11 - The Chacay Massacre

Summary

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 – 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.

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 groups as well as participation in politics in the Río de la Plata on the other side of the Andes.² The Chacay Massacre was a peripheral action in a peripheral region of a peripheral war; nonetheless, it says much about the relationship between borders and exile in the period, a relationship that can be traced from the beginning of the revolutions of independence to the Chacay Massacre trial, whose proceedings were published in 1833 and 1834. The massacre and subsequent trial, while marking the decline of the Pincheiras as a political force, more broadly highlight the role played by political dislocation in reinforcing the international borders that emerged after revolution and independence in the Americas, as well as the complex interactions of different exile groups in the post-imperial borderlands. With revolution, different types of sovereignty emerged – national, provincial, and that represented by Indigenous autonomy – and they came together at Chacay in a broad context of political exile.

The events leading up to the Chacay Massacre were part of a broader panorama of civil war in Chile and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, the polity that emerged from the independence process that began in 1810 and whose capital was Buenos Aires. The United Provinces splintered into competing and often warring provinces following the failure of the centralist constitutions of 1819 and 1826 and the de facto or de jure independence of Paraguay (1813), Bolivia (1825), and Uruguay (1828). In this context, starting in the 1820s, Unitarians and Federalists – the former favoring centralized rule in Buenos Aires and the latter provincial sovereignty – formed competing alliances of provinces that battled for control. Between 1829 and 1831, Federalists emerged triumphant and put into place a loose Argentine Confederation under Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, in which Buenos Aires maintained control of foreign relations and customs port revenue.³

As mentioned, the Chacay Massacre was a peripheral battle in this conflict. It occurred in the Andean province of Mendoza, which bordered Chile to the west and the Ranquel and Pehuenche Mapuche to the south. In the decades preceding the massacre, Chile had briefly experienced an autonomous constitutional government before its suppression by Loyalist forces in 1814. Chilean independence was formally declared in 1818, only after the Patriots had invaded from neighboring Mendoza in 1817. The military leader of this effort, José de San Martín, used Mendoza as a springboard from which to attack Chile before leading a campaign to royalist Peru in 1820, assisted by Bernardo O’Higgins and other Chilean émigrés, just as the United Provinces were collapsing into interprovincial warfare.⁴

The Mapuche Indigenous peoples living to the south of the Spanish Empire on both sides of the Andes played a key role in these conflicts (see Map 11.1). The Mapuche were a loose grouping that shared a language and certain cultural characteristics and had preserved their autonomy from the Spanish, while formally recognizing the king as sovereign. They maintained relations with Creole societies through warfare, commerce, and cultural contacts, often enacted in formal political agreements known as parliaments. The name “Mapuche” emerged in the eighteenth century when the groups to the west of the Andes in present-day Chile expanded toward the Pampas on the Atlantic side of the mountains, spreading their language and cultural practices in a process known as the “Araucanization of the Pampas.”⁵ In the independence period, however, Indigenous groups typically used designations that referred to their geographic origins and political alliances. For example, the Borogano were Loyalist Mapuche who had migrated from the Araucanian region of Boroa to the Pampa after 1810; the Ranquel lived to the south of the Argentine provinces of Mendoza and San Luis; the Pehuenche controlled the Andean valleys and mountain passes that led to Chile. Starting in 1810, with the outbreak of autonomous Patriot governments, Loyalists encouraged Mapuche rebellions and attacks on Creole settlements in the area between Buenos Aires and the southern Chilean city of Concepción.⁶ Autonomous Mapuche polities would form military alliances with Loyalists and Patriots, as well as with the different Argentine provinces that emerged from the disintegrated United Provinces after 1820. As a result, these polities also emerged as important sites of exile for political opponents from Chile and the Argentine provinces.

Map 11.1 The Indigenous frontier.

Exile, Sovereignty, and Borders in the Spanish American Revolutions

The study of nineteenth-century exile in the context of liberal and republican revolutions and nation-state formation has emerged as a growing field in recent decades.⁷ It is important to note that exile was not particular to one faction or ideological group, given that Loyalists and Patriots, Unitarians and Federalists all faced the need to emigrate at one point or another. Exile, rather, was related to territorial dynamics and uncertain borders; it was a political practice connected to the emergence of independent republics in the region.

