Regulating Violence and Rewriting History: Argentina’s Napalpí Reservation and the 1924 Massacre

In 1911, the Argentine military completed its fourth and final conquest campaign in the northern territories of Chaco and Formosa, home to at least 30,000 indigenous Toba, Mocoví, Pilagá, and Wichí. Faced with starvation, many indigenous people sought work on cotton and sugar plantations or surrendered to the military. Argentine authorities devised plans to indoctrinate indigenous laborers with new concepts of civilization, work, and jurisdiction. This paper identifies the model reservation at Napalpí as a crucial institution in the state’s efforts to claim a “monopoly of violence” in its northern territories. Reservation administrators relied on force to regulate indigenous inhabitants’ daily work patterns and restrict their movement. Some indigenous people responded by demanding alternative labor arrangements, raiding nearby settlements, or leaving the reservation temporarily. In 1924, a millenarian movement at Napalpí attracted hundreds of followers; they refused to work, and some apparently believed that bullets would not harm them. Their prophecies proved tragically wrong. On July 19, 1924, policemen and armed civilians massacred approximately 200 indigenous men, women, and children. Even as this extra-judicial killing spree bolstered the state’s authority, officials used their power to rewrite history, arguing that a handful of Tobas had been killed in an inter-tribal conflict. At Napalpí, struggles over the control of violence mapped onto struggles over competing versions of history, as uneven power relationships shaped individuals’ understanding of what mattered about the past and what might be possible in the future. In the years that followed, state officials referred in coded language to their desire to avoid another violent confrontation in Napalpí, and evoked the memory of past violence to subdue indigenous resistance. Official rhetoric of benevolent assimilation failed to disguise the fact that peace on the ground was maintained only through the state’s command of superior force.