“The massacre is a nail in the heart of the country until it comes to light,” says Francisco Nazar. He looks directly at me, not scared to speak out about the killings that have been virtually covered up for the past 60 years.
Nazar is a priest who works with indigenous groups in northern Argentina, and he is referring to the Rincón Bomba massacre. During October and November 1947, 1,500 indigenous people from the Pilagá tribe were killed in a campaign that started near the town of Las Lomitas and spread throughout the province of Formosa.
Despite the discovery of mass graves more than two years ago, the Argentine government is still refusing to recognise the killings took place, and ‘official’ history taught in schools in the area makes no mention of the fact that half of the aboriginal race was wiped out in under a month.
Five common graves have been found in Formosa province, yet there is no state funding to help the anthropologists continue excavating. One of the lawyers fighting to open an official investigation into the massacre is Carlos Alberto Díaz, who even goes so far as to call the killings ‘genocide’, lamenting that in Argentina, despite much progress, there are still ‘human rights for white people, and different human rights for the indigenous’.
The Past
In 1947, Argentina’s famous president Juan Domingo Perón had been in power for a year. He and his starlet wife Eva Duarte, more widely known as Evita, were popular and optimistic about making sweeping social changes.
Much of the country was poor, and Formosa was no exception. The indigenous communities living there, the Wichi, Toba and Pilagá, were very much at the bottom of the pile. As their territory was nationalised, these nomadic tribes, traditionally hunter-gatherers, found they had less and less room to live as they previously had done. Unaccustomed to staying in one area and working the land, many faced severe poverty and starvation.
When the Pilagá people were offered work on the sugar plantations in neighbouring Salta province, they felt it would perhaps be a way to provide for their families and accepted the labour. The entire community of over 3,000 people walked more than 200km along the railways tracks to Salta. The trek lasted many days.
Upon arrival at the plantations, they found the owners refused to honour the wage they had been promised. Additionally, instead of being paid in pesos, the work would be paid in ‘bales’, a sort of voucher system in which the salary could only be spent on certain products in certain places, highlighting the subordination of the indigenous workers to the landowners.
The Pilagá refused to work under such conditions, and so had little choice but to turn around and make the long journey back to Formosa. As 1947 was a very dry year, there was scare food to be found along the way. When the more vulnerable started falling sick, the group decided to head to Las Lomitas, where Luciano Córdoba, the local priest, had always been good to them.
They stopped in a place known as Rincón Bomba, a settlement just outside of the town, right in the heart of the province.
After a round journey of some 500km, may of the tribe were weak and ill. The caciques (tribal leaders) went to speak to the authorities of Las Lomitas and ask for assistance. At first the local community, a mixture of criollos and people of European descent, was open to helping the Pilagá, providing them with food and supplies.
However, by the middle of winter, the rains had not come and provisions were scarce for everyone. The local community became hostile towards the aboriginals. The governor of Formosa was told of the problems and asked the central government for humanitarian aid. Perón responded by sending a train up to the province with three wagons: one with food, one with medicines and one with clothes for the Pilagá. The train arrived in Formosa city, but due to bureaucratic hold ups sat for ten days in the station. The Las Lomitas police chief pressed for the goods to be forwarded on to the town, and after another delay, the train arrived. By this point there was only two wagons – the one with medicine never arrived – and most of the wagon containing the clothing was empty, and all of the food was in a bad condition, decaying and rotten, having been kept in an un-refrigerated container for two weeks.
Despite the state of the produce, when it arrived at the beginning of October the food was given to the Pilagá anyway. Already malnourished and weak from their long journey, many could not cope with the rotten food and within hours of consumption began to fall ill, and die. Some 50 people are believed to have died due to food poisoning overnight.
In the meantime, the Pilagá had been dancing to try and bring the rains that were desperately needed to enable them to live off the land. The strange rituals frightened the townspeople, however, and rumours spread that there would be an indigenous attack. Díaz explains that such rumours were common during the beginning of the 20th century, and ‘often used as an excuse to oppress or even kill the aboriginals’.
When two of the caciques went to talk to the head of Las Lomitas, angry at their treatment and the deaths, it only seemed to confirm the fears of the residents. Such an attack was deemed to be imminent, and overnight the Pilagá found themselves surrounded by gendarmes (the border police), with three or four posts of machine gunners, and two mortar stations.
According to Díaz, at around dusk on 10th October 1947, the sub-commander of the gendarmerie gave the order to start firing at the community, and by dawn some 200-250 Pilagá had been killed.
Despite intensive investigations on Díaz’s part as to why the gendarmes started firing, it is still unclear. It could be there was a misinterpreted order and when one post of gunners started firing, the others retaliated. What is known, however, is that the indigenous people were very much second class citizens during this time, not seen as having rights as humans on any level, and there was pressure from the local community for the authorities to sort out the ‘indigenous problem’ that was on their doorstep.
After the shootings, it seems to have been decided that there should be no witnesses to what had happened, and therefore no survivors were to be left. A month-long hunting campaign began to track down and kill survivors. By 5th November, when the genocide ended, an estimated 1,500 Pilagá had been killed.
According to survivors, the ones who escaped death were all the people who had chosen to flee north, towards Paraguay, when the killings began in Rincón Bomba. Those who fled east, west or south were caught up with and mostly died.
“We were lucky. We went the right way,” says Rosa Fernández, one of around 20 survivors still living in Formosa. She was just 12 years old at the time.
Others tell of the gendarmes catching up with them and ‘playing games’ whilst executing their kin. One such ‘game’ included shooting at a line of Pilagá people from the side, to see how many skulls one bullet could penetrate.
