Charrúa

The grasslands of Uruguay were the heartland of the Charrúa, an Indigenous people whose range also reached Entre Ríos in Argentina and Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. Semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, they resisted Spanish and Portuguese colonists for three centuries. After the Uruguayan army's attack at Salsipuedes in 1831 they were officially declared extinct, yet descendants survived, and since the 1980s organisations in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil have reclaimed a Charrúa identity.

Little is known of Charrúa life before contact, as nearly all written records come from Spanish observers. They moved with the seasons and with rain and drought: in summer they went to the coasts and rivers to fish and gather shellfish, fruit and roots, and in winter they moved inland to hunt deer, rheas and small animals with bows and arrows and with bolas, stones joined by cords and thrown to entangle prey. At first contact in the sixteenth century they were the dominant people between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, alongside smaller Chaná and Guaraní populations, and conflict with Europeans pushed many into the Banda Oriental, the land east of the Uruguay River.

The Jesuit chronicler Pedro Lozano blamed the Charrúa for killing the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís on his voyage up the Río de la Plata in 1515–16, and together with the Chaná they fought the occupation of their land. European settlement of the Banda Oriental came late, around 1700, as Spain, Portugal and Britain contended for the Plata basin. After decades of fighting, a treaty of 22 March 1732 recognised Charrúa laws and sovereignty in return for their recognition of Spanish law. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the spread of cattle ranching and the privatisation of herds disrupted their food supply, and settlers frequently shot Indigenous people who crossed their land.

Many Charrúa had served under the independence leader José Gervasio Artigas, and they strongly backed the Thirty-Three Orientals against the Brazilian Empire. In the new republic, however, settlers accused the remaining free Charrúa of raiding and banditry, and in 1830 Rivera's rival Juan Antonio Lavalleja urged action against them. President Fructuoso Rivera, who had long been on friendly terms with them, summoned the chiefs and their families to a meeting by the Salsipuedes Creek on the pretext of needing help to guard the border. On 11 April 1831, once the gathering was off its guard, they were surrounded by about 1,200 soldiers under the president's nephew, Bernabé Rivera. Rivera's official report gave 40 killed and 300 taken prisoner; the details of the attack remain disputed. Survivors were marched about 260 kilometres to Montevideo and handed out as servants or sold, and further attacks followed, including one in August 1831 in which 15 were killed and 80 captured. The campaign is widely described as genocidal.

Four captives were bought in 1833 and exhibited to the public in Paris; three of them, and a baby born there, soon died. A monument in Montevideo, Los Últimos Charrúas, commemorates them.

The historian Lincoln Maiztegui Casas has described the Charrúa decline as a gradual process lasting more than 200 years, rooted in European occupation of their land, while Diego Bracco sees Salsipuedes as the end of the Charrúa as a cohesive community in Uruguayan public memory. Some communities survived in Argentina and Brazil; the Argentine census of 2001 recorded 676 Charrúa in Entre Ríos, and descendants across the three countries have been estimated at 160,000 to 300,000. The Charrúa language is no longer spoken.

After Uruguay's return to democracy in 1985, people began to affirm Charrúa ancestry publicly. The Association of Descendants of the Charrúa Nation was founded in August 1989, and the Council of the Charrúa Nation, formed in 2005 by ten communities and organisations, campaigns for recognition. Researchers describe this as a contemporary ethnogenesis. In Brazil, a Charrúa community in Porto Alegre won official recognition in 2007. In Uruguay the phrase "garra charrúa", Charrúa tenacity, became linked with the national football team after 1935.

Our 1492 map draws an approximate Charrúa territory across present-day Uruguay and neighbouring lands. It borders the Guaraní (including the Mbya) to the north and the Guenoa-Minuane and Yaro nearby.