Conquest of the Desert
Argentina conquered Patagonia and the southern pampas between 1878 and 1885 and destroyed the Indigenous societies that held them. The frontier had been static for a long time. Mapuche, Tehuelche and Ranquel peoples controlled the land south and west of a line of forts, raided cattle from the estancias, and traded the herds across the Andes into Chile; Argentina's earlier policy had been a mixture of treaties, subsidies and a defensive ditch dug across the pampas. Julio Argentino Roca, as war minister and then president, argued that this was expensive and permanent, and that the alternative was a single offensive campaign. The instruments were the repeating rifle, the telegraph, and the railway, which allowed columns to be supplied deep into the interior. The campaign of 1879 pushed to the Río Negro with about 6,000 troops. Perhaps 1,300 Indigenous people were killed in the fighting and some 15,000 taken prisoner; the survivors were marched north, families were separated, children were distributed as domestic servants in Buenos Aires households, men were sent to the sugar estates of Tucumán or to the navy, and hundreds were held on an island in the Paraná. Around 15,000 leagues of land passed into the hands of a few hundred families and companies, which is the origin of the Argentine land structure. The campaign is on the hundred-peso note, and the argument about whether to call it a genocide has been running in Argentina since the 1990s. Mapuche land claims are a live political issue.
- Year: 1878 CE
- Category: Military