Marta Gomez recalls how her family was caught along with other people from her community and they were rounded up into a circle, to be shot by the machine gunners. They were saved by a man called Cureste, a local leather trader who had a good relationship with the Pilagá. He arrived on his horse and stopped the gendarmes, saying to them, “if you are going to kill them, you will have to kill me first.”
They were spared, “but this was on the condition the cacique, who was with us, handed over his daughter, who was a virgin, to the gendarmes for the night,” Marta adds, looking at her hands. Cureste advised him to do it, as his presence as a white man would not guarantee their safety. The girl, who was just 12 or 13 years old, was handed over. She survived, and so did the rest of the group but Marta says ‘she was never the same again’.
Then at the beginning of November, just as quickly as the genocide began, it was all over. Ambrosa Gonzalez, who had fled with her mother and another survivor some 80km north towards Paraguay, says: “Two men arrived on horses, a white man and an indigenous man. They told us the persecution was over and to come back to Las Lomitas.”
When asked if they believed the men, she says quietly: “What choice did we have?” They had not been killed outright, and the presence of the indigenous man on horseback gave them some hope, and so they returned to the town.
Ambrosa will not look any of us in the eye. In fact, she barely lifts her eyes from the ground the entire time we are talking. I notice her black skirt, and Marta explains Ambrosa has worn black daily since the massacre, as a sign of respect for the family members she lost. She also refuses pass by the place where the massacre took place, instead taking the long road to Las Lomitas. “I saw my grandmother be shot there. I don’t want to see that place,” she says quietly.
The indigenous man on horseback who helped find the survivors is Ceferiano Gomez. He tells of how he went around finding Pilagá people and bringing them back, trying to regroup the community.
Ceferiano says the Pilagá lived in fear for many years that it could happen again, and the gendarmes used this as a regular threat to the community for the following decades. The authorities also took all of the tools they had, for fear of reprisals, and the aboriginals couldn’t work, fish, hunt or do any of the things they were accustomed to.
He tells of how the practice of raping indigenous girls also became common, with the threat of the murder of the family if they did not hand over their daughters. “Many daughters were kept hidden or taken to more remote Pilagá communities to be brought up. Other times families would lie and say the daughters were sick, but they were generally taken for the night anyway, to be ‘broken in’.”
The campaign led to around half of the race being wiped out, entire families lost. “There are few survivors. Our race has almost expired,” says Melitón Dominguez, son of a cacique, of his people.
Whilst in Las Lomitas the massacre is widely acknowledged to have happened, and the Pilagá tell this history to their children, outside of Formosa it is almost entirely unknown.
Two years ago, on 28th December 2005, the first grave was found, and a few months later in March 2006, the first mass grave found, with more than 30 bodies.
Lawyers Carlos Alberto Díaz and Julio César Garcia first heard of the massacre in 2005. They were incredulous that something could have happened and they, educated Argentines living in the neighbouring Chaco province, had not heard anything about it. They started investigating, travelling from their base in Resistencia to Salta and Formosa to research the killings. They found some newspaper archives from the time, and there was a small amount of coverage. But even in the clippings that acknowledge something took place, the number of Pilagá murdered is widely underestimated, and all contain the ‘official’ history: that the Pilagá started attacking the town and so the gendarmes retaliated.
The Present
The Pilagá community is still obviously marginalised and poor. The houses in Rincón Bomba are made of mud and sticks and, in some cases, rubbish – plastic sheets are walls, and filled plastic bottles act as anchors, holding the sheets down.
I am surprised to see electricity lines running from Las Lomitas. They are obviously a new addition, as the trees that have been chopped down to make room for the power cables are still green with leaves, lying on their sides next to the lines. Juan Luis, our translator, explains that as the elections approached, the local deputy ensured that visible improvements were made to the community. I comment that at least there is no longer a dictatorship, so if nothing more every four years they are going to see changes. He laughs, but somehow it’s not very funny.
Despite the government’s seeming inability to provide the Pilagá with a basic standard of living and basic rights, there are individuals who have become advocates for them. Nazar, the local priest who has lived in the area for over 35 years, works actively with the communities around Las Lomitas, and played a key role in helping them get rights to the land in 1984.
When asked about the situation of the aboriginals living in Formosa, he says: “The dominant class is still racist, and the indigenous fear that if they speak out they will have rights taken away again. The people they would be speaking out against are the ones who give them their benefits, their education, attend them when they go to hospital.
“In many ways the colonial system the Spanish Crown imposed some 500 years ago still exists.”
What changes are needed then, I ask.
“People need to wake up. There needs to be a collective conscience, rights for everyone regardless, and people need to be willing to fight for them,” he replies.
Díaz agrees. He says when people talk about human rights they think of the dictatorship of the 1970s, and think things have changed for the better. Indigenous rights are still not considered by the mainstream populace.
As he has found, even getting the massacre officially recognised by the authorities has proven impossible, something he believes is due to the fact that it was indigenous blood spilled.
Positive changes are happening however – last month on the 10th October anniversary the Pilagá were able to officially commemorate the massacre, and placed a monument for their people who had been killed. It is the first time such an act has taken place, and is seen to be a milestone.
Nazar says: “Things are changing slowly. The monument is a big step forward, and ten years ago that would never have been possible. The community would not have been able to do it.”
However, as Díaz says, until things progress legally, there is still a long way to go. Even if it is too late to prosecute the perpetrators of the crime, the survivors, and Pilagá community in general, still deserve answers. None of them are aware why the massacre ended when it did, why the order was given to stop the genocide, or even what triggered it in the first place. Questions like these are ones Díaz and his team are trying to resolve, through an official investigation. But they are aware that as the likes of Melitón and Ambrosa grow older, time to provide them with the answers they deserve is running out.
The gendarmerie were asked to comment on the massacre, but at the time of going to print had not responded.