Читать книгу Rebellion in Patagonia - Osvaldo Bayer - Страница 6

“In general, Argentines have the impression that Santa Cruz is not part of our fatherland.”

Lieutenant Colonel Varela,

Report to the War Ministry on the campaign

against the strikers

February 1922

What had happened in Patagonia? Or, better said, what was Patagonia in 1920?

To simplify things, we can say that it was an Argentine territory that was worked by Chilean peons and exploited by a group of landowners and merchants.1 In other words, on one side we have those who were born to obey and on the other those who made their fortunes because they were strong by nature. And, down south, “strong” almost always means “unscrupulous.” But that’s the way things have to be: Patagonia is a land for strong men. At those latitudes, kindness is a sign of weakness. And the weak are devoured by the wind, alcohol, and their fellow men. For all their faults, those white men who came to conquer Patagonia were pioneers. It was there that they arrived, made their plans, sought their fortunes, and harvested their riches, drinking the waters of abundance. He who stays and carries on and whose feelings do not waver will get rich. With nobody’s help. Have pity on those who want to take away what’s rightfully theirs, what they’ve won in the battle against nature, distance, and solitude!

In this battle, they depend on their sheep, horses, and chilotes.2 The chilotes are a dark, nameless people; wretches born to huddle in the mud, to never have a peso to their name. They work to buy alcohol and the occasional gift for their women. Their aspirations in life end there. They are the opposite of those who have risked everything to come to Patagonia with the sole goal of getting rich, “progressing.”

This is the difference: some have been drunk on resignation or indifference since they were children. Others are dominated by a sole passion, one that is just as natural in those inhospitable lands: ambition.

Among the ambitious, we can find individuals who have led truly fantastic lives … and who have made fortunes that are just as fantastic. It’s enough to mention just one—the life and fortune of Mauricio Braun, for example.

In 1874, a Jewish family disembarked at the port of Punta Arenas: a man, a woman, and their four children. The father, Elías Braun; the mother, Sofía Hamburger. They came fleeing Tsarist Russia, where irrationality was used to maintain privilege and the people, brutalized by slavery, looked to blame anyone for their dismal lot except for those who had enslaved them. Hence the brutal pogroms against the Jewish minority. Encouraged by the church and the decadent Russian nobles who posed as nationalists, the mob, morally and physically intoxicated, fell upon that cursed race, upon the “Christ-killers,” and unleashed orgies of blood. Just as others hunt rats, so the Russians hunted Jews. Armed with little more than clubs, they would surround a Jewish village or neighborhood and take the lives of others in revenge for all the injustices they themselves had suffered. Each Jew they beat to death was like an orgasm of pleasure. Their masters exploited them, it’s true, but every once in a while he gave them the freedom to kill a Jew. And then he gave them the right to rape the Jew’s wife, who needed to surrender her body next to her husband’s corpse on those terrible nights if she wanted to save her life and those of her children.

That was the ghastly image imprinted on the hearts of Elías and Sofía Braun when they made landfall in South America. Don Elías was a realist. He knew that there’s only one way to overcome prejudice: to have money and power. Only then would he be respected in spite of his race. With the realism and lack of sentimentality he had earned through experience and suffering, Elías Braun got to work. He started with a warehouse in Punta Arenas. But if Elías was a man with a knack for business, his son Mauricio would outdo him in every way. He got his start in business when only a teenager. Everything was looking up. The past was to be forgotten. In this spirit—and despite their origins—the Braun family became Catholic the moment they stepped foot in a Catholic country.

In 1920, on the eve of the labor unrest in Santa Cruz, Elías Braun’s son Mauricio Braun owned the Tierra del Fuego Development Corporation in partnership with his sister Sara Braun, controlling a total of 1,376,160 hectares—an astronomical figure that would be difficult to exceed anywhere in the world. This figure comes from an article entitled “Mauricio Braun, Rancher,” written by Emilio J. Ferro, president of the Patagonian Federation of Rural Societies. It appeared in an issue of the magazine Argentina Austral, which was published by the Braun-Menéndez/Menéndez Behety Group. This particular issue was entirely dedicated to Mauricio Braun. The article also states that the Development Corporation possessed some 1.25 million heads of sheep, producing 5 billion kilos of wool, 700,000 kilos of leather, and 2.5 million kilos of meat.