Recent studies have also sparked renewed interest in the interactions between Creoles and Indigenous groups to the south of what would become the independent countries of Chile and Argentina. These studies have shown that both the Indigenous context and the Creole dimension must be taken into account in order to understand the revolutions of independence and the formation of independent republics.⁸ These interactions created vibrant yet unequal relations, as well as a dynamic of economic and cultural exchange that included intermarriage.⁹ However, these studies are not always cross-national and instead tend to focus on either Chile or Argentina, which is both surprising and unfortunate given that trans-Andean networks stood at the heart of the Mapuche culture on which they focus.¹⁰ Indigenous societies were also important sites of exile, as we will see, in a pattern that finds its roots in the colonial period, when deserters from the army or escapees of coercive labor practices sought refuge on the Indigenous frontier.

The renewed focus on the independence period has also advanced the understanding of sovereignty and republicanism in early nineteenth-century South America.¹¹ The independence movements began as municipal revolutions in the context of a crisis of sovereignty triggered by the Napoleonic invasions of the Iberian Peninsula and the deposition of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain. As more and more towns sought to assert their own sovereignty, not only against Spain but also against former viceregal or regional capitals, such as Buenos Aires, the limits of the emerging republican polities became unclear and subject to constant negotiation and warfare. In some cases, this led to the breakaway of territories into new internationally recognized countries – such as Uruguay or Bolivia – while in others it provoked deep conflicts over the nature of the republican constitutional organization that would govern them, as in the conflict between Unitarians and Federalists in the Argentine Confederation. In all of these cases, governance tended to occur at a local or provincial level, and national authorities often had few resources with which to impose their will.

This chapter seeks to combine these approaches in order to understand how exile contributed to evolving understandings of borders and sovereignty in the region, using the example of political dislocation in Chile and the Río de la Plata. Émigrés and autonomous Indigenous groups, sometimes working in tandem, brought together political projects in Chile and the Río de la Plata, doing so in a context in which the territorial limits of sovereignty were not always clear. The very act of crossing these borders, and the attempts by political authorities to control this mobility, brought about a slow transformation of these boundaries. Territories that had previously been considered as part of a hierarchy of overlapping legal jurisdictions began to be thought of as bounded territories separated by a discrete border.¹²

There were several different types of borders at play here. The old imperial frontiers remained the most important, for example between the United Provinces and the Luso–Brazilian Empire, independent in 1822, or the one with the still autonomous Indigenous groups to the south – the subject of this chapter. Crossing the frontier region that separated “Indians and Christians” (indios y cristianos) was perhaps the most significant move for a Creole, given that it meant leaving “civilization” to live among “savages.” The Andes, in this context, were still more of a bridge than a boundary, despite the nominal existence of a new international border separating Chile and the Argentine Confederation after independence. Indeed, it was only during the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms that Cuyo – the border region of which Mendoza was the capital – was stripped from Santiago’s jurisdiction and attributed to Buenos Aires, with the formation of the Vice-Royalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776. This internal border was essentially administrative, and deep cultural, economic, and family ties persisted between Mendoza and Chile.¹³ After independence, fleeing across the new international borders that separated Chile and the Argentine provinces represented a possible route to asylum, as a change of jurisdiction often entailed the protection of local authorities. Crossing provincial borders could also offer refuge, particularly when local governments were controlled by rival factions in the context of the Argentine civil wars. Over the long run, these multiple movements across different borders reinforced the salience of the new international and provincial borders, while at the same time beginning to undermine Indigenous autonomy.¹⁴ Exile and border crossing played a key role in this gradual transformation, and the Chacay Massacre highlights different types of exile mobility in a period when sovereignty and borders were still in flux.¹⁵

Loyalists, the Mapuche, and Exile

Starting in 1810, when autonomous Patriot governments came to power in Santiago and Buenos Aires, the defeated Loyalist forces retreated to Indigenous territory south of the Bío-Bío River in Chile, using their political ties to Mapuche leaders, known as loncos, to plan raids on Creole towns and villages on both sides of the Andes. Once the Patriots returned to power in Chile in 1817, Loyalists again retreated south, regrouping under the command of Vicente Benavides and continuing to fight against the nascent Chilean republic and its Mapuche allies. Benavides captured the southern regional capital of Concepción in 1820, only to have his forces wiped out the following year. At their height, his Loyalist forces controlled most of the south, while the Chilean troops were occupied with consolidating independence and supporting San Martín’s expedition to Peru.

Once the situation in Lima had stabilized, the Santiago government turned its attention to the south in what one nineteenth-century historical account called the Guerra a Muerte (War to the Death).¹⁶ Though Benavides was captured and executed in 1822, the Chilean Pincheira brothers continued the guerrilla struggle against the nascent republic, first under the command of Spanish-born Juan Manuel Picó, and then independently after his execution in 1824. Picó’s fall coincided with the defeat of the Spanish Loyalist forces at Ayacucho, Peru. After this date there were no Spanish authorities in South America to be loyal to, and the Pincheiras waged a guerrilla struggle characterized by their Indigenous alliances and involvement in the civil wars between the Argentine provinces.

