Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

The Conquest of the Desert and the Occupation of Araucanía

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

The Conquest of the Desert — Argentina, 1878–1885, with Chile's Occupation of Araucanía, 1861–1883

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Every event below is named, dated, and sourced in line with author/institution and year. Where figures vary between sources, the range or the conflict is given; no figure is silently rounded up. Primary witnesses are labelled as witnesses. Special care governs this file: the campaign's own paperwork sorted human beings into the perpetrators' categories — men of fighting age counted under a label this file renders as "spear Indians," and women, children, and the elderly counted under the label chusma. Those categories, and the arithmetic built on them, are quoted and labelled throughout as the perpetrators' accounting. They are never adopted as this file's own words for the Mapuche, Tehuelche, Ranquel, Puelche, Pehuenche, and other peoples on whom the campaign fell.

1. The land and the peoples — the "desert" that was not one

The name itself is the first perpetrator-side term in this record. The "desert" of the Conquest of the Desert was the Pampa and northern Patagonia: grassland and river country inhabited for centuries by Indigenous peoples who governed it, traded across it and across the Andes, and were recognised — in treaties the Argentine state itself had signed across the preceding decades — as political entities. By the 1870s the peoples of the region included Mapuche communities and confederations (among them those of Calfucurá's successors, Namuncurá, and Sayhueque), Ranquel communities in the central Pampa, Tehuelche (Aonikenk) peoples to the south, Puelche (Gennakenk) communities, and Pehuenche communities in the Andean foothills. Their country was called a desert by the state that intended to take it because, in the governing doctrine of the period, land not held under European-style title and cultivation was treated as empty. President Nicolás Avellaneda's own formulation, quoted in the Argentine scholarly record, made the equation explicit: to suppress the Indigenous peoples and occupy the frontiers was, "in other terms," to populate the desert.

Relations across the frontier had long mixed trade, treaty, negotiation, and violence in both directions — including Indigenous raids (malones) on frontier settlements, with settlers killed and captives and livestock taken, which Argentine governments cited as the campaign's justification. What changed in 1878 was not the existence of conflict but the state's decision, documented in its own law and its commander's own words (§2), to end the Indigenous peoples' existence as peoples on that land altogether — by submission or by destruction — and to distribute the land itself.

2. Intent on the record — the law, and the commander's words

The law. The campaign was authorised and financed by Law 947 of 4 October 1878, passed under President Avellaneda at the urging of his Minister of War, General Julio Argentino Roca. Because the law's wording is often paraphrased, this file prints what verification confirms of the enacted text (Law 947, Article 1, as published): it authorised the Executive to spend up to 1,600,000 pesos fuertes on executing the frontier law of 13 August 1867 — the establishment of the frontier line on the left bank of the Negro and Neuquén rivers — "previo sometimiento por desalojo de los indios bárbaros de la Pampa": prior subjection, by dislodgement, of the people the law calls, in its own words, the "barbarian Indians of the Pampa" (the label is the law's, quoted and labelled as such). Article 2 charged the cost to the proceeds of "the public lands that shall be conquered" within the law's limits — the campaign was, by its own statute, to be paid for out of the land it took. The 1867 law it executed (Law 215) had already provided that if any of the peoples resisted peaceful submission to national authority, a general expedition would be organised "to subdue them and throw them south of the Negro and Neuquén rivers."

A correction this file makes in the open. The phrase "by reason or by force" is frequently attached to Law 947 in secondary summaries. Verification against the enacted text does not place it there. The phrase is Roca's own, from his 1878 message to Congress presenting the campaign plan, and it is printed here under his name, where it belongs:

"Our self-respect as a virile people obliges us to put down as soon as possible, by reason or by force, this handful of savages who destroy our wealth and prevent us from definitely occupying, in the name of law, progress and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of the Republic." — Julio Argentino Roca, message to Congress, 1878 (quoted as the commander's own words; his label for the peoples is his, not this file's).

Roca's doctrine, as the standard summaries of his position state it, was that the only solutions to what he called the Indian threat were to extinguish, subdue, or expel the Indigenous peoples. The campaign that followed is documented below against that stated doctrine.

3. The campaign, 1878–1885

Adolfo Alsina, Roca's predecessor as Minister of War, had pursued a defensive strategy — a frontier trench (the zanja de Alsina) and negotiated incorporation. Alsina died in December 1877; Roca replaced him and replaced the strategy with offensive conquest.