But let’s look at Mauricio Braun’s properties in Patagonia, citing as before the laudatory issue of Argentina Austral:

He directly controls the 100,000-hectare Coy-Aike ranch, near the Coyle River in Santa Cruz. In Chubut, he founded the 117,500-hectare Quichaura ranch, the 77,000-hectare Pepita ranch, the 57,500-hectare Laurita ranch, and the 10,000-hectare Laura ranch. Together with the Anchorena family, he purchased the 90,000-hectare 8 de Julio ranch. In partnership with Ernesto von Heinz and Rodolfo Stubenrauch, he settled the 50,000-hectare Tapi Aike ranch. In 1916, he purchased 20,000 hectares in southern Santa Cruz from Rufino Martínez, christening the plot San Elías.3 The Tres Brazos, Cancha Rayada, La Porteña, Montenegro, Gallegos, Chico, and Dinamarquero ranches are his as well. He controls 25 percent of the capital stock in the Laurita, Glencross, and Victorina ranches. He controls 20 percent of the San Julián Sheep Farming Company and 30 percent of the Aysen Development Company. He also controls 30 percent of the Monte León and La Carlota Argentine Ranching Company. Together with Santiago Frank, he settled the La Federica ranch near Lago San Martín. Alongside Segard and Company, he has invested in the Huemules ranch. In partnership with Pablo Lenzner, he settled the El Líbrum ranch between Río Gallegos and Lago Argentino. He settled the Los Machos ranch in San Julián with Juan Scott and the La Vidalita ranch with Erasmo Jones. With Guillermo Bain, he settled the 60,000-hectare La Josefina ranch in Cabo Blanco. With Donato Bain, he settled the 40,000-hectare Colhuel Kaike ranch in Las Heras. Together with Angus Macpherson, he settled the 58,000 hectares near Lago Buenos Aires that make up the San Mauricio ranch, named in his honor. He has invested in Hobbs and Company, which founded the Lago Posados ranch and which had Lucas Bridges at its head. […] He assisted Hobbs and Company in settling the 90,000-hectare El Ghio ranch. […] In 1915, he and Rodolfo Suárez, in partnership with Capagli and Company, acquired the 56,250-hectare María Inés ranch, located to the west of Río Gallegos.

But this wasn’t the extent of Mauricio Braun’s property—he owned much more. By the turn of the century, he had become the owner of the Cutter Cove Mining Company, which dealt in copper, and the Bank of Chile and Argentina, which had its headquarters in Punta Arenas and branch offices in the Santa Cruz port towns of Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, and San Julián. From there he acquired the South American Export Syndicate Ltd.’s meatpacking plants in Río Seco, Punta Arenas, Puerto Deseado, and Río Grande (Argentina) and Puerto Sara, Puerto Borries and Puerto Natales (Chile). He then founded the La Austral insurance company and invested in the power plant in Puerto Santa Cruz, the electric company in Punta Arenas and the telephone companies in Magallanes and San Julián. He also owned the La Magallanes shoe factory and the Lavaderos de Oro Development Company.

The Brauns weren’t the only ones who were all-powerful in southern Chile and Argentina. There were two other characters who had also amassed mountains of gold in just a few short years. One of them, an Asturian named José Menéndez, has been accused of decimating the indigenous habitants of our far south in José María Borrero’s book Tragic Patagonia. The other, José Nogueira, was Portuguese. These two, Menéndez and Nogueira, transformed themselves from humble shopkeepers to powerful businessmen in a matter of years.

Elías Braun, the Russian Jew who had disembarked at Punta Arenas, was more than just a good businessman. As under monarchies, Braun, Menéndez, and Nogueira pooled their fortunes—not only as partners, but also as families. They had no racial complexes. And so Sara Braun—the eldest daughter of Elías Braun—married the Portuguese immigrant Nogueira, while Mauricio Braun married Josefina Menéndez Behety, the daughter of the Asturian José Menéndez, forming the Braun-Menéndez family. Nogueira died shortly thereafter and Sara Braun inherited a tremendous fortune, which she allowed her brother Mauricio to administer.

Power in Patagonia hinged on the following formula: land plus wool production plus commercialization plus control of transportation. Menéndez, Nogueira, and Braun understood this when they sought to take control of the seaways. How they pulled this off is explained perfectly by Frigate Captain Pedro Florido, the former governor of Tierra del Fuego, in his article “Don Mauricio Braun, Shipping Magnate”:

