Barranca Yaco. An Argentine historical-political latitude

Abstract

This article analyses the eventful way in which “Barranca Yaco” became a long-lasting Argentine historical-political point of latitude. Starting with the
assassination of Facundo Quiroga in the place of that name (1835), its rapid elaboration as a crucial event and its assimilation to the toponym itself, it has gone through a series of historiographical extensions and diffractions, generically cultural or strictly political, through which that place was composed. It also looks at the ways in which the liminal event, diversely valued, fed into and absorbed other events: in particular, the one that established the most direct and obscure relationship with it: the explosive detonation of Marcos Osatinsky’s corpse by the Comando Libertadores de América in 1975. Those oscillations,
stratifications, and bifurcations are best seen by going a little further: to the patrimonialist, commemorative, even memorialist turn of the XXIst century.