Introduction

The article presents part of the results of the doctoral dissertation "Policy and women in the Araucania: other possible worlds in times of globalization",¹ in particular those focused on the analysis of the women's sociopolitical organizations in this Chilean region. The research, methodologically, in qualitative descriptive nature, had among its objectives to analyze the sociopolitical organizations² of women in the region Araucania, their strategies and forms of organization in political practices and how these interrelate with those of the national and Latin American movement. The results of this objective are those presented in this article.

The data collection tools used were: an Organizational Cadaster,³ developed for this study, that identified 50 organizations of women; in-depth interviews, seven of which to well-known women who were region leaders; and the review of documentary sources produced by women, which made it possible to describe organizationally and socio-politically the women's organizations in the region, between 1980 and 2000.

Thus, a contextualized diachronic research found expression, which aims to understand, from the very same women inhabitants of the south of the country, how they experience and interpret the social world around them and which they build from the social interactions with other people (^{Pérez, 2004}; ^{Ruiz, 2012}). In this case, we present how the women from the Araucania are protagonists of the interactions and alliances among them, with the national movement and with Latin American movement networks; a social and political network from where it is possible to comprehend their practices and actions in favor of their rights.

The results of the study allow to document and visualize the women of the region gathering, organizing and acting in the last thirty years in order to establish their visions of the world in the local and national society, establishing alliances and intercultural relations between the Mapuche and non-Mapuche, rarely valued and highlighted by social sciences.

Theoretical and methodological scope of the study

Theoretically, the research is based on the contributions made by Latin American women, who, through the sociopolitical practices of the feminist social movement, have generated knowledge and individual practices which question and aim to transform patriarchal society, establishing themselves as relevant actors in the policy of the States in the last three decades (^{Valdés, 2000}; ^{Vargas, 2002}; ^{Molyneux, 2003}; ^{Lagarde, 2003}; ^{Vargas, 2008}; ^{Valdivieso, 2009}).

The qualitative research, considering that "thinking the qualitative is to reconstruct the opaque weave of the fabric that constitutes the social world" (^{Scribano, 2008: 14}), aimed to imagine women incorporating the gender subordination in the reflection, expanding the methodological possibilities of social sciences, while obtaining new data and forms of data; using common women's texts and objects which give an account of the social construction of their gender (^{Perrot, 2009}).

The strategy to select the cases and the women's organizations that participated in the research varied along it, as often occurs in studies of this kind (^{Salamanca and Martín-Crespo, 2007}). For the case of women's organizations, initially the study began with the ones known by the researcher. Afterwards, other organizations that made contact were registered under a snowball sampling selection and used the relationship networks that women organizations generate throughout their sociopolitical actions. In the case of the interviewed women leaders, the participants' selection, was conducted by the so-called convenience method - the leaders who were in the city of Temuco between December 2009 and February 2010. In this way, in the study a group of participants was put together, which is consistent with that expressed by ^{Salamanca and Martín-Crespo (2007: 3)} that "in deciding when and where to observe, whom to talk to, as well as which information to process and register and how to do it [...] we are not just deciding what is relevant or not, but we are also drawing several samples of the available information".

The instruments of data collection were:

A total of 50 cadasters⁴ were applied to women organizations from several communities. Most of them were answered directly by the members of the organization, helped when necessary by student assistants.⁵ The in-depth interviews to key women leaders of the Araucania region were open conversations that aimed for the understanding of the meaning of their participation in women organizations, often obtaining answers rather emotional than rational (^{Ruiz, 2012}). These seven interviews were conducted by the lead researcher and the participants were selected according to defined inclusion criteria.

Documentary information was also collected from the conversations of understanding (^{Scribano, 2008}) conducted in the Schools of Citizen Participation and Leadership in 2008, where approximately one hundred women, women leaders and members of sociopolitical organizations of the region participated. The ordering, categorical data collection and analysis of the gathered information in the research was done using the software Atlas Ti,⁶ a group of IT tools for qualitative analysis of textual, graphical and video data.

Analysis and results: The women of Araucania and their organizations

In the 1980s, Chilean women, some supporters of political parties, others simply from their families' political affiliation, engaged in the human rights defense of thier relatives, victims of the dictatorship's political repression: political prisoners, victims of torture, missing detainees; generating or participating in several political action networks that promoted to resist the dictatorship and to take actions to restore democracy.

In Araucania, mothers, couples, wives and daughters of left wing parties' missing and/or prisoner supporters, played their part in the organization for the dictatorship's repression resistance. They were the ones who in practice, administrated and preserved left-wing political parties as social movement bodies, as Encarnación Alarcón, a well-known leader of the Association of Relatives of Missing Detainees, states: "the Communist Party of Chile would have disappeared of the region without us, the women"⁷ (^{Ketterer, 2004}).

