Читать книгу Rebellion in Patagonia - Osvaldo Bayer - Страница 7

“A handful of ranchers were the masters of

Patagonia, paying in scrip or Chilean currency”

Colonel Pedro Viñas Ibarra, who, as a captain, commanded one of the columns repressing

the strikes in Patagonia.

The slaughter of Patagonia’s workers will occur under the watch of President Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first president of Argentina elected by universal, secret, and compulsory voting.1 The leader of a movement with deep popular roots, a caudillo loved by the petite bourgeois and proletarian masses (with the exception of those class-conscious workers who identified as anarchists or socialists), Hipólito Yrigoyen and his Radical Civic Union successfully used constitutional methods to destroy the regime—but not the power—of the landowning and mercantile oligarchy. Though timid, his reformism successfully managed to democratize Argentina and increase the political participation of the masses, while he made genuine attempts at a more independent foreign policy and a fairer redistribution of the country’s wealth. But this same timidity, this propensity for dialogue and compromise, was not enough to overcome the crises faced by his administration. When the industrial workers of Buenos Aires rose up, he allowed the oligarchy to repress them with the army and the armed commandos of the upper crust, resulting in the bloodshed of the Tragic Week of January 1919. And when Patagonia’s agricultural workers firmly demanded a series of concessions and the movement threatened to go beyond mere unionism—according to the information available in Buenos Aires—he lets the army defend the feudal order with blood and fire.

Yrigoyen thus became the involuntary executioner of Argentina’s social movements. Ironic, but not coincidental. What hadn’t occurred under the pre-1916 oligarchic regime—during which repression never reached the level of collective massacre—would transpire under the populist government of Yrigoyen (to reduce repetition).

1920. The distant territory of Patagonia is in crisis. Since the end of the Great War, wool prices have fallen and unrest has increased. The British market is saturated. Two and a half million bundles of wool from Australia and New Zealand that were shipped to London have gone unsold. Patagonian wool hasn’t even had that much luck: it hasn’t even left the port. The London bureau of the Havas news agency issues a report stating that “significant stocks of low quality South American wool have been offered at low prices to the Central Powers.” The good times of the war, when money flowed freely into hands that were already full, have ended in Patagonia. This is the fate of all regions that are condemned to produce a single product: when the price of wool rises, there’s prosperity; when it falls, as occurred from 1919 on, there’s unemployment, poverty, repression, depressed wages, economic crisis, resignation among small producers and traders, and panic among large landowners. The latter has already asked Yrigoyen for help, though the president proved to be far from sympathetic. The Radical president instead dared, on two consecutive occasions, to move against the sacred interests of the true masters of Patagonia. He reinstated customs offices in the far south to control imports and exports and then ordered land claims to be reassessed. The latter meant that many ranches were considerably reduced in size, as their owners had taken possession of much more land than they actually owned.

These two measures cut down on a number of rights and prerogatives that had been acquired per se, but also created a defensive atmosphere among large landowners that united them in resistance to anything that smelled of tax collectors and government agents.

It was Dr. Ismael P. Viñas, the new judge in the Patagonian territories of Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego—a man with a Radical background and a personal friend of Yrigoyen—who broke with the tradition that all of Patagonia’s public servants and judges either answered to ranching interests or were their direct agents. Before the surprised eyes of the representatives of the region’s corporations, Viñas initiated legal proceedings for tax evasion against one of the region’s largest ranching concerns, The Monte Dinero Sheep Farming Company. The resolute judge also initiated proceedings against The San Julián Sheep Farming Company for their illegal seizure of the property of Donald Munro, who had passed away at the turn of the century and whose fields, as he lacked heirs, should have been turned over to the National Education Council.

This was unthinkable for the large ranching concerns and their agents. It was clear that something had changed in Argentina. The Yrigoyen administration had decided to defend the government’s interests against the creeping influence of those who controlled the country’s sources of socioeconomic power. But this radicalism showed its limitations at each step. Though he backed Judge Viñas, Yrigoyen also allowed for the inconceivable: the government of Santa Cruz remained in the hands of an ultraconservative, Edelmiro Correa Falcón, who—though it’s hard to believe—simultaneously served as the secretary of the Santa Cruz Rural Society, the landowners’ federation. President Yrigoyen could have immediately designated someone else to serve as governor, as Santa Cruz was then a territory and not a province—it was under the direct control of the federal government, in other words, and did not enjoy political autonomy.2

As if afraid of rattling the mighty too much, Yrigoyen did not replace Correa Falcón. The ultraconservative continues holding the reins of the territory’s government bureaucracy and police apparatus, both of which will be used against the Radical judge.

