Who Killed Jules Crevaux? : Murder in the Bolivian Chaco

Abstract

The first book to explore the deaths of explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew from an Indigenous perspective.In 1882, the celebrated French explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew were killed by Indigenous people in the Bolivian Chaco, a fiercely contested region on the border between Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. The event sparked an international uproar. The scene of the crime was embroiled in clashes among various Indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, and missionaries. Official investigators sent from France and competing newspapers ended up mired in a morass of equivocal, ambiguous, false, and contradictory information.To make sense of this event, Isabelle Combès is the first researcher to consult the local archives and to include the perspective of Indigenous peoples. In search of who killed Crevaux and why, Combès unearths the power struggles and social imaginaries behind the incident and its aftermath. Readers will find not only an engrossing story in these pages but also an exemplar of historical inquiry that questions the very nature of truth-telling.