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