ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the impact that the government of Salvador Allende had on the Mapuche people in order to distinguish between historical landmarks such as the Agrarian Reform Law, Indian Law 17.729, the relationship between the Mapuche and the political parties, and the so-called old social movements of the period. Historically, Mapuche society was characterized as tribal with high levels of social equality and territorial and political decentralization that enabled the development of autonomous political and cultural practices in this region of the Southern Cone. The anticolonial struggle was a characteristic trace of the Mapuche people who for many centuries were able to resist colonial pressures to submit and dominate them. Given the processes of formation and expansion of the Chilean state and the Indian policies it imposed during the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, processes of change and transformation in the 1970s transcend and constitute points of reflection, analysis, and evaluation.
