In 1884, the Argentine Minister of War and Navy, Benjamín Victorica, commanded his troops in the conquest and occupation of the current territories of the province of Chaco, then inhabited by the Mocoít, Qom, Pilagás, Wichís, Vilelas and other peoples. The process of forced displacement and their use as cheap labor required the creation of the so-called civil reductions, state institutions that delimited territories where the original inhabitants could be confined for their control and availability. The Napalpí reduction was created in 1911, on an area of 20,000 hectares. In 1915, 1300 people belonging to the Qom, Mocoít and Shinpi’ communities lived there, usually employed in the forest and cotton exploitation administered by the National Territory of Chaco in control of the territory, as well as by external settlers in their farms and sugar mills. The inhabitants of the reduction were not allowed to move freely and suffered from terrible housing, sanitary, food and working conditions, with unequal pay, without rest and forced to follow customs alien to their tradition and ancestral way of life.

Between the end of 1923 and the beginning of 1924, conflicts over these conditions between the inhabitants of the reduction and the government of the National Territory of Chaco increased when Governor Fernando Centeno prohibited the departure of indigenous people from the reduction, since the local settlers were opposed to the transfer of the labor force to the sugar mills in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta. While the Qom and Mocoit wanted to work in the sugarcane harvest, where the pay was scarce but higher than in the reduction, the settlers wanted to use them for their cotton crops. Led by the chieftains Gómez, Maidana, Machado and Dominga, hundreds of Qom and Mocoít withdrew from the reduction and gathered in El Aguará to start a strike and request for better living conditions, which was not answered at first by the authorities. In May 1924 the negotiations were extended with petitions and promises from the administration of the territory, although in the face of their non-compliance the concentration remained firm while the local press spoke of “indigenous threat” and “uprising”. In June of that year a police contingent was installed near the reduction to pursue its inhabitants.

On July 19, the Chaco II plane of the Aero Club Chaco flew over the area and dropped food and sweets from the air to drive the Qom and Mocoít out of their homes: when this happened a force of more than one hundred men of the National Police of Territories, together with settlers and landowners, fired more than 5000 bullets at the men, elderly, women and children concentrated there. Those who were not killed in the shooting were shot with machetes, beaten and tortured. Testimonies of mutilations, decapitations, impalements, burials in mass graves and incineration of corpses are preserved. The bodies of the leaders were exhibited as an example, and a jar with the ears and testicles of the chieftain Maidana remained after the massacre in the police station of the nearby town of Quitilipi. The survivors of the massacre (around forty children and fifteen adults) were hunted down until September to eliminate the possibility of witnesses. It is estimated that between 400 and 500 Qom and Mocoit people were killed in the events.

Shortly after the massacre, the first news began to circulate in the Chaco press and military reports which, in a concealment maneuver, adopted the official version that spoke of “malones” and confrontations between factions of native peoples. The federal court of Resistencia, capital of Chaco, labeled file 910/24 as “Indigenous uprising in the Reduction of Napalpí”, gathering only police versions and without witnesses from the affected communities. Centeno was forced to go to the capital Buenos Aires, where the newspapers were already reporting versions of the massacre, to expose a false version indicating that there had been four dead, all of them “Indians who killed each other”. On August 29, forty days after the massacre, the former director of the Reduction of Napalpí, Enrique Lynch Arribálzaga, denounced by means of a letter to the National Congress that the persecution of survivors continued so that they could not serve as witnesses if an Investigating Commission of the Chamber of Deputies was sent.

The case escalated to such an extent that in September 1924 the Chamber of Deputies began to discuss it with one session per week during the following month. Several legislators demanded Centeno’s resignation and the socialist block assumed the responsibility of the investigating commission. On September 4, an extraordinary session was called to question the Minister of the Interior, Vicente Gallo, for six hours. There, Congressman Francisco Pérez Leirós presented the results, referring to them as “a series of facts that seem to belong to the nightmare of a madman” and showed the jar with the ears and testicles of the chieftain Maidana.

Despite the evidence and the results of the investigations, the case was quickly closed. Centeno continued in his position and displaced the judge who was in charge of the case, Justo Farías, to replace him with Juan Sessarego, a man he trusted. The prosecutor Jerónimo Cello, who asked for the case not to be closed, was therefore removed. Sessarego acquitted the eighty police officers charged. The crime thus remained unpunished and hidden for eight decades.

In 2004, eighty years after the massacre, the organizations representing the native peoples of the Chaco initiated a civil action for compensation for damages, and in January 2008 the government of that province made a public and official apology for the events. In 2014, the National Public Prosecutor’s Office initiated a new investigation of the crimes committed in Napalpí that lasted four years to determine whether crimes against humanity had taken place, and requested the opening of a Trial for the Truth given the situation that all those responsible were already deceased. As part of this investigation, the Human Rights Unit of Chaco’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the civil organization Napalpí Foundation also requested the intervention of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). This team began the work of exhumation of the mass grave at the site of the massacre in 2018, and found in September of the following year the first skeletal remains that determined the existence of four mass graves.