Pedro Andrés García in the Buenos Aires Frontier: from diplomacy to military occupation

Abstract

Colonel Pedro Andrés García is considered a highly skilled specialist in the issue of the southern frontier with Indians. He was said to encourage a policy that combined threatened violence with seduction as a way to attract them to “civilized life”. In this paper I intend to prove that his main goal was to incorporate Indian territories, up to the Colorado River, to the incipient Nation-State. The land, not civilizing Indians or defending the frontier, was the object of his Indian policy. Thus, in 1810 he supported a formal agreement by treaties with friendly southern caciques, resuming the diplomatic tradition of the late colonial era. The changing political circumstances and the growing hunger for lands of Buenos Aires’ expanding cattle-raising economy inclined him towards a non-negotiated military occupation a decade later.