TEMUCO, Chile – “Our heart is wounded, but we’ll carry on,” teacher Norma Catrilaf said in describing the feelings of the peasants of the Mapuche community invaded last month by heavily armed Chilean police in search of an activist wanted for attacks on vehicles.

Residents of the Juan Catrilaf II community say the score of Carabineros – Chile’s militarized national police – who carried out the Oct. 25 raid “gave beatings and fired indiscriminately.”

Efe verified that among those injured by the rubber bullets shot at them were several women, elderly people and a baby.

One of the most seriously wounded was Juan Dario Catrilaf, 22, who took three shots at point-blank range and remained hospitalized Monday in the Maquehue Hospital near Temuco, capital of the Araucania region – home to most of the 650,000-strong Mapuche nation, Chile’s largest indigenous group.

“After the police left they returned to the sector and that’s when I went to ask for an explanation. As I approached them they shot me twice in the leg,” the wounded man said.

“When I tried to get away, I took a third shot and fell down, and the cowardice of the Carabineros was such that when I couldn’t even move, one of them aimed the shotgun at me from 30 centimeters (1 foot) away and fired,” said Juan Dario, who still has 14 rubber bullets in his right leg.

Juan Catrilaf II was, until the day of the raid, a community that had maintained an ongoing dialogue with Chilean authorities. It had been founded legally as a company to receive close to 500 hectares (more than 1,100 acres) of the 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) that the government of Michelle Bachelet has been distributing among the Mapuche population over the last three years.

The community’s leader, Sergio Catrilaf, was jailed Monday in Temuco, where he is being held without bail under Chile’s Anti-Terrorist Law, a widely criticized measure dating from the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship.

Catrilaf is accused of taking part in the burning of three freight trucks and a bus on July 28 at the highway toll plaza near Temuco.

But besides losing its leader, the community has lost its chance of obtaining the 458 hectares (1,131 acres) of land belonging to big landowner Jorge Luchsinger that the authorities were on the point of buying for the Mapuches.

Interior Minister Edmundo Perez Yoma announced Nov. 2 that the government will not hand over lands to indigenous communities whose members are charged with acts of violence.

The announcement was ratified by the minister of Indian affairs, Edmundo Perez Yoma, who said that though criminal responsibilities are individual, the government will not hand over lands to those who shelter wrongdoing.

“This to Chilean society is the Mapuche conflict, but until the day of the raid, for us it was all about recovering out ancestral lands,” Sergio’s cousin Norma Catrilaf said.

The Mapuches are demanding constitutional recognition of their identity, rights and culture, as well as ownership of the tribe’s traditional territory.

Their struggle to reclaim ancestral lands from farmers and timber companies has led this year to the deaths of two Indian activists in confrontations with the Carabineros.

“We want to progress as Mapuches, but the Chilean government itself is stopping us,” Norma Catrilaf said.

Sergio Catrilaf is admired and respected by the settlers, and was building greenhouses and a pool for irrigating crops with rainwater. He was at the point of obtaining more land to make Juan Catrilaf II more prosperous, but now, the Mapuches say, the dream has vanished. EFE