As we have said, these two hotels were the Grand Hotel and the Hotel Español. The owner of the latter, Serafín Zapico, seeing that he would either have to give in or be forced to close the hotel, asked Judge Viñas for advice. Viñas agreed to straighten things out for him, telling him the next day to go to the headquarters of the Workers’ Society, as Soto and other union members had agreed to meet with him. The distressed businessman did as he was told and Soto informed him that the only way to resolve the matter would be to rehire the four hotel workers who had been fired during the strike, paying their lost wages, and accepting the conditions demanded by the union. Zapico consulted with Viñas, who also told him that this was the only way to end the conflict. And so Zapico bowed his head and paid up.
Things wouldn’t be so easy for Manuel Albarellos, the owner of the Grand Hotel. Despairing of the “blockade” imposed by the Workers’ Society, he also turned to Judge Viñas, who gave him the same advice he had given Zapico. According to Albarellos’s subsequent statement to the police, when he entered the building he was surrounded by union members who insulted him and threatened him, saying that they could only reach an arrangement if he paid a 3,700-peso fine.
The desperate hotel owner—3,700 pesos was a substantial sum in those days—went back to Judge Viñas, who told him not to give up and promised to settle the matter. Viñas—after meeting with the labor leaders—told the hotel owner that he was able to get him a “discount” and that he would only have to come up with 2,500 pesos. To complete his cavalry, the reluctant hotel owner, accustomed to treating his workers like slaves, had to swallow his pride and make the payment in person at the union headquarters. The hotel owner, specialized in attending to the needs of the well-to-do, had to hand the money over to Soto, who made a show of counting it out before an assembly of jubilant workers. Soto told him that he could go, that the “blockade” would be lifted.
There’s no doubt that for these proletarians, accustomed to the lean side of life, these triumphs must have felt glorious.
Governor Correa Falcón makes all this known to the federal government, sending a detailed report to Interior Minister Ramón Gómez, popularly known as Tuerto Gómez. The minister’s reaction is typical of the Radical administration: he orders it to be filed away. For him, the best way to solve a problem is to leave it unsolved. And this would also allow the judge, a loyal party member, to remain in good standing. The government already took the side of the governor in the case of the English ranches. And so now it’s time to take the judge’s side, even if only by omission. Besides, it’s a policy of the Radical administration to give the unions a free hand as long as they don’t go too far.
Under the leadership of Antonio Soto, the Rio Gallegos Workers’ Society receives a great impetus. It acquires a printing press, begins to publish the newspaper 1° de Mayo and sends delegates to the ranches of the interior to explain the basics of organizing and fighting for concessions. These delegates bring up names like Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta. They all have an anarchist background and constantly bring up the example of the October Revolution in Russia.
It’s genuinely strange—and why not exciting?—to find the red flag flying over the headquarters of a small union that nevertheless embodied the hopes of the dispossessed in distant Río Gallegos, a town of barely four thousand inhabitants, far removed from all major cities and thousands of kilometers from the cauldron of rebellion that Europe became in the 1920s. It’s incredible how these men, who not only lacked proven leaders but also had a complete lack of organizational experience, nevertheless put their best foot forward in order to not lose the hurried pace that the Russian Revolution had imposed on the proletariat.
And just as strange is another incident that will directly lead to many of the events that followed. In September 1920, the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society asks the police for permission to hold a memorial for the Catalan pedagogue Francisco Ferrer, the father of rationalist education who was executed eleven years beforehand at the Montjuich Castle. In an act that brought shame upon the human race, the most conservative faction of the Catholic Church had influenced Alfonso XIII to do away with a teacher who used reason to destroy myths and who opposed religious obscurantism and militaristic irrationality above all else.
The memorial is scheduled for October 1st. In the days leading up to the event, the Workers’ Society distributes flyers throughout the city and surrounding ranches. The text of these flyers says more than any later interpretation of these events:
THE RÍO GALLEGOS WORKERS’ SOCIETY
1909—OCTOBER 13—1920
TO THE PEOPLE
It has been eleven years since this day moved the entire world.
It has been eleven years since the lowest and most cowardly attack on Free Thought was carried out in the thousand-times-accursed Montjuich Castle (Barcelona).
Francisco Ferrer, the founder of the Modern School, who taught children the path of light, was cravenly executed by those Tartuffes who commit all class of infamies in the name of Christ. But Francisco Ferrer will live forever in our hearts and we shall always be ready to spit this crime in the face of its perpetrators.
Glory to the martyrs of Human Liberty!
Glory to Francisco Ferrer!
Farmworkers: You have the duty to come to town on October 1st and pay homage to the Martyr of Freedom.
FRANCISCO FERRER
Cravenly executed on October 13th, 1909
On September 28th, Diego Ritchie refuses to issue a permit for the event. The workers aren’t intimidated and, without stopping to blink, declare a forty-eight-hour general strike.1 And this isn’t a bluff. Here’s what Amador V. González has to say about the strike:
September 30th dawned to a city in a state of siege. Though there was no reason to adopt such measures and martial law had not been declared, pedestrians were banned from gathering on the streets or in doorways, the armed forces poured out of the barracks to show off their Mausers and prison guards patrolled the city by automobile, frightening residents from north to south, as if the city was a warzone. On the 1st, armed men surrounded the offices of the Workers’ Society and passersby were stopped and sent in another direction. The offices of the Workers’ Society were closed down and the homes of its secretary and treasurer ransacked, but under what law? As a preliminary measure, the Workers’ Society ordered the suspension of all previously scheduled demonstrations and declared the general strike to be indefinite until the authorities recognized their error in allowing the police chief to use such extreme measures against a peaceful and orderly commemoration.2
The confrontation is ruthless. The government and police use force and the workers use the strike, that powerful measure of civil disobedience.
Faced with Correa Falcón’s offensive, the workers turn to their friends Borrero and Viñas. They gather in the offices that the lawyer shares with Dr. Juan Carlos Beherán and prepare to appeal Commissioner Ritchie’s decision.
In their statement to the judge, they make use of an impressively original argument. They write:
We protest against the prohibition of a demonstration scheduled for today—October 1, 1920—to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of Francisco Ferrer, whom the believers in the religion of labor hold as a martyr of freedom and a symbol of their ideas, just as believers in the Catholic religion pay homage to St. Francis of Assisi or the Maid of Orleans, recently beatified as St. Joan of Arc, or as believers in the Mohammedan religion pay homage to Mohammed, or as believers in the religion of patriotism pay tribute to the heroes of the Reconquista, the War of Independence, or the Emancipation.
Judge Viñas receives the appeal at three in the afternoon and immediately orders Commissioner Ritchie to explain his motives. And he also informs him that the court will remain open past its normal hours as a way of letting him know that his response must be immediate.
The barracks arguments used by Commissioner Ritchie show a devastating inconsistency:
By banning the meeting to be held today, the