We shall see how the judge will be supported in this conflict by the sparse middle class of Santa Cruz—small business owners, white collar workers, and artisans—as well as by unionized workers. A crude class alliance in this distant territory will form a sort of anti-oligarchic front aimed at destroying the medieval regime to which they are subjected. When the hour of decision comes, however, this class alliance will break apart and the entire middle class will defect to the side of the landowners, letting the workers alone fall victim to the savage repression.

But first let’s study the forces in Buenos Aires that are playing tug-of-war over Argentina’s first popularly elected president.

When Patagonia’s landowners asked Yrigoyen for support in facing the wool crisis, the president was surrounded by a series of enormous problems. Though he hadn’t lost his calm, he was constantly being attacked in both international and domestic politics and on economic, social, and political issues.

Internationally, Yrigoyen had once again fallen out of favor with the Allied nations. Foreign Minister Pueyrredón had left Geneva during the inaugural meeting of the League of Nations after being the sole delegate to vote against the war reparations imposed on defeated Germany. The Argentina of Yrigoyen thus remained true to its policy of neutrality, showing its desire to maintain an independent line, that of a sovereign nation.

And the summer that comes at the end of 1920 will be a hot one in every sense of the word. The peso reaches a record low: 100 dollars buy 298.85 Argentine pesos, scandalizing the haughty columnists at the traditional newspapers, the fearless defenders of the oligarchy’s privileges. They blame the populist government. They don’t explain that the falling value of the German mark also affects the value of pounds sterling and strengthens the dollar, and that Argentina’s economy has become more independent of the British sphere and is slowly beginning to fall under the influence of the true winner of the First World War: the United States.

Domestically, the price of bread has jumped once again, this time to sixty centavos per kilo, which makes these same columnists remember in passing that, before the coming of the populist government, this essential foodstuff cost barely thirty centavos.

Labor conflicts are on the rise. There’s a near-general strike among agricultural laborers, primarily in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, Chaco, and Entre Ríos. The ranchers, the small independent farmers, and the large and small property owners don’t turn to Yrigoyen for defense. They don’t trust him. Neither do Argentina’s businessmen nor the representatives of powerful foreign corporations. They know that they have a firm ally, their only friend but a strong one: the Argentine Army. If the army hadn’t defeated the workers of the Vasena metal works with fire and blood, who else would have saved the country from the anarchist and Bolshevik hordes in January 1919? Did Yrigoyen even try? Did anyone see any white berets on the streets repressing the rebel workers?3 All those individuals whose actions stand out in the uncontrolled class struggle of the first three decades of the twentieth century have been graduates of the National Military College. It was Colonel Ramón Falcón who trained the police and worked to break up the major labor organizations until 1909, the year in which he fell victim to the bomb thrown by the anarchist Simón Radowitzky. It was General Dellepiane who became the hero of the Vasena metal works, where proletarian cadavers were piled into wheelbarrows. It is Lieutenant Colonel José Félix Uriburu who will give subversive anarchism the coup de grace in 1930, together with men like Colonel Pilotto and Major Rosasco.4 And later on, it is General Justo who will put an end to the dreams and vagaries of proletarian revolution with severe repression and a continuous state of siege.

But in the wake of the Tragic Week, or Red Week, of January 1919, the upper and upper-middle classes—that is, everyone with something to lose from a workers’ uprising—start preparing to defend themselves, even though they know they can count on the army as a strong ally. The genius behind this movement is Dr. Manuel Carlés, the president of the Argentine Patriotic League. A talented organizer, his paramilitary organization spreads across the country, forming a true army of white guards. The organization’s brigades are formed by bosses, managers, foremen, police officers, retired military men, and the so-called good workers. Respectable people, in other words. Well-armed, they patrol Argentina’s small towns and countryside. If a property owner has a problem with their laborers, the Argentine Patriotic League comes to their aid. They are prepared to do whatever is needed to defend what’s theirs. Carlés has also organized women’s brigades, led by young Catholic women from good families who recruit their followers from among factory workers and domestic workers.