• 1878 — the preliminary sweeps. From late 1878, Roca's forces conducted continuous attacks on Indigenous settlements between the Alsina trench and the Río Negro to wear down resistance before the main advance. By December 1878 the army's own reporting counted more than 4,000 people captured and about 400 killed in this preliminary phase.
• April–July 1879 — the main advance. Some 6,000 troops, armed with modern breech-loading Remington rifles, advanced in five divisions. Roca's column reached Choele Choel on the Río Negro on 25 May 1879. Resistance facing repeating rifles and artillery collapsed in most sectors; many communities fled south or across the Andes into Chile, surrendered, or were overtaken. It is this phase that Roca's report accounts for in §4.
• 1880–1885 — the Patagonian campaigns. Roca, president from October 1880, ordered the conquest completed south of the Río Negro. Colonel Conrado Villegas's campaigns of 1881–1883 subdued the Neuquén and Limay country; fighting continued into 1884, with the last major engagement in October 1884 and the surrender of the last large independent group — the communities of the chiefs Inacayal and Foyel, more than 3,000 people — in present-day Chubut in December 1884. This file dates the Conquest of the Desert 1878–1885, from the authorising law and first sweeps to the end of organised resistance; narrower datings (1879 alone, or 1878–1884) in the literature refer to the main advance or the last surrenders respectively.

4. The perpetrator's accounting — Roca's report, printed as what it is

The central perpetrator-side document of this record is the campaign accounting published in the Memoria (annual report) of the Department of War and Navy, 1879, under Roca's authority as Minister of War. It is printed here in full, in its own categories, labelled at every line as his accounting:

• 1,313 men counted under the report's category rendered "spear Indians" (indios de lanza — men of fighting age) — killed
• 1,271 men counted under the same category — captured
• 10,539 people counted under the report's category chusma — in the report's usage, women, children, and the elderly — captured (see the textual conflict noted below)
• 1,049 people counted as reducidos — "reduced," i.e., brought under state control in settlements
• Five principal chiefs captured; one, Baigorrita, killed

The total in the report's arithmetic is 14,172 people "suppressed from the pampa" — the report's own conception, in the language of the Argentine record, of people removed from the land by death, capture, or reduction. Two things about this arithmetic are stated in terms:

• It does not count everyone who died. By the terms of the accounting itself, it excludes deaths in flight and pursuit, and deaths by hunger, exposure, and disease among the fleeing and the concentrated — deaths the campaign caused and its own paperwork did not enumerate. The 1,313 is a count of one category of the killed, in one phase, by the killers' own tally; it is not a death toll for the Conquest of the Desert.
• A textual conflict stands in the figure for the captured chusma, and it is printed, not resolved. Roca's statement to Congress, as reproduced in the Argentine reference record, gives 10,539 women and children taken prisoner, and the 14,172 total follows from it. Other reproductions of the 1879 Memoria text — including a municipal legislative record quoting the Department of War and Navy's calculations — give the same line as 10,513, with the component figures then summing to 14,152 when the six chiefs are included. The difference is twenty-six people in a transcription. This file carries the 10,539 / 14,172 form, as the form in which the total is conventionally stated, and prints the variant here so that no reader takes any digit of a perpetrator's tally as beyond question.

5. No single death toll — and why this file constructs none

This record constructs no single death toll for the Conquest of the Desert, and states why in terms: the available figures measure different things, and summing them into a headline would fabricate a number no source holds.

• Roca's accounting (§4) counts, for the 1879 phase: 1,313 killed in one category, and 14,172 people killed, captured, or "reduced" in total — a measure of removal, not of death.
• Modern summaries of the captive total give about 15,000 Indigenous people taken captive across the campaigns, who "became servants or prisoners" (campaign summaries carried in the international reference record; Minority Rights Group, Argentina country profile, which records more than 1,000 Mapuche killed in the campaign and survivors held captive, many forced into servitude).
• Modern Argentine scholarship (§6) documents more than 15,000 people displaced by the campaigns and their aftermath — a measure of displacement, overlapping with but not identical to either the captives or the removed of the official arithmetic.

Deaths in pursuit, deaths by hunger on the flight south and across the Andes, deaths in the concentration places and on the deportation marches and ships, and deaths in servitude were real and are documented as mechanisms (§6); they were not counted by anyone in a form that survives as a total. Figures for total Indigenous deaths that circulate in popular accounts — running to tens of thousands — rest on adding numbers that were never counts of the same thing. They are not carried in this record. What the record carries is each figure as what it is, with its source and its measure named.

