Cartographies of Disaster and Memory: The Pilagá and Colonial Violence

Written on 02 January 2026. Posted in News

BY CARLOS SALAMANCA VILLAMIZAR FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

In 1947, the National Gendarmerie entered the traditional territory of the Pilagá people and killed dozens of Indigenous men, women, and children. The event became known as the “Pilagá Massacre” or the “Rincón Bomba Massacre”. It was only in 2019 that the Argentine judiciary recognised the responsibility of the National State and underscored the collective nature of the harm inflicted. Mapping initiatives have since made it possible to reconstruct the violent acts that foreshadowed the massacre, as well as the Gendarmerie’s assaults on Pilagá people who attempted to escape. Eight decades on, the restitution of territories violently seized from Indigenous communities remains unfulfilled.

The so-called Rincón Bomba Massacre took place in October 1947, when hundreds of Pilagá Indigenous people gathered on the outskirts of Las Lomitas, near a railway station that connected Formosa (today the provincial capital) with the sugar mills to the west. Between 1917 and 1938, Las Lomitas served as the headquarters of the Gendarmerie regiment’s squadron command, from which two lines of forts fanned out across Pilagá territory and, further north, along the Pilcomayo River. The railway dramatically expanded the cheap transport of large contingents of Chaco Indigenous workers, who travelled to the sugar mills each year between March and October.

There, they endured a system of exploitation, discipline and subjugation in exchange for meagre wages. When they returned from the harvest, these small sums allowed them to buy clothes, tools and utensils in the shops of Las Lomitas and nearby towns. Yet when they attempted to return to their ancestral lands, they were confronted by criollos (non-Indigenous settlers) who sought to dispossess them. Allied with the authorities, the settlers pressured the Pilagá to relocate to the Bartolomé de las Casas Mission (130 kilometres away). Alternatively, they were forced into two agricultural and livestock colonies established in 1936, also located in militarised zones under military surveillance and control.

Hungry, ill, and persecuted by pervasive violence, the Pilagá converged on La Bomba from surrounding settlements, seeking the aid of a healer, Luciano Córdoba (Tonkiet), whose powers offered relief from the wounds of economic exploitation and colonisation. In the colonial imagination of the criollos, however, this gathering of Indigenous people was first cast as an “irreducible” group of unusual size, then as a potential threat, and finally as the pretext for a military assault.

A National and Colonial Massacre

Before the massacre, the authorities had urged the Pilagá to disperse and resettle in Bartolomé de las Casas. After the massacre they managed to confine the survivors there where they were subjected to exploitation under conditions akin to slavery. Plantation, missionaries, economic exploitation and military surveillance together constituted a network of colonial spaces that formed the basis of a broader structure of violence.

In the years that followed and while the events remained largely concealed from the rest of Argentine society, the Indigenous people relied on their own social mechanisms to cope with the damage. Many distanced themselves from “life as it was before” and embraced Evangelical Christianity, through which they processed their trauma and sought refuge from State harassment. During the 1990s and 2000s, various initiatives emerged across the Chaco demanding memory, truth and justice, in the wider context of national transformation and the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Peoples in the region and in Argentina.

Rincón Bomba challenges the notion of the massacre as an isolated, singular event in time and space. On the one hand, it belongs to a continuum of violence. On the other, its spatial imprint is dispersed and far-reaching. Both dimensions point to the collective nature of the harm: temporally by revealing the multiple generations that have endured this violence and its legacies; and spatially, by exposing the broad geographic scope of its impact.

Locations of violent episodes perpetrated against the Pilagá between 1917 and 1947 that contributed to the dispossession of their lands. Map: Carlos Salamanca & Lautaro Sosa

A Foretold Massacre

The first major outbreak of violence recorded in the twentieth century occurred with the attack on Fort Yunká in 1919, which resulted in the Pilagá suffering a harsh—albeit misdirected—reprisal [1]. The field diary of Swedish officer Gustav Emil Haeger, who conducted an expedition to the Gran Chaco in 1920, documents the case of the settler Anselmo Calermo, described as “an old friend”, who, after being “driven away by the Pilagá” from the Cañada de Descanso, turned to Fort Chávez and instigated a military expedition against Nelagadik and his people—highlighting the collusion between the military and criollo cattle ranchers [2].

Anthropologist Jules Henry recounts further army attacks in 1933, during which several Indigenous people were killed and others forcibly relocated some 50 miles west of their traditional “communities” [3]. In 1935, hundreds of Pilagá who had fled to Paraguay to escape Gendarmerie assaults sought refuge at the El Toba Mission, under the protection of missionaries who would later establish the Pilagá Mission [4]. Between 1937 and 1939, testimonies from Anglican missionaries at the Pilagá Mission indicate that “clashes between the Pilagá, the army, cattle ranchers and settlers were commonplace” [5].

Missionaries also documented how Indigenous people faced systematic violence at the hands of Paraguayan soldiers. Among these assaults were two massacres: one in April 1937 which claimed the lives of six Indigenous people and another in 1938 which killed seven more [6]. Meanwhile, criollo settlers also killed Pilagá with impunity, accusing them of cattle theft. When anthropologist Alfred Métraux travelled through the area in 1939, he encountered a landscape of “decay and death”; smallpox was rampant, conflicts with the army were constant, and the settlers occupied Indigenous lands. During the 1930s, in the context of the Chaco War, the Pilagá also suffered violence from Paraguayan soldiers [7].

