Slow-Burning Challenge to Chile on Easter Island

HANGA ROA, Easter Island — Not long ago, as some elders of the Rapanui people wistfully recall, a sense of profound isolation pervaded this windswept speck of land in the Pacific. Horses were the dominant mode of transportation, flights to the outside world were few and far between, and the island’s Polynesian language enjoyed dominance in most spheres of life.

See an interesting slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/10/07/world/americas/20121007EASTER.html?ref=americas

Now, so many cars roam the roads of this fragile island (it is smaller than Martha’s Vineyard) that Rapanui grimly joke how they may outnumber the moai, the prized towering statues their ancestors carved from volcanic tuff, beguiling archaeologists. Spanish, the language of Chile, which annexed Easter Island in 1888, now prevails across much of the island. New luxury hotels catering to rich Chileans and moneyed foreign visitors charge $1,100 a night, accentuating a festering income gap.

And there is yet another feature of life in Chile, a nation grappling with fierce anti-government protests by students and indigenous groups, which has made it here: violent clashes with security forces. Inspired by other parts of Polynesia that have obtained a considerable degree of political autonomy or are in the process of seeking independence, leaders of the Rapanui people are mounting a slow-burning rebellion against Chile. Their movement on the island — which they call Rapa Nui, not Easter Island — presents a unique test for a Latin American country: quelling a challenge to its rule in the middle of the South Pacific. “Our nearest border is with the Pitcairn Islands, not Chile,” said Leviante Araki, 54, president of the Rapa Nui Parliament, a pro-independence organization, referring tothe British overseas territory more than 1,200 miles to the west.

Newcomers from mainland Chile, which is almost twice that distance in the other direction, are fueling a sharp increase in Easter Island’s population, increasing it by 54 percent to 5,800 over the last decade. Continentals, as mainland Chileans are called here, now slightly outnumber Rapanui on the island, at about 3,000 to 2,800, according to the mayor, Luz Zasso Paoa. Protests here have crystallized around the thwarted efforts by one prominent Rapanui clan, the Hitorangi, to reclaim land on which a luxury hotel was recently completed. But other sources of ire among the Rapanui have also emerged, including bitterness over privileges like subsidized housing that have been extended to some mainland Chileans, competition for jobs in the lucrative tourism trade and the mainland’s control over the island’s affairs.

Security forces violently evicted Rapanui protesters in 2010 who had occupied buildings and other sites. Images captured on cellphone cameras showed bloodstained Rapanui,drawing admonition from the United Nations last year over the use of force to resolve the island’s problems. Though the situation has calmed somewhat since then, nonviolent protests by the Rapanui have continued well into this year. Despite the agitation, Easter Island still awes. Nearly a thousand monolithic moai remain strewed around volcanic craters and sandy shorelines, guarding the secrets of an island settled more than nine centuries ago by Polynesian explorers. Clusters of horses wildly roam the hills, as if Easter Island belonged to them. But unresolved disputes over land and sovereignty, between the Rapanui and continentals — and even among some of the Rapanui themselves — are clouding this superficially easygoing outpost. Rather than subjugating the autonomy movement, the crackdowns seem to have added to the resentment here, with the Rapa Nui Parliament now taking its fight to the courts by filing a lawsuit on the mainland this year seeking independence.

The group says the island’s annexation, under an 1888 treaty, was made illegitimate by Chile’s inequitable administration of it, including the removal of Rapanui from ancestral lands, their forced confinement to the town of Hanga Roa and the leasing of almost the entire island for decades to the Williamson-Balfour Company, a Scottish sheep-ranching concern... Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/world/americas/slow-burning-rebellion-against-chile-on-easter-island.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0