Rebellion in Patagonia. Osvaldo Bayer
country into conflict with English capital at a time when Yrigoyen doesn’t want any more problems than he already has; the British legation has been closely following events as they unfold.
Neither has the depression in the wool market been properly dealt with. The time is not right for Yrigoyen to involve himself in land conflicts in Patagonia. For him, that time will never come.
Judge Viñas will be disowned. He will emerge defeated from his attempt to fight British capital. The victor will be Governor Correa Falcón, along with all the interests he represents. But the war is just getting underway and the judge has only lost two battles.
In addition to this internecine strife between the representatives of the executive and legislative powers, which the landowners and merchants of Santa Cruz were following with concern, there was also an atmosphere of latent rebellion among the workers in the region’s small towns and rural areas. Worried, Governor Correa Falcón informs the interior minister in April 1920 that “some individuals have arrived from the capital and other parts of the country to spread new ideas, beginning a campaign aiming to subvert the territory’s public order.” He encloses a copy of an anarchist pamphlet titled Justicia Social, which had been widely distributed among the region’s farmworkers.
Correa Falcón, who has a nose for labor disturbances, is not overreacting. That June, at the La Oriental ranch near the province of Chubut, an unmistakably subversive strike breaks out. Two Russian anarchists—Anastasio Plichuk and Arsento Casachuk—and one Spaniard—Domingo Barón—stir up the farmworkers and proceed to carry out an occupation of the ranch. But Correa Falcón, with the help of the Chubut police, acts with exemplary speed and vigor. He steps in and breaks the strike. The two Russians and the Spaniard—with the stigma of having violated Article 25 of Public Safety Law 7029—receive a few good blows to their swollen, revolutionary heads and are thrown in the hold of a naval transport on its way to Buenos Aires, where President Yrigoyen will sign their deportation orders under Residence Law 4.144.
Correa Falcón also knows that there is another threat right there in Río Gallegos: Antonio Soto, the new secretary-general of the Workers’ Society.
A Spaniard, Antonio Soto was born in the Galician city of El Ferrol on October 11th, 1897, the son of Antonio Soto and Concepción Canalejo. He arrived in Buenos Aires at the age of thirteen. When his father passed away, he and his brother Francisco entered a life of misery and privation not uncommon in Argentina at the time of the centennial. Antonio was rarely able to attend elementary school. Instead, he learned a variety of trades—like many other children in those days—and was educated by poverty, exploitation, and corporal punishment. He was attracted to anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas from a young age. In 1919—when he was twenty-two years old—he joined the Serrano-Mendoza theater company, which toured the ports of Argentine Patagonia and then continued on to Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, Puerto Montt, etc., bringing the dramatic arts to the south’s most isolated southern villages.
A true popular rebellion breaks out in Trelew, Chubut in January 1920. It all started when retail workers go on strike in protest against the governor, the police, and powerful businessmen. Almost the entire population of the city joins the movement. The situation is aggravated by mutual recriminations and, as in every small town, personal issues came to the fore.
In the midst of this conflict, Antonio Soto, the stagehand of the Serrano-Mendoza theater company, makes his appearance by rallying the people behind the striking workers. This earns him his arrest and expulsion from Chubut. It’s the first entry on his police record.
He arrives in Río Gallegos soon afterwards. He is attracted to the town’s working class atmosphere. Before and after theatrical performances, he goes to the headquarters of the Workers’ Society and listens to the speeches of Dr. José María Borrero, who speaks like the gods and always leaves the audience stunned. Borrero encourages Soto to stay in Río Gallegos and join the union; he realizes that Soto is a man of action with the proper ideological background, as well as someone who knows how to express himself in assemblies. And so when the theater leaves town, Soto stays behind.
The future leader of the rural strikes finds work as a stevedore, or as he calls himself, a “beach worker.” By Sunday, May 24th, 1920, he has been elected secretary-general of the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society.
This is Antonio Soto. According to his police file, he is 1.84 meters tall, has clear blue eyes, dirty blond hair, and a lazy right eye.
He receives his baptism by fire as a union leader that July. Together with unions from elsewhere in Santa Cruz, the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society launches strikes in every port and hotel in the territory. They demand higher wages. It isn’t easy. Particularly in Río Gallegos. The stevedores lose their strike. The hotel workers’ union moves forward, however. The bosses give in, accepting the workers’ conditions—with the exceptions of the owners of the Hotel Español and the Grand Hotel, who resort to hiring 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