After the eldest brothers, Juan Antonio and Santos Pincheira, died in 1823 in the course of these military confrontations, José Antonio and Pablo Pincheira took command of the montonera. Chilean authorities considered them bandits, particularly after Benavides’s capture and execution. They were exiles, however, in the sense that they continued their political struggle from territory that was not controlled by Chile or the Argentine provinces, but rather by an independent polity in Indigenous territory. Even before the executions of Benavides and Picó, the Pincheiras were closely allied with the Pehuenche, who controlled the mountain passes through the Andes, as well as the Borogano and some Ranquel loncos. They then established themselves south of Mendoza in what is currently the Argentine province of Neuquén, attracting up to several thousand Chilean Loyalists to the villages that sprang up under their control. From this highland stronghold, the pincheirinos – as they were known – conducted raids across southern Chile and the Argentine provinces of Mendoza, San Luís, and Córdoba, as well as along the Río Negro in the southern reaches of Buenos Aires province.¹⁷

Their montonera fit into older economic and migratory patterns of Mapuche society. The waves of eastward migration across the Andes that had started in the eighteenth century intensified after 1810 in the wake of the pressures of war. Since colonial times, it had been customary for cattle fattened or raided on the Atlantic side of the Andes to be herded to Chillán or Antuco in Chile, where they were transformed into jerky or tallow for exportation. Commerce was as important as war in frontier relations, even after 1810. The Loyalist property owners of the south profited from this situation, purchasing and reselling the stolen cattle while enjoying the military protection of the Pincheira brothers.¹⁸ The latter continued raiding and trading from their Neuquén base until the surrender of José Antonio in 1832.¹⁹ Forced to leave Chilean territory, the Pincheira brothers and other Loyalists politicized these preexisting economic circuits, while at the same time bringing them under their control.

Not all Indigenous groups were Loyalists, though, and the strategies of Santiago and Buenos Aires hinged on alliances with certain loncos in order to better control more-recalcitrant leaders. An example of these dynamics can be seen in Venancio Coyhuepán, a former ally of O’Higgins who appeared at the Independence Fort in the province of Buenos Aires (present day Tandil) in 1827 with the Chilean captain Juan de Dios Montero, one thousand Mapuche, and thirty Chilean soldiers. They had crossed the Andes in pursuit of the Pincheira brothers as part of Chilean general Jorge Beauchef’s campaign in the south. With their access to the mountain passes cut off by the Pincheiras and their Pehuenche allies, Coyhuepán was forced to seek refuge at the fort – and thus into an alliance with Buenos Aires. Coyhuepán came into contact with Governor Rosas and stayed to fight the pincheirinos.²⁰ These alliances highlight the fact that the final defeat of the Pincheiras was the result of cooperation between the authorities in Buenos Aires and Santiago, and a step toward more effective control of the border, though this could not have happened without the cooperation of the indios amigos.

The Pincheira brothers were not the first Creole military leaders to ally themselves with the Mapuche in a common cause. For a very brief period, José Miguel Carrera succeeded in uniting different Mapuche groups in a tenuous alliance against both Buenos Aires and Santiago, doing so from his exile in the Río de la Plata. Carrera was not a Loyalist, however. An important figure in the first Chilean Patriot government between 1810 and 1814, Carrera was among the thousands of Chileans who fled across the Andes to Mendoza after the Loyalist takeover in 1814. In Mendoza and Buenos Aires, he lost out in a factional struggle with his rival, Bernardo O’Higgins, who would lead the Chilean Patriots allied with San Martín and become Chile’s first president after 1817. In the United States in 1815 and 1816, Carrera recruited unemployed veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, armed a frigate for use against the Spanish, and sought US support for independence, before returning to Buenos Aires and factional politics.²¹

The United Provinces were at this point riven between those who sought to establish centralized rule under the sovereignty of Buenos Aires, and those who supported the Federal League of José Artigas. Artigas, from what is now Uruguay,²² allied with the littoral provinces of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos against Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, the latter of which had invaded the Banda oriental. By 1819, the Portuguese had taken control of Montevideo, which they would occupy until its independence in 1828, and forced Artigas into exile in Paraguay, but the Federalist provinces had a new ally: the Chilean Carrera.²³

Carrera brought together exiled Chilean soldiers under his control, as well as an alliance with Ranquel forces that contributed to bringing down the centralized government of the United Provinces in 1820 as part of an attempt to install a more pliable government in Buenos Aires that would support his effort at taking power in Chile. The result of the collapse of this government was the unmooring of San Martín’s continental project to liberate South America from the Spanish. San Martín’s allies in Chile and Mendoza maintained an axis of power independent of Buenos Aires. Carrera was unsuccessful in his bid for a patron, however, and turned instead to the Mapuche and their control of the mountain passes.

