The massacre

On July 19, 1924, the Argentine state waged an extermination campaign against Indigenous workers on strike at Napalpí, resulting in one of the country’s largest massacres of the twentieth-century. Over a hundred state police, gendarmes, and a handful of armed settlers brutally slaughtered hundreds of Indigenous cotton-pickers in the state-run Napalpí reducción (Indigenous labor reserve), located on ancestral Qom and Moqoit lands of present-day Chaco Province in northeastern Argentina. The attackers tortured, raped, and mutilated victims, burned corpses in mass graves, abducted children, and hunted down survivors in the forests for weeks.

Nearly a century later in 2022—following years of Indigenous activism and community-led research—a local Federal Court declared the Napalpí massacre a “crime against humanity.” The Court recognized the massacre as part of a national scheme of genocide against Qom and Moqoit peoples, and the coerced labor and debt bondage they endured as unlawful servitude. It obliged the state to finance reparations (which have yet to materialize) and a memorial and museum (which have).

A puzzle

While the Court ruling has brought solace to my interlocutors, many remain haunted and puzzled by the state terror that targeted their ancestors who, after all, supplied mass cheap labor during the cotton boom.  As one older descendant of survivors put it in 2023: “Why would they want to kill the very people who worked for them?” There is still an undercurrent of fear that, beyond the logics of the capitalist market and the law, there is some other dark logic at work. One that marks them as exterminable.

Settler colonialism, as an analytic, has not been widely considered in Latin American research (Castellanos 2017), for a variety of reasons that include strong traditions of Indigenous enslavement and exploitation in the region (Speed 2017). But my interlocutor’s question above brings to mind Wolfe’s (2006) now-classic assertion that the “logic of native elimination” in a settler society generally trumps any capitalist drive to exploit native labor.

The late Qom author and activist from Napalpí, Juan Chico (2016), made a similar point in his writings and recorded interviews: the massacre was not a one-off instance of localized police repression against strikers, but rather the culmination of a long genocidal state campaign against Indigenous peoples.

In the late nineteenth century, Argentina devised the “Conquest of the Desert” campaign as a land-grabbing, extermination war against militarily autonomous Indigenous peoples who ruled half of present-day Argentina, beginning in the southern Pampa and Patagonia regions, and moving north to the Chaco, where Napalpí is located. A common settler nation-building trope of Biblical origin, the “desert” negates prior Indigenous presence by rhetorically eviscerating the land of its people whilst, in the same breath, calling for their elimination (one thinks, for instance, of the Zionist dictum to “make the desert bloom”). The purpose of Argentina’s “desert conquest” was to consolidate a melting pot (crisol) nation of European immigrants on Indian-free lands. But by the time the campaign arrived at Napalpí in the early twentieth century, that strategy had taken a new turn.

Reduction

Argentina established its reducción system at Napalpí in 1911 as a settler-colonial solution to a subtropical dilemma. Slavery had already been abolished. European immigrants would sow, plant, and populate the lands; but who could be persuaded—or coerced—to harvest cotton under the burning Chaco sun?

State authorities resolved that “reducing” surviving Indigenous peoples into concentrated policed labor camps was, conveniently, both the most humane and lucrative means to free up the land. Military forts were established throughout Indigenous Chaco terrains, converting the space outside the camps into militarized zones to assure the “peaceful” settlement of European cotton planters and the impossibility of autonomous Indigenous lifeways. For the state, labor comprised its own logic of elimination: forced into the reducción, Indigenous hunter-gatherers would be racially de-Indianized through civilizing, sedentary agricultural work.  They would be eliminated as “Indians” and saved as exploitable workforce.

Pass laws were introduced. Indigenous people could no longer circulate freely and safely without a salvoconducto—a badge of good conduct issued by settler bosses or administrators. In 1924, settlers lobbied the state to harden these restrictions, prohibiting outright “their” Indigenous workforce from leaving the cotton harvest region to seek livelihoods elsewhere. Movement in the land, though policed, had been a remaining hallmark of territorial autonomy. Pushed to their limit, Napalpí workers called a fateful strike.

Napa’alpí—meaning “souls of the dead” in Qom (Sánchez 2019, 209)—already named this region as a deathspace well before the reducción existed, suggesting a wide-open, sacred, and transitable space. However, the spatial connotation of the term narrowed for many locals after the massacre, blending with the necropolitics of the labor camp. As one of Chico’s (2016, 49) interviewees put it: “[I think] reduction means making Napa’alpí smaller. It means cemetery.” As if reducing the living were not enough, the dead too now seemed corralled into colonized enclosures.

Exterminability

By design, exterminability is a feature of any highly-surveilled, ghettoized space or concentrated labor camp. Enclosure makes large-scale massacre of the targeted population a feasible disciplinary option at any given time. But when enclosure is a national strategy for settler land grabbing, its design takes on particular features.

The reducción was founded on a transactional wager, wherein Indigenous life was to be preserved from genocide conditionally. The strike violated an implicit settler contract that proposed concentrated labor as an alternative to extermination. Napalpí workers demanded not just livelihoods, but autonomous movement in their homelands. In abnegating their use-value to the settler state, they negated the original terms of their right to life.

Exterminability is a form of racism (Hage 2016). Yet not all racisms are the same, nor are all colonial situations alike. In a settler-colonial case like Napalpí, Indigenous exterminability is foremost about land, even when targeted at striking workers. Labor may be touted as a humane alternative to genocide (as many Latin American histories attest). Yet the design of the reducción worked towards Indigenous exterminability as a predetermined infrastructure. Under a settler wager like this, it takes only the flip of a switch—in this case a strike—to convert the exploited into the exterminated.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the people of Napalpí, especially Vanesa Barrientos, Daniel Chico, Anahí Gómez, Elvira Leiva, Vivi Notagay, Rafael Sánchez, and their extended families. This research was funded by Horizon 2020 grant no. 846550. The views expressed are solely my own.