Rincón Bomba massacre

In October 1947, during Juan Perón's first presidency, Argentina's National Gendarmerie, supported by an Argentine Air Force aircraft and National Territories Police, carried out a mass killing of Pilagá Indigenous people at Rincón Bomba (also called La Bomba), near Las Lomitas in the then National Territory of Formosa. Estimates place the death toll between 750 and 1,000 people, with atrocities including executions, disappearances, torture, rape, kidnappings, and forced labor.

The events followed a mass migration. In April and May 1947, hundreds of Qom, Pilagá, Mocoví, Chorote, and Wichí families traveled to El Tabacal Sugar Mill in Salta for harvest work, but were underpaid and then dismissed after protesting. Left without resources, many walked roughly 450 kilometers to Las Lomitas, where a Gendarmerie squadron was based, arriving mid-May 1947. A large encampment formed at Rincón Bomba under healer Tonkiet (Luciano Córdoba) and caciques Oñedie (Paulo "Pablito" Navarro) and Nola Lagadick, growing to an estimated 1,000 to several thousand people. Malnutrition caused deaths, and in September 1947 Governor Rolando de Hertelendy alerted federal authorities; relief supplies dispatched by Perón arrived late in September with much of the cargo spoiled. The spoiled food caused mass poisoning in early October 1947, killing at least 50 people, mostly children and elders.

Rising tensions, fueled by local press warnings of an indigenous "malón" (raid), led Gendarmerie commander Emilio Fernández Castellanos to encircle the camp with roughly 100 gendarmes and machine gun positions, confiscating the group's weapons. On October 10, 1947, gendarmes opened fire during a meeting arranged between cacique Pablito and Fernández Castellanos, killing men, women, and children who had approached carrying portraits of Juan and Eva Perón. Despite an order to cease fire, second-in-command José M. Aliaga Pueyrredón had deployed additional machine guns, and killings continued for weeks through shootings, burnings, thirst, hunger, and disappearances. From October 15 to 23, 1947, a Junkers Ju 52 aircraft with a mounted machine gun operated from Las Lomitas in support of the operation. Survivors were sent to indigenous colonies for forced labor under Gendarmerie oversight. Contemporary national newspapers described the episode as an indigenous uprising or "malón," and the massacre went largely unaddressed by the Argentine state and mainstream society for decades, preserved primarily through Pilagá oral memory.

In 2005, the Pilagá People's Federation filed criminal and civil lawsuits against the Argentine state. The criminal case was closed following the deaths of the accused, including Leandro Santos Costas (charged 2011, died before trial) and Carlos Smachetti (indicted 2015, died 2017). The civil case resulted in a 2019 first-instance ruling by Formosa Federal Court No. 1 recognizing the massacre as a crime against humanity and ordering reparations, and a 2020 second-instance ruling additionally classifying it as genocide while upholding the reparations amount, which the Pilagá Federation has appealed to the Supreme Court. In 2006, a forensic team located 27 bodies near Las Lomitas consistent with the reported events.