2023-05-31 03:30:00
In the 19th century, warrior tribes maintained a system on an international scale, which consisted of alternating threats of violence and fleeting truces, in order to force the Argentine authorities to negotiate and obtain concessions and benefits..
That in history there can be found as many pretexts to undertake nonsense as answers to unmask them, I verified it by rereading a doctoral research that I began in the ’90s on “Indigenous diplomacy in the Pampas during the 19th century” for the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA.
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During a good part of the 19th century, it existed in the Pampa -in its broadest sense- a consolidated political-economic structure, consisting of small but violent indigenous armies, with extraordinary guerrilla military skills -the “raid”, in the style of the fearsome Hungarian cavalries that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages-, that attacked everywhere the border of forts, towns and estancias from the Andes to the Atlantic, appropriating cattle, women, children and products, destined to subsist and market the surplus in their land of origin, Chile, where they were scarce and valued.
According to the acquaintance process of “Araucanization of the Pampa” started in the 17th century as a response to the expansion towards the south of the Chilean authorities, the Araucanians were overflowing the Andes and discovering the wealth of the mostrenco pampas cattle.
This slow process of two centuries was reinforced with the Rosas Desert Campaign (1833), who negotiated with some of those tribes of Chilean origin the extermination of those older and closer to the border towns of the Pampa (boroganos, etc.), in exchange for stabilizing the region in favor of large Buenos Aires landowners like him, his relatives and friends, which even resulted in links such as patronage to the so-called cacique “Mariano Rosas”, Self-vindicated Chilean, as recounted by Lucio V. Mansilla, Rosas’s nephew, who visited him in his own tolderías.
The successive Argentine national and provincial governments, mired in endless dissensions, barely maintained miserable forts around which prospered. a syncretic border culture, in which self-sacrificing soldiers and industrious settlers converged, with military corruption, political speculation, arms and alcohol smuggling, and the thirst for freedom of the gaucho spirit, humus where outlaws, deserters, captives, fugitives and adventurers proliferated.
The impotence of the authorities to put an end to this anarchy allowed the warlike nomadic tribes to prevail in infinite negotiations, materialized in ephemeral written agreements, through caciques who are experts in their peculiar art of negotiating, “languages” or interpreters, safe-conduct writings to cross the border, stamps, diplomatic letters, etc.
The “pampa business”
This system on an international scale consisted of alternating threats of violence and fleeting truces, in order to force the Argentine authorities to negotiate and obtain concessions for products that were trafficked in Chile. in exchange for not appropriating what was produced at the border, which allowed them to live without working, practicing extortion known as “pampa business”, that is, always demanding something extra in succession to what they already obtained.
Added to this was a dark and unstable network of alliances with other Argentine and Chilean political entities, aimed at obtaining advantages in their cross-negotiations, forming a vast status quo of violence, retaliation, intrigues and international interests outside the border without much benefit to anyone and that it concluded with the Conquest of the Desert (1879), a campaign more successful for its planning than for its battles, which brought order, legality and peace to a Pampa that in a few years turned its inhabitants into one of the first powers in the world.
The equivalence with the present is notable: small groups that allege in an unverifiable way belong to autochthonous cultures even though they claim to be foreigners, claiming special rights invoking racial arguments in a country that enshrines equality before the law, who demand the right to live in a primitive way even though they enjoy the civilization they condemn, who use violence as a solution to conflicts to appropriating private goods that they have not produced or seek to produce – like those warriors who did not raise animals because it was easier for them to steal them or some current Machis who enjoy Argentine state subsidies -, who operate under the acquiescence of some unarmed Argentine authorities and other accomplices and of individuals moved by dark interests, who fleeing from the pressure of the Government of Chile take refuge on this side although they reject the Argentine State but live from it, It does not offer a consistent future, not even for them, but above all, it constitutes a way of life at the opposite of our constitutional spirit and of the open, free, peaceful and modern society, such as the one Argentina aspires to be.
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