Rebellion in Patagonia. Osvaldo Bayer
in Río Gallegos once more. The first to arrive is the Presidente Mitre, carrying 326 third class passengers. La Unión, the mouthpiece of the ranchers, triumphantly reports that the ship has brought in “a full staff for the meatpacking plants.” The arrival of the Mitre ends a period of seventy days’ rest at the ports of Santa Cruz, which the newspaper notes is “equivalent to the time that Columbus took to discover America four centuries ago.”
The ship’s arrival in Río Gallegos has a tremendous psychological impact on the town’s residents, especially its merchants and landowners. Two delegates from the syndicalist FORA also arrive from Buenos Aires on the Presidente Mitre: Santiago Lázaro and Francisco Somoza, who will wage a war to the death against Antonio Soto and the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society.
Besides the Mitre, the Presidente Quintana, and the Asturiano are also on their way to the coasts of Patagonia.
Antonio Soto decides to travel to Buenos Aires and clarify the situation to the syndicalists. He emerges from hiding and is smuggled aboard the steamship Asturiano by the ship’s mechanics. During a stopover at Puerto Deseado, the town’s sub-prefect learns of Soto’s presence aboard the ship and orders the maritime police to bring him ashore. But the ship’s entire crew goes on strike and the police, outdone, are forced to retreat. Upon docking in Buenos Aires, the police try to search the ship, but a group of three hundred stevedores get in the way.9 La Organización Obrera, the mouthpiece of the syndicalist FORA, reports Soto’s arrival on January 29th. Soto will participate in the union’s national congress as the delegate of the Río Gallegos Workers’ Society. But Soto has also come to encourage the unionized workers of Buenos Aires to help their fellows in the countryside, then facing the toughest moments of the strike. The labor congress, bringing together delegates from every corner of the country, is held from January 29th to February 5th, 1921. There, Soto will insult the national union leadership. He will criticize the decision of the Maritime Workers’ Federation to allow ships filled with strikebreakers to disembark and sail to Río Gallegos. The entire congress will listen with astonishment to the Patagonian delegate’s scathing criticism of the national leadership’s lack of solidarity and their abandonment of the labor movement in the south during so difficult a year for the workers as 1920.
Soto will never be forgiven for this speech. Criticizing the bureaucracy of the country’s most powerful labor federation is a capital sin. And the bureaucracy immediately hits back. The union’s national newspaper, La Organización Obrera, publishes the following report on the labor congress on February 12th:
The delegate from Santa Cruz used the labor disputes on the southern coast as an opportunity to bring up matters that took two hours to address. He made unjustified criticisms of the Maritime Workers’ Federation and the national leadership, which drew a vehement response from Alegría, Cisneros, and others, as well as from the national leadership council. In the end, the decisions of the national leadership were endorsed by a vote of 99 to 3, and it was agreed by a vote of 111 delegates that all matters not scheduled on the agenda should be addressed in committee.
As we can see, the Chamber of Deputies isn’t alone in referring sensitive matters to committee—unions can do it as well.
But the rural strike will last until the bitter end. El 68 and El Toscano move shrewdly. They’re constantly shifting camp and don’t seek out confrontation, but when they need to fight, they fight. And they will prove this in their tragicomic clash with Commissioner Francisco Nicolía Jameson and the officers under his command.10
As we have seen, the strikers have been camping out in a canyon nine leagues away from El Cerrito. From there, they set out for Juan Clark’s El Tero ranch. Their ranks have been swollen by around 450 peons. Keeping with their tactic of staying on the move and disorienting the police, they push forward and set up camp in a quarry, which will later be known as Cañadón de los Huelguistas (Strikers’ Canyon). There they remain for several days while El 68 heads to Río Gallegos to meet with Soto. The former prisoner of Ushuaia manages to slip past the police checkpoints and then leaves the capital accompanied by thirty men, a truly daring feat. They attack the ranches they come across on their way back to camp, taking hostages, capturing gendarmes, and requisitioning weapons and horses. Their ranks swell by 150 men, making a total of six hundred strikers in the canyon. They immediately break camp and march towards Lago Argentino, where they carry out an occupation of La Anita ranch. There they capture four gendarmes and thirty shearers.