6. What was done to the survivors — the modern Argentine scholarship

The reconstruction of the survivors' fate is the work of modern Argentine scholarship — Walter Delrio (Memorias de expropiación, 2005), Claudia Briones, Diana Lenton, and their colleagues, including the collective statement "Discussing Indigenous Genocide in Argentina" (Delrio, Lenton, Musante, Nagy, and others, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2010) — working from military, naval, municipal, and beneficence records. Its documented findings:

• Concentration before distribution. Captives were concentrated at points including Valcheta (Río Negro), Chichinales, Rincón del Medio, and Malargüe (Lenton, in the Argentine scholarly record), and marched or shipped — many on foot, in columns — to Buenos Aires and to Martín García Island in the Río de la Plata, which operated as prison, labour depot, and distribution centre: the place from which people were assigned onward.
• Families were separated as policy's ordinary operation. Men were conscripted into the army and navy or sent as labourers — to the sugar harvests of Tucumán and the vineyards of Mendoza and Cuyo (Enrique Mases's research, in the Argentine record). Women and children were distributed the other way: some 3,000 people were sent to Buenos Aires, where, the Argentine reference record states, they were separated by sex expressly to prevent them having children.
• Children were distributed as servants. Captive children — and women with children — were placed, on written request from households, officials, and institutions, into domestic service in Buenos Aires homes and into estancias. The documentary trail survives in the requests themselves: the army's inspectorate and Martín García's command received and filled orders specifying Indigenous children and women by age and sex (requests reproduced in Delrio, Lenton et al., 2010, including orders placed on behalf of senior officials of the Avellaneda government). Distribution ran in part through the Sociedad de Beneficencia (Society of Beneficence). Mothers' resistance and grief at the takings are in the contemporary record; the takings proceeded regardless. In the terms of the framing file of this record, forcible transfer of children is act (e) of the UN Genocide Convention (1948); the Argentine scholars named above argue the Convention's frame applies to the campaign as a whole — physical elimination, concentration, deportation, enslavement, the identity-cleansing of children, and cultural destruction constituting, in their analysis, a genocidal process bound up with the constitution of the Argentine state (Delrio, Lenton et al., 2010). That characterisation is printed here as the cited scholarship's finding; other historians frame the campaigns primarily as war and state expansion, and the disagreement is part of the Argentine public record to this day.
• The land. The conquered territory — tens of millions of hectares of Pampa and Patagonia — passed under Law 947's financing scheme and subsequent land law to soldiers, officers, campaign financiers, companies, and settlers, in grants that founded the great estancia holdings of the south. The peoples removed from it received, in Argentina, no equivalent of the Chilean reduction titles described in §7; survivors were left at the margins of their own country, or absorbed invisibly as labour.

The modern legal record continues: in August 2022 a complaint asked the Argentine federal courts to open a trial for truth (juicio por la verdad) on the campaign — a proceeding to establish the facts judicially, its filers expressly seeking no punishment of long-dead perpetrators — charging state responsibility for genocide and for its continuing denial (Agencia Presentes, 17 August 2022). No Argentine court judgment establishing the campaign's character is in the record consulted for this file.

7. Paired section — Chile: the Occupation of Araucanía, 1861–1883

At the same decades, on the western side of the Andes, the Chilean state annexed the last large Indigenous-governed territory within its claimed borders: the Mapuche country south of the Biobío River, which Spain had never conquered and which Chile had formally recognised as a separate frontier country in the parliament-treaties of the colonial period. Chile calls the process, in its own official vocabulary, the "Pacification of Araucanía"; the Mapuche name for their country is Wallmapu, its Chilean side Gulumapu. This record titles it by the neutral description the scholarship uses: the Occupation of Araucanía. The carrying scholarship is José Bengoa, Historia del pueblo mapuche (siglo XIX y XX) (1985), supplemented by his Historia de un conflicto (1999) on the land figures.

Course. The plan adopted from 1861 was the army officer Cornelio Saavedra's: not a single invasion but a fort-line advance — a line of forts planted inside Mapuche territory, the frontier moved to it, land behind it declared the state's, and the line then planted again further south. The line reached the Malleco River in the later 1860s; wars followed in 1868–1871; the advance paused while Chile fought the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) against Peru and Bolivia, and the Argentine advance across the Andes (§3) simultaneously drove Mapuche communities westward into Araucanía, closing the old trans-Andean refuge. The final offensive came in 1881–1883, against a general Mapuche rising of November 1881; the army founded Temuco in February 1881 and, on 1 January 1883, refounded Villarrica, the formal end of the occupation. President Domingo Santa María declared to Congress on 1 June 1883, in the state's own words: "Today the whole Araucanía is subjugated, more than to the material forces, to the moral and civilizing force of the republic."