The presence of the Mapuche community joined the initiatives, which resulted in the organization of women of that community deriving out of an "in-depth analysis of the reality that affected the communities and women particularly, due to the experience of ethnical and gender discrimination" (^{Valdés, 2000}), thus creating a sociopolitical process that is here to stay.

A first categorization of sociopolitical organizations of the women of the region is by their origins. It recognizes four types: a) those originated from non-state organizations' (NGO) actions, mainly in the 1980s b) those created from the post-dictatorship State during the nineties c) the autonomous, created by women themselves in the first decade of 2000s, and d) Mapuche women's organizations.

Organizations originated from NGOs

NGOs had a significant presence in Araucania during the dictatorship, especially in rural areas. At that time, there were three types of NGO: 1) charity; 2) palliatives of the State reduction due to the structural adjustment and implementation of the neoliberal model in Pinochet's dictatorship; and 3) development and integration promoters of emerging groups: youth, women and ethnic groups (^{Jiménez, 1996}). Nevertheless, this kind of specialization was challenged by the high rates of poverty in the region, derived from the State reduction and the implementation of the neoliberal model. Supported by international cooperation, several rural programs were installed for women that wanted to improve their economic conditions by means of the organization and farmer training: for Mapuche and non-Mapuche⁸.

Most of these transferred productive knowledge in textile weaving, horticulture, apiculture, small cattle management, as well as family health, nutrition, organizational support, personal development and entrepreneurship with the implementation of the approach Women in Development - WID), in a kind of compensation for "the gender bias in the traditional programs of development" (^{Carrasco, 2003}: 9).

This is a common case in Chol Chol Foundation, NGO that until 2003 joined approximately two thousand women in the region⁹. In this practice, as in other similar ones, most of the efforts of the NGOs groups revolved around the high rates of regional poverty, and the limited use of the gender approach made promoting women to focus more on the development of revenue-generating productive actions for their families' survival than on promoting their rights as women.

According to the approach developed by Caroline Moser (cited in ^{Murguialday, 2005}), during that decade, women of Araucania were more focused on solving practical needs of gender than on solving the strategic ones, which turned out in the reproduction and strengthening of family and production activities that are often an extension of a gender division of work; seldom questionable among rural units.

Nevertheless, the creation of spaces where rural sectors, mainly Mapuche, could gather without the presence of men, as well as the trainings in organizational topics implemented by the NGOs, collaborated so that once the democracy was restored in 1989, some of them could gain power as women leaders of their communities, creating her own NGOs or bonding with the State; mainly through The Indigenous Law, promoted by The National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI).

Ana Tragolf is one of these women. She describes the beginnings of the Corporation of Mapuche Women Aukinko Zomo in the 1990s: "When I left, one of the first people who had founded the organization was María Isabel¹⁰ [...] she and other women left the organization and nowadays they are carrying out multiple activities in the community, connected with [indigenous] communities and their organizations of women too" (Tragolaf, 2009).

Something similar happened with the members of the Center for Women's Development, urban women that got together in 1994, publicly declared feminists, pioneers of this kind of actions in the region, which subsequently makes them reflect on this disjunctive concept of women's reality in the region, as stated by its founder Fresia Cea:¹¹ "After this public activity [referring to the Press Conference in 1994], we devoted ourselves to clear up a little bit more what feminism was and why it was a novelty. Some women had heard the term, but they did not know exactly what it was about. Or some others, I would say, had an affective relationship with the concept, but they did not know anything beyond that (Cea, 2010).

Therefore, with more information about the international platform of women's rights and the signed agreements for this matter, the State and some NGO's adopted the gender approach in their development proposals; although initially it was more an imposition for the financing entities than a self-motivated idea among development stakeholders.

An organization that exceeds this initial productivity definition is the one of rural and indigenous women, Hueichafe Domo, which comes out in 2004 from the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI). "Hueichafe Domo means entrepreneur women, expectant, persistent, always alert to any situation. In this sociopolitical organization, we have the ability to face all these problems that deteriorate the rural world, we offer the training for strengthening personal and organizational development of women in rural areas" (^{Catalán, 2009}).

These women formally organized in 2004. Nevertheless, they have worked together since the Land Reform. As Eliana points out "a lot of them are there before 2004, even before 1973. When in that time the Land Reform Centers, rural establishments, Mother Centers and Rural Cooperatives" (^{Catalán, 2009}). Some of them joined ANAMURI¹² since the late 1990s and have the important responsibility of building in the system, the acknowledgement for indigenous women (^{Painemal, 2008}). Hueichafe Domo is an organization integrated by Mapuche women and aims for: "[the] individual strengthening, the personal development providing all the elements so, as women, can protect themselves, how to face society and their social contexts" (^{Catalán, 2009}).

