legs. But Wilckens has also been hit and a sharp pain shoots through his body. He instinctively retreats to the doorway and climbs three or four steps, taking a moment to pull himself together—the enormous explosion has knocked the wind out of him. It takes just three seconds. Wilckens immediately descends the staircase. The anarchist then realizes that all is lost, that he can’t flee, that he has a broken leg (his fibula has shattered and the pain in his muscles is agonizing) and that he can’t move his other foot because of a piece of shrapnel lodged in the instep.
As he leaves the doorway, he comes across Varela. Though both of his legs are broken, he manages to remain upright by leaning against a tree with his left arm while trying to unsheathe his saber with his right hand. Now the two wounded men are once again face to face. Wilckens approaches, dragging his feet, and pulls out a Colt revolver. Varela roars, but instead of scaring the blue-eyed stranger, it sounds like a death rattle. The officer is collapsing, but he’s not the type to surrender or plead for mercy. He keeps tugging at the saber but it refuses to leave the scabbard. There’s only twenty centimeters left. Varela is still certain that he’ll be able to unsheathe it when the first bullet hits. His strength abandons him and he begins to slowly slip down the tree trunk, but he has enough time left to curse the man who shot him. The second bullet ruptures his jugular. Wilckens empties the chamber. Every bullet is fatal. Varela’s body is left wrapped around the tree.
The explosion and the gunshots have caused women to faint, men to flee, and horses to bolt.
Lieutenant Colonel Varela has died. Executed. His attacker is badly wounded. He makes a final effort to reach Calle Santa Fe. People are beginning to show their faces. Fearing the worst, Varela’s wife goes down to the street and the poor woman catches sight of her dead husband, his body broken so dramatically.
Several neighbors approach the fallen man, lifting him up to carry him to the pharmacy on the corner. Others follow the strange foreigner who looks like a Scandinavian sailor. They keep their distance because he still carries his gun in his right hand. But two policemen have already come running: Adolfo González Díaz and Nicanor Serrano. They draw their guns when they’re just a few steps away from Wilckens but they don’t need to act because he offers them the butt of his own revolver. They take it away and hear him say, in broken Spanish, “I have avenged my brothers.”2
Officer Serrano—“Black Serrano,” as he’s known at the 31st Precinct—responds by punching him in the mouth and kneeing him in the testicles. His hat—one of those traditional German hats with a wide brim, a cleft crown and a bow on the ribbon—falls off. They take him in with his head uncovered, awkwardly trying to stabilize himself with his wounded legs, like a shorebird with broken feet.
And so begins the cycle of revenge for the bloodiest repression of workers in twentieth century Argentina, save only for the period of the Videla dictatorship. The first chapter was written two years earlier, in the midst of the cold and the relentless gales of Patagonia, far to the south, with the most extensive strike of rural workers in South American history.
CHAPTER ONE: ARGENTINA’S FAR SOUTH
“In general, Argentines have the impression that Santa Cruz is not part of our fatherland.”
Lieutenant Colonel Varela,
Report to the War Ministry on the campaign
against the strikers
February 1922
What had happened in Patagonia? Or, better said, what was Patagonia in 1920?
To simplify things, we can say that it was an Argentine territory that was worked by Chilean peons and exploited by a group of landowners and merchants.1 In other words, on one side we have those who were born to obey and on the other those who made their fortunes because they were strong by nature. And, down south, “strong” almost always means “unscrupulous.” But that’s the way things have to be: Patagonia is a land for strong men. At those latitudes, kindness is a sign of weakness. And the weak are devoured by the wind, alcohol, and their fellow men. For all their faults, those white men who came to conquer Patagonia were pioneers. It was there that they arrived, made their plans, sought their fortunes, and harvested their riches, drinking the waters of abundance. He who stays and carries on and whose feelings do not waver will get rich. With nobody’s help. Have pity on those who want to take away what’s rightfully theirs, what they’ve won in the battle against nature, distance, and solitude!
In this battle, they depend on their sheep, horses, and chilotes.2 The chilotes are a dark, nameless people; wretches born to huddle in the mud, to never have a peso to their name. They work to buy alcohol and the occasional gift for their women. Their aspirations in life end there. They are the opposite of those who have risked everything to come to Patagonia with the sole goal of getting rich, “progressing.”
This is the difference: some have been drunk on resignation or indifference since they were children. Others are dominated by a sole passion, one that is just as natural in those inhospitable lands: ambition.
Among the ambitious, we can find individuals who have led truly fantastic lives … and who have made fortunes that are just as fantastic. It’s enough to mention just one—the life and fortune of Mauricio Braun, for example.
In 1874, a Jewish family disembarked at the port of Punta Arenas: a man, a woman, and their four children. The father, Elías Braun; the mother, Sofía Hamburger. They came fleeing Tsarist Russia, where irrationality was used to maintain privilege and the people, brutalized by slavery, looked to blame anyone for their dismal lot except for those who had enslaved them. Hence the brutal pogroms against the Jewish minority. Encouraged by the church and the decadent Russian nobles who posed as nationalists, the mob, morally and physically intoxicated, fell upon that cursed race, upon the “Christ-killers,” and unleashed orgies of blood. Just as others hunt rats, so the Russians hunted Jews. Armed with little more than clubs, they would surround a Jewish village or neighborhood and take the lives of others in revenge for all the injustices they themselves had suffered. Each Jew they beat to death was like an orgasm of pleasure. Their masters exploited them, it’s true, but every once in a while he gave them the freedom to kill a Jew. And then he gave them the right to rape the Jew’s wife, who needed to surrender her body next to her husband’s corpse on those terrible nights if she wanted to save her life and those of her children.
That was the ghastly image imprinted on the hearts of Elías and Sofía Braun when they made landfall in South America. Don Elías was a realist. He knew that there’s only one way to overcome prejudice: to have money and power. Only then would he be respected in spite of his race. With the realism and lack of sentimentality he had earned through experience and suffering, Elías Braun got to work. He started with a warehouse in Punta Arenas. But if Elías was a man with a knack for business, his son Mauricio would outdo him in every way. He got his start in business when only a teenager. Everything was looking up. The past was to be forgotten. In this spirit—and despite their origins—the Braun family became Catholic the moment they stepped foot in a Catholic country.
In 1920, on the eve of the labor unrest in Santa Cruz, Elías Braun’s son Mauricio Braun owned the Tierra del Fuego Development Corporation in partnership with his sister Sara Braun, controlling a total of 1,376,160 hectares—an astronomical figure that would be difficult to exceed anywhere in the world. This figure comes from an article entitled “Mauricio Braun, Rancher,” written by Emilio J. Ferro, president of the Patagonian Federation of Rural Societies. It appeared in an issue of the magazine Argentina Austral, which was published by the Braun-Menéndez/Menéndez Behety Group. This particular issue was entirely dedicated to Mauricio Braun. The article also states that the Development Corporation possessed some 1.25 million heads of sheep, producing 5 billion kilos of wool, 700,000 kilos of leather, and 2.5 million kilos of meat.
But
