Atrocidades civilizadas en la guerra contra los bárbaros. Principios del siglo XIX

• Main Authors: Juan Francisco Jiménez, Daniel Villar, Sebastián Leandro Alioto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro Científico y Tecnológico-CONICET, Mendoza & Universidad Nacional de La Pampa 2012-12-01
• Series: Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana
• Subjects: Indians; Civilized War; War against Barbarians; Atrocities
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/842

The atrocities carried out by pro-independence forces against the Indians of southern Chile during an episode of the Guerra a Muerte, at the beginning of the 19th century, originated the production of certain testimonies linked in such a way that they allow the reconstruction of that despicable set of conducts and the reactions they prompted. Besides accounting for the case already mentioned based on the accounts by four participants—which accompany this introduction—, and on the justifications and comments that two of them were forced to outline after a critical intervention of an outsider, we will try to answer the question if military atrocities constituted a sub-product of a special type of conflict—the one taking place when “tribal” societies face state forces—; if there were only circumstantial excesses, condemned and punished by the superiority, or if, on the contrary, they formed a systematic behavior; and last, if the rules that governed the confrontation of European powers against colonial enemies in the peripheral world were or were not different from the ones ruling the wars against other Western powers.