SANTIAGO: The Supreme Court Wednesday ordered a probe into allegations that police wounded three children and a teenager when they evicted native Mapuche protesters from a hospital in southern Chile.
The ruling follows a legal petition from the National Institute of Human Rights in favor of the minors, who were wounded by shotgun pellets when police removed protesters in July from a hospital in the Araucania region, some 700 kilometers south of Santiago.
Chile's national police, the Carabineros, are considered a branch of the armed forces, so the court ordered "the corresponding military judge to carry out an investigation" of the incident.
"The rigor displayed by the police as they faced the group of people ... exceeded the framework of what is acceptable," the ruling said.
The Santiago office of the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, issued a statement at the time condemning the police action. To call attention to the incident, two Mapuche activists peacefully occupied the office for 39 days, ending on September 2.
The Mapuche are Chile's largest indigenous population, making up about six percent of the population, or some 700,000 people. The Chilean state annexed large portions of their southern lands at the end of the 19th century.
Tensions have flared in the southern Araucania region, a stronghold of the Mapuche minority, since the radicalization of the Mapuche movement following the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990.
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