For that reason, the members are constantly trained throughout productivity, environmental and marketing courses financed with competitive funds of national and international organizations.

In 2009 the food security program called Land Desertification Recovery,¹³ supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stated: "we competed for the fund as Hueichafe Domo, of course, and we won. We applied for it again because we wanted to include fifteen communities" (^{Catalán, 2009}), aiming for teach more members basic concepts of climate change, desertification and the effects on women's diet and their families'.

Conclusion²²

The region of Araucania in Chile is a complex territory of social, economic and cultural relations determined by the presence of the Mapuche people that influence women movement's manifestations in the region. The relations based on domination, subordination and resistance between cultures shape a colonized territory, where cultural ascriptions for women are patriarchal, traditionalist, sexist and influenced by religion, which limits them to the sphere of household and reproduction.

The historical resistance of Mapuche community toward the dominant culture abuse has given the allowance, many times at a discourse level, more than the material one, of essentialist cultural forms both in the family and in the Mapuche community making them the extended, patrilocal core in which women have the responsibility of cultural reproduction and positions them in dominant and respected place in these areas.

Nevertheless, the dominant intercultural relations, the culture dynamism, rural-to-urban migration, family transformations due to neoliberalism and its effects in labor and production sources have transformed such parameters, relocating Mapuche women to Occidentalized patriarchal contexts. This brings positive and negative effects on their opportunity to participate in organizations. In the same way, the region impoverishment in Mapuche communities mainly, implies the permanent regeneration of survival strategies of rural population.

This is why it is not surprising that an important part of the studied organizations have been the result of the intervention of external agents, either the government or private NGOs, more than being a result of the desire and motivation of the women themselves. The effects of the country's recent history are also reflected on the women organizations of the region since most of them appeared after the restoration of democracy in the nineties, as part of the process of reorganization of the social structure of the territory, starting as non-state organizations and later, as part of the government. All of this as a way of social structure reorganization divided by the dictatorship's political repression.

In this process, the women of Araucania experience the weight of gender dominant relations of patriarchy, while men often reject to participate in different nurturing and household activities, thus limiting their chance of participation in organizations. On a counterpart, their participation in feminine activities is a kind of resistance to the reorganization imposed by the socio-economic, neoliberalist and patriarchal system, adopting productive objectives that eventually help to overcome economic issues. Something necessary and imposed to meet with others in order to solve practical needs.

The support networks among women organizations take different shapes, as the ones between productive and autonomous organizations which collaborate in the structuring of learning and empowering processes required for the adoption of strategic requests.

The cultural differences among women of the region are also explicit in the relations between Mapuche and non-Mapuche women. This women intercultural form that sometimes do not consider their roots in their participation in productive organizations is expressed in other way when participating in organizations that aim for cultural objectives, while Mapuche women use the cultural and legal tools from their culture and the State to organize around socio-political objectives demanded by their people.

The evidence obtained show that both the government and NGOs promote women organization with a paternalistic tone, using collectivity as a way of solution practical issues generated from the neoliberal economic model; objectives of strategic nature that could transform the established social order are not promoted, and a real women participation in State's institutionalism or in non-state organizations.

Situations like these make the development in the region of Araucania more complex. The government through its public policies and development programs imposes a technical and political way of thinking that occasionally upholds a continuous usurpation against Mapuche people, generating contradictory judgments often incomprehensible for planners and executors of such policies.

The same criticism applies for the gender approach, since as it is more general, it does not allow to recognize the differences that might exist in the relations with Mapuche men and women. This, from our point of view, transgresses the cultural respect. It is a criticism that Mapuche women themselves make to the government's programs which imposes Occidental categories of equality between men and women, assuming that these can operate likewise in Mapuche culture.

This research allows documenting that in both government and NGOs, there is little support for social and political necessities to transform the social order expressed by women which might enable them to gain access to social, economic and cultural rights that may become a real change for them. Changes in land co-ownership for rural Mapuche women; or the creation of transformational processes based on the effective exercise of their rights: violence-free relationships; full enjoyment of sexual and reproductive rights and in this way, the existing patriarchal society in the region could be gradually and effectively transformed. Finally, we state that eventually the women of the region, by means of their experiences and organizational practices, are becoming aware of themselves and for themselves, placing their strategic demands and human rights in the heart of public debate.