When the young Mauricio Braun first came ashore in Punta Arenas, so began his future career as a shipping magnate, a story that is inseparable from that of progress in Chilean and Argentine Patagonia. Another ship arrived one year later, bringing a young Spaniard and his wife. Like Mauricio, they would forever be part of the history of the region’s progress and would even become part of his family, though no one suspected it at the time. This model couple, José Menéndez and María Behety, had decided to come to that distant port town in search of better prospects than those that had been offered them by the thriving city of Buenos Aires. Completing the trinity was a renowned Lusitanian who had been already been working in the region for some years as a shipwright and a guide, as he knew Tierra del Fuego’s symphony of inlets, bays, fjords, and channels—off-­limits to the novice sailor—like the back of his hand. Here we refer to José Nogueira, the owner and operator of a fleet of 100–400 ton schooners, which he used for fishing, seal hunting, and trading with the region’s Indians, not to mention the man who had the privilege of introducing Falkland sheep to Patagonia’s ranches. Mauricio Braun started working in Nogueira’s offices when he was fifteen and quickly rose through the company thanks to his business skills and his knowledge of many languages, which made him stand out and earned him the respect of his bosses. As the years passed, our young hero took a fancy to Don José’s daughter, Josefina Menéndez Behety, and soon married her. As his sister had married Nogueira, he became the son-in-law and brother-in-law of his superiors, who would later become his business partners: first Nogueira and then Don José. Though they became partners in 1908, at first José Menéndez was his rival as Don José had dedicated himself to the maritime sector after his arrival in Punta Arenas. One of his first actions in this line of work had been to purchase a maritime supply business from Captain Luisito Piedrabuena. In this manner, José Menéndez, José Nogueira, and Mauricio Braun, who quickly became a partner in Nogueira’s firm, anticipated the theories of the great maritime philosopher Ratzel, who said in 1904, “If you would rule on land, harness the sea.”

The firm of Mauricio Braun and Scott was incorporated in 1904, shortly thereafter acquiring the schooner Ripling Wave, which they used to bring supplies to the distant ranches of Tierra del Fuego and the Strait of Magellan, returning with bales of wool. But Mauricio Braun didn’t stop there. As Punta Arenas was a required stopover between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in those days, maritime activities constituted the town’s main source of commercial activity, wealth and progress and the shipping magnate’s strong personality and drive consequently won him considerable prestige and influence. The Mauricio Braun & Blanchard Trading and Shipping Company was incorporated in 1892, with Mauricio providing 80 percent of the initial capital stock […] but the fierce competition between the various shipping firms, especially that owned by his father-in-law José Menéndez, forced him to overhaul the propulsion systems he had been using. […] Technical requirements and business rivalries took precedence over romanticism […] as progress and economic logic know nothing of sentimentality. The new company acquired many small passenger and cargo steamboats to serve the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Río Grande, and other port towns in Santa Cruz were regularly served by the steamboats Lovart, Magallanes, Keek-Row, Patagonia, Porvenir, Araucanía, and Cordillera, among others. José Menéndez’s acquisition of the 350-ton steamboat Amadeo was the warning shot that motivated the firm of Braun & Blanchard to follow in the wake of Mauricio’s father-in-law and keep the competition going.

Braun & Blanchard also acted as a shipping agent for British shipping lines, acquiring a fleet of tugboats—Antonio, Díaz, Laurita, Armando, Carlos, etc.—along with a shipyard of the dimensions and characteristics needed to provide these boats with the logistical support they required. But the last word had yet to be said. While his father-in-law, a powerful adversary, was increasing the tonnage of his ships and extending his shipping lines beyond Buenos Aires and Valparaíso, Braun founded the Magallanes Whaling Company in 1904. […] He built the factory and principal whaling station on Deception Island, meeting the demand for blue whales and other, smaller cetaceans with his flagship Gobernador Borries and his other whaling vessels, all of them christened with the names of distinguished Chilean admirals: Montt, Uribe, Valenzuela, etc.

The rivalry between the shipping companies owned by Braun and José Menéndez was legendary, and it was this competition that created the regular steamboat lines serving Chile and Argentina. […] Mauricio and his father-in-law didn’t mix business with family, and if that sturdy Asturian had an overpowering character, his son-in-law, whom he confronted on the seas, was every bit his equal. By 1907, we can see that Braun & Blanchard were no longer content with only providing services along the coasts of Tierra del Fuego and the most southerly reaches of Chile and Argentina, and so they extended those services right up the Chilean coastline, leasing the Norwegian ships Alm and Westford. The following year, they bolstered this line with Chiloé and Magallanes, which had been built in the United Kingdom for carrying cargo and passengers. They acquired other vessels later on, all of them named after provinces of Chile: Valdivia, Llanquihue, Santiago, Tarapacá, and Valparaíso.

Of course, every maritime industry needs a shipyard to carry out repairs. And so Braun built one in Punta Arenas.

But, at the end of the day, son-in-law and father-in-law were drawn together. The historian Juan Hilarión Lenzi, in another article paying homage to Mauricio Braun, has this to say on the matter:

The trading and shipping ventures operating under the name of Braun & Blanchard—which served as a holding company—competed with those operated by José Menéndez, both in the region of the Strait of Magellan as well as throughout Patagonia. Father-in-law fought against son-in-law in the world of business. Neither Don José nor Don Mauricio gave any quarter. Their family ties and personal relationships did not interfere with their business plans, but it wasn’t logical to insist on conflict when their final objectives were the same. The two tycoons eventually arrived at an arrangement and agreed to form a company that would expand and reinvigorate their field of action. José Menéndez and Mauricio Braun merged their respective companies on June 10th, 1908, forming the Patagonia Import and Export Company. The company’s initial stock was 180,000 pounds sterling. The subsidiaries of Braun & Blanchard in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, San Julián, Puerto Madryn, Trelew, and Ñorquinco and Menéndez’s holdings in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, and Comodoro Rivadavia also merged their operations.

