But this same timidity, this propensity for dialogue and compromise, was not enough to overcome the crises faced by his administration. When the industrial workers of Buenos Aires rose up, he allowed the oligarchy to repress them with the army and the armed commandos of the upper crust, resulting in the bloodshed of the Tragic Week of January 1919. And when Patagonia’s agricultural workers firmly demanded a series of concessions and the movement threatened to go beyond mere unionism—according to the information available in Buenos Aires—he lets the army defend the feudal order with blood and fire.
Yrigoyen thus became the involuntary executioner of Argentina’s social movements. Ironic, but not coincidental. What hadn’t occurred under the pre-1916 oligarchic regime—during which repression never reached the level of collective massacre—would transpire under the populist government of Yrigoyen (to reduce repetition).
1920. The distant territory of Patagonia is in crisis. Since the end of the Great War, wool prices have fallen and unrest has increased. The British market is saturated. Two and a half million bundles of wool from Australia and New Zealand that were shipped to London have gone unsold. Patagonian wool hasn’t even had that much luck: it hasn’t even left the port. The London bureau of the Havas news agency issues a report stating that “significant stocks of low quality South American wool have been offered at low prices to the Central Powers.” The good times of the war, when money flowed freely into hands that were already full, have ended in Patagonia. This is the fate of all regions that are condemned to produce a single product: when the price of wool rises, there’s prosperity; when it falls, as occurred from 1919 on, there’s unemployment, poverty, repression, depressed wages, economic crisis, resignation among small producers and traders, and panic among large landowners. The latter has already asked Yrigoyen for help, though the president proved to be far from sympathetic. The Radical president instead dared, on two consecutive occasions, to move against the sacred interests of the true masters of Patagonia. He reinstated customs offices in the far south to control imports and exports and then ordered land claims to be reassessed. The latter meant that many ranches were considerably reduced in size, as their owners had taken possession of much more land than they actually owned.
These two measures cut down on a number of rights and prerogatives that had been acquired per se, but also created a defensive atmosphere among large landowners that united them in resistance to anything that smelled of tax collectors and government agents.
It was Dr. Ismael P. Viñas, the new judge in the Patagonian territories of Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego—a man with a Radical background and a personal friend of Yrigoyen—who broke with the tradition that all of Patagonia’s public servants and judges either answered to ranching interests or were their direct agents. Before the surprised eyes of the representatives of the region’s corporations, Viñas initiated legal proceedings for tax evasion against one of the region’s largest ranching concerns, The Monte Dinero Sheep Farming Company. The resolute judge also initiated proceedings against The San Julián Sheep Farming Company for their illegal seizure of the property of Donald Munro, who had passed away at the turn of the century and whose fields, as he lacked heirs, should have been turned over to the National Education Council.
This was unthinkable for the large ranching concerns and their agents. It was clear that something had changed in Argentina. The Yrigoyen administration had decided to defend the government’s interests against the creeping influence of those who controlled the country’s sources of socioeconomic power. But this radicalism showed its limitations at each step. Though he backed Judge Viñas, Yrigoyen also allowed for the inconceivable: the government of Santa Cruz remained in the hands of an ultraconservative, Edelmiro Correa Falcón, who—though it’s hard to believe—simultaneously served as the secretary of the Santa Cruz Rural Society, the landowners’ federation. President Yrigoyen could have immediately designated someone else to serve as governor, as Santa Cruz was then a territory and not a province—it was under the direct control of the federal government, in other words, and did not enjoy political autonomy.2
As if afraid of rattling the mighty too much, Yrigoyen did not replace Correa Falcón. The ultraconservative continues holding the reins of the territory’s government bureaucracy and police apparatus, both of which will be used against the Radical judge.
We shall see how the judge will be supported in this conflict by the sparse middle class of Santa Cruz—small business owners, white collar workers, and artisans—as well as by unionized workers. A crude class alliance in this distant territory will form a sort of anti-oligarchic front aimed at destroying the medieval regime to which they are subjected. When the hour of decision comes, however, this class alliance will break apart and the entire middle class will defect to the side of the landowners, letting the workers alone fall victim to the savage repression.
But first let’s study the forces in Buenos Aires that are playing tug-of-war over Argentina’s first popularly elected president.
When Patagonia’s landowners asked Yrigoyen for support in facing the wool crisis, the president was surrounded by a series of enormous problems. Though he hadn’t lost his calm, he was constantly being attacked in both international and domestic politics and on economic, social, and political issues.
Internationally, Yrigoyen had once again fallen out of favor with the Allied nations. Foreign Minister Pueyrredón had left Geneva during the inaugural meeting of the League of Nations after being the sole delegate to vote against the war reparations imposed on defeated Germany. The Argentina of Yrigoyen thus remained true to its policy of neutrality, showing its desire to maintain an independent line, that of a sovereign nation.
And the summer that comes at the end of 1920 will be a hot one in every sense of the word. The peso reaches a record low: 100 dollars buy 298.85 Argentine pesos, scandalizing the haughty columnists at the traditional newspapers, the fearless defenders of the oligarchy’s privileges. They blame the populist government. They don’t explain that the falling value of the German mark also affects the value of pounds sterling and strengthens the dollar, and that Argentina’s economy has become more independent of the British sphere and is slowly beginning to fall under the influence of the true winner of the First World War: the United States.
Domestically, the price of bread has jumped once again, this time to sixty centavos per kilo, which makes these same columnists remember in passing that, before the coming of the populist government, this essential foodstuff cost barely thirty centavos.
Labor conflicts are on the rise. There’s a near-general strike among agricultural laborers, primarily in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, Chaco, and Entre Ríos. The ranchers, the small independent farmers, and the large and small property owners don’t turn to Yrigoyen for defense. They don’t trust him. Neither do Argentina’s businessmen nor the representatives of powerful foreign corporations. They know that they have a firm ally, their only friend but a strong one: the Argentine Army. If the army hadn’t defeated the workers of the Vasena metal works with fire and blood, who else would have saved the country from the anarchist and Bolshevik hordes in January 1919? Did Yrigoyen even try? Did anyone see any white berets on the streets repressing the rebel workers?3 All those individuals whose actions stand out in the uncontrolled class struggle of the first three decades of the twentieth century have been graduates of the National Military College. It was Colonel Ramón Falcón who trained the police and worked to break up the major labor organizations until 1909, the year in which he fell victim to the bomb thrown by the anarchist Simón Radowitzky. It was General Dellepiane who became the hero of the Vasena metal works, where proletarian cadavers were piled into wheelbarrows. It is Lieutenant Colonel José Félix Uriburu who will give subversive anarchism the coup de grace in 1930, together with men like Colonel Pilotto and Major Rosasco.4 And later on, it is General Justo who will put an end to the dreams and vagaries of proletarian revolution with severe repression and a continuous state of siege.
But in the wake of the Tragic Week, or Red Week, of January 1919, the upper and upper-middle classes—that is, everyone with something