In 1817, Carerra’s brothers, Juan José and Luis, had already attempted to invade Chile, and their trial and execution in Mendoza the following year revealed Creole fears of an alliance between the Carrera faction, the Mapuche, and Loyalists in the south. Carrera was, in fact, in contact with Benavides, and among his Chilean troops were former Loyalist prisoners of war.²⁴ More importantly, however, he was able to unite Federalists, the Loyalist Borogano, and other Indigenous groups in a brief alliance between 1820 and 1821. He was nevertheless unable to channel this force into an invasion of Chile, in part because the logic of the Indigenous alliance called for raiding along the Buenos Aires frontier rather than invading Chile.²⁵ He was defeated, tried, and executed in Mendoza in 1821.

The Carrera experience reveals some of the same territorial dynamics that would appear with the Pincheira brothers. In the early years of independence, facing the breakdown of sovereignty and state structures in the Río de la Plata, émigrés could find refuge among the Mapuche and create alliances that both united disparate Indigenous groups and created alternative sovereignties, such as that of Artigas’s Federal League.

Exile and Provincial Sovereignty in the Río de la Plata

The different types of borders and sovereignties at play underscore the relationship between exile mobility and border formation in Argentina and Chile. In addition to the old imperial borders and the new international borders between the recently independent polities, provincial borders also retained their salience in the context of the breakdown of sovereignty in the Río de la Plata. The second and definitive collapse of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in 1828, after a war with Brazil over the fate of what would become the independent Oriental Republic of Uruguay the same year, led to a new round of civil warfare over the constitutional issues of centralism and federation. The victory of the Federalists led to the formation of the Argentine Confederation under the weak control of Buenos Aires and its governor Rosas, under the terms of the 1831 Federalist Pact. In Chile, too, an 1829 revolution began the process of consolidating conservative republican rule. Although the Pincheira brothers had supported this revolution militarily, it soon became clear that the new regime was equally concerned with suppressing the last remnant of loyalism in the south. The relative stability of Chile in the 1830s and 1840s would make it an important site of exile for neighboring countries.

The civil wars in Buenos Aires and the littoral provinces had their equivalent in Mendoza and the interior, where the Unitarian José María Paz of Córdoba and the Federalist Facundo Quiroga of La Rioja faced off.²⁶ Many of the leading Unitarians were former allies of San Martín, and both sides included veterans of the independence wars in Chile and Peru. The province of Mendoza became a battleground in this struggle, with control passing from one faction to another, and each change of government led to an exodus to Chile, to neighboring provinces controlled by factional allies, or into territory to the south controlled by Ranqueles and Pehuenches. From these sites of exile, new revolutions and invasions could be launched. In 1829, the departure of Mendoza’s Federalist troops to fight against Paz in Córdoba led to a short-lived Unitarian revolution that placed independence hero General Rudecindo Alvarado at the head of the province. Alvarado was passing through Mendoza on his return from Chile, where he had sought to collect his unpaid salary from his time in the Army of the Andes. His government lasted only a few weeks and was soon toppled by a counter-revolution. While many Unitarians fled to Chile or Córdoba after the fall of his government, Jacinto Godoy fled south, where José Antonio Pincheira granted him protection. His account sheds light on exile on the Indigenous frontier, as we see in the next section.²⁷

Following the victories of Paz over Quiroga in 1829 and 1830, the Unitarian general José Videla Castillo retook Mendoza from the Federalist governor Juan Corvalán. Videla Castillo was quickly elected governor but delegated his civilian power to Tomás Godoy Cruz, in order to concentrate on military operations in the field.²⁸ Corvalán and many Federalists in turn sought refuge to the south, where they attempted to negotiate Pincheira’s support against the new Unitarian government in Mendoza. When the negotiations soured, around forty Federalist officers and soldiers, including Corvalán, were massacred by Pincheira’s Indigenous allies at Chacay.

