A Guaycuruan nation of the central Formosa marshes between the Pilcomayo and Bermejo, close kin of the Toba — long confused with them — who held the heart of the Chaco against Spaniard and settler alike.
Confined within the Formosa Territory after the Conquest of the Chaco, the Pilagá were massacred at Rincón Bomba (1947), where National Gendarmerie gunned down hundreds to over a thousand; some 4,500 Pilagá keep their language in central Formosa.
The atlas holds 3 border frames for Pilagá —
the shape you scrub through changes in 1600 · 1751 · 1884.
Moments from the Chronicle
1884The Conquest of the Chaco begins Building on a war the Argentine state had declared in 1870, President Roca's minister Victorica launched the decisive 1884 campaign into the Gran Chaco, driving the Toba, Pilagá, Mocoví and Wichí north of the Bermejo behind a line of forts and pushing survivors onto reductions, sugar mills and cotton estates; formal hostilities ended only in 1917.
1947Rincón Bomba massacre of the Pilagá Over weeks in October 1947 the National Gendarmerie, backed by aircraft, fired on and hunted down a gathering of Pilagá near Las Lomitas, Formosa — estimates of the dead run from hundreds to as many as 1,500 — a foundational trauma later declared a genocide by an Argentine federal court.