SANTIAGO – Two trucks packed with lumber were intercepted and set on fire early Tuesday in the southern Chilean region of Araucania by Mapuche Indians fighting to reclaim ancestral lands.

Police said the attacks took place in Malleco province on the road linking Angol and Collipulli, about 600 kilometers (360 miles) south of Santiago.

About a dozen hooded assailants in military garb fired shots to force the driver of the first truck to pull over and get of the vehicle, which they then doused with gasoline and set on fire.

The second truck was destroyed by a Molotov cocktail at a spot about 400 meters (yards) down the road from the first.

A radical Mapuche organization calling itself the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco issued a statement claiming responsibility for the latest attacks and declaring “war against the Republic of Chile.”

The CAM also demanded that Chile cede all the territory south of the Bio Bio River to make room for an “autonomous Mapuche nation.”

The attacks, which began at 1:10 a.m., came hours after five Mapuches were formally indicted under a Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law for similar assaults carried out Oct. 11 near the city of Victoria.

Police reached the scene of Tuesday’s violence within minutes, according to an area radio station that reported the Mapuches fired shots at a patrol car, while authorities said the attackers melted into the surrounding forest.

Chile’s interior minister, Edmundo Perez Yoma, said in Santiago that any Mapuche communities found to have sheltered “criminals” would not be eligible to receive land under a government program aimed at redressing the Indians’ grievances.

The anti-terrorism legislation was drafted during the late Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship triples prison sentences for crimes such as arson or land seizures.

In August, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged Chile not to use the law in cracking down on violent protests linked to the Mapuches’ land claims.

The law has been applied in the cases of 34 people who are being prosecuted or have been sentenced for crimes related to the Mapuche struggle, according to a report prepared by the Ethical Commission Against Torture, a coalition of more than a dozen Chilean human-rights groups formed during the dictatorship.

The 650,000-strong Mapuche nation, Chile’s largest indigenous group, is demanding constitutional recognition of its identity, rights and culture, as well as ownership of the tribe’ traditional territory.

The Mapuches’ struggle to reclaim ancestral lands from farmers and timber companies led in August to the death of an Indian activist, shot in the back by a police officer. EFE