Mazza established Scientific Societies in seven northern provinces in 1926-27 to help coordinate his studies and diffuse information. He was assisted by, among others, Dr. Guillermo Paterson, an English Argentine epidemiologist known for his work on malaria. His efforts, however, encountered indifference and, then, resistance from the area's landed gentry, who generally saw squalor and contagious disease as an externality, and feared that Mazza's efforts might trigger a peasant revolt. His campaign to incinerate rural thatched roofs, a habitat for vinchucas, was particularly controversial. A fascist, 1930 coup d'état against the aging President Hipólito Yrigoyen, moreover, led to the elimination of funding for the MEPRA the following year, after which Mazza maintained the facility with donations and his own funds. His efforts forced the South American medical community to accept the validity of trypanosomiasis (making it the special topic of the prestigious VI National Congress of Medicine, in 1939), and yielded the first detailed description of the dynamic between living conditions, trypanosomiasis, and its insect vector.