Unaware of these developments, Commissioner Nicolía Jameson has received orders from Correa Falcón to reinforce the guard at La Anita. Assisted by Officer Novas, he gathers together fifteen well-armed men and they drive off in a car and a truck. They feel safe because they know that Laprida is stationed at La Vanguardia with fifty soldiers, and they’re confident they won’t see a trace of El 68’s men. Upon reaching Calafate, the commissioner lets his men stop at Echeverría’s tavern and generously buys them a few rounds. They’re a bit tipsy when they resume their journey to La Anita. But when they reach the Río Centinela, they see three cars approach. Sixty riders emerge from the side of the road. Commissioner Jameson orders his men to halt and take up positions.
As the cars approach, a gendarme named Artaza, drunk and unsteady on his feet, begins firing left and right. Facing such a welcome, the strikers stop and fire on the police. Commissioner Nicolía Jameson and his men flee as best they can, piling into their vehicles, turning around and taking off at top speed, leaving behind Artaza, who is too drunk to run, and another two gendarmes named Giménez and Páez. Realizing that they have been left to the mercy of the strikers, Giménez and Páez scream for their lives. Officer Nova, riding in the truck, draws his revolver and forces the driver to stop and pick them up. Artaza is left on his own and keeps firing until he is cut down by El 68’s men.
Officer Nova will later tell his superiors that Nicolía Jameson beat a hasty retreat; that when he saw the strikers, he shouted, “Everybody aboard, let’s go!”; that Artaza had left the police station drunk, “having consumed a large amount of alcohol, purchased from La Anónima by Commissioner Jameson.”
The car leaves the truck far behind. When Nova finally reaches Echeverría’s tavern, he finds “Commissioner Jameson and Officer Garay totally intoxicated, embracing each other and saying farewell.” Jameson had bought three bottles and got drunk, as had most of his men, strengthening their spirits while they waited for the strikers. But the latter had given up the chase, as the area was under surveillance by Captain Laprida and his cavalry troops. The police officer’s testimony will state that, as he left the tavern, Jameson shouted, “Long live the fatherland! Down with the red flag and long live the flag of Argentina!” He then ordered those present to give a cheer for each officer who had fought that day.
When they arrive at the police station, they find Subcommissioner Douglas ordering Jameson to give a cheer for him and his men. He then orders Nova to fetch three bottles of whiskey from Dickie’s ranch “to share among the men who conducted themselves so bravely at the Río Centinela.” And then something occurs that clearly shows these men’s brutality and total lack of respect for humanity. Two riders were being held at the station on suspicion of being strikers. Jameson has them taken from their cells, orders his men to strip them naked and beats them with the flat of his saber in front of the troops. He then orders them to be left naked all night, though this order is later overridden by Captain Laprida, who arrives half an hour later. But Nicolía Jameson hasn’t finished with the day’s great deeds. Nobody at the police station feels safe. They all fear an attack by El 68 and El Toscano. And so they decide to head to Lenzner’s ranch, where most of the cavalry troops are stationed. There, Captain Laprida turns a German striker over to the police. Nicolía Jameson immediately orders the German to be taken out back. He handcuffs the prisoner, lowers him halfway into a well and then uses Officer Nova’s handcuffs to shackle him to a nearby fence. A true Chinese torture: spending the Patagonian night out in the open, with one’s feet in the water. (An investigation will conclude with Jameson’s dismissal on March 23rd, 1921 for “misconduct and moral weakness.”)
But the “Battle” of the Río Centinela will naturally be seized upon by the press as yet another opportunity for outrage at the savagery of the strikers. Río Gallegos’ La Unión will refer to the death of Artaza as an “unprecedented and premeditated