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1916: The Zainuco Massacre

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On this date in 1916, eight convicts were summarily executed by Argentine police after a prison break in an affair known as the Zainuco Massacre.

Almost all the information about this event available online appears in Spanish and this also applies to the links in this post.

Jose Cancino, Nicolas Ayacura, Fructuoso Padin, Jose Lopez, Antonio Stradelli, Transito Alvarez, Francisco Cerda and Desiderio Guzman were among the last escapees among over 100 inmates who had overpowered their guards and fled the overcrowded Nequen prison on May 23.

Most of these men would be trapped and re-arrested in the coming days, but a large body of them forged rapidly westward, hoping to cover the 500 kilometers to the Chilean border. Not until a week later did police catch up with them, at a place called Zanaicuo south of the city of Zapala.

Bivouaced at a ranch there, the fugitives* were awakened from their rest during the dark early hours of May 30 by a fusillade; they had looted where possible during their flight, but their ammunition was not plentiful and quickly exhausted itself, forcing the escapees’ surrender.

At this point, their captors divided their prizes, either 15 or 16 souls, into two halves. The first of these halves, the lucky half, marched away to Zapala, destined to return to their irons. The other eight were brought to a lagoon, putatively to freshen up … and there they were shot dead, to a man. The cops’ story was that a couple of them tried to grab guns, though a resident of the parts who found the bodies reported that all eight had been shot execution-style in the head. They were consigned to a mass grave.

A few months later, nosy Neuquen journalist Abel Chaneton, who evinced an unwanted degree of interest in this incident, was also shot dead by police, permitting the quiet closure of the case.

And there it has rested ever since — mostly in obscurity, although a human rights consortium recently marked the centennial of the killings by placing a sculpture and marker, reading:

100 years after the Zainuco massacre, we rise up against oblivion and the impunity of this and all the crimes of the state authorities.

* A South African named Martin Bresler had separated from the main body of prisoners and did indeed manage to reach Chile — allegedly surviving a freezing night by nesting inside his horse, tauntaun style. He moved to the United States, fought in World War I, and wound up dying in a Buenos Aires mental asylum in 1942.

On this day..