At the same time, having been recognised as “Argentine” for collaborating with the army and serving as frontier guards, the Pilagá continued to confront their traditional enemies, the Nivaĉlé and the Maká, who had been incorporated into Paraguayan forces by the war. According to Dr Anne Gustavsson, a Social Anthropology scholar, prior to 1947 a dozen Pilagá men, led by Sedaakie’n and Peletooe’n, went clam-gathering north of Laguna Yema and were ambushed by criollo settlers, who, in collusion with the police, deceived and massacred them. Only Sedaakie’n and Peletooe’n managed to escape. After this “clam-gatherers’ massacre”, the site came to be known as “Pozo Quemado” due to the traces of fire left behind [8].

Map showing the location of some episodes of violence linked to the Rincón Bomba massacre from 9 to 16 October 1947. Map: Carlos Salamanca & Lautaro Sosa

Mapping the Massacre

Let us also broaden the perspective geographically. The Gendarmerie attack at Rincón Bomba did not take place at a single location, but across a series of sites. On the afternoon of October 10, 1947, Squadron 18, divided into two groups, opened fire on an indeterminate number of Indigenous people who had gathered at La Bomba [A]. In the preceding days, the Pilagá had been disarmed by the same gendarmes, who sought to “demobilise” them and force them into submission.

On October 11 and in the following days, the attacks continued as the Pilagá attempted to flee. Most headed north, without water or food, enduring long nocturnal marches while hiding in the bush. On several occasions, they were forced to abandon their youngest children. At Pozo de los Chanchos Panorí, two children were attacked by a patrol, and two young people fleeing with the group of Desade’en were killed by gunfire [B]. On the lands of landowner Esteban Curesti at Campo del Cielo, a woman named Seecholé and her family were detained all day in 40-degree heat without water. The gendarmes separated a girl from the group, and the squadron’s second commander, Aliga Pueyrredón, raped her [C].

In El Descanso, near Pozo del Tigre, Panorí’, two more children and over fifty people were detained in an animal corral [D]. In La Alcoba, near El Descanso, three elders were tied to a tree and burned alive [E]. In Pozo del Tigre, the gendarmes went from house to house searching for fugitives: they found a couple, burned them alive, and executed a girl with a gunshot to the head [F]. On October 13 and 14, the gendarmes caught up with the Piakqolek group fleeing towards Navagán, detained three individuals, and executed them in front of the entire group [G].

The Dasae’en group, which had fled north after the La Bomba massacre, was intercepted by the Gendarmerie near La Lagunita following denunciations by criollo settlers; a woman was wounded there [H]. Near the Paraguayan border, seven people were killed [I]. On October 16 a Junker aircraft that had taken off the previous day from the El Palomar base in Buenos Aires strafed several Indigenous people with a machine gun [J]. In El Cuervo, Oñedié was captured, taken to Fort La Soledad, and subsequently sent to Colonia Muñiz [K]. Confidential Document No. 1047 recorded 15 deaths in a supposed confrontation without judicial verification or any record of the fate of the bodies [L].

Following the repression many Pilagá surrendered to the authorities. At first, they were rounded up in Pozo del Tigre and then taken to the station from where they were transported by train to Estanislao del Campo, and subsequently by truck to Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco Muñiz [M]. There, they were forced to work without pay under the mission system until at least February 1948 [22]. An agricultural-style settlement was established under the administration of “Cacique Coquero” with a government promise to grant land titles and develop a population centre for the Pilagá survivors of the massacre [N].

Disputes over Recognition, Restitution, and Reparation

In the years that followed, collective gatherings—including Evangelical assemblies—were nearly prohibited and, even throughout the 1950s, remained subject to police harassment. In later decades, under closer State supervision, the legal registration of Indigenous churches served as a form of protection.

Some families who had taken refuge in the bush gradually returned to their settlements, increasingly limiting their movement within traditional hunting, fishing, and foraging territories, which were progressively appropriated by cattle ranchers. Others resettled in communities such as Namqom in Formosa, far from their ancestral lands and largely inhabited by the Qom, their traditional rivals. In all cases, the Pilagá adopted a more sedentary way of life and reduced mobility between communities.

In 2007, the Argentine judiciary authorised excavations at the site where the massacre began, which until then had been used as the shooting range of the National Gendarmerie in Las Lomitas, on lands that had been appropriated. Other excavations uncovered three mass graves and human remains. In 2019, the judiciary acknowledged the responsibility of the National State for the massacre and emphasised the collective dimension of the harm. Since then, the Pilagá Communities Federation, the main advocates of the legal claim, maintained that the reparations remain insufficient and that the usurped territories must be included.

The current political climate in Argentina offers little hope for guaranteeing Indigenous territorial rights. Even more concerning is a territorial survey law unimplemented for 20 years that has left Indigenous communities in a situation of clear legal vulnerability, amid a context in which the national government seeks to further advance an extractivist economic model. The restitution of territories seized through violence from Indigenous communities remains, as it always has been, an unfinished task.

Carlos Salamanca Villamizar is an Independent Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), affiliated with the Institute of Geography “Romualdo Ardissone” at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He is also Director of the Spaces, Policies, Societies Programme at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, National University of Rosario (UNR).

Cover photo: National Gendarmerie officers with Pilagá children taken hostage during the massacre. Photo: Archive

Tags: Indigenous Debates