The Negro Matapacos and
the Symbols of the Revolt
Mauricio Amar
There are symbols of the revolt that are imposed by power and others that are created by the people. That is an exclusive potency of the revolt, because in normal times, in the one that appears to be linear and homogeneous, neither the people are the people nor are their symbols their own. The revolt makes the people invent symbols that, of course, come from the most subterranean places of memory. Of dark labyrinths whose passages had been blocked for decades or centuries. The creation of these symbols is a fundamental part of a popular revolt, because through them the people exist in the form of the common. They are the codes of a strange telepathy that means that events are not stopped by some power’s announcement, since each message from the government is passed through the sieve of its meanings.
At least two symbols that emerged spontaneously from people are the Negro Matapacos [“Copkiller Black Dog”] and the Mapuche flag. Two symbols that with some differences mean the same thing. On the one hand, the Negro Matapacos as an enraged quiltro [mixed, mongrel, dog without defined breed], a non-submissive dog and, nevertheless, a friend of some humans, of the oppressed ones. The fact that many demonstrators use the bandana printed with the figure of the dog in protests is a clear sign that Negro Matapacos symbolizes the quiltro that we all are, the infinite mixture that makes up our bodies, without any pretense of whitening, or definitely against any type of belonging to a race, a privileged group or an originary way of life. The Negro Matapacos destroys even the search for anthropocentric human superiority and links the people with the animal, unifying soul and body in an absolute way. There are no longer some with a soul and others with a body, but only mestizos [mixed]. A form-of-life that cannot be appropriated by power.
In a beautiful book entitled Dogs [Chiens], the French philosopher Mark Alizart has shown us that the dog, a particularly unfairly reviled figure in modern times, was once the animal that bonded with us lovingly, guarded us from external dangers, and gave us the possibility of having leisure time, essential for the emergence of philosophy and the arts. The dog is submissive most of the time, but he does not hesitate to defend us when we need it, not by a simple order, as the agents of repression do, but with the deep love of a friend. Without a doubt, the Negro Matapacos is the beautiful symbol of love for the revolt, not because it is violence, but because it appeals to the horizon of the future rather than to the recognition of the common mestizaje [mixture] that has us here in the streets thinking of ourselves as part of the common.
The case of the Mapuche flag is not very different. As we have seen, it appears in each protest as a kind of flag of the people, different from that of the State. Obviously in this case there is a matter to resolve with the Mapuche people, because it is a borrowed flag and, at the same time, appropriated. The people recognize themselves in the struggle of the Mapuche people, but they also identify themselves as Mapuche or, at least, the Mapuche function symbolically as the eternally oppressed part of the same people. As it happens with the figure of the Negro Matapacos, the Mapuche flag transports the people to an originary place, the potency of the mixture, which had been whitewashed by years of official history. And now, it comes out just like that, the mestizo body hoisting a flag that in the square no longer means only Mapuche, but all oppressed people. There the Mapuche people are not suppressed as the left in general wanted to do in the past, but rather they appear as a potent singularity as long as everyone knows that this is the Mapuche flag, and also renders as a common potency, since it is the flag of an entire people, to which the heterogeneity that constitutes it has been erased for centuries.
There are also some symbols imposed by power. The most brutal of them is blindness. The eyes of Chileans shot by State violence are the symbol of a government that does not see and does not want others to see. The intervention of the ministries of education trying to reduce the hours of history and philosophy, in addition to the already non-existent civic education, were the first pellets in the eyes, seeking to leave the people one-eyed or blind. And it seemed that they had succeeded. Now we know that the bullet-ridden eyes will be the necessary blindness to not look back. The blindness that sharpens other senses that power does not know how to control. The Negro Matapacos is, at the time of the revolt, the guide dog of the blind.
The symbols of the revolt are strange in normal times. They only make sense when clocks break. However, when historical time resumes its course, the people must preserve the absolute potency that belongs to them. Not to act every moment, but to act when possible. Every time his life is fractured by power, the Negro Matapacos will be able to bite our clothes hard again to remind us of the quiltro that has always made us appear on the scene.
Santiago de Chile, October 2019.
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Translated from Spanish to English by Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, reviewed by Jovana Isevski.
The text in Spanish appeared in October 2019, in a dossier published as an indocile reflexive intervention in the midst of the Chilean revolt of October 2019, a dossier in which Michalis Lianos, Gerardo Muñoz, Matías Bascuñán, Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Federico Galende, Mauricio Amar Díaz and Rudy Pradenas participated: "Los estados generales de emergencia. Dossier en movimiento sobre revueltas y crisis neoliberal", p. 61, Ficción de la Razón, octubre de 2019. Link:
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