Both Argentina and Chile launched campaigns of territorial expansion in the second half of the 19th century , at the expenses of indigenous peoples and neighbor states . The so-called Pacification of the Araucania by the Chilean army dispossessed the up-to-then independent Mapuche people between the 1860s and the 1880s , as did Argentina with the Conquest of the Desert . In southern Patagonia , both states occupied indigenous land and ocean , and facilitated the genocide implemented by sheep-farmers and the Salesian priests in Tierra del Fuego . Argentina also expanded northward , dispossessing a number of Chaco peoples through a policy that may be considered as genocidal
Tierra del Fuego
Selk'nam genocide
Genocide of indigenous peoples