Constituent Genocide in Argentina: the Question on Reparation

DIANA LENTON; WALTER DELRIO; PILAR PÉREZ; ALEXIS PAPAZIAN; MARIANO NAGY; MARCELO MUSANTE

Armenian Review

Worcester

Lugar: Masachussets; Año: 2012 vol. 53 p. 63 - 84

1911-9933

In Argentina, genocide was perpetrated over the Indigenous Peoples and there has been no account of this for more than a century. Therefore, in the present a majority of the Argentineans perceive themselves as the outcome of a European melting pot. In this sense, the European colonization of the sixteenth century over a territory imagined as a desert and the expansion of the nation-state by the late nineteenth century are the historical processes that account for this melting pot.  The aim of this paper is to examine the construction and effects of the genocide of the indigenous Peoples as an unthinkable event in history. In the present, different agencies -such as indigenous Peoples´ organizations, academic research, alternative media- have started to visibilize the constitutive genocide of the Argentinean nation state. This has generated a growing debate on the idea and the historical processes developed since then. In this context a series of specific but related conflicts can be identified and described. We name these conflicts as genocide-prints through which we will consider the scope, not only of the genocide, but also of the current debates on possible/impossible reparations.