Manuel Carlés tours the country, sounding the alarm about the threat posed by organized labor and the Yrigoyen administration, despite having been an employee of the federal government not long ago. On December 5th, 1920, Carlés gives the following florid speech:

We are the only country in the world whose authorities, barely concealing their contempt, allow for public sedition against our national identity. Saturated with the insults of sectarianism, the greatest atrocities against the right to work and the moral honor of the fatherland are treated as if they were but the sound of falling rain.

The Patriotic League acts with complete independence: they use the newspapers to issue orders to their members, openly calling on them to take up arms, repress strikes, provide support for besieged capitalists, etc.5 One example will be enough: this communiqué was issued on December 5th, 1921 by the Patriotic League brigade in Marcos Juárez, Córdoba in the midst of a peon strike:

The brigade has mobilized all of its members, who are preparing themselves to defend their collective interests from the anarchist agitators who made their appearance last night and who have since been interfering with the harvest. These outlaws have been threatening the workers and resort to violence at the first sign of resistance; they immediately tried to storm the police station when a group of their agitators was arrested. Such a state of affairs justifies the serious measure of mobilizing the brigade. Divided into defense sectors, we stand ready to repel this aggression. The town’s police force is small, but fortunately we form a large and determined group that is willing to guarantee the right to work, even if by force of arms. Today we called upon the ringleader of the subversive movement—a foreigner, naturally—and we have given him a period of two hours to leave the region. If he fails to do so, we will follow the instructions issued by the central committee for these situations. Dr. Carlés has addressed the brigade, endorsing our actions and offering us the tools we need to reach our noble goals.

It’s clear that the League has been given a free hand: they run workers out of town, carry firearms, attack unions, break up protests. It’s a counter-union, a union of the bosses. The only difference is that the government and the police don’t allow the workers to carry firearms.

And quite rightly. Nobody can disagree—at least from the point of view of those who have something to lose—that everyone should defend themselves as best they can. Fear justifies everything. News of the massacres of nobles, capitalists, and landowners by revolutionaries in Russia has kept the lords and masters of Argentina up at night. It’s time for neither hesitancy nor the Christian spirit. Each class must defend what’s theirs. This true around the world but especially so in Argentina, with the country’s strong union movement and anarchism’s unshakable hold on broad sectors of its working class. But the government doesn’t seem to have taken notice of the muted class warfare that has taken over the streets and countryside. And so Yrigoyen is criticized by the workers for allowing illegal paramilitary organizations to operate with impunity and by the bosses who rebuke his lack of energy in suppressing strikes and acts of terrorism.

Now let’s examine the forces that will come into conflict in the distant territory of Santa Cruz. On one side, we have the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society (affiliated with the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation, or FORA), which organized stevedores, cooks, waiters, hotel staff, and farmworkers. Their enemies were the city’s bosses, organized in the Río Gallegos Commerce and Industry League, the Santa Cruz Rural Society (bringing together all the region’s ranchers), and the Argentine Patriotic League, which, as we have said, united property owners, trusted employees, etc. and was a paramilitary organization directed against the proletarian left.

Let’s start with the workers. Their central organizations in Buenos Aires were totally divided.

There were two FORAs: the FORA V (orthodox anarchists)6 and the FORA IX, in which syndicalists, socialists, and the addicts of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution prevailed.7 The latter promoted dialogue with the Radical government—one of its leaders, Maritime Workers’ Federation Secretary-General Francisco J. García, had open access to Hipólito Yrigoyen’s offices. The anarchists of the FORA V called them chameleons, while the FORA IX, in turn, considered the anarchists to be sectarians.

But the working class wasn’t just divided into different organizations, but also different ideologies. Among the socialists, there was the classic division between social democrats and partisans of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as represented by the Socialist Party and the International Socialist Party, which would soon change its name to the Communist Party. The anarchists, in turn, assumed three different positions: the orthodox anarchists were split into a moderate wing (which had a voice in the newspaper La Protesta) and a leftist wing (represented by the newspapers El Libertario, La Obra, and later on La Antorcha), while another group of anarchists who sympathized with the Russian Revolution was grouped around the newspaper Bandera Roja, and included Julio R. Barcos, García Thomas, etc. These latter were the so-called anarcho-bolsheviks.