The documented aftermath is territorial and demographic, and it is documented differently from Argentina's — a difference this file states in terms: death figures for the Occupation of Araucanía are NOT documented at the Argentine level. Chile's campaign left no equivalent of Roca's Memoria tally, and no count of Mapuche war dead, or of deaths in the famines and epidemics that followed the destruction of herds and crops, survives as a documentable figure. Figures that circulate for a Mapuche population collapse — one widely repeated claim, attributed to Ward Churchill, of a fall from half a million to 25,000 within a generation — are not supported by Bengoa's record and are not carried in this file. What Bengoa documents is the dispossession, in figures that do survive:

• Of roughly 10 million hectares of Mapuche country, the Chilean state's radicación (settlement) process of 1884–1929 left the Mapuche with about 500,000 hectares — some 5 per cent — granted in roughly 3,000 reduction titles (títulos de merced); Bengoa's figures as reproduced in the Chilean scholarly record are 3,078 titles, 475,423 hectares, for 77,751 people, about six hectares a person, while other Chilean counts of the same process give 2,918 titles and 510,386 hectares for 82,629 people. The variants are printed together; the order of magnitude — a twentieth of the country retained — is not in dispute.
• Behind the line, the state auctioned the taken land and planted Chilean and European settler colonies on it, with state support; the reduced communities, confined on the poorest fraction of their own land, were subjected to continuing usurpation by settler neighbours thereafter (Bengoa, 1985, 1999). Displaced Mapuche crowding at forts for state food rations — nearly 10,000 rations a month around 1900 — are in the Chilean army's own memoirs of the period.

The modern record. On 20 February 2019, Frédéric Luz — Prince Federico I of Araucanía and Patagonia, holder of the exiled royal title originating in the nineteenth-century kingdom recognised by Mapuche leaders — wrote to the International Criminal Court at The Hague accusing the governments of Chile and Argentina of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Mapuche people, past and present. A Mapuche delegation, including Lonko Juana Calfunao and supported by the Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzón, presented the case at The Hague on 11 April 2019; the petition is recorded in written statements to the UN Human Rights Council (A/HRC/40/NGO/100, 2019; A/HRC/43/NGO/196, 2020). The petition is part of the modern record of both campaigns in this file. No ICC investigation or judgment arising from it is in the record consulted, and none is claimed here.

Sources for this file

Law 947 (Argentina, 4 October 1878), Articles 1–2 — enacted text as published (Wikisource transcription of the official text) • Law 215 (Argentina, 13 August 1867) — the submission-and-expulsion provision • Julio Argentino Roca, message to Congress (14 August 1878) — the "by reason or by force" statement, quoted as his own • Memoria del Departamento de Guerra y Marina (1879) — Roca's campaign accounting, §4, with the 10,539 / 10,513 textual variant printed from the Argentine reference and municipal records • Walter Delrio, Memorias de expropiación (2005) • Walter Delrio, Diana Lenton, Marcelo Musante, Mariano Nagy, et al., "Discussing Indigenous Genocide in Argentina," Genocide Studies and Prevention 5(2) (2010) — concentration, deportation, distribution, child transfer • Claudia Briones and colleagues, Argentine anthropological record on the campaigns and state formation • Enrique Mases — deportees as labour in Tucumán and Cuyo • Minority Rights Group, Argentina country profile — captives, servitude, Mapuche killed • Agencia Presentes (17 August 2022) — the 2022 trial-for-truth filing • José Bengoa, Historia del pueblo mapuche (siglo XIX y XX) (1985) and Historia de un conflicto: el Estado y los mapuches en el siglo XX (1999) — Araucanía occupation, radicación and land figures • Chilean scholarly reproductions of the radicación counts (Correa and Mella; Melin, Mansilla and Royo, following Bengoa) — the variant totals printed in §7 • Domingo Santa María, message to Congress (1 June 1883) — quoted as the Chilean state's own words • UN Human Rights Council written statements A/HRC/40/NGO/100 (2019) and A/HRC/43/NGO/196 (2020), and contemporary reporting (Latin America Reports; Mapuche International Link, April 2019) — the ICC petition of 2019.

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