ABSTRACT
Remember the life and trials of Atacama’s 33 miners, who were trapped 700 m underground for over two months during 2010? The live-coverage rescue effort showcased some of the techniques combined to transform the Atacameño pueblo and miners into individualized icons. More is now known regarding the measures taken by the private production company that was hired by the Sebastián Piñera government in order to prevent and avoid communication glitches and filter any inappropriate message or image that might come out of the pit to embarrass the government and the country. So, unlike all the other messages that trickled out of the deathly pit, the one saying ‘Fuerza al pueblo Mapuche’—a cheer of support for the plight of the Mapuche people in southern Chile—was not conveyed by the media, the government’s production team going so far as to altogether suppress the message. In doing so, however, it caused unease amongst the miners’ families, whose message was stifled. For, throughout the global media-frenzied ordeal of the miners’ accidental captivity (for over 80 days in total), a group of 34 Mapuche political prisoners was simultaneously on a hunger strike for ancestral land rights and to protest against the application of Pinochet’s long-surviving antiterrorist law (for which the Chilean state has been recently condemned by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights). In contrast with the coverage of the miners’ every movement in the north, the Mapuche prisoners in the south received no attention from the mainstream media. The silencing or strategic media ‘undercommunication’ of the life and trials of the Mapuche in the south of Chile, and the Atacama Desert oasis and mining cultures, portrays Indians as if they were non-existent, dead and inert, ghosts with an abstract and waterless cultural history (Goffman 1959; Collier et al. 1995).
