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.
CHAPTER THREE: DAWN FOR THE WRETCHED
“For his exploiters, the value of a man can’t match
that of a mule, a sheep, or a horse.”
Manifesto of the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society
November 1920
The strikes in Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, Puerto Deseado, and Río Gallegos were enormously significant for those living in the south. They opened the eyes of the bosses to the possibility of a revolutionary strike that could threaten the private property system at any moment. The days had ended when some people gave the orders and others did nothing but obey. And they realized that, to defend themselves from this danger, they needed unity and, above all, the support of the federal government, which could provide police reinforcements and deploy the armed forces. For the workers, these episodes showed that a movement without organization was condemned to fail. More than anything else, the men of the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society criticized themselves for their lack of coordination with their sister organizations in Puerto Natales and Punto Arenas on the Chilean side of the border.
To understand the background to the coming tragedy, we need a clear explanation of the behavior
