During the Chilean autumn of 2002, the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio published a two-page advertisement sponsored by logging companies listing hundreds of “acts of terrorism” allegedly committed by militant organizations of indigenous Mapuches.1 Aside from the transparent attempt to appropriate the discourse of the U.S. government’s “global war on terror,” the advertisement’s alarmist rhetoric invoked the many histories of peasant struggle against forest management and commercial logging around the globe. The accusations that Mapuche groups had set fire to trucks, destroyed fences, sabotaged roads, stolen wood, and, more generally, engaged in a low-intensity war of harassment against the logging companies recalled not so much terrorist cells as they did the activities of the nineteenth-century French peasant desmoiselles of the Ariège who attacked forest guards to protest new state regulations on the extraction of forest products or Himalayan peasants who opposed forest management introduced under the British Raj.2 Today,...
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