Abipones

The Abipones were a Guaicuruan-speaking people of the Gran Chaco, kin to the Toba and Mocoví, originally settled along the lower Bermejo River. Seasonally mobile hunters, fishers and gatherers with little farming, they took to the horse after contact: by 1641 they had abandoned agriculture for cattle and horse raiding, striking as far as Asunción and Corrientes and earning the name frentones for their half-shaven heads.

Pressured by Spaniards and the Toba, they shifted south between the Bermejo and Salado rivers. From 1710 Spanish campaigns broke their power, and by 1750 Jesuit missions had settled and Christianized them.

Disease cut their numbers below five thousand by 1768, when the expulsion of the Jesuits left them without protectors; within half a century raids and land loss ended them as an independent people, the last speakers of their language dying out in the early nineteenth century.