Santiago: The body of a Mapuche Indian leader has been found in Chile, floating in the reservoir she spent a decade trying to prevent from being created.
Prosecutors requested an autopsy of 73-year-old Nicolasa Quintreman, who was nearly blind, to rule out foul play. Her body was found yesterday, a day after she went missing.
Quintreman`s protests against the construction of a hydroelectric dam on her tribal land in the southern Biobio region made her the face of Chile`s environmental movement.
With her sister Berta, she led a public fight against the European power company Endesa at a time when Chile`s environmental enforcement was lax and its indigenous protection law wasn`t closely followed.
Hundreds of other families supported them initially, but they gradually gave in to the pressure and traded their land for other properties beyond the flood zone.
Finally, she too gave up, trading her small plot in 2002 for an undisclosed sum and a larger property 15 kilometres away.
"People who said they were my friends abandoned me," she said then. "If they had stayed with me, I could have kept up the fight."
