Qualla: Rincón Bomba massacre

Rincón Bomba massacre: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fuerza Aérea Argentina, Public domain. They had come for work and were owed honesty, and they got neither. In the spring of 1947, hundreds of Pilagá families and their neighbors gathered at a dry ravine near Las Lomitas, in the Formosa scrubland of northern Argentina. The Pilagá had lived in the Gran Chaco for centuries, resisting Spanish conquest and outlasting it, and these were their descendants — farmers, healers, children, elders. They were hungry, they were grieving, and they were waiting. What arrived was not relief. Between October 10 and 30, the Argentine National Gendarmerie surrounded them with machine guns and an aircraft and killed an estimated 750 to 1,000 people. For more than fifty years, the country pretended it had not happened.

Read more: Rincón Bomba massacre on Qualla

Image: Fuerza Aérea Argentina | Public domain

Rincón Bomba massacre: The Wages They Were Promised

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos Diaz Vexelman, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 co...

Read more: Rincón Bomba massacre on Qualla

Image: Carlos Diaz Vexelman | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rincón Bomba massacre: Gathering at the Madrejón

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gendarmería Nacional Argentina, Public domain. 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 ...

Read more: Rincón Bomba massacre on Qualla

Image: Gendarmería Nacional Argentina | Public domain

Rincón Bomba massacre: What the State Called Order

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gendarmería Nacional Argentina, Public domain. 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 f...

Read more: Rincón Bomba massacre on Qualla

Image: Gendarmería Nacional Argentina | Public domain

Rincón Bomba massacre: The Long Road to Being Believed

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gendarmería Nacional Argentina, Public domain. 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'...

Read more: Rincón Bomba massacre on Qualla

Image: Gendarmería Nacional Argentina | Public domain