Abstract

In Argentina, on 19 May 2022 the Federal Court of Resistencia (Chaco Province) concluded its judgement relating to the Napalpí massacre of 19 July 1924 in the indigenous reserve (now known as Colonia Aborigen Chaco). It was confirmed as a crime against humanity and part of a national scheme of genocide against the Qom and Mocoví indigenous population. Moreover, it stated that the Argentinian State, administrator of the reserve and believed to be responsible for the massacre, should adopt a compensation scheme for the victims and enact a series of commemorative events. The verdict is especially important for a country which adopted policies to physically exterminate and absorb the indigenous communities living in the northern and southern areas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These aimed at creating a socially and culturally homogenous, as well as white, national population and fostering economic development by exploiting the land acquired and the labour of the surviving indigenous, which was settled in reserves administered by the State (reducciones civiles para indígenas) in the northern territories. The Juicio por la Verdad was also important as it started a path of historical revision and correct attribution of responsibility, due to a different reconstruction of the facts from that diffused by the official (oficialista) press and institutions which had led to the massacre being dismissed and forgotten. This essay reconstructs the event itself, placing it in the historical-political and economic-social context of the time. It shows the institutional and press position and traces the oral memory of the events of the survivors of the carnage which was handed down to descendants and scholars, and reproduced in the Juicio por la Verdad, which ended with the aforementioned ruling of which the significant passages are cited.