None of these divisions that caused such heated polemics in Buenos Aires were visible in the Santa Cruz Workers’ Federation, which had its headquarters in Río Gallegos. Its leaders didn’t concern themselves with ideological differences and instead focused on standing up to the power of the bosses, the government, and the police. There’s no doubt that danger had united them. We can say that, deep down, they all had an anarchist background, though many were still blinded by the triumph of the Russian Revolution.

The Río Gallegos Workers’ Federation had a short life. It was founded in 1910 and would end its days among the mass graves of its members in the summer of 1921–1922. The founder of this labor organization was a blacksmith named José Mata, described by the police as a “suspected anarchist militant.” He was born in Oviedo, Spain in 1879. He had several children, whose names speak for themselves: Progreso (Progress), Elíseo (Elysium), Alegría (Happiness), Libertario (Libertarian), Bienvenida (Welcome). The first labor dispute in Santa Cruz took place in November 1914 on the Mata Grande ranch, owned by the Englishman Guillermo Patterson. The leaders of this first strike were the Spaniard Fernando Solano Palacios and the Austrian Mateo Giubetich. They demanded that their bosses stop charging migrant farmworkers for their meals and for the combs and shears broken during the shearing, as well as demanding that medical examinations be voluntary, or rather that this expense stop being the responsibility of the workers. They also demanded 85 pesos per month plus food expenses for cart drivers instead of the 90 pesos minus 30 centavos per meal they were currently being paid. The shearers should also have their meals included, they demanded.

The strike then spread to the Los Manantiales and Florida Negra ranches, which were owned by the Englishmen Kemp and Hobbs. The police intervened in defense of the English ranchers and arrested the movement’s two leaders. The judge invoked the Social Defense Law, an anti-anarchist measure that sentenced them to prison time and the seizure of 1,000 pesos of their property as reparations for lost profits. But the problems didn’t end there, as the strike then spread to all the ranches located near San Julián. The movement’s leadership fell to the interim secretary of the San Julián Workers’ Society, a forty-eight-year-old Chilean carpenter named Juan de Dios Figueroa. Shearing stopped throughout the region and the bosses responded by bringing in scabs by ship from Buenos Aires. When the scabs disembarked, a battle broke out on the beach. The scabs were backed by the police. This first conflict ended in the total defeat of the strikers and the region’s anarchists were hunted down, leading to the arrest of sixty-eight people, an unprecedented number for San Julián. Nearly all of them were foreigners: forty Spaniards, twenty Chileans, one Englishman, one Italian, one Russian, four Argentines, and one Frenchman.

At the beginning of 1915, and as an aftershock of the first strike, the workers of The New Patagonia Meat Preserving and Cold Storage Co. Ltd.—the Swift meatpacking plant of Río Gallegos—stopped work. Once again, police repression helped defeat the movement, and strike leaders Serafín Pita (Uruguayan) and José Mandrioli (Italian) were imprisoned.

The subsequent movements would also be strangled by police repression. But the region’s labor organizations, instead of being destroyed, were strengthened by these defeats. It’s worth mentioning the strike declared on April 20th, 1917, the first attempted general strike in Río Gallegos. It was organized by the workers to demand an end to the practice of corporal punishment inflicted by foremen on underage farmworkers. It was a strike carried out in solidarity, in other words, which speaks to the altruistic spirit that motivated the proletarians of these distant lands.

In April 1918, a general strike was declared in Puerto Deseado. The demands of the employees of La Anónima (owned by the Braun-Menéndez family) and other companies were supported by the railway workers of the Deseado-Las Heras line, the only rail line in Santa Cruz.

There was always contact and solidarity between the anarchist workers’ organizations in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, solidarity that managed to overcome the enormous distances separating the two countries and the unreliable means of communication connecting them. Collaboration was so close that many union leaders operated in both regions, such as the libertarian Eduardo Puente, who participated in the April 1918 demonstrations in Puerto Deseado and later played a role in the strikes that December in Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in Chile. The Magallanes Workers’ Federation (Chile) declared a general strike in protest against “the high cost of living and the economic monopoly of a single family we all depend on”—the Braun-Menéndez family, naturally. Striking workers were attacked by the gendarmerie, leaving many dead or wounded. Soldiers sacked the union’s office, destroying their furniture and archives, and arrested the three main strike leaders: Puente, Olea, and Cofre. But the popular outrage was so great that the authorities decided to come to an arrangement with the union. They agreed to all of the strike demands and released Olea and Cofre. Puente, however, was deported. He was sent back to Río Gallegos, where the workers were in a state of great agitation. The Workers’ Federation was making the biggest moves it had ever made. And the fight wasn’t over higher wages but the freedom of one man: Apolinario Barrera.

This is how it happened: Simón Radowitzky, the young anarchist who had killed Colonel Falcón in 1909 and had been sentenced to life in Tierra del Fuego, the “Argentine Siberia,” escaped from his island prison. He had the help of Apolinario Barrera, the manager of the anarchist newspaper La Protesta, who had come down from Buenos Aires specifically for this purpose. After a legendary escape, they were captured in Chile and taken to Punta Arenas on the cruiser Zenteno, left shackled to an iron bar on the deck for twelve days. From there, an Argentine Navy transport took them to Río Gallegos, where Aponinario Barrera was turned over to the police and Radowitzky was sent back to the gloomy Ushuaia penitentiary.

Meanwhile, the governor, in turn, ordered that Puente also be arrested and sent to Ushuaia. The Workers’ Federation called a general assembly of its members on January 14th, 1919 to decide on whether or not to organize a general strike calling for the release of Apolinario Barrera and Eduardo Puente. But the assembly never got the chance to make its decision, as the police, under the command of Commissioner Ritchie, surrounded the union offices, barged in, and arrested the entire leadership committee (nine Spaniards and one Russian). Another group of workers immediately took over the committee’s duties and declared a general strike.

Something unexpected happened on January 17th, something that had never been seen on the streets of Río Gallegos: a demonstration by working-class women. They demanded the immediate release of the men who had been imprisoned because of their union activities. According to the police, the women, who had taken over Calle Zapiola and Calle Independencia, refused orders to disperse. They allegedly hurled abuse at the representatives of law and order, threw stones at Commissioner Alfredo Maffei and attacked Officer Ramón Reyes from behind.

Things only got more serious from there. Sergeant Jesús Sánchez arrested the demonstration’s organizer, the Spaniard Pilar Martínez (a thirty-one-year-old widow and a cook by trade). But according to the police report, the woman—a brave Galician flower—gave him “a sharp kick in the testicles, producing a painful contusion rendering him unfit for duty for two days.” The police report, signed by Commissioner Ritchie, adds that this crude act committed by a representative of the weaker sex was witnessed by Submissioner Luis Lugones and the civilians Antonio Adrover, Pedro Rubione, and Augusto Guilard, who immediately offered to testify against the woman.

The medical report, issued by Dr. Ladvocat, shouldn’t be missed: “Sergeant Jesús Sánchez complains of a sharp pain in his left testicle that is exacerbated by the slightest pressure. But it will heal without any long-term consequences for the patient.” His honor was saved! Heaven forbid that this police officer should lose the virility that he demonstrated so well by beating women.

This affair ended with the formal dissolution of the Workers’ Federation and the fleeting triumph of the governor, who just a few days later will have to come to the rescue of Colonel Contreras Sotomayor, the governor of the Chilean province of Magallanes, then facing a strike by the workers at the Borries Meatpacking Plant in Puerto Natales. These workers were supported by the Última Esperanza Farmworkers and Meatpackers Union, led by the anarchists Terán, Espinosa, Saldivia, and Viveros. The workers occupied the city and administered it through workers’ councils.

Despite the internal situation in Río Gallegos and the popular rebellion in Punta Arenas that threatened to spill over the border, the governor of Santa Cruz sent all the troops at his disposal to Puerto Natales, where Major Bravo reinstated the Chilean deputy mayor at his post.

And so the first cycle of workers’ uprisings in the extreme south of the continent came to an end. The Río Gallegos Workers’ Federation also ended the first stage of its existence with the final closure of its offices by Judge Sola and the imprisonment of its leaders, who would be released just five months later. And it is Antonio Soto who will lead the new Río Gallegos Workers’ Society in the second stage of its existence, right up to its final defeat at the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Varela.