Backstory: Argentina's indigenous shadows

Today, says Ines Quilici, a sociologist with Argentina's National Institute for Indian Affairs, they "live in a terrible exclusion" from society around them, an exclusion reinforced by ignorance. "In Santa Fe Province the illiteracy level among the Mocovi is alarming, maybe as high as 75 percent," she says. "This is among adults, although lately the children are getting into schools." Ms. Quilici estimates only between 6,000 to 7,000 Mocovi remain in this area. (In all, according to James S. Olson's book "Indians of Central and South America," there are 10,000 Mocovi alive today.) The Argentine Association for Native Peoples estimates a national total of 200,000 indigenous people from 15 different tribes.) Her agency tries to help them by buying small pieces of land and setting up community centers where they can study their own language and history.

"For their own defense," she says, "the Mocovi must learn who they are, where they came from. They've got to wake up."

Argentina has always presented itself as a white European country in South America. Near the end of the 19th century, in an effort to populate the country the government encouraged only European immigration: Travel in any direction from here, and eventually you'll encounter a remnant of an old agricultural colony, land given free or at generous rates to French, Swiss, German, British, Jewish, and Italian settlers. The Indians were moved aside.

As I watched boxer Juan Vera stalk his opponent, I thought it appropriate that these people gather in places like this. I was hardly surprised when told their enthusiasm has stimulated the creation of boxing clubs hereabouts. Why boxing? Maybe because one of their own did so well at it.

Outside Club Parador, Provincial Route 1 runs 100 miles up to San Javier, a town of maybe 6,000 people. San Javier began as a Jesuit mission in 1743. It was the site of the last rising by the Mocovi, in 1904, a desperate act that grew from the bitter taste of never-ending defeat, of a people forced deeper into poverty with each wave of immigration.

In the novel, "Wind From the North," Alcides Greca, wrote: "Not one of these pariahs is the owner of the soil where he lays his head. Every day a new owner arrives who pushes him farther and farther away.... Upon the last Indians a wind of death blows. Even their dogs seem unhappy."

Not far from San Javier on Provincial Route 1, stands an enormous memorial to Carlos Monzon, built on the spot where he was killed in a car crash in 1995. Monzon held the world middleweight boxing title from 1970 to 1974; he retired undefeated. He was the first native American boxing champion in the history of that most ancient sport - a Mocovi, born in San Javier.

Monzon is a hero to the Mocovi, though mightily flawed: he went to prison for killing his wife. Yet this hardly diminished the affection for him among his people, such as those in the Club Parador.

They need all the heroes they can get.

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