This April 16 marked 146 years since the start of the Desert Campaign, an essential process for the territorial, institutional, and economic consolidation of modern Argentina. However, what should be a moment of patriotic reflection is, year after year, hijacked by a toxic and reductionist narrative: that of historical revisionism, which has transformed soldiers into genocides, heroes into villains, and the national state into a machinery of extermination.
The Desert Campaign was not a genocide, but a necessity. It was a state action aimed at incorporating territories that escaped the control of the central government, where the law of the strongest prevailed and where continuous raids—assault, robbery, and death—created a climate of constant insecurity. It was not a war of extermination against indigenous peoples, as some want to present today, but a political, military, and strategic action to guarantee sovereignty, order, and peace throughout Argentine territory.
It is enough to recall the words of Lucio V. Mansilla, who, after living with indigenous peoples in his famous work "Una excursión a los indios ranqueles," made it clear that violence was not the exclusive domain of the State, but part of a much more complex conflict. The raids were not simple desperate responses, but organized incursions that murdered, kidnapped women and children, and ravaged estates.
But revisionism doesn't seek to understand history in its context: it trims, deforms, and turns it into an ideological banner. For them, anything that smells of authority, civilization, or national defense is oppression. The same people who idealize Marxist guerrillas that sowed terror in the 70s now lament the "invasion" of the desert as if Roca had ordered the Holocaust.
Julio Argentino Roca, on the other hand, was a builder. Under his command, Argentina went from being a fragmented and vulnerable country to a unified nation, with clear borders, effective state presence, and productive potential. It was thanks to that campaign that Argentina incorporated Patagonia, extended the railroad, promoted immigration, and placed the country on the threshold of becoming one of the world's agro-exporting powers.
In the words of historian Félix Luna, who can't be accused of being ultraconservative, Roca was "the most effective politician the country had in the 19th century." His action, far from being criminal, was profoundly rational: "If we didn't do it, the Chileans would," Luna warned in his classes.
