they can count on the army as a strong ally. The genius behind this movement is Dr. Manuel Carlés, the president of the Argentine Patriotic League. A talented organizer, his paramilitary organization spreads across the country, forming a true army of white guards. The organization’s brigades are formed by bosses, managers, foremen, police officers, retired military men, and the so-called good workers. Respectable people, in other words. Well-armed, they patrol Argentina’s small towns and countryside. If a property owner has a problem with their laborers, the Argentine Patriotic League comes to their aid. They are prepared to do whatever is needed to defend what’s theirs. Carlés has also organized women’s brigades, led by young Catholic women from good families who recruit their followers from among factory workers and domestic workers.
Manuel Carlés tours the country, sounding the alarm about the threat posed by organized labor and the Yrigoyen administration, despite having been an employee of the federal government not long ago. On December 5th, 1920, Carlés gives the following florid speech:
We are the only country in the world whose authorities, barely concealing their contempt, allow for public sedition against our national identity. Saturated with the insults of sectarianism, the greatest atrocities against the right to work and the moral honor of the fatherland are treated as if they were but the sound of falling rain.
The Patriotic League acts with complete independence: they use the newspapers to issue orders to their members, openly calling on them to take up arms, repress strikes, provide support for besieged capitalists, etc.5 One example will be enough: this communiqué was issued on December 5th, 1921 by the Patriotic League brigade in Marcos Juárez, Córdoba in the midst of a peon strike:
The brigade has mobilized all of its members, who are preparing themselves to defend their collective interests from the anarchist agitators who made their appearance last night and who have since been interfering with the harvest. These outlaws have been threatening the workers and resort to violence at the first sign of resistance; they immediately tried to storm the police station when a group of their agitators was arrested. Such a state of affairs justifies the serious measure of mobilizing the brigade. Divided into defense sectors, we stand ready to repel this aggression. The town’s police force is small, but fortunately we form a large and determined group that is willing to guarantee the right to work, even if by force of arms. Today we called upon the ringleader of the subversive movement—a foreigner, naturally—and we have given him a period of two hours to leave the region. If he fails to do so, we will follow the instructions issued by the central committee for these situations. Dr. Carlés has addressed the brigade, endorsing our actions and offering us the tools we need to reach our noble goals.
It’s clear that the League has been given a free hand: they run workers out of town, carry firearms, attack unions, break up protests. It’s a counter-union, a union of the bosses. The only difference is that the government and the police don’t allow the workers to carry firearms.
And quite rightly. Nobody can disagree—at least from the point of view of those who have something to lose—that everyone should defend themselves as best they can. Fear justifies everything. News of the massacres of nobles, capitalists, and landowners by revolutionaries in Russia has kept the lords and masters of Argentina up at night. It’s time for neither hesitancy nor the Christian spirit. Each class must defend what’s theirs. This true around the world but especially so in Argentina, with the country’s strong union movement and anarchism’s unshakable hold on broad sectors of its working class. But the government doesn’t seem to have taken notice of the muted class warfare that has taken over the streets and countryside. And so Yrigoyen is criticized by the workers for allowing illegal paramilitary organizations to operate with impunity and by the bosses who rebuke his lack of energy in suppressing strikes and acts of terrorism.
Now let’s examine the forces that will come into conflict in the distant territory of Santa Cruz. On one side, we have the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society (affiliated with the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation, or FORA), which organized stevedores, cooks, waiters, hotel staff, and farmworkers. Their enemies were the city’s bosses, organized in the Río Gallegos Commerce and Industry League, the Santa Cruz Rural Society (bringing together all the region’s ranchers), and the Argentine Patriotic League, which, as we have said, united property owners, trusted employees, etc. and was a paramilitary organization directed against the proletarian left.
Let’s start with the workers. Their central organizations in Buenos Aires were totally divided.
There were two FORAs: the FORA V (orthodox anarchists)6 and the FORA IX, in which syndicalists, socialists, and the addicts of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution prevailed.7 The latter promoted dialogue with the Radical government—one of its leaders, Maritime Workers’ Federation Secretary-General Francisco J. García, had open access to Hipólito Yrigoyen’s offices. The anarchists of the FORA V called them chameleons, while the FORA IX, in turn, considered the anarchists to be sectarians.
But the working class wasn’t just divided into different organizations, but also different ideologies. Among the socialists, there was the classic division between social democrats and partisans of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as represented by the Socialist Party and the International Socialist Party, which would soon change its name to the Communist Party. The anarchists, in turn, assumed three different positions: the orthodox anarchists were split into a moderate wing (which had a voice in the newspaper La Protesta) and a leftist wing (represented by the newspapers El Libertario, La Obra, and later on La Antorcha), while another group of anarchists who sympathized with the Russian Revolution was grouped around the newspaper Bandera Roja, and included Julio R. Barcos, García Thomas, etc. These latter were the so-called anarcho-bolsheviks.
None of these divisions that caused such heated polemics in Buenos Aires were visible in the Santa Cruz Workers’ Federation, which had its headquarters in Río Gallegos. Its leaders didn’t concern themselves with ideological differences and instead focused on standing up to the power of the bosses, the government, and the police. There’s no doubt that danger had united them. We can say that, deep down, they all had an anarchist background, though many were still blinded by the triumph of the Russian Revolution.
The Río Gallegos Workers’ Federation had a short life. It was founded in 1910 and would end its days among the mass graves of its members in the summer of 1921–1922. The founder of this labor organization was a blacksmith named José Mata, described by the police as a “suspected anarchist militant.” He was born in Oviedo, Spain in 1879. He had several children, whose names speak for themselves: Progreso (Progress), Elíseo (Elysium), Alegría (Happiness), Libertario (Libertarian), Bienvenida (Welcome). The first labor dispute in Santa Cruz took place in November 1914 on the Mata Grande ranch, owned by the Englishman Guillermo Patterson. The leaders of this first strike were the Spaniard Fernando Solano Palacios and the Austrian Mateo Giubetich. They demanded that their bosses stop charging migrant farmworkers for their meals and for the combs and shears broken during the shearing, as well as demanding that medical examinations be voluntary, or rather that this expense stop being the responsibility of the workers. They also demanded 85 pesos per month plus food expenses for cart drivers instead of the 90 pesos minus 30 centavos per meal they were currently being paid. The shearers should also have their meals included, they demanded.
The strike then spread to the Los Manantiales and Florida Negra ranches, which were owned by the Englishmen Kemp and Hobbs. The police intervened in defense of the English ranchers and arrested the movement’s two leaders. The judge invoked the Social Defense Law, an anti-anarchist measure that sentenced them to prison time and the seizure of 1,000 pesos of their property as reparations for lost profits. But the problems didn’t end there, as the strike then spread to all the ranches located near San Julián. The movement’s leadership fell to the interim secretary of the San Julián Workers’ Society, a forty-eight-year-old Chilean carpenter named Juan de Dios Figueroa. Shearing stopped throughout the region and the bosses responded by bringing in scabs by ship from Buenos Aires. When the scabs disembarked, a battle