Besides the branch offices in these towns, the Patagonia Import and Export Company—popularly known as La Anónima—also incorporated larger ships into its fleet.4 It acquired the Asturiano and the Argentino in 1914, with the Atlántico, the Americano, and the José Menéndez coming later.

But the power of Mauricio Braun was barely one-tenth of that exercised by his father-in-law José Menéndez, the tough, ravenous Asturian who served as the true Tsar of Patagonia until his death. A man who has yet to find his true biographer, who will either describe him as egotistical, brutal, and unscrupulous, dominated by an insatiable desire for wealth, or as a leader who fought for progress without caring who was tramped underfoot along the way.

José Menéndez passed away in 1918, leaving a large part of his fortune to King Alfonso XIII of Spain, which provoked the ire of Argentina’s socialists and anarchists. Control of La Anónima passed into the hands of Mauricio Braun.

We have consulted the publications of the Menéndez-­Behetys and Braun-Menéndezes rather than those of their detractors. Here we’re not interested in the origins of their fabulous wealth so much as we are in the political power granted by their economic strength.5 It’s clear that those who had acquired such immense wealth in such a short time would not allow a group of madmen flying the red flag and speaking of concessions to come along and occupy their ranches. Their fellow landowners felt the same.

Through the example of the Braun-Menéndez family, we can understand who controlled the economy in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, as well as the power that this inevitably represented…in the face of so much wealth, to whose interests were the region’s poor civil servants, policemen, judges, governors, etc. going to respond?

Now let’s see the hands into which the rest of the territory of Santa Cruz had fallen. The concession of 2,517,274 hectares of formerly state-owned land granted to Adolfo Grünbein (1893) was then divided among the ranchers Halliday, Scott, Rudd, Wood, Waldron, Grienshield, Hamilton, Saunders, Reynard, Jamieson, MacGeorge, MacClain, Felton, Johnson, Woodman, Redman, Smith, Douglas, and Ness from England; Eberhard, Kark, Osenbrüg, Bitsch, Curtze, Wahlen, Wagner, Curt Mayer, and Tweedie from Germany; Bousquet, Guillaume, Sabatier, and Roux from France; Montes, Rivera, Rodolfo Suárez, Fernández, Noya, and Barreiro from Spain; Clark from the United States; Urbina from Chile; and Riquez from Uruguay. In other words, not a single Argentine.

The Grünbein concession took 2,517,274 hectares of land out of the hands of the public trust. Adolfo Grünbein purchased 400 kilometric leagues at the price of 1,000 gold pesos per league. Of these, 125 leagues were turned over to the Bank of Antwerp.

The turn-of-the-century oligarchic government thus condemned Patagonia to be ruled by large landowners and to be and to the medieval system of primitive methods of exploitation. It condemned Patagonia to sheep farming, the most harmful and injurious form of production. But what was established by the oligarchic regime was later embraced, or at least tolerated, by the Radical and Peronist governments, as well as by all of Argentina’s military dictatorships. In Patagonia, military governors are honored with monuments, banquets, and tasteless poetry for having promoted a handful of public works while leaving the great landed estates intact—and, in the end, these public works were largely carried out to benefit the landowners. None have thought to promote immigration through the construction of ports, irrigation systems, and factories. And, fundamentally, none have thought to promote agriculture among the region’s indigenous inhabitants instead of planning for their total extermination. The only initiatives, rather, have been of a military nature. With warships and barracks, the government attempted to forge a sense of patriotism that can only be felt through shared traditions and a day-to-day commitment to the land. But that would be to speak of wasted opportunities. Reality was and is different.

What invites ridicule is the idea, still being peddled today, that the repression seen during the 1921–1922 strike was carried out in defense of our national heritage and against those who, flying the red flag, wanted to “internationalize” Patagonia. Without any need for a red flag, Patagonia was already internationalized—not just by foreign landowners, but also because all of her raw material wealth was sent overseas.

In other words, the intervention of the Argentine Army did not occur to defend the nation’s interests, but to preserve the status and privileges of foreign companies and to protect an unjust feudal regime that still chokes southern Argentina, slowly turning it into a desert.

And it will be in that desolate landscape where the sparks will fly between the two poles of the region’s rudimentary social structure: the serfs and the great medieval landowners.