Francisca Linconao
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18 September 1958
Francisca Linconao | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Member of the Constitutional Convention of Chile | |
| In office July 4, 2021 – July 4, 2022 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Francisca Linconao Huircapán 18 September 1958 |
| Occupation | Machi |
Francisca Linconao Huircapán (born September 18, 1958), also known as Machi Linconao, is a machi (a Mapuche spiritual authority) and human rights activist in Chile. She became the first Indigenous rights defender in Chile to successfully invoke the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention when she sued to stop a company from logging a forest adjacent to her community. In 2021, she was elected as a representative of the Mapuche people to the Chilean Constitutional Convention election.[1][2][3]
Linconao was born in Padre Las Casas, Chile, in 1958.[4][5] She was one of nine children, and her father died when she was a baby.[5] Despite her initial hesitation, wanting to stay in school, at age 12 she became a machi, a Mapuche traditional healer and religious leader.[5] She went on to become both a spiritual leader and a human rights defender for the Mapuche people.[6]
Machi Linconao v. Palermo
In 2008, she submitted a protection action known as an Action of Rights Protection against Sociedad Palermo Ltd., owned by the Taladriz family, to stop the company from illegally felling trees and shrubs of the native forest along the slopes of Cerro Rahue and replacing them with pine trees.[5] The trees and shrubs were located within the Palermo Chico farm, next to her community. The logging was affecting not only the Cerro Rahue ecosystem but also a wetland known as a menoko that Linconao and her people consider sacred.[7][8]
In 2009, the Temuco Court of Appeals ruled in Linconao's favor, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court. It was the first judgement in Chile that took into consideration the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization, making Linconao the first Indigenous rights defender in the country to successfully invoke the convention.[7][9]