The peaceful Tehuelche chieftain Örqueke (Olkeke or Ölkelken) made two trips to Buenos Aires. In the first part of 1867 he was depicted with other Patagonian chiefs at an unspecified location in the city. There are no pictures of him from the second (mandatory) visit in 1883, when he came to the city as a “prisoner of war” and later became a distinguished visitor to Buenos Aires society, but there are pictures of his people.
On July 19 of the same year (1883), 17 men and 37 women and children from their community near Las Salinas, near Puerto Deseado, were captured by Argentine Army troops and expelled from their awnings.
Ten days after this remnant of the so-called “Desert Campaign,” they were forcibly shipped onto the National Navy steamship Villarino and housed in the military barracks of Retiro.
At the Boca dock, people looked curiously at “the wild ones.” She was eagerly waiting to be able to share the housework with the children and young Chinese women.
One of the detained Tehuelches, Gencho, also known as Cohuano or Guestre, threatened to cut their throats with a knife in his hand when he learned that the community’s children would be separated from their parents and given to families in Buenos Aires. The efforts of the capital Luis Piedra Buena and Federico Spurr calmed the situation. “This broadcast will not be distributed like the previous ones,” wrote chronicler Nicanor Larrain.
The diaries The press And The nation They put pressure on public opinion. They claimed that they were a tame tribe and that the military action that Colonel Lorenzo Vintter, governor of Patagonia, entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Lino Oris de Roa was unjustifiable.
Once “the mistake” was understood in the official spheres, prisoners declared them “guests.” The nation’s president, Julio Argentino Roca, received Chief Örqueke in his office in the government building, gave him money and invited him to smoke cigars.
To entertain them and clean up the chaos, the Tehuelches visited the zoo, the Humberto I circus and rode the tram around the Argentine capital. At the zoo, Orqueke experienced one of the big surprises the big city had in store. He saw an African ostrich. A huge species compared to the “oiu” (choiques) of their country.
At the invitation of Ramón Lista, President of the Argentine Geographic Society, and the Spanish Ambassador to Buenos Aires, Don Juan Durán y Cuervo, they visited two strongholds of the Buenos Aires night: the “La Alegría” theater, where the invited Tehuelches were applauded by the audience. They also visited the Paris Café. Between zarzuelas, speeches and banquets, they were presented and exhibited to the Argentine public. Some clever circus entrepreneurs suggested hiring them, but the government did not grant permission.
The mask of tragedy appeared with irony in this political-military entanglement, in which important authorities of the nation were involved, since the peaceful Tehuelche chief, who was a collaborator of the settlers, companion of the expedition member George Musters, friend of Piedra Buena and the governors Carlos Moyano and Ramón Lista, died in Buenos Aires. He could no longer return to Patagonia: he died of pneumonia in the big city.
His body was removed from bed 39, the first room of the military hospital, and dissected by a group of students to be taken to a display case at the Natural History Museum of La Plata. His skeleton was lost during the journey and the whereabouts of his remains remain unknown to this day.
Örqueke’s death did not mean the end of his community’s worries. The next day they were subjected to a lengthy photo session with commentary The nation and the newspaper The diary.
After Italian-Argentine botanist Carlos Luis Spegazzini commissioned the photographs, the national government reneged on its promise to return them to their lands: a group of experienced Tehuelche horsemen were deployed to take the cattle south. The rest remained like ghosts in the barracks or scattered without identity in a society that makes them invisible.
Osvaldo L. Mondelo He is a certified journalist (UNLP), former university professor and author of the current book Mulatto (Chümjaluwun).
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