On July 19, 1924, police and settlers shot more than 300 members of the Qom and Moqoit peoples, who were protesting for better living conditions and an end to the abuses committed against them in the fields where they were forced to work in slave-like conditions.

Among the victims of the massacre were children and elderly people, mutilated and buried in mass graves.

After these events, the persecution and repression of the survivors continued.

Almost a century later, on April 19, 2022, the first trial in this nation on such crimes began, which recognized the responsibility of the State in the ‘planning, execution and concealment of the murder with cruelty and brutal perversity in the context of a process of genocide of the indigenous peoples’.

Federal Judge Zunilda Niremperger considered that this sentence constitutes in itself a form of reparation and ordered the translation of the final arguments into the Qom and Moqoit languages.

She also ordered the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to continue with the excavations, search and exhumation of mass graves and to return the skeletal remains found to the community.

She also requested the Foreign Affairs Ministry to disseminate the sentence in international organizations and the inclusion of the case in the national educational plan.

Niremperger requested to strengthen the policies of prevention and eradication of hatred, racism, discrimination and xenophobia, as well as the respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.

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