The road to Rincón Bomba began at a sugar mill. In April 1947, the El Tabacal estate in Salta Province hired hundreds of Qom, Pilagá, Mocoví, Chorote, and Wichí families for the cane harvest. Whole families walked hundreds of kilometers to reach the work. When payday came, the company paid 2.50 pesos a day instead of the six it had agreed to. When the workers protested this plain theft, they were dismissed — left stranded, unpaid, far from home. With nowhere else to go, they set out again on foot, some 450 kilometers across the Chaco toward Las Lomitas, where they hoped the state might help. They arrived in mid-May.

The Pilagá settled at a place called Rincón Bomba, beside a dry ravine the locals called a madrejón. They were led by a healer named Tonkiet — Luciano Córdoba — and by the caciques Pablito Navarro and Nola Lagadick. Word of Tonkiet's healing drew more people, until the gathering numbered well over a thousand. At first the townspeople and the local gendarmes were welcoming. Then hunger set in. Food finally sent by the government arrived spoiled, and the rotten supplies poisoned the camp, killing at least fifty people in early October — most of them children and elders. Many believed, then and now, that the poisoning was no accident. The dead were not even permitted burial in the town cemetery.

As fear spread among the white residents, the local press began warning of an indigenous "raid" that was never coming. The Pilagá were starving and mourning, not arming. The Gendarmerie commander ringed the camp with about 100 men and four machine gun nests and confiscated what few weapons the people had. From October 15 to 23, a Junkers Ju 52 aircraft fitted with a machine gun joined the operation, flying out of Las Lomitas. The killing went on for twenty days. More than 200 people simply disappeared. Those who fled were hunted down a corridor of country later remembered as the "trail of death," stretching some 40 kilometers from the camp. These were families — mothers, grandfathers, small children — pursued and shot for the crime of being unwanted.

Argentina buried the memory along with the dead. For decades the massacre went unspoken in official history, surviving only in the testimony of the Pilagá themselves — among them eight people who had been children at the ravine and lived to describe it. In 2005 the Pilagá People's Federation sued the state, and a forensic team began recovering bodies from the mass graves. In 2019 a federal court ruled that what happened at Rincón Bomba was a crime against humanity; in 2020, it was classified as a genocide. The court ordered the state to commemorate the dead and to repair what could be repaired. Some of the children who survived lived long enough to hear their country, at last, say the word out loud.