page_title: Cattle raiding
section_title: Patagonia and Araucanía
hierarchical_section_title: Cattle raiding / Historical cattle raiding / Patagonia and Araucanía
caption_attribution_description: El Malón
context_page_description: Cattle raiding is the act of stealing cattle. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing, and the perpetrator as a duffer. In North America, especially in the Wild West cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling, while an individual who engages in it is a rustler.
context_section_description: Cattle raiding became a major issue at the end of the 19th century in Argentina, where cattle stolen during malones were taken through Camino de los chilenos across the Andes to Chile, where they were exchanged for alcoholic beverages and firearms. Several indigenous groups and outlaws, such as the Boroano and Ranquel peoples, and the Pincheira brothers, ravaged the southern frontier of Argentina in search of cattle. To prevent the cattle raiding, the Argentine government built a system of trenches called Zanja de Alsina in the 1870s. Most cattle raids ended after the military campaigns of the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, and the following partition of Patagonia established by the Boundary Treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina.
  The return of Chilean veterans from the War of the Pacific coincided with the Chilean Army's crushing of Mapuche resistance in the Occupation of Araucanía (1861–1883). This led to opportunities for bandits and veterans-turned-bandits to immigrate to the newly opened Araucanía territory, leading to sudden rise in violence and in a region that was recovering from Chilean-Mapuche warfare. Bandits that immigrated to Araucanía allied with displaced Mapuche and made cattle theft their chief business. Stolen cattle was sold in marketplaces through the region.
caption: El Malón, Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858)
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