Policing the Border: Rural Workers, the Border, and Police Forces in Northern Patagonia, 1910–30

In 1911 and 1918, the Argentine government created a Border Police (Policía Fronteriza) that would focus its surveillance in Northern Patagonian Andes. This force was meant to patrol the rural areas near the border with Chile, but not the passes themselves. In practice, the Border Police received complaints landowners, laborers, and even local police officers about mischiefs, cattle-raiding, land-seizing, and inebriation. This paper will examine the intersection of police work and rural labor in Northern Patagonia between 1910 and 1930 as a window into larger questions of state formation in border regions of Latin America. In a region where Argentines coexisted with a myriad of other nationalities (Chileans, Spanish, Germans…), the volatile idea of the nation was often embodied in the figure of the police officer. How did the image of uniformed order reconcile with the reality of a border region? Drawing on police reports and news clippings, this paper will shed light on how the Border Patrol shaped local understandings of statecraft and authority.