Los Tobas

HISTORY

 The Toba tribe belongs to native people who inhabited the current country of Paraguay, Chaco and also the so-called Chaco region formed by the provinces of Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero, Salta and Formosa.
 Originally, Chaco was covered by vast forests of valuable plant species, such as "quebracho". The tuffs were a nomadic group. They used to survive by hunting, fishing andgathering. Day by day, they started to adopt more advanced cultural elements, such as pottery, weaving with plant fibers and basketry.
Since 1880, the Government began a campaign, which objective was the occupation of indigenous territories. Chaco campaign lasted until 1919, when it was the grand confrontation between these groups and the army. The repeating rifles decimated the Indians. Their ancestralhunting became involved, first, to logging.
 The Indians resisted heroically and there were very significant attacks tuffs groups. Some are well remembered, for example: Laguna Yema, El Palmar and Fortin Yunta. The effort was in vain; Aborigines were marginalized in the poorest areas and reduced their territory so they found survival increasingly difficult.
 They had two strategies of dominationof the surrounding society that we should highlight, for better understanding of the situation of this town today.
 The first because of military nature, and is remembered as The Conquest of Gran Chaco, one of the main characters was General Victoria. The goal: the territorial expansion of the National Government.
The second was economic, interested in raw materials (tannins, logging andcotton, sugarcane) and cheap labor. Companies like 'The Forest' performed an intensive exploitation of quebracho wood used for railway construction and tannin for tanning hides. They became to encompass more than two million hectares. When they left the area, thousands of workers were unprotected.
Quebracho tree takes a hundred years to grow. No one was interested. With great difficulty, the tuffs wereadapted to a new situation much more oppressive. Very few worked in the logging industry: in his worldview quebracho trees were sacred, and much of them became discord with the target, they were the depredations of the forest. They could continue fishing in the river Bermejito, which crosses the region of the province of Chaco, where they settled mostly. Eventually, they could sell their crafts,but there wasn´t too much tourism in the region that can buy them, and rural or domestic tasks, in the case of women in the service of white settlers. But above all, they had a better chance of survival because of the Chaco region produce cotton. Once a year they participated massively in the cotton harvest, which allowed them to get a good sum of cash. Managed by women, money was sufficient tomeet the most urgent needs until the next harvest.
The serious problem is, in principle due to bad weather, crop failure.
Another major capitalist enterprise was 'Las Palmas'. In 1911 was: 100,000 ha, a capital of $ 3,000,000 gold, a sugar mill that produced 500 tons of cane per day plant tannin, alcohol distillery that produced 2000 liters per day, sawmill, power plant, repair shops, port on theParaguay river, rail: via fixed 75 km, 20 km via laptop, proveduría stores, 22,000 head of cattle (unpublished monograph Hugo Humberto Beck) transcribe a complaint to make then-Socialist deputy Alfredo Palacios to the National Congress after her visit to the area:
"I've been in 'Las Palmas' (...) and I saw with pain a state within a state (...) and where painful to say, the Argentine authorities,obedient, obey the will of foreign managers ( ...) I felt out of my country meet (...) and I felt real sad when (...) indigenous and Corrientes (...) went to my lodging, full of fear, to speak of exploitation they suffered. "
 Another important day was 'The Killing Napalpí': In 1911 was founded Napalpí Reduction (means 'graveyard' because there they buried dead people). It had an area of ​​8...