No. 6.
Mr. Osborn
to Mr. Evarts.
Buenos Ayres, March 5, 1878. (Received April 29.)
Sir: Soon after the consummation of reconciliation between the two political parties of this country, and a change in the cabinet had taken place, in which the office of minister of foreign affairs was conceded to a “Metrista,” Dr. Elizalde, the Chilian minister then at Rio de Janeiro, was assured by Minister Elizalde that if he would return to Buenos Ayres the disputed boundary-line question—in Patagonia, between Chili and the Argentine Republic—could be at once put in the course of final settlement.
For weeks after the return of the Chilian minister to Buenos Ayres it was reported and believed a basis of settlement had been agreed upon by the ministers, and approved by their respective governments; but the later information to be had, and I think it is quite reliable, although both parties are very reticent, is, that a settlement is no nearer completion than at any other period in years past, in consequence of a complication which arose in the arrest and imprisonment of, and the refusal of this government to deliver up to the Chilian minister, the “Santa Cruz criminals.”
It appears the Chilian mutineers at Sandy Point on leaving that place took an inland route to render pursuit more difficult, and marched some three hundred miles to Santa Cruz, on the Patagonian coast, where some seventy were captured by the Argentine authorities, and brought to this [Page 10] city on the Argentine war vessel Parana and confined in the penitentiary.
To the demand of the Chilian Government for the surrender of the mutineers for trial in Chili as such, the Argentine Government replies that the mutineers, on the march up from Sandy Point to Santa Cruz, murdered some forty of their own comrades on Argentine territory, and they must take their trials under Argentine laws.
It appears that the territory in which the murders were committed is a portion of the disputed territory involved in the question of the boundary-line between the two governments; hence the present complications attending the main question.
I have, &c.,