Qualla: Laguna del Desierto incident

Laguna del Desierto incident: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is almost nothing at Laguna del Desierto - a long, cold lake hemmed by forest and the granite spires of the Fitz Roy massif, far from any town, on a border nobody had ever truly settled. On the afternoon of 6 November 1965, a six-man Chilean police patrol was preparing to ride out of this emptiness when dozens of Argentine gendarmes closed a ring around them. The Chileans called out to negotiate. A shot was fired. Lieutenant Hernan Merino Correa fell dead, and a sergeant beside him was wounded. One bullet, in a valley where no one lived, became a rupture between two nations that would take three decades to settle.

Laguna del Desierto incident: A Line Drawn in a Bottle

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The trouble was old and bureaucratic, the kind that festers for generations. When Chile and Argentina submitted their irreconcilable border claims to British arbitration in 1902, a demarcator named Herbert Leland Crosthwait was sent to mark the line through this trackless country...

Laguna del Desierto incident: A Country on Edge

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1965 Argentina was a nation primed for conflict, though not over a Patagonian lake. President Arturo Illia governed a country seething with the unfinished business of Peronism, his administration mocked in the press as slow and weak - he was nicknamed the turtle - while sectio...

Laguna del Desierto incident: The Patrol

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Chilean patrol was small and ordinary: Major Miguel Torres, Lieutenant Hernan Merino Correa, Sergeant Miguel Manriquez, Lance-Corporal Victor Meza, and two carabineros, Julio Soto and Jose Villagran. They were policemen, not soldiers of an invading army, sent to a shelter sou...

Laguna del Desierto incident: A Hero and a Grievance

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three days later the captured men were released and flown home with an envoy of President Eduardo Frei Montalva. Chile's foreign minister, Gabriel Valdes, condemned the killing as an unprecedented and inexcusable act in the history of the two countries' boundary disputes. For Chi...

Laguna del Desierto incident: The Long Aftermath

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The killing rippled outward. The Argentine general who had planned the Laguna operation, Julio Alsogaray, would help lead the coup that toppled President Illia in June 1966, walking into the president's office before dawn to invite him to resign. The border question itself dragge...