The Chacay Massacre: Exile, the Mapuche, and Border Formation in Chile and the Río de la Plata, 1810–1834
Résumé
In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown -themselves exiled from southern Chile -who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region. 1 At the center of this dangerous chessboard were the Pincheira brothers, from a family of Chilean Loyalists in the south of the country, who directed a montonera -a guerrilla band -against both Santiago and Buenos Aires long after the last regular Loyalist troops had been defeated. Their struggle involved alliances with independent Indigenous 11 The Chacay Massacre Exile, the Mapuche, and Border Formation in Chile and the Río de la Plata, 1810-1834
Edward Blumenthal
1 The historiography on the independence period has undergone an enormous expansion in the decades surrounding the bicentenary. Recent important contributions include Jeremy
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HistoireOrigine | Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte |
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