scabs. So Soto and a compatriot enter one of the hotels and use their fists to try and convince the holdouts to stop work.
When the hotel owner complains to the police, Soto and his colleague are arrested. Representatives of the Workers’ Society then approach Judge Viñas, asking him to release the two men. The time has come for the judge to put the governor in check. Viñas orders the two workers to be immediately released, even though the police have already initiated criminal proceedings against them for forcible entry, assault, and property damage. We shall soon see the consequences of this decision.
On August 24th, the police chief, Commissioner Diego Ritchie, informs Governor Correa Falcón that:
The police have discovered that the local Workers’ Federation is working with its counterparts in Buenos Aires, the port cities and Punta Arenas (Chile) to launch a general strike that is to begin next month, a movement that could take on a revolutionary nature … dynamite is being prepared in one or more of the territory’s ports.
Commissioner Ritchie—who insists that the strike will include rural peons—puts in a request for machine guns.
Two weeks later—on September 7th, 1920—the police chief’s concerns grow and he sends the governor another report:
Faced with the threat from the workers and anarchists, I deem the situation in the territory to be quite serious, as there’s no doubt that the general strike being planned will unavoidably become a seditious movement, given the unrest in the workers’ camp and the territory’s numerous anarchists and repeat offenders, whose ranks are being swelled by the dangerous elements expelled from Punta Arenas in the aftermath of that city’s revolutionary strike.
In his urgent request for reinforcements, the police chief provides the following interesting details:
The territory’s police force consists of 230 troopers (including the border patrol), who are stationed at 46 precincts, sub-precincts and detachments spread across a 282,000 square kilometer territory that is home to some very important ranches and four large meatpacking plants—the Swift plant in Río Gallegos, the Swift plant in San Julián, the Armour plant in Puerto Santa Cruz and the Puerto Deseado Meatpacking Plant, owned by a local ranching company. Río Gallegos alone has a population of around 4,000 residents, with more in important towns like Puerto Santa Cruz, San Julián, Puerto Deseado, and Las Heras. It’s easy to see how difficult or even impossible it would be to defeat a movement such as the one being prepared with our badly paid and understaffed police force.
He then requests infantry troops from Buenos Aires or a warship carrying an expeditionary force, adding that the police under his command are keeping a close watch on the movement’s ringleaders.
On December 15th, 1920, Governor Correa Falcón complains to the interior minister that Judge Viñas “favors the workers” and has been a party to “extortion” against the business community of Río Gallegos. This is what happened: after the July hotel workers’ strike had been lifted, the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society declared a boycott of the hotels that had refused the union’s demands. The boycott was well organized: taxi drivers refused to take passengers to those hotels, union members talked to hotel staff and encouraged them to stop working—or, rather, pressured them to stop work—and hotel guests were stopped in the street and had the conflict politely explained to them. And the streets of that small city were inundated with flyers in those days.
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
