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After several years of research in Chile and Argentina Patagonia, the Spanish historian José Luis Alonso Marching published "Menendez. King of Patagonia", the definitive text on the subject-according to experts on the truth of the extinction of the selk'nam in Tierra del Fuego, which in fact was an order by José Menéndez, the great landowner in southern Chile, killing about whose family there are two separate museums in Punta Arenas, who is credited as the economic development of the region.
Last year the Spanish historian José Luis Alonso Marching found in the National Library of Spain's original text Thirty years in Tierra del Fuego, the Salesian missionary expedition great naturalist and Alberto de Agostini. With this book in your hands, the historian found that in the current editions of the text, including on 2013, paragraphs and not missing any. In texts censored, the missionary was relentless: the extinction of selk'nam people in Chilean Patagonia and Argentina was not the work of his "ignorant gluttony," "tribal war" or a product of his "miserable physique" as dictated for many years the official story, but the product of extermination and expulsion ordered by one man, Jose Menendez, the big landowner of the southern tip of Chile.

"Explorers, ranchers and soldiers had no scruples against mauser download their wretched Indigine, as if it were beasts or game," reads one of the censored paragraphs (De Agostini, 1929: 244).


Alberto de Agostini with a Selk'nam

This finding together with other important testimonies are contained in the book Menendez. King of Patagonia (Editorial Catalonia), recently launched in Chile and, according to expert historians in Patagonia, as Osvaldo Bayer, would be "the definitive book on the truth that occurred in southern Chile and Argentina."

"There were two things that struck me in the research: the genocide of an entire people (selk'nam) in the twentieth century and the tragic fate of the workers (also butchered) working in those rooms," says Alonso Marching almost at the beginning of the conversation with Culture + City, which explains without euphemisms nature of criminal responsibility who was also the grandfather of Enrique Campos Menéndez, Pinochet's favorite writer and editor of the military orders of the coup.

CENSORSHIP

Censorship in the text of De Agostini says Alonso Marching, was more of a self-censorship that religious applied to their books after the congregation was pressed by the power of Menendez to change history and whitewash the slaughter to more latifundista Big southern Chile, who accumulate one of the largest fortunes in Latin America with the wool trade.

"The first Salesians did not deny the killings, the first, as Faganno and De Agostini, were people who were in the field, who built missions from scratch, and published in their journals how they were exterminating the indigine. It happens that after there was a change in the historiography of the Salesians. Those who come after are already subject to the economic power of Menéndez, then that history colonization is rewritten, and there maintain that the indigine simply disappear without intervention ranchers, "Alonso said.



The motivation for investigating the role of Menendez and his descendants in Chile was born almost by chance. One day it counts strolling by the Asturian Museum in Buenos Aires, found a bust of Jose Menendez. I never heard a word from him, even though it is Spaniard historian. In his hometown, Alonso found no street named after him, but a school, founded at the beginning of the last century, it was the way they were the "Indians" (as the European settlers who came to America known) to give back to their homeland fortune reached in his adventures.

"More than 350 schools were built in Asturias, in the first decades of the twentieth century, and among them is that of José Menéndez and Miranda that bears his name," says Alonso, thus emphasizing the starting point of a history marked by Fortunately, cruelty and lies.

EMPIRE MENÉNDEZ

In the Region of Magallanes, Punta Arenas specifically, the Menendez family mansions are preserved as museums, realizing, through its fastuosidad- from the golden age of the Magellan region.

The book explains that Menendez, after a short stay in Cuba, arrived in our country in 1868 Shortly receives thousands of hectares as a benefit of the Chilean government for the colonization in the south. The idea was to bring economic development to the area and establish indigenous reservations. In those years Mauricio Braun, another immigrant, had also received thousands of acres, like Julius Popper in Argentina.

Alonso Marching note that, as part of a large investment, families Menendez and Braun are joined through the marriage of their children, and lands Popper after a bizarre death for alleged poisoning, are assigned to Menendez, turning the latter into the master of all Chilean Patagonia and Argentina through Tierra del Fuego Explotadora Society.

The economic empire that came to add banks and shipping, trade originated from sheep's wool, which they sold to England in exchange for sterling. The insertion of the sheep in the area and consequent displacement of guanaco, animal that inhabited those areas, according to the book is the source of one of the largest massacres of indigenous and had full editorial power of those years to cover the genocide.

KILLING OF THE SELK'NAM

"As we began to move sheep border because all the wealth of economic dynasties was based on the wool livestock," says the historian, "began more land required to finish settling in the territory selk'nam" .

When installed in the area, the land is divided by barbed wire, and guanaco -main sustenance and shelter from the Cornered onas- looks to higher ground.