An account of the political turmoil published in Mendoza during the 1830 Unitarian government provides striking testimony of the importance of exile during these conflicts. Its author, José Luis Calle, was Videla Castillo’s secretary and played a role in the events.²⁹ Calle highlighted the fact that when Videla Castillo and Godoy Cruz came to power in 1830, “a considerable number of the principal inhabitants were already living as émigrés in Chile”³⁰ because of the violence of Federalist repression the previous year.³¹ The reference to the “principal inhabitants” hints at the class structure of exile: While common soldiers were typically executed (often through summary throat cutting), members of the elite could hope for the chance to flee.³²

The fate of these exiles was an important part of the negotiations. In the final agreement – as relayed by Calle – exile was the subject of the first two articles. A sort of amnesty was declared, “a general guarantee for all individuals who, victims of internal conflicts, found refuge in neighboring territories.” Article two indicated that the parties would facilitate the return of “individuals banished (desterrados) for political reasons” and that individuals in prison would be freed.³³ Calle’s declarations suggest the centrality of the exile experience in the political imaginary of Unitarians, a memory built on decades of exile. They also reveal the interprovincial nature of exile in the context of civil war. The agreement does not refer to Chile, but instead to “neighboring territories,” a reminder that the mountain passes were not the only path to exile. Calle also referred to the persecutions suffered by people from the neighboring province of San Juan who had found refuge in Mendoza, only to be attacked by invading Federalists from San Juan.³⁴ It was only later in the decade, after the consolidation of the Federalists’ power in the Argentinian Confederation, that “exile” began increasingly to imply crossing an international border.

Indeed, when a new Federalist government came to power in Mendoza in 1831, following the massacre at Chacay, many Unitarians fled to Bolivia and Chile, thus beginning a new cycle of exile that would characterize life in the Argentine Confederation under Rosas. Many civilians fled to neighboring Chile, whereas Videla Castillo joined Paz on the battlefield, only to escape to Bolivia with other Unitarian officers after Paz’s defeat later in 1831. Shortly thereafter, the main Unitarian participants were put on trial in absentia in Mendoza for their alleged role in inciting the massacre.

The trial itself was a transnational political affair – it was shaped by exile and demonstrated the increasing importance of public opinion in exile. Godoy published the trial proceedings in Chile as part of an effort by the émigrés to prove their innocence in the court of public opinion, a decision that he justified in terms of exile and political displacement: “The separation from my native soil, for a period that can be called almost indefinite, makes me feel the necessity of offering my compatriots the main evidence of my innocence.”³⁵ The proceedings include the defense testimony of Godoy and Godoy Cruz, as well as that of five pincheirino witnesses, which had been compiled in Chile and then presented to the court in Mendoza by the defendants’ wives, before being published.³⁶ This document is an example of how exile writing circulated between Chile and Mendoza: The written testimony had traveled from Chile to Mendoza to be presented at the trial, while the defense was then published in Chile, where it was read and possibly sent back to Mendoza as exile propaganda.³⁷ Indeed, Calle subsequently owned and ran El Mercurio, Chile’s most important newspaper from 1833 to 1838, and he published his account in the paper’s press. With the defendants safe in their Chilean exile, the trial was most important as a conflict over assigning guilt for the massacre in the court of public opinion on both sides of the Andes. As exile freedom of movement on the Indigenous frontier was reduced, more territorial patterns of exile gained in importance.

The Indigenous Frontier as a Site of Exile

The Pincheira brothers followed in Carrera’s footsteps, uniting disparate Mapuche groups and intervening in interprovincial and interfactional politics in the Río de la Plata. The Guerra a muerte did not end with Benavides’s execution in 1822. It continued under the authority of the Pincheira brothers, who had built up support among the Mapuche in the southern Andean region. By 1825, the Pincheiras were raiding across the Río de la Plata frontier, and Chilean families were migrating to live in the mountain villages under their control. The historian Martha Bechis has argued that it was the participation of the Creole montoneras, first under Carrera and then the Pincheiras, that allowed for a greater unity of different Indigenous groups in the region.³⁸ Although Chile claimed large sections of the southern territories that formed their base of operations, the Pincheiras and their Indigenous allies enjoyed de facto autonomy, as previously noted, and it would be decades before Neuquén was conquered by Buenos Aires. This independence allowed the territories to become important sites of exile. By 1830, however, the pincheirinos’ movements were restricted to Mendoza because the governor of Buenos Aires, Rosas, had used a combination of force and negotiation to come to terms with the Pincheiras’ Borogano allies, with the goal of reducing violence along the Buenos Aires frontier.³⁹

