For a century it was a name to inspire schoolchildren: Julio Argentino Roca, the military hero and statesman who tamed Patagonia's wilderness and made Argentina a modern nation.

He was George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one, a founding father who gazed from banknotes, adorned plinths and gave his name to avenues from Buenos Aires to Santa Cruz.

But maybe not for much longer. Avenues are being renamed and there is a campaign to topple the former president's statues, erase him from banknotes and teach children a new version: that Roca was a genocidal murderer who brought shame to Argentina.

The man portrayed for generations as a talented visionary has been recast, according to revisionist history, as a villain who exterminated indigenous communities and their culture from much of South America.

Critics say his "conquest of the desert", once hailed for uniting Argentina and rebuffing Chile in 1878-79, was a barbaric campaign which bathed the nascent state in innocent blood.

Writers, academics and indigenous groups are lobbying for Roca, an army general who served as president from 1880-86 and 1898-1904, to be branded a criminal who slaughtered Indians and shared out their land with cronies.

In recent weeks, two cities – Santa Cruz and Tucumán – have renamed Julio Argentino Roca avenues after Néstor Kirchner, a former president who died in October aged 60. His wife and successor, Cristina, has supported the prosecution of more recent human rights abusers from the 1970s dictatorship.

The renamings followed other initiatives to remove Roca from the 100 peso note and to swap a statue in Buenos Aires with a towering 10-metre bronze figure of an indigenous woman. A leading writer and historian, Osvaldo Bayer, said he felt ashamed every time he passed Roca's statue.

Leftwing blogs have taken up the cause. "A big sector of Argentinian society denies there was a genocide. Modern Argentina is built on that negation, the mother of all repressions."

The row echoes debates across Latin America over whether to celebrate or lament the arrival of Christopher Columbus and European settlers. Several countries have renamed 12 October as indigenous day rather than Columbus day and rehabilitated indigenous rebels as patriots.

Roca, born in 1843 to a prominent family in northern Argentina, rose up the army ranks and was tasked with quelling indigenous resistance in the pampas and Patagonia, a vast wilderness which the government wanted to settle with immigrant European farmers lest Chile gobble it up.

Roca's 6,000-strong cavalry force crushed Mapuche and other Indian groups, killing more than 1,000 and capturing thousands more who became servants or prisoners and were prevented from having children. Campaign dispatches depicted them as barely human.

White settlers turned the conquered lands into a breadbasket which made Argentina an agricultural superpower and a confident, thrusting nation in the early 20th century.

Some academics have defended Roca's treatment of indigenous people. Juan José Cresto, a director of the national history museum, said the Indians were violent parasites who attacked farms and kidnapped women. The historian was branded a racist and lost his post.

In a separate incident, a history teacher was removed from her post in Pampa province for telling a radio station that Roca deserved praise for putting Indians to flight and opening Argentina's frontier to European settlers.

Néstor Torres, the province's education minister, said such views should not be transmitted to children. "The thought worries us."

Indigenous people



The plight of Mapuche Indians, who once occupied most of Patagonia, remains an open wound in Argentina and Chile. For centuries they resisted colonisation but, like their counterparts in North America, were eventually forced into impoverished, bleak reservations.

All but invisible in Argentina, in Chile the Mapuche have kept their traditions and have seized attention with a low-level insurrection against the state to demand land restitution.

They have staged hunger strikes, attacked police, occupied forests, burned buses and cut off highways. Authorities have responded with security force sweeps using Pinochet-era anti-terrorist legislation.

President Sebastian Pinera has acknowledged a historic injustice and promised to resolve it but talks with Mapuche leaders have stalled.