"Once the guanaco disappears Selk'nam begin to starve. When they realize the appearance of the sheep begin to feed this animal and understand it as something quite natural, do not really know how those sheep have appeared there, nor knew the concept of ownership, "explains historian.


Grupo de “cazadores de indigenas” de una de las estancias de Tierra del Fuego

"When Selk'nam start attacking sheep, Jose Menendez gives the order to kill them. They do so first by shooting directly to exterminate them, and women and children hunting occurs. The hunt will then offer them in public places, "says Alonso, who states that this is long after the exhibition of indigine and pieces of circus, in what is called" human zoos ".

The Menendez family, especially José Menéndez -remarca the historian, were the instigators of the massacre. "José Menéndez began as a foreman and administrator of your stay a Scotsman named Alexander Mc Lennan (The red pig), who was the biggest killer of Indigenous and recognized by him. He received direct orders from José Menéndez, was his employee. "

The book argues that for every dead Indigine, Menendez paid one pound, so that in fortune which reached to have the Scot could even calculate the number of Indigine killed and, according to the versions of other historians, could estimated at several hundred, if not thousands.

"When he retired Mc Lennan, Jose Menendez gave her an expensive watch in gratitude for all these services," he says.

THE OFFICIAL HISTORY

"I managed to contact me with a great-grandson of Alexander Mc Lennan, who told me that you can not make it right to kill Indians, but thanks to what his grandfather and Jose Menendez, today no Indians in Tierra del Fuego and no problems. And they tell me that in the 2014 "recalls historian amazement.

For many years the official story that was told was aimed to conceal the crimes, which were even celebrated as sport.


Selk'man mission in San Rafael

In 1971, the historian and descendant of the clan, Armando Braun Menéndez, ranchers spokesman, said that the cause of death of the Indigine were their eating habits. "It was often observed next to the remains of a whale, the bodies of the Indigine, arrived late to the feast, were victims of their ignorant gluttony" (Braun 1971: 135). Insists so much on the subject he writes that "it was so miserable that his physical body could not bear its own weather."

This absurd conjecture Alonso explains in his book hit the blunt response ethnologist Jean-Christian Spahni, who sai😛 "My research around the inhabitants have shown me that genocide had really existed and were caused precisely by the owners stays at Armando Braun tries to defend. "

Another of the heirs of the estate owners, the favorite writer of Pinochet, Enrique Campos Menendez, he even express their doubts about a possible cannibalism of Selk'nam, issue, upon his words, and no one even dared mention .

The official history of genocide denial tries to settle the point, another of the heirs, Eduardo Braun Menéndez, He comes to bind told in the book "the scientist Alexander Lipschutz (National Science Award 1969) the removal of any reference to indigenous hunting, as a prelude to publish his essays in the journal Science and Research, who led the grandson of José Menéndez. "

THE TRAGIC PATAGONIA

In addition to the extermination of the ones, book Alonso plays other sensitive issues in Patagonia, and that has to do with the killing of more than 1,400 Chilean workers in 1921.

These crimes were collected in a book called The Tragic Patagonia, published in Argentina in 1928 by José María Borrero. In this book, written without scientific rigor, there was a report on each page and soon became a myth to disappear from bookstores. A second text, allegedly called Orgies blood and, according to myth, recounted the murders of 1921, became a legend after ensuring that the manuscript had been stolen and burned.

Part of this story was picked up with scientific seriousness by Osvaldo Bayer, who published Rebellion in Patagonia, in 1972, a testimonial nonfiction book that dealt with the struggle by syndicalists workers revolt in the province of Santa Cruz in Patagonia Argentina, between 1920 and 1921 This story began as a strike against the exploitation of workers by their employers, then repressed by the army under Lieutenant Héctor Benigno Varela, sent by President Hipólito Yrigoyen.

"They shot hundreds of laborers of the rooms, most of them Chileans, but also Asturian, Argentines, Germans, Italians. Those are two great tragedies in this story, I think this story can not see it with a smile because it's a tragic story, because they disappear so brutal peoples who inhabited for millennia this land and there is a savage crackdown on the pawns worked on ranches, "says Alonso Marching, whose book Bayer acknowledges that" after this collection of evidence no one can point out that the criticisms that emerged as the events occurred or were exaggerated versions of pure imagination. "

'Like historian think is responsibility of the Chilean state in these massacres?

'The laborers were shot by the Argentine Army, but most were Chileans and Chilean authorities not only did not raise his voice, but the Argentine authorities collaborated with silence. This Osvaldo Bayer demonstrated long ago, when he discovered how the Chilean police themselves carrying the laborers to Argentina, where that country's army shot them. It is true that these events occurred almost a century ago, but States must reconnoiter. In Argentina, in the area where the shootings occurred, each headquarters where there was a detention center there are plaques identified in that place and in that barracks killed people. I do not know what tributes Chilean authorities have made these pawns.