The proceedings of the Chacay Massacre trial underscore a particular iteration in the relationship between forced removal, systems of exile, and frontier conflict. Globally, penal transportation was an important weapon in the imperial arsenal against Indigenous resistance.⁴⁰ Forced removal practices extended beyond individuals to entire populations.⁴¹ In 1830, the same year as the Chacay Massacre, the infamous Black Line was drawn through the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), the colonial government’s systematic attempt to round up and remove the remaining Aboriginal population from the island and confine them offshore.⁴² In the Río de la Plata example, however, the intersection between exile, imperial expansion, and Indigenous sovereignty played out very differently. First, forced removal went in the other direction, with unwanted populations pushed into Indigenous polities rather than taken from them. Second, systems of exile and porous sovereignties opened up opportunities for the Mapuche, at least in the immediate term.

Military service on the frontier had been a common sentence for prisoners since colonial times, and in later decades both Chile and Argentina developed penal colonies in Tierra del Fuego, known in Chile during the 1850s as President Manuel Montt’s “Siberia.”⁴³ According to the Unitarian exile testimonies already discussed, the different governments of Mendoza, both Federalist and Unitarian, had been negotiating with José Antonio Pincheira and his allies. In 1829, a treaty signed with the Federalist government of Mendoza named him General Commander of the Southern Frontier, which had been his official title in the Loyalist forces. This gave him a new legitimacy, beyond that coming from his Indigenous alliances and loyalty to the Spanish king.⁴⁴ He was now an officer in the Mendoza frontier militia, a key position from which to mediate between Creoles and Mapuche, albeit one who resided principally in Indigenous territory. During the military campaigns of 1830, while Mapuche groups took advantage of the absence of troops in Mendoza to raid the province, Pincheira stepped forward as an intermediary to negotiate peace on the southern frontier. According to Calle, an additional motivation of the ousted Federalist governor Corvalán was to incorporate Pincheira’s Chilean and Indigenous troops into the campaign against Paz in Córdoba.⁴⁵

This is not an unreasonable assumption because it was common practice to negotiate peace with Indigenous groups by encouraging them to attack a neighboring province. In turn, the Unitarians based in Córdoba tried to seduce groups from the center of the Pampas since those in the Buenos Aires hinterland were already allied with Rosas. The Ranqueles and Boroganos, as well as Pincheira and his followers, were the object of these entreaties, which were complicated by the fact that the pincheirinos, the Boroganos, and some of the Ranqueles still recognized the Spanish king. In January 1830, between the two victories of Paz over Quiroga that preceded the Unitarian takeover in Mendoza, 1,200 Mapuche fighters and pincheirinos, including Carrera’s former ally Pablo Levenopán, attacked frontier posts in Unitarian Córdoba and San Luis.⁴⁶ This also coincided with Rosas’s previously noted success in winning over groups formerly allied to Pincheira.

José Antonio Pincheira’s forces, particularly those under the command of Julián Hermosilla, thus began to participate in the conflicts between Federalists and Unitarians. According to Calle they “happened” (acidentalmente) to remain in Mendoza after it was retaken by the Federalists in 1829, and they were the ones who ended the looting and pillaging of the city.⁴⁷ The Federalist government of the province continued to negotiate with Pincheira and his Mapuche allies, with the goal of preventing a Unitarian invasion of the province.⁴⁸

Jacinto Godoy, the Unitarian who had found refuge with pincheirinos, describes how he accompanied José Antonio Pincheira and the allied loncos during their negotiations with Governor Corvalán, in which the latter offered food and clothing to gain their support, as was the custom. The possibility of pillaging Mendoza, which everyone understood would soon be under Unitarian control, was the argument that convinced them, according to Godoy.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, the Federalists simultaneously evacuated the provincial capital before the arrival of Unitarian forces. Godoy was, therefore, still with José Antonio Pincheira when Videla Castillo and Godoy Cruz took power in April 1830. Though Jacinto Godoy does not explain why he decided to stay with Pincheira instead of returning to Mendoza, it is possible that he did not want to flout Pincheira’s protection and run the risk of being captured by the Federalists. He might also have doubted the Unitarians’ ability to keep control of the province. Regardless, he was in a difficult position, under the protection of the Federalists’ ostensible allies while the Unitarians were in power in Mendoza.

