Felipe Gálvez's award-winning film Los Colonos delves into Chile’s brutal settler-colonial past, exposing the consequences of cultural extermination and resonating with Latin America's contemporary Indigenous struggles.
A t the southernmost tip of Earth, in the deepest Patagonian wilderness, Scottish lieutenant Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley) and his men navigate the vast unhospitable landscape at the behest of wealthy, Spanish landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). It’s 1893 and the reformist Chilean state is imposing its authority thousands of miles away from the modernized capital, Santiago de Chile. Governmental policy—to roll out agricultural development across the nation and stimulate the development of its furthest territories—has prompted a mass giveaway of land to Europeans willing to emigrate and bring their skills to the country.
Los Colonos, or The Settlers in English, directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle, tells the story of the sociopolitical conflicts that emerged in the Patagonia during the mid-1850s as European settlers began arriving in large numbers. A small crew, led by Lieutenant MacLennan (Stanley) and Texan rancher Bill (Benjamin Westfall) who can “smell a Native a mile away,” has been hired to delineate a route for the livestock on the land gifted to Menéndez by the Chilean government. This seemingly simple task is met with fierce resistance by the land’s original inhabitants, the Selk’nam people. The men soon realize what is truly at stake and what the mission will involve.
MacLennan, an ambitious man hired for his military experience, needs a sharpshooter fast enough to react to the ambushes hampering his work. Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a mestizo local that has been captured and forced to work for the men, has all the skills MacLennan is looking for: an ability to communicate with the Indigenous locals and superb gun capabilities. After a selection process in which Segundo’s outstanding marksman skills outshines the other candidates, MacLennan orders Segundo to join him and ranger Bill on their assignment for Menéndez. They force Segundo into betraying his own people and assist in the repartition of his own ancestral land, a task that leads him to wrestle with his own conscious when forced to carry out the most heinous acts of violence.
read more: https://nacla.org/the-settlers-los-colonos-necessary-anatomy-genocide