El Soldato Argentino,1 Vol. II No. 13
January 2nd, 1922
The first strike was nothing more than an overture to the massacre that would follow. It was a rosy chapter in the history of Patagonia when compared to the horror that events will acquire nine months later. Let’s see how General Anaya, who participated in the repression of the second strike as a captain, describes the difference:
We have just heard the most objective account possible of the events that shook the far south in 1921. To differentiate it from the events that followed, allow us to refer to it as the “peaceful military campaign,” in contrast to what I shall call the “bloody military campaign.”2
Work resumes and the much-delayed shearing is rushed to completion. But this gives a false impression of what’s really going on: the workers have triumphed, plain and simple. This is how the Workers’ Society sees it, how the Rural Society sees it, and how the Commerce and Industry League sees it.
Two police officers have been murdered. Landowners, gendarmes and ranch administrators have been taken hostage. Fences have been cut, animals have been slaughtered, buildings have been destroyed.
But that didn’t stop Captain Yza and Commander Varela from coming to Patagonia and settling with the strikers, giving them safe conduct passes that allowed them to freely move around the region and work wherever they pleased. And don’t forget that they didn’t hand over their weapons, as most of them remain in the possession of El 68, El Toscano, and the group that followed them. Aside from a few old rifles and rusty revolvers, Varela turned up nothing. Such is the panorama seen by the landowners and despondent merchants of Santa Cruz.
When Varela returns to Río Gallegos, they even say so to his face. Edelmiro Correa Falcón recounts the story in his pamphlet The Events in Santa Cruz, 1919–1921:
Once the 10th Cavalry Regiment’s peacemaking mission had concluded, a few individuals happened to encounter Lieutenant Colonel Varela in Río Gallegos. While they drank their tea, one of those present said that it set a dangerous precedent to allow so many weapons to remain in the hands of the rebels, who had nevertheless been issued with a sort of act of indemnity. The lieutenant colonel rejected this view of the situation, adding that his mission had been satisfactorily completed in accordance with the personal instructions of the president—a claim that was later borne out by those who heard these instructions issued. During this same conversation, another one of those present said that the news arriving from the countryside left him convinced that there would soon be a general uprising throughout the territory. The lieutenant colonel ignored this prediction, repeating that he believed his pacification efforts to have been definitive.
But the mighty aren’t Varela’s only critics. The commander’s pacifist stance is even being openly censured within his own regiment. Captain Anaya enumerates these criticisms:
The regiment, which had remained in the barracks in Santa Cruz, was utterly oblivious to what was going on and felt unsatisfied with the peaceful outcome. These feelings were encouraged by the landowners who had abandoned their ranches and wanted to see brutal, indiscriminate repression. The coastal business interests also disapproved of the solution, wishing that the strike had instead been drowned in blood. They mounted a campaign of defamation against the military officer and the governor, whom they claimed had blindly made a pact with insurgents out of ignorance and short-term political gain. Some officers were not unsympathetic to these criticisms, feeling that a humanitarian rather than military solution to the conflict had robbed them of their laurels.
Even before he leaves for Buenos Aires, Varela hesitates. He seems to be under a lot of pressure. Enrique Noya—brother of Rural Society President Ibón Noya—will tell us the following:
When the first strike ended, my brother Ibón told Varela, “When you leave, it will all start again.” Varela replied, “If it starts up again, I’ll come back and shoot the lot.”
In Río Gallegos, La Unión mercilessly attacks the settlement reached by Varela and Governor Yza:
The settlement deals exclusively with the economic aspects of the conflict, constituting a resounding victory for the impositions of the workers that has been facilitated by the authorities themselves. Lacking understanding, and with a total absence of impartiality, they have delivered a Solomonic judgment and indirectly forced capital to accept it.3 Nothing has been done to address the crimes, thefts, arsons, etc. that were committed during the strike—the perpetrators and their accomplices have not been taken in, not even for questioning.
The bosses had insisted on a hard line, glorifying Correa Falcón and brutish police officers like Ritchie and Nicolía Jameson. They had seen violence as the only possible solution. They could not understand the accommodating policies of the Radical president, as implemented by Governor Yza and Lieutenant Colonel Varela.
So, as we can see, nothing has been settled. There are still three antagonistic forces in a sparsely populated region. There are the bosses, with Correa Falcón as their most visible figure, along with the administrators of British-owned ranches and, perhaps most importantly, Mauricio Braun and Alejandro Menéndez Behety, who are the most intelligent of the lot, the ones with the most influence in Buenos Aires and the ones who have slowly begun to arrange a definitive settlement of the crisis. The second faction revolves around Borrero and Judge Viñas and includes all the members of the Radical Civic Union. It is this group whose support Governor Yza will seek. The third conflicting force is, of course, the labor movement, strengthened by its recent success.
In his role as the mediator between the bosses and the workers, Yza asks the Workers’ Society to lift its boycott of certain stores. But Antonio Soto refuses to simply do whatever the governor tells him to do. Yes, the boycotts will be lifted, but only when three conditions are met:
All of the strikers who have been fired will be rehired and given back pay for all workdays lost to the strike.
All non-unionized workers will be dismissed.
The bosses will reimburse the Workers’ Society for all costs incurred in printing their manifestos.
In short, Soto demands unconditional surrender. When the bosses learn of his demands, they are truly outraged. La Unión, scandalized, can’t help but attack the governor once more:
The government’s passivity in the face of such extortion essentially authorizes the subversion of law and order and the abdication of authority to the labor associations, which now represent a new power running parallel to the constitutional authorities. Outside agitators, the aftertaste of unrestricted immigration, profess doctrines in which those who were once slaves will take the place of their oppressors. An undisciplined horde, incapable of the honest struggle to earn a living, offers us the sad spectacle of tyranny lurking behind the veneer of economic concessions and forces us to confront the problem of nationality by slandering native-born citizens and supplanting the principles of the law with the imperative of their bastard aspirations. Foreigners, who have formed trade unions for no other purpose than the subversion of order and rebellion against the law and who have found easy living in revolt and social imbalance, proclaim destructive theories in the form of supposed concessions. They must therefore destroy any trace of the national spirit that could oppose their aims. War has been declared against the country’s sons, against the criollos who have more right than anyone to live in our society, as it is their home, on the simple ground that they rightly rebel against the imposition of these utopias.
This patriotic nonsense is but a sample of the arguments that were rehashed day after day, in every corner of the country, by the Argentine Patriotic League. According to them, Argentine workers weren’t the victims of capitalists or landowners, be they foreign or domestic, but instead of immigrant workers who “brought with them ideas that are incompatible with national sentiments.”
Syndicalism, liberty, equality, socialism, and universality were all foreign notions. The authentic Argentine, by contrast, was that worker who refused to succumb to this siren song, who was satisfied with his lot and was always respectful to his betters. He had a deep-seated love