Mapuche

The Mapuche are the largest indigenous people of present-day Chile and adjacent Argentina, with a well-documented history of sustained and largely successful military resistance to Spanish colonial expansion south of the Bio-Bio River for roughly three centuries, formalized in a series of parlamento treaty agreements recognizing Mapuche territorial autonomy until the Chilean and Argentine states' later nineteenth-century military campaigns ('Pacification of Araucania' and the Argentine 'Conquest of the Desert') incorporated Mapuche territory by force. Mapuche social organization is traditionally based on extended kin groups (lof) without a historical centralized state structure, and contemporary Mapuche political movements, including ongoing and well-documented land-restitution conflicts in southern Chile, remain an active subject of national policy and periodic civil conflict in both countries today.