Proposed LNG terminal sparks Mapuche resistance
Aylén Tapia during the “Whose sea” gathering organized by the Southern Oil Observatory in 2025 in Mar de Plata, Argentina. Photo © La Revuelta Comunicación.
Interview • Natalia Concina • July 10, 2025 • Leer en castellano
A musician and teacher, also a biology student and member of the Indigenous Mapuche Tehuelche-Atlantic Zone Parliament, Aylén Tapia has lived much longer than her 28 years. Despite her young age, her story offers as much insight into over a century of colonization processes as it does upon extractivism’s contemporary advance in Argentina.
The daughter of farmers—her mother is the daughter of a Mapuche man and an Irish-Mapuche woman, and her father is of African descent—Tapia was born and raised in the lof (community) of Las Margaritas, located about 60 kilometers upriver from a town called General Conesa, in Río Negro province.
Río Negro is part of Argentina’s Patagonia, a vast region in the south of the country stretching from the Andes to the Atlantic, where numerous Mapuche-Tehuelche communities live.
For four years, Tapia traveled through different communities, learning about the Indigenous Mapuche worldview and sharing her knowledge.
During one of these voyages of reckoning, she arrived at the Mapuche community of Lafken Winkul Mapu, where she was arrested and tortured during a brutal crackdown by security forces on November 23, 2017. The day after her arrest, Rafael Nahuel, a young Mapuche man, was assassinated. Although Tapia was released a few hours after her arrest, the legal process against her continued. Fabricated charges were pressed against her; she was accused of terrorism.
“Sometimes I feel that my youth was stolen from me. I was in very bad shape, but I was able to move forward thanks to my parents' love,” assures Tapia, who was just 21 when she was arrested. “Today I understand that they couldn’t take away my will to live, and that is an act of resistance.”
Tapia currently lives in a coastal town on the San Matías Gulf, where she is resisting the construction of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal. The Gulf is a unique ecosystem due to its clear, warm, shallow waters with barely a wave. Southern right whales choose this place to give birth and raise their calves during their first months of life.
“In the Mapuche worldview, whales can carry souls to and from the Wenu Mapu [sky],” she said. “That is why our ancestors came from all over the territory to what is today known as the San Matías Gulf to bury their dead at sunrise.”
But she does not defend the Gulf simply because it is her people's sacred burial ground. She does so because she knows from her own body’s experience how extractive projects reconfigure territory, their devastating environmental impacts, their destruction of regional economies, and the communities they displace.
The LNG terminal—which would change the entire ecosystem of the Gulf—aims to export gas and oil produced at Vaca Muerta, a huge shale oil and gas field that spans several provinces, including Neuquén, Río Negro, La Pampa, and Mendoza. Exploration began in 2010 during the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner under the banner of energy sovereignty.
Small in stature with wavy hair and a broad smile, Tapia speaks at just the right volume, neither shouting nor whispering. Her words have the power to captivate those who hear her speak.
Ready to recount the story of her life—and with it, that of her land—we spoke with Tapia via video call, continuing a conversation we had begun months earlier at a gathering of coastal communities in the Buenos Aires town of Mar del Plata. Our interview was edited for clarity and length and translated into English by Ojalá.
Natalia Concina: Can you tell us about your childhood in the Las Margaritas community and its history?
Aylén Tapia: My great-great-grandmother lived in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. During the so-called Desert Conquest [state-led genocide against Indigenous peoples in the south in the late 19th century], she was stolen by a colonel who brought her to this territory.
He was an alcoholic and violent man; he got her pregnant several times, until he finally left. She stayed with her children and lived out her last days in Leufuche [river people] territory. She raised my grandfather, and I was raised by him. That's why I always had contact with the Mapuche worldview, and with many practices that I later learned were part of our culture, like how to tame horses.
I spent my childhood between the countryside and General Conesa, the nearby town. I remember how in 2001, when Argentina was going through a major economic crisis, there was no hunger there, because the town produced fruits and vegetables, as well as raising livestock. And so there was a lot of food bartering. There was a sense of autonomy that was later lost with the collapsing of regional economies for the imposition of the extractivist model.
NC: Tell us how Vaca Muerta impacts your community?
AT: When I was 13, they started to tell us about fracking and its consequences. It was difficult to organize because people find it harder to fight against certain [progressive] governments [progressives, like that of the then-President Cristina Fernández]. When I was a teenager, farmers would come and tell us to go and pick the fruit because it was cheaper to let it rot than to harvest it.
Eventually, tremors started to increase, and the land and water became contaminated by fracking. Plus, government policies were making it impossible for small producers to survive. For example, in order for a horse to be allowed to travel on a road, it has to be fitted with a chip, which is unthinkable for us, not being able to move around with our own animals. So the farmers sold their land, and only a few old-timers remained, producing only enough to survive, now that they couldn’t contribute to the regional economy as they used to.
NC: Did your family sell? What happened during your adolescence?
AT: No, my family is still on the land. In fact, I still go back there. As a teenager, I went to Patagones [a town in the south of the Province of Buenos Aires] to study music. I met a lot of young people who practiced our [Mapuche] culture and had been dispossessed of everything, and I realized how rich I was because I grew up on the land.
That’s where we began to organize the Mapuche Parliament, to organize ourselves politically, and I also started traveling and getting to know other communities. That's how I arrived in 2017 at the Lafken Winkul Mapu lof, a Mapuche community that was reclaiming its territory in Villa Mascardi, located atop the the mountains of [Río Negro’s] Nahuel Huapi National Park.
NC: How did you arrive at the Lafken Winkul Mapu lof, and what happened there?
AT: When you arrive at a lof, you make yourself available for whatever is needed. People imagine that you are “in struggle,” but what you are actually doing is living. Over the weeks I was in Lafken Winkul Mapu before the repression took place I worked with the children, and I helped the machi [community healer of body and spirit], Betiana Colhuan Nahuel, collecting medicinal plants.
On November 23 [2017], the Naval Prefecture [a national security force] entered the community. It was still night, and they started shooting. We started running, I was carrying a little girl in my arms. I saw how they tortured the machi Betiana, who was only 16 years old. After torturing us, they took us into custody.
Rafael Nahuel wasn't there that night. When they released us the next day, he apologized for not being there to help us and told us he was going up to bring food and warm clothes to people in the community who had been cut off higher on the mountain.
That's when they killed him. Rafa was 21 then, like me. Lautaro, the comrade who was initially accused of killing him because he was the one who found Rafa's body and brought it down, was 19. We were all very young, and in a terrible state.
Even though I had been released, I couldn't leave the area. They didn’t let me return to Conesa until December. It was very hard because I came back labeled as a terrorist. I couldn't find work as a teacher, I lost a lot of weight, and my hair thinned and fell out. The house where I lived was burned down.
NC: And that's when you moved to the coast, where you live now?
AT: Some time later. With the pandemic, I started teaching online, and then I started studying biology. When the pandemic ended, I moved to San Antonio. A few months later, in 2022 [under President Alberto Fernández], Law 3308 was amended, removing environmental protection from the Gulf of San Matías. [The law prohibited hydrocarbon activity in the Gulf, which meant its marine ecosystem was protected, as were local tourist and fishing economies.]
NC: And that's when a new struggle began?
AT: Yes (laughs).
In reality, though, it's part of the same struggle, because for us, the land is united from the mountain to the sea. The law was amended to promote the creation of an LNG terminal in the Gulf, which they say will be the largest in South America, and it requires construction of a pipeline that would cross the entire province, transporting crude oil and natural gas from its source [in the mountains] to the coast. This means maxing out production in Vaca Muerta, and we know how much destruction that entails.
That's why we're not just defending the coast, but the entire territory.
