The abbreviated agreement and the sentence
Facundo Jones Huala reached an agreement with the federal Prosecutor's Office and, through an abbreviated trial, admitted having been part of the Resistencia Ancestral Mapuche (RAM). The federal judge of Bariloche, Leandro Gómez Constenla, approved that agreement and imposed a sentence of five years and two months of effective prison. The legal classification corresponds to article 213 bis of the Penal Code, which punishes with three to eight years in prison those who organize or join groups aimed at imposing their ideas or confronting those of others through force or intimidation.[S1][S2]
According to what was established, the Mapuche leader will initially remain detained until 2030. However, the effective time he still has to serve will be calculated taking into account the period he has already spent in preventive detention, which began on June 6, 2025, when he was arrested in El Bolsón after participating in the public presentation of a book in Bariloche. From that moment, he remained deprived of his liberty at the disposal of the federal Justice.[S1][S2]
A case that began with more serious charges
The file that investigated Jones Huala's link to the RAM had started with a broader accusation than the one finally agreed. Among the legal figures analyzed during the investigation were public intimidation, incitement to collective violence, illicit association and apology of crime, charges that were left out of the agreement approved by the judge. The possibility of applying article 210 bis of the Penal Code was also evaluated, which sanctions organizations dedicated to attacking the constitutional order and provides for more severe penalties than those finally imposed. That classification, however, was not part of the final agreement either.[S1][S2]
The central hypothesis of the investigation — declared of complex instruction, which led to successive extensions of preventive detention — held that Jones Huala had exercised a leadership role within the RAM for several years.[S1][S2]
Negotiations between the Prosecutor's Office and the defense
One of the axes of the negotiation between the parties was precisely the legal classification of the facts. While the Prosecutor's Office had initially promoted a more serious accusation, the defense of the Mapuche leader opposed that position and directed its efforts so that the resolution would be limited to his participation within the organization. During the process, a previous conviction that Jones Huala had received in Chile was also taken into account. Finally, the file was closed through the abbreviated trial mechanism, with the approval of the agreement by judge Gómez Constenla.[S1][S2]
