The article analyzes the violence in the rural area of the Argentine Patagonia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the crime world in a frontier situation and the process of coercion and control assumed by the state, under the watchful eye of the ruling class in Argentina. Legendary bandits, reverenced by their criminal actions; "foreigners", or Chilean, bandits, besides those belonging to indigenous communities, are investigated from the perspective of Eric Hobsbawm, allowing the identification within the banditry universe of Patagonia, the called "social bandits".
Argentine; Patagonia; violence; banditry; social bandits.