Julio Argentino Roca

General Julio Argentino Roca was twice president of Argentina and commanded the campaign that took Patagonia from its indigenous peoples. He fought in the civil wars and the war against Paraguay before becoming minister of war. The Conquest of the Desert of 1878 to 1885 was his campaign and his political platform: a systematic advance south with repeating rifles and the new telegraph against the Mapuche, Tehuelche and Ranquel peoples, which killed perhaps a thousand directly, drove thousands more into captivity or forced labour on sugar estates and in Buenos Aires households, broke up families deliberately, and opened roughly fifteen thousand square leagues to settlement. Whether it constitutes genocide is actively argued in Argentina, and the campaign is no longer taught the way it was for a century. He rode the result to the presidency in 1880. His two terms built the railways and ports that made Argentina one of the richest countries in the world by 1900, brought mass European immigration, made primary education free, secular and compulsory, and established civil marriage against fierce clerical opposition. The land itself went to a few hundred families. His face was on the hundred-peso note until 2012 and his statue in Bariloche has been repeatedly attacked. He also signed the treaty that fixed the Chilean border along the Andes in 1881, which avoided a war. His nickname was the Fox. Argentina removed his image from the currency and renamed several public spaces in the 2010s, and the debate about the monuments has run alongside a broader reassessment of the campaign itself.

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