Daniel Raisbeck
Daniel Raisbeck

In November 1881, Juan José Dardo Rocha, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, passed a decree that forbade the use of a widely used torture device called the cepo. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a cepo thus: “formerly a wooden frame in which a criminal was fastened as a punishment.” The Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary goes into greater detail:
Cepo: An instrument made of two thick pieces of wood, which when joined together form round holes in the middle, in which the prisoner’s throat or leg was secured by joining the wood pieces.

So ubiquitous was the cepo in 19th-century Argentina that it features prominently in Gaucho literature, as author Emiliano Tagle notes. Thus, in Juan Moreira (1879), a classic novel about the legendary, gun-slinging outlaw—perhaps the Argentine version of Billy the Kid—author Eduardo González writes that the “inquisitorial instrument” is always found outdoors and beneath a tree. As the prisoner’s neck or legs were exposed, foliage was his “only protection against the sun and frost.” Juan Manuel de Rosas, the much-feared tyrant of Buenos Aires (from 1829 to 1852), would mandate two hours of throat-fastening under the cepo for anyone caught carrying a knife on a religious holiday (so writes the comandante Gregorio Aráoz de Lamadrid).

The inconvenience of carrying the heavy wooden device across long distances led to adaptations of the cepo on military campaigns, Tagle adds. Hence the “rope” cepo, whereby the prisoner’s ankles were tied with a rope, with a half-muzzle at each end tied firmly to a stake; or the so-called “Colombian cepo,” which involved tying a sitting prisoner’s wrists and passing the arms outside his knees, with a stick placed in the space between the back of the knees and the bends of the elbows. Yet another version, the estaqueada, involved forcing the prisoner onto the ground with all four limbs outstretched,  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/mileis-key-pending-task-ending-argentinas-currency-controls-part-i