for change and progress; the second, with his charismatic personality, is the spokesman for that stratum of Santa Cruz society caught between the landowners and the workers. A stratum that is almost entirely made up of Spaniards: small landowners, small business owners, tavern keepers, hotel and restaurant owners, white collar workers, independent artisans, etc. This petite bourgeoisie sees their existence threatened by the large consortiums—like the Braun-Menéndez family’s La Anónima—true regional monopolies in the sale of such staple products as food, clothing, etc., and possessing the capital and logistical infrastructure needed to destroy any potential competition.
With the meager resources at its disposal, the Patagonian middle class depends on its clientèle, the workers. They even support the labor movement to a certain extent, because higher wages means more purchasing power and therefore higher sales volumes.
This middle social stratum has just one weekly newspaper to speak for it: La Verdad, whose owner and editor is José María Borrero. On their side, the landowners have the biweekly La Unión.
Two dissimilar men arrive in Río Gallegos at almost exactly the same time, though by very different routes. The first is the aforementioned Judge Ismael Viñas, appointed by President Yrigoyen for a three year term, while the second is the Spaniard Antonio Soto, who ended up in the far south as a stagehand for a traveling Spanish operetta company: he set up the scenery, arranged the seating, cleaned up afterwards, and even played the occasional minor role when needed. He decides to stay in Río Gallegos and, within a matter of weeks, becomes the secretary of the Workers’ Society, steering it in a frankly revolutionary direction.
The fuse of the coming tragedy will be lit by Judge Viñas through his aforementioned legal proceedings against two English ranching companies: The Monte Dinero Sheep Farming Company and The San Julián Sheep Farming Company.
The acting governor and secretary of the Rural Society, Correa Falcón, uses all the resources at his disposal—the police, the government bureaucracy, and the newspaper La Unión—to obstruct the judge. José María Borrero defends the judge’s unprecedented stand against the power of the landowners in the pages of La Verdad, while two lawyers, Juan Carlos Beherán and Salvador Corminas, provide legal support. This group of men makes contact with the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society and holds frequent meetings with Antonio Soto and other union leaders. And so there are working-class manifestos written by Borrero, a lawyer.
A protracted power struggle between the judge and the governor ensues. Viñas accelerates the legal proceedings and orders Monte Dinero’s assets to be auctioned off. The governor retaliates by ordering the arrest of the auctioneer and a group of the judge’s friends, including José María Borrero, Corminas, and Beherán. When Viñas orders the seizure of the assets of San Julián, the other English ranching company, Governor Correa Falcón once again intervenes with the police to prevent them from being auctioned off.
The president soon learns of the conflict. Even though Judge Viñas is a loyal Radical, the federal government knows that supporting him would bring the country into conflict with English capital at a time when Yrigoyen doesn’t want any more problems than he already has; the British legation has been closely following events as they unfold.
Neither has the depression in the wool market been properly dealt with. The time is not right for Yrigoyen to involve himself in land conflicts in Patagonia. For him, that time will never come.
Judge Viñas will be disowned. He will emerge defeated from his attempt to fight British capital. The victor will be Governor Correa Falcón, along with all the interests he represents. But the war is just getting underway and the judge has only lost two battles.
In addition to this internecine strife between the representatives of the executive and legislative powers, which the landowners and merchants of Santa Cruz were following with concern, there was also an atmosphere of latent rebellion among the workers in the region’s small towns and rural areas. Worried, Governor Correa Falcón informs the interior minister in April 1920 that “some individuals have arrived from the capital and other parts of the country to spread new ideas, beginning a campaign aiming to subvert the territory’s public order.” He encloses a copy of an anarchist pamphlet titled Justicia Social, which had been widely distributed among the region’s farmworkers.
Correa Falcón, who has a nose for labor disturbances, is not overreacting. That June, at the La Oriental ranch near the province of Chubut, an unmistakably subversive strike breaks out. Two Russian anarchists—Anastasio Plichuk and Arsento Casachuk—and one Spaniard—Domingo Barón—stir up the farmworkers and proceed to carry out an occupation of the ranch. But Correa Falcón, with the help of the Chubut police, acts with exemplary speed and vigor. He steps in and breaks the strike. The two Russians and the Spaniard—with the stigma of having violated Article 25 of Public Safety Law 7029—receive a few good blows to their swollen, revolutionary heads and are thrown in the hold of a naval transport on its way to Buenos Aires, where President Yrigoyen will sign their deportation orders under Residence Law 4.144.
Correa Falcón also knows that there is another threat right there in Río Gallegos: Antonio Soto, the new secretary-general of the Workers’ Society.
A Spaniard, Antonio Soto was born in the Galician city of El Ferrol on October 11th, 1897, the son of Antonio Soto and Concepción Canalejo. He arrived in Buenos Aires at the age of thirteen. When his father passed away, he and his brother Francisco entered a life of misery and privation not uncommon in Argentina at the time of the centennial. Antonio was rarely able to attend elementary school. Instead, he learned a variety of trades—like many other children in those days—and was educated by poverty, exploitation, and corporal punishment. He was attracted to anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas from a young age. In 1919—when he was twenty-two years old—he joined the Serrano-Mendoza theater company, which toured the ports of Argentine Patagonia and then continued on to Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, Puerto Montt, etc., bringing the dramatic arts to the south’s most isolated southern villages.
A true popular rebellion breaks out in Trelew, Chubut in January 1920. It all started when retail workers go on strike in protest against the governor, the police, and powerful businessmen. Almost the entire population of the city joins the movement. The situation is aggravated by mutual recriminations and, as in every small town, personal issues came to the fore.
In the midst of this conflict, Antonio Soto, the stagehand of the Serrano-Mendoza theater company, makes his appearance by rallying the people behind the striking workers. This earns him his arrest and expulsion from Chubut. It’s the first entry on his police record.
He arrives in Río Gallegos soon afterwards. He is attracted to the town’s working class atmosphere. Before and after theatrical performances, he goes to the headquarters of the Workers’ Society and listens to the speeches of Dr. José María Borrero, who speaks like the gods and always leaves the audience stunned. Borrero encourages Soto to stay in Río Gallegos and join the union; he realizes that Soto is a man of action with the proper ideological background, as well as someone who knows how to express himself in assemblies. And so when the theater leaves town, Soto stays behind.
The future leader of the rural strikes finds work as a stevedore, or as he calls himself, a “beach worker.” By Sunday, May 24th, 1920, he has been elected secretary-general of the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society.
This is Antonio Soto. According to his police file, he is 1.84 meters tall, has clear blue eyes, dirty blond hair, and a lazy right eye.
He receives his baptism by fire as a union leader that July. Together with unions from elsewhere in Santa Cruz, the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society launches strikes in every port and hotel in the territory. They demand higher wages. It isn’t easy. Particularly in Río Gallegos. The stevedores lose their strike. The hotel workers’ union moves forward, however. The bosses give
