Importance of the Desert Campaign (1878-1885)

A singular process that served to build the national State and delimit its borders but that at the same time was useful to eliminate those who were understood as a threat, the Indian. This process was known as the Desert Campaign and was carried out by Argentine political and military leaders at the end of the 19th century.

Every historical process has its raison d'etre.

The last decades of the 19th century found Argentina in a sea of ​​uncertainty, chaos and endless fights. In this sense, the military and political leaders who came together under the name "Generation of 80" would be the ones to take the reins of the history and they began to implement certain transformations that would end up consolidating the Argentine State as we know it today.

But that job It wasn't easy and one of the main obstacles these characters encountered was an indefinite territory, almost empty and unused and occupied in some regions by communities of indignation that did not want to be integrated into the project national. This is how the idea of ​​the conquest of that desert was born, of the humid Pampa but above all of the territories that today are part of the south of the province of Buenos Aires and Patagonia. All these lands should be put at the service of the

agricultural production to export and consolidate a capitalist economy, hence the ferocity in the advance and conquest.

Annihilation as a way of establishing the national state

As has happened in the history of many modern countries, the history of the Argentine State has been built on the basis of many innocent deaths. The Campaign to the Desert (which lasted from 1778 to 1885 and served to elevate Julio Argentino Roca as the top leader of that generation policy) was a way of cementing the foundations of Argentine institutions on the annihilation, the death and dispossession of the pre-Columbian peoples who already barely subsisted by the end of the XIX century.

The symbolic aspect of this process also has to do with the way in which the Argentine State took advantage of this plan to build the image of a supposed enemy, clearly defenseless (although no less dangerous for that) in the face of the military capabilities of the national army and devastated of their lands and their power of self determination. That enemy was for a long time pointed out as the representation of barbarism and its elimination understood as a just cause for the survival of the civilized State.

Photo: Fotolia – Laufer