where he resumed his organizing work until he was once again imprisoned. After being freed, he moved to Brazil, where he engaged in anti-fascist organizing before going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After Franco’s victory in 1939, he fled to France, where he was placed in a concentration camp. He then made his escape, evading the pending Nazi invasion by just under twelve months. That June he settled in Mexico, where he worked in a toy factory until his death in 1956, but he remained active in the anarchist movement and wrote for Mexican anarchist publications.3
The centennial of Argentina’s independence from Spain, celebrated in 1910, was marked by a perhaps inevitable clash between the year’s triumphant nationalism and the restless labor movement. On May 8th—less than a month before the centennial celebrations, scheduled for May 25th—seventy thousand people took to the streets of Buenos Aires to protest the mistreatment of inmates in the National Prison. The CORA and the FORA separately resolved to begin a general strike on May 18th if their demands, including the repeal of the Residency Law, were not met. The government began making arrests on May 13th—in all, over two thousand union members were imprisoned—and a state of emergency was declared the following day. The police organized nationalist gangs to raid union halls, the offices of left-wing newspapers and immigrant-owned businesses. But the strike still went forward. During the centennial celebrations, the trolleys of Buenos Aires could only advance under armed guard and anonymous saboteurs ensured that the electric lights that had been installed to illuminate the city would remain dark.4 “The government won,” FORA organizer and anarchist historian Diego Abad de Santillán would later write. “But history will remember that, to celebrate Argentina’s independence, it was necessary to turn Buenos Aires into a military camp, with a state of siege and overflowing prisons.”5
By 1910—also an election year—it was clear that Argentina’s oligarchy could not continue ruling as it had; things would have to change in order for them to stay as they were. The National Autonomist Party had dominated Argentine politics for the previous thirty years, protecting the interests of Argentina’s commercial and land-owning oligarchy, ensuring domestic stability and moving the country past the civil wars of the nineteenth century. But it was only able to maintain its grip on power through widespread electoral fraud and disenfranchisement—it’s estimated that only 20 percent of the native-born male population voted during the 1910 elections—and by the turn of the century, the party had begun to collapse under the weight of factional infighting.6 The violence seen during the centennial made it clear that the vaunted stability of the so-called Conservative Republic ushered in by the National Autonomist Party could not last without major changes, and so one of incoming president Roque Sáenz Peña’s first actions in office was to pass an electoral reform establishing the secret ballot and compulsory suffrage for all adult male citizens.
Though the intention behind this reform was to provide the ruling oligarchy with democratic legitimacy, the Sáenz Peña Law, as it came to be known, in effect handed the country over to the Radical Civic Union, Argentina’s main opposition party. Formed in the 1890s, when an economic crisis divided Argentina’s oligarchy into competing factions, the Radical Civic Union staged a series of unsuccessful coups at the turn of the century. After its founder, Leandro Alem, committed suicide in 1896, leadership of the party passed into the hands of his nephew Hipólito Yrigoyen, who worked to expand the party’s base beyond the intra-elite struggles of its early years. Following the party’s final coup attempt in 1905, Yrigoyen decided to change his strategy from military conspiracy to grassroots organizing, recruiting urban professionals, small business owners and other middle-class elements to join the Radical Civic Union. Yrigoyen’s populist attacks on the country’s oligarchy appealed to those Argentines who found themselves unable to advance, while local Radical committees organized street corner meetings and free concerts, opened medical clinics, and distributed food to the needy in an attempt to win over the country’s working class. By the time Argentina’s first elections with universal male suffrage were held in 1916, the Radical Civic Union had positioned itself to easily crush the conservatives. The final results were not even close: Yrigoyen was elected by a thirty-three-point margin.
Once in office, Yrigoyen strove to paternalistically present himself as the “father of the poor” by integrating an immigrant workforce into the framework of Argentine nationalism, providing workers with access to credit and a rising standard of living, and expanding the country’s middle class by founding universities and opening up new opportunities in the public sector bureaucracy. His populist reforms sought to shore up support from a battered and militant working class and channel it into institutional change that could cool off an explosive situation, yet without undertaking land reform or altering the basis of Argentina’s export-oriented economy. This political strategy is familiar to us now, but the Radical period in Argentine history occurred many years before similar center-left attempts to co-opt working class radicalism, such as the New Deal in the United States or the Popular Fronts in Western Europe.
During these years, Argentina’s labor organizations continued to advance towards unification. The first unification congress between the FORA and the CORA—much-delayed by state repression—was finally held in December 1912, although the organizations would not merge until September 1914, when the CORA dissolved itself and joined the FORA. But this unity would not last long. During the ninth congress of the FORA, held in April 1915, a resolution was approved that made the labor federation officially non-ideological, thus rejecting the union’s previous anarcho-communist line. “The FORA is an eminently working-class institution, made up of affinity groups organized by trade which nevertheless belong to the most varied ideological and doctrinal tendencies,” the resolution stated. “The FORA therefore cannot declare itself to be partisan or to advocate the adoption of a philosophical system or a determined ideology.”7 The adoption of this resolution provoked a split; the anarchists withdrew from the federation in May of that year and formed the FORA V—after the FORA’s fifth congress, when the resolution in favor of anarcho-communism was adopted—leaving the syndicalists in control of what came to be known as the FORA IX, after the resolution of the ninth congress.
Another difference between the two FORAs had to do with their composition—the FORA V had a strong base in Argentina’s largely immigrant workforce, while members of the FORA IX were overwhelmingly native-born Argentines, with some affiliated unions (such as the Maritime Workers’ Federation) even going so far as to ban immigrants from joining.8 With a reformist orientation and a rank-and-file who were largely eligible voters, building an alliance with the FORA IX became a clear priority for the Radical Civic Union as it sought to win the working-class vote. When Yrigoyen took office in 1916—just one year after the split in the FORA—he adopted a policy of largely giving the FORA IX a free hand while maintaining the fierce repression employed by his predecessors during strikes organized by the FORA V.
The first labor dispute faced by his administration occurred just one month after he took office, when the sailors, stevedores, and boilermen of the Maritime Workers’ Federation (FORA IX) went on strike to demand that their wages be adjusted to the rising cost of living. Yrigoyen invited the union’s leaders to meet with him at the Casa Rosada and promised to refrain from using the police to protect strikebreakers, thus giving the workers the breathing room needed to settle the dispute with their bosses. The strike ended one month later with a victory for the union.9 This would generally set the pattern for future strikes under the Yrigoyen administration—at least for those organized by the syndicalists. Things would be very different for socialist and anarchist-led strikes.
In December 1918, the United Metalworkers Resistance Society (FORA V) declared a strike at the Vasena factory, demanding higher wages, an eight-hour workday and the right to overtime pay. The Vasena family proved to be intransigent; they not only hired strikebreakers but used their connections to the Radical party to obtain the weapons permits needed to arm them. But the metalworkers received the solidarity of the city’s unions and merchants—railway workers refused to unload raw materials destined for the Vasena works, while local shopkeepers donated food, coal, and other necessities to the strikers—and so the strike dragged on for over a month. By the beginning of 1919, there were nearly daily clashes between strikebreakers and the police on one side and
