Immigration

Santiago –  At least 23 natives were injured and six were arrested during a violent eviction Friday from a state-owned building on Chile's Easter Island.

Edi Tuki, a relative of one of the injured, told Efe that about 45 police entered the Hanga Roa civic center Friday at dawn to evict a group that had occupied the building for three months.

"It's a lie that there are Carabineros (Chile's militarized police) injured, but they injured at least 23 of our brothers and sisters, three of them seriously. One was shot in the eye with a buckshot pellet from just a meter (yard) away. I was there," Tuki told Efe.

He said that they are somewhat afraid because they "were warned that in an hour a Hercules airplane was coming with special forces of the Carabineros."

The island's indigenous people, the Rapa Nui, demand the return of lands they earlier ceded to the government for the construction of public buildings.

"They were asleep when the Carabineros entered and started hitting them and shooting buckshot to get them out," Marisol Hito, spokeswoman for the Hito clan, said on Radio Cooperativa.

The eviction was decreed by prosecutors after violation of the order issued Thursday banning a group of islanders from going near the building.

A Carabineros lieutenant consulted by Efe said that they are "waiting for reports from the island."

Meanwhile, Francisco Marin, the islanders' representative on the Chilean mainland, told Efe that he had received the list of the 23 injured natives.

The political conflict on the Polynesian island, located in the Pacific Ocean more than 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) off the coast of continental Chile, began in the summer when the Chilean government named Pedro Edmunds Paoa as governor of the territory.

Alarm bells were raised on the island after it was learned that the group behind Paoa's appointment intended to acquire for development some of the land the the Rapa Nui had donated for public purposes.

Though Edmunds Paoa resigned on Aug. 10, the dispute continues.

Easter Island is one of Chile's main tourist destinations due to its natural beauty and mysterious ancestral culture, the only vestiges of which are hundreds of monolithic stone statues with oversized human heads, known as moais. EFE