Facundo Jones Huala, in a file photo.
Argentine Mapuche leader Facundo Jones Huala, a fugitive from Chilean justice since February 2022, was arrested this Monday in southern Argentina. In 2018, Jones Huala was sentenced to nine years in prison for burning down a home in Chilean Patagonia and carrying firearms, but after being paroled a year ago, he fled and his whereabouts were unknown. In Argentina, he is known for leading the Mapuche occupation of 500 hectares of the more than 900,000 hectares owned by Benetton in Argentine Patagonia.
Jones Huala, 35, was arrested by police at dawn in the shed of a house in El Bolsón, in Argentina’s Río Negro province. Agents got to the house following a call from a neighbor and found the Mapuche leader alone and drunk, according to provincial authorities. Jones Huala offered no resistance and was taken to a police station.
The Argentine government is awaiting an extradition request from Chile. If he does not arrive within 24 hours, Jones Huala will be released because the common crimes he is charged with in Argentina do not require preventive detention, Río Negro Security Minister Betiana Minor has warned.
From the Chilean Interior Ministry they confirmed the will of Gabriel Boric’s government that “he will be extradited to serve the appropriate sentence”. The announcement came on the same day the Senate approved a renewed extension of the state of emergency in the southern macrozone, the epicenter of Chile’s Mapuche conflict.
Lonco Jones Huala is accused of leading the extremist group Resistencia Ancestral Mapuche, which has been blamed for attacks on properties on both sides of the border. He was first arrested in Argentina in 2017 and extradited to Chile a year later, where he was sentenced to nine years in prison. The court found him guilty, along with three other men, of burning down the home of the caretakers of a farm in the Chilean city of Río Bueno in 2013 in order to leave the house and then spray-spraying the place with the intention of setting fire to the property with accelerant and set it on fire, resulting in the house being completely destroyed.”
He was released on January 21, 2022 after appealing to the Temuco Court of Appeals in southern Chile. However, the following month the Supreme Court revoked the conditional release he had been granted and ordered his return to prison. The Chilean judiciary could not find him and declared him a fugitive.
Jones Huala has an Interpol “blue alert” in place, aimed at obtaining more information about an individual’s identity, their whereabouts or their criminal activities in connection with a criminal investigation, the Río Negro government reported.
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