Rebellion in Patagonia. Osvaldo Bayer
an arrangement and agreed to form