It is worth remembering that the land occupations between 1970 and 1971 had a significant impact on the press and public opinion at the time, even becoming a topic of debate in the National Congress.
In that sense, leftist militants had a strong presence in this area, including socialists, communists, and particularly young members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR), a newly formed party at the time. With a Guevarist inspiration, MIR promoted the mobilization process for workers to occupy the land. All these groups played a decisive role in creating unions and developing political activities, both formative and mobilizing, in the region.
This process generated an acute climate of terror, which the authorities followed with an intervention and subsequent liquidation of the company, privatizing the lands and, finally, with the gradual but sustained expulsion of the inhabitants of the Complex. This became a practice of forced displacement of thousands of people, framed within a repressive strategy by the State, adding to its crimes against humanity in the area.
On October 3 and 4, 1973, the military executed twelve people detained in Neltume, city in the region of Los Ríos, accusing them of attacking a Carabineros police checkpoint. On October 9, the authorities detained, executed, and disappeared seventeen inhabitants from the southern areas of the Complex. One day later, on October 10, the authorities detained another fifteen union leaders and workers from the Complex in the town of Liquiñe, also in the region, and transferred them to the Toltén Bridge in Villarrica, where they were executed and made to disappear. Chilean justice has investigated these repressive actions in the case files of the Caravana de la Muerte, Valdivia episode.
During the same period, and as part of this strategy, the military dictatorship’s personal delegated with managing COFOMAP implemented a series of measures restricting the freedoms of its inhabitants, all aimed at maintaining control over the area and creating conditions for their expulsion from the territory. Administratively, the military authorities first transferred the lands of the Complex to the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) and later to the Corporación de Fomento (CORFO). From this entity, they privatized the lands, deindustrializing the area and dismantling all its productive facilities, especially the sawmills, which accelerated the harassment of the workers that still remained in the Complex.
The situation intensified from 1981 onwards, after the discovery of a guerrilla unit in the area, made up of militants from the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Some of them were forestry workers from COFOMA. Between September and December of 1981, the military summarily executed seven militants from the MIR in the areas of Releco and Choshuenco, amid the deployment of hundreds of soldiers and agents from the National Intelligence Agency (Central Nacional de Informaciones, CNI), who spread out across all the lands of the Complex.
Following a standard counterinsurgency practice, the military operations were combined with civic-military operations, coordinated by the Commander of the Army Division and Provincial Governor of Valdivia, General Rolando Figueroa Quezada. Public employees and members of civil organizations linked to the dictatorship, such as the National Youth Secretariat (Secretaria Nacional de la Juventud) or Cema Chile, participated in these operations. Those not only sought to detect support for the insurgency but also aimed to discipline the population of the Complex through fear and cooptation.
In this context of repression and military occupation, authorities developed the aforementioned process of disintegration and liquidation of the Complex. This process culminated in the disgraceful privatization of the various lands that made it up, including the gradual expulsion of all its inhabitants, a process that was not backed up by any judicial resolution.
It was from the 2000s onwards that former militants of the MIR and their families revisited the area to explore the places where repression occurred in the early years of the dictatorship and the guerrilla resistance activities took place in the early 1980s.
In the search to recover these stories of struggle, contact was made with the inhabitants of Neltume. At the same time, this broke the fear that still existed, despite the end of the dictatorship, and sparked specific actions such as meetings and conversations about the recent past.
The next step was to create a space to revitalize the intense history of this territory. This is how the neighborhood community and former militants created the Neltume Museum and Memory Cultural Center. The Center is a self-managed institution that promotes workers’ memory, and since 2004, it has formally begun to recover the history of the territory. This has been done through meetings, visits to sites of repression and struggle, through community engagement on the historical memory of the territory, as well as creating a permanent exhibition and generating educational actions.
Currently, this space remains very active, despite the difficulties imposed by negationism, as proved by attacks and thefts at the Museum and fires at the former blacksmith shop and the Carabineros police station (both memory sites). These are incidents that have been poorly investigated by state institutions. Despite this, the Center continues to support environmental, social, and indigenous demands in the region, historically continuing the actions of workers, militants, and activists who, during the 20th century, helped shape the social and economic landscape of these southern lands.
House of the Cultural Center and Museum and Memory of Neltume. Source: museoneltume.cl
Translation: Yasmin Getirana
To learn more:
Bize, Cristóbal. (2017). El otoño de los raulíes. Poder popular en el Complejo Forestal y Maderero Panguipulli (Neltume, 1967-1973). Santiago: Tiempo robado.
Centro Cultural Museo y Memoria de Neltume. https://www.museoneltume.cl
Silva, R. La transformación de lo local. La empresa estatal Cofomap bajo la dictadura civil-militar-empresarial, Los Ríos, Chile (1977-1988). Boletín Americanista. N° 89, 2024 pp. 277-298.
Silva, R. La memoria de Neltume, Chile: el patrimonio que vence al negacionismo. Tempo & Argumento vol 16 N° 42,2024, p. e0104.
Cover image credit: Occupation of the Neltume property. Source: http://museoneltume.cl/
WORKING CLASS MEMORY SITES
The Working Class Memory Sites series is coordinated by Paulo Fontes.
