In 1881, the fledgling nations of Chile and Argentina signed a treaty in which they settled the long-disputed question of who owned what parts of Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago at the southernmost tip of Patagonia. Made up of towering mountains and seemingly endless plains, it is as breathtaking as it is barren — so barren that for a long time the Spanish settlers of South America showed no interest in the region. As a result, its native inhabitants, the nomadic Selk’nam, narrowly escaped colonization while other Indigenous peoples on the continent were subjugated.
This changed when, following the introduction of the treaty, Chile and Argentina encouraged the settlement of Tierra del Fuego to prevent the other from encroaching on their territory and to capitalize on recently discovered gold deposits. In addition to gold, the abundance of grasslands attracted sheep farmers, who in Chile were granted more than half of the region’s 6.9 million acres. Their arrival quickly led to conflict with the Selk’nam, whose trespassing and occasional killing of livestock sparked calls for their assimilation, removal or — as one local newspaper advocated in 1894 — even extermination.
When the Chilean government failed to respond, wealthy farmers like Jose Menendez hired gunslingers to protect their flocks and hunt down the Selk’nam, bringing their bows, arrowheads and body parts back as proof of their kill count. Chilean director Felipe Galvez Haberle’s 2023 film “The Settlers” (“Los Colonos”) follows three such gunslingers: Alexander MacLennan, a Scottish private who claims, it turns out falsely, to have been a high-ranking officer in the British army; Bill, a foul-mouthed Texas Ranger who loves brutalizing Indians so much he’s traveled to the edge of the world for an opportunity to do so; and Segundo, a half-Selk’nam worker plucked from Menendez’s farm — against his will, as well as Bill’s — because of his superior marksmanship.
Menendez isn’t the only historical character to appear in the film, which is now available on Mubi. MacLennan also existed in real life. As in the film, he was known among Indian hunters as “El Chancho Colorado” (the red pig), likely because of his red army jacket. His legacy is preserved in the names of several roads and rivers. The character of Marcial Vicuna is based on a historical figure as well: a lawyer who traveled to Tierra del Fuego on behalf of then-President Pedro Montt to document the crimes MacLennan and his associates committed there.
Although visually reminiscent of the work of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood in its sweeping depictions of desolate landscapes and its relationship with the violent, often stoic and silent gunslingers that inhabit them, “The Settlers” is anything but a typical Western. Utterly devoid of heroism or romance, Galvez’s postcolonial take on the genre — one that not only deconstructs the morality of the gunslingers but also the historical setting in which they operated — unearths a chapter of Chilean history that the country’s political establishment has tried desperately to erase but which has remained, despite their efforts, a key part of the national conversation to this day. Just as the film shines a light on the injustices Chilean natives suffered at the hands of colonizers, so too has a new generation of politicians and social movements under the leadership of current President Gabriel Boric sought to enshrine Indigenous rights in a new constitution, alongside other measures related to social justice and environmental protection.
The reception of “The Settlers” has been enthusiastic both in Galvez’s home country and internationally. The Chilean magazine Culturiz Arte called the film a “sensory, almost primitive experience, which takes a living landscape of delirious beauty [and] puts it at the center of the narrative.” It won the award for best film at the Stockholm International Film Festival and took home the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at Cannes, becoming the first Chilean production to do so. Praising its subtle but by no means reserved treatment of historical events (the Spanish newspaper El Pais called it “a treatise on colonialism that does not rely on rhetorical excess or pretense”), several Latin American critics have compared it to Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which also revolves around the unpunished murders of Indigenous people, albeit on a much smaller scale. Scorsese came under fire for focusing on the perpetrators at the expense of their victims. But what was criticized in that case has been widely celebrated here. Instead of attempting to speak on behalf of a community to which he does not belong, Galvez chose to make a film that is primarily about the crimes of the settlers as opposed to the suffering of the settled.
Viewers acquainted with Latin American cinema will notice that “The Settlers” has a lot in common with Patricio Guzman’s award-winning 2015 documentary “The Pearl Button” (“El Boton de Nacar”), which juxtaposes the extermination of Indigenous peoples with the reign of terror under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 until 1990. Most striking is the filmmakers’ shared focus on geography: Both “The Pearl Button and “The Settlers” explore how the vast, isolated and largely empty Patagonian landscape served to hide the horrors of both colonial and postcolonial violence from “civilized” urban centers. This is especially true for “The Settlers,” where the only on-screen confrontation between Menendez’s mercenaries and the Selk’nam is obscured by a cloud of impenetrable morning mist.
Menendez, MacLennan and Bill, who claim their mission is to “clean” the land, adhere to the same line of thinking that the colonial settlers of Patagonia expressed in their private writings — texts that have only recently become easily accessible to scholars and, by extension, Galvez: that the Selk’nam, being the last Chilean Indigenous group to make contact with Europeans, were “impossible to civilize,” leaving the Europeans no other option but to eradicate them. For example, a government-appointed Argentine explorer named Ramon Lista wrote that the “insular savages” were “condemned to isolation, with no other perspective than the narrow horizon of their native soil, with no more aspirations than to find the food that enslaves, without more society than the family, with no more hope than death,” and had clearly regressed “to the first stage of their intellectual evolution.”
“The Settlers” underscores the blatant hypocrisy behind such statements. Questioning a recurring theme in Westerns — that the inhospitable environment of the frontier returns civilized individuals to a state of nature that matches their conception of the “savage” natives — the film goes out of its way to underscore that its European characters were robbed of their humanity and basic decency long before they ever set foot in Patagonia. This is certainly the case for MacLennan, whose violent demeanor stems from his experiences in the British army, and also for Col. Martin, another British expat in self-imposed exile who shoots Bill and rapes MacLennan when the party enters his camp. What little we learn of their backstories reveals that these aren’t otherwise good people corrupted by the temptations of a lawless terrain, as many colonial stories (think Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”) tend to depict them. On the contrary, these are people who were corrupted long before the story begins and came to the frontier in search of a place where they could act on their darkest desires without fear of legal repercussions.
The second half of the film extends this critique beyond the individuals who pulled the trigger. Vicuna arrives at the mansion of Menendez, informing his host that he was sent south by the newly formed government of Pedro Montt in faraway Santiago to investigate the “terrible crimes” Menendez instigated.
“What crimes?” Menendez asks. He denies accusations in the local newspapers that MacLennan — in a scene deliberately not shown to the viewer — poisoned a whale carcass that took the lives of the more than 100 Indigenous people who fed on it, and that he paid McLennan’s men money for severed Selk’nam ears and carved-out uteruses. Menendez repeats what he has passed on to his subordinates: that no agreements can be reached with the Selk’nam, who — even though Segundo carried out his orders faithfully and without resistance — respect neither words nor laws.
Menendez’s daughter, helping to manage her father’s estate in his old age, also rushes to the family’s defense, telling Vicuna that he couldn’t possibly “know all we have done for the Indians … all the food we gave them. Nor all the orphans taken into decent homes.” Many of these homes were run by Christian missionaries and praised by apologist settlers as an effort to save the Indigenous people from a fate they had inflicted on themselves. In reality, however, these supposedly humanitarian programs represented another form of colonization, separating Selk’nam children from their parents’ culture and turning them into model citizens. In “The Settlers,” Galvez rightly implicates the Catholic Church through the inclusion of a priest who, seated next to Menendez’s daughter, offers a manipulative, and ultimately erroneous analysis of the Selk’nam’s disappearance:
The human being is so complex, and so fragile at the same time. That is also where his value lies: in his ability to choose, to fail, but also to forgive and be forgiven. The Indians could resist the cold, even naked, but our illnesses killed them, even God couldn’t help them.
Before the end credits roll, even Vicuna is turned into a perpetrator. Visiting the Isla Grande de Chiloe, an island at the northern end of the archipelago, the lawyer meets with a retired Segundo to learn more about MacLennan’s actions. Living in a hut on the shores with his wife Rosa, Segundo’s predicament is essentially that of his people as a whole: driven away from their ancestral homeland, holding out at the edge of the Earth. Rosa, an Indigenous woman Segundo met in Martin’s camp, where she worked as a cook and translator, instantly mistrusts Vicuna, who — dressed in black and towering atop his horse — thanks her for inviting him into her home despite giving her no other choice but to do so.
Inside, as Segundo recounts MacLennan’s poisoning of the animal carcass, Rosa asks the lawyer why he is gathering all this information. Vicuna’s answer, “justice,” fails to put her at ease. The subtext of her silence is obvious: Not only is the lawyer unable to undo the damage MacLennan has wrought but she suspects him of having a hidden agenda. Her suspicions are confirmed when, following the interview, Vicuna dresses her and her husband in neat, Western clothes, and has them pose in front of a camera seated at a table, drinking tea.
In the film’s final dialogue, Vicuna implores an uncooperative Rosa to pick up her cup, paralleling the Chilean government’s unwillingness to involve the Selk’nam in their supposedly progressive and inclusive administration. “Do you want to be part of this nation or not?” Vicuna asks before the screen slowly fades to black. In truth, the lawyer and his supposedly progressive colleagues are no different from the Christian missionaries in the previous scene. Vicuna told Menendez that he wants to create a new country, one where settlers and Indians can live together in peace, as equals — but this is plainly untrue. While Vicuna does not resort to the same violent means as MacLennan and his employer, his ends are the same as theirs: to erase a culture he deems backward, an obstacle to political unification and control, and to incorporate them into Chile’s nation-building project — a project that cannot tolerate internal division or difference.
Segunda and Rosa posing in front of Vicuna’s camera also signifies the commodification of the Selk’nam and other Indigenous Chileans, whose ancestral land and culture, much like their North American counterparts, have been transformed from living, breathing entities into taxidermied tourist attractions. “It is problematic and extremely violent,” Galvez said in an interview, “that now if you travel to Chile you can see that the image and iconography of the Selk’nam community has been transformed into souvenirs: There are T-shirts, stuffed animals, cushions, buttons, chocolates, candies, a whole merchandising around this Indigenous community.”
More than a condemnation of the Montt administration’s hollow commitment to Indigenous rights, the film’s final scene comments on the paradox of the Chilean government using nation-building as a pretext to capitalize on minority groups rather than uplift them.
Paradoxically, Vicuna’s mission of documenting the Selk’nam genocide does not end but rather perpetuates the oppression of Indigenous people in Chile. In an article in the Journal of Genocide Research titled “‘Condemned to Disappear’: Indigenous Genocide in Tierra del Fuego,” the sociologist Carlos Gigoux argues that by proclaiming the Selk’nam completely “extinct,” the Chilean government was able to more easily suppress the political rights of the small but significant number of people who managed to survive the atrocity.
This strategy continued all the way up to 2019, when the Chamber of Deputies of the Chilean Congress first proposed a bill that would officially acknowledge the Selk’nam genocide and recognize the tribe’s 1,444 self-reported living descendants as one of Chile’s federally protected Indigenous peoples, making them eligible for land and legislative representation. The bill was signed into law in September 2023, a historic moment for a community that, for decades, was officially regarded as nonexistent.
To some extent, the nihilistic mood of “The Settlers” reflects the polarization of Chilean politics today, with conservatives and progressives unable to agree on reforms to fix a system both regard as broken. Boric’s liberal constitution, drafted in response to 2019 protests against economic inequalities that have significantly widened in the country since the Pinochet dictatorship, was rejected by the Chilean people in a 2022 referendum. Just over a year later, another draft constitution — a decidedly illiberal one proposed by the right-wing opposition — was also rejected in a public vote. This has resulted in what the Chilean political scientist Diego Sazo describes as “rising pessimism” about the country’s future. Boric’s faction, for its part, has had to sacrifice its progressive goals in pursuit of compromise. “The depth of the changes we imagined went against the grain of what the majority of the people wanted,” he acknowledged in a March 2024 interview. “We changed our priorities and our speed, but not our principles.”
Beyond the realm of Chilean politics, “The Settlers” is an impressive directorial debut for Galvez and a leap forward for the Western as a genre. For decades, filmmakers have taken steps to remove this staple of cinema from its spaghetti-stained origins as a conduit for escapism and revisionism and ground it in psychological and historical reality. If films like “True Grit” and “No Country for Old Men” deconstructed the personality of the heroic frontiersman, “The Settlers,” much like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” recontextualizes the genre in space and time. Going beyond acknowledging the existence of past injustices that both filmmakers and politicians have long ignored, Galvez turns them into the film’s central theme, and his film is all the more effective for it.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.