The Unitarian governments were also negotiating with Pincheira and the loncos. This can be seen in the defense testimony of Jacinto Godoy’s wife, who affirmed that Governor Videla Castillo’s contact with the Pincheiras, which included gift-giving, was not proof of a plot to assassinate the Federalists. She pointed out that all the governments, “including that of Spain,” negotiated with Indigenous groups with ritualized gift-giving and that the treaties signed by the Federalist governor were still in effect despite the change of government, in a clear reference to the old system of parliaments.⁵⁰

The Godoy Cruz defense includes two reports that suggest that Pincheira was mediating between the Federalists and Unitarians.⁵¹ The first, a letter from the pincheirino commander Julián Hermosilla to Governor Videla Castillo, informing him of the massacre, was intended to clear the former of the suspicion of having participated and affirm the pincheirinos’ desire to maintain the agreements signed with the previous government. At the same time, Hermosilla requested a pardon for the surviving Federalists, soldiers who had fled Mendoza in fear of Unitarian reprisals. In what was a common refrain, Hermosilla declared that he could not control the “barbarians” and was unable to prevent them from killing Corvalán and the others.⁵² But his main argument can be found in his affirmation of the pincheirinos’ role as mediators, as can be seen in their desire to facilitate negotiations between Unitarians and Federalists in order to put an end to the “war [that has been] disastrous for this province,” and to preserve the pact between the “pueblo of Mendoza” and Pincheira.⁵³ Although Hermosilla admitted that they had not lived up to their side of the agreement and were unable to control their Indigenous allies, he also pointed out that Mendoza had been remiss in not sending the subsidies needed to keep them happy. Videla Castillo and Godoy Cruz, in response, affirmed that they had always “been convinced of the prudence and the good faith of Colonel Pincheyra [sic].” They declared the treaties still in effect and pardoned the Federalist survivors.⁵⁴

This suggests that one of the principal motivations of both Unitarians and pincheirinos was to preserve the existing alliance in order to keep the peace on the Indigenous frontier. The Pincheiras had a central role in preserving the peace that ensued from their mediation between the Mapuche and Creoles, Federalists and Unitarians, and also between the Argentine provinces and Chile. The contacts between Mendoza and Chile were an important part of this story, and not just for the Unitarian exiles who had fled. According to Godoy, José Antonio Pincheira had refused to permit his brother Pablo Pincheira and Julián Hermosilla to carry out raids into Chile, because he wanted to honor the provisions of the treaty with Mendoza which required maintaining peace on the frontier.⁵⁵

Toward the end of May, a month after the Federalists had fled Mendoza, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The Indigenous and pincheirino fighters were unhappy with the gifts given by the Federalist governor, and they started stealing cattle, horses, and other goods from the Federalist camp. The Federalist soldiers’ morale declined, in part because they could not leave their camp to join the battle against Paz. In this context, the Federalists began to consider flight to Chile. Jacinto Godoy claimed to have helped several Federalist officers flee to Chile, offering them Pincheira’s best baqueano (guide) to cross over into Curicó.⁵⁶ During their stay in the Pincheira camp, two other Federalist officers fled to Chile with “a large number of troops and émigrés, taking with them all the cattle, mules and horses” in the camp. Furthermore, the “principal refugees” – Federalists who had found refuge with Pincheira after fleeing the Unitarian government – also wanted to flee to Chile (or Buenos Aires), but Corvalán forbade it.⁵⁷ It is interesting to note the use of the words “refugees” and “émigrés” to refer to the Federalists in the camp, again highlighting the Indigenous frontier as a site of exile for both Unitarians and Federalists. There were also rumors – falsely attributed to Jacinto Godoy, according to his wife – claiming that the Federalists wanted to turn the Mapuche over to the Chileans.⁵⁸

Godoy ended up as a Federalist prisoner, impeded from returning to the Pincheira camp. At this point, the Mapuche attacked the Federalists, massacring the soldiers on June 11, 1830, and Godoy was saved by a pincheirino soldier who lifted him onto his horse.⁵⁹ Shortly thereafter, Godoy fled to Chile, where he would gather the evidence to defend himself and the other Unitarians from accusations of complicity in the massacre.

Exile and Border Formation in Chile and the Río de la Plata

Whether a Unitarian plot or the work of Indigenous allies who felt betrayed or provoked by Hermosilla for unknown reasons, this episode is important because it shows the complexity of the frontier – between Indigenous and Creole societies, as well as between Chile and the Argentine provinces – in an era when political displacement and borders started to take on a more territorial form. The breakdown in sovereignty, starting with the implosion of the Spanish Empire and its state structures in America, led to a fluid situation in which borders and jurisdictions between countries, provinces, and Indigenous territories were porous and unclear. The gradual consolidation of nation-states in the region led to an assertion of control of these borders, often at the expense of Indigenous autonomy. Political dislocation played a key role in this process: Émigrés fled to neighboring jurisdictions, thus reaffirming the autonomy of the latter, while central authorities sought to bring these territories under their control, in part to eliminate the threat posed by exiles. The possibility of exile, even when only temporary, allowed different actors to defend their political positions from without, using violence, negotiation, public opinion, or a combination of these strategies. Loyalists and Patriots, Federalists and Unitarians, indios y critianos, all participated in these dynamics.

This was not, however, a linear process leading to the triumph of the nation-state. Porous borders allowed for possible territorial reconfiguration, particularly during the period when San Martín’s allies controlled governments on both sides of the Andes.⁶⁰ In a context of civil war and competing provincial sovereignties – including Indigenous autonomy – exile to a neighboring province or Indigenous polity was as important as crossing the new international borders. Flight could strengthen these alternative sovereignties, complicating the trend toward territorially bounded nation-states. While exile produced borders and played a role in competing sovereignties, it did not necessarily give rise to the national borders or state structures we know today.

The surrender of José Antonio Pincheira in 1832 came after years of steady erosion of his power through the combined actions of Buenos Aires and Santiago. Governor Rosas’s negotiations with the Boroganos left the pincheirinos increasingly isolated, despite the latter’s alliance with Mendoza. In 1832, the Chilean government sought to enlist the support of La Rioja’s Governor Facundo Quiroga against Pincheira. That same year, a Chilean expedition against the Pincheiras and their allies succeeded where previous ones had failed, capturing and executing Pablo Pincheira and Hermosilla in 1832, before crossing the cordillera to defeat José Antonio Pincheira the following year.⁶¹ José Antonio Pincheira negotiated a pardon, surrendered, and was allowed to retire to a small hacienda in Chile, where he lived out his days.⁶² It was from there that he was called on to testify about the Chacay Massacre, though, in another nod to the increasing importance of international borders, the Mendoza authorities did not seek to hold him accountable.

The republican powers that were consolidating on either side of the Andes – Rosas and his allies, or the conservative Chilean governments that emerged after 1829 – would no longer allow independent actors such as the Pincheira brothers to operate freely in what they saw as their territory. The combined efforts of Santiago and Buenos Aires to eliminate this threat had the effect of making the international border a more concrete reality. By eliminating the pincheirinos from the south Andean space, the Chilean government was able to further its control over the south, rooting out the last Loyalist stronghold, even if it could not stop the passage of émigrés and others from one side of the Andes mountains to the other. In Buenos Aires, the elimination of the pincheirinos played a key role in Rosas’s Indigenous military campaigns in these years and in his consolidation of power.

The defeat of the Pincheira brothers was part of the slow transition from jurisdictional to territorial borders, and the imagining of Chile and Argentina as territorially bounded nations. This would be more completely realized only toward the end of the century with the consolidation of a united federal republic in Argentina after 1861 and the conquest of Indigenous autonomy in the 1870s and 1880s by Santiago and Buenos Aires. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, Indigenous groups continued to offer refuge to those defeated in civil conflict in Argentina, as made clear by Lucio Mansilla’s famous account of his trip to Ranquel territory just a few years before these campaigns began.⁶³ Yet again, concerted action between Santiago and Buenos Aires – which also involved a great deal of competition as to where the border would run – set the pattern for the negotiations and brutal military campaigns that would lead to their conquest.

The effects of exile on territorialization differed from border to border. International borders gained in salience, provincial ones gradually declined, while the Indigenous frontier only ceded its importance through conquest. In the following decades, whenever Buenos Aires’ power over the provinces was weak – and interprovincial conflict strong – provincial borders and exile became more significant. Throughout the century, international exile, whether to neighboring countries or with the Mapuche, was an important feature of political struggle. The defeat of the pincheirino coincided with new waves of exile from Chile and the Argentine Confederation in the 1830s as more conservative republican regimes consolidated their control. Concentrated in urban sites, these exile waves would not have the same Indigenous alliances, military power, or freedom of movement along the frontier as had the Pincheira or the Carrera brothers before them. They would, however, play a crucial role in both the internal political order of the new republics as well as international relations in South America, as political émigrés engaged in host country politics and opposed their home governments. This was part of a wider range of transnational political, economic, and family ties that predated independence and played a role in the formation of independent republics.⁶⁴ The Chacay Massacre trial, marked by transnational public opinion, highlights these new dynamics. A new era of exile was emerging in the framework of nascent republics that were beginning to imagine themselves as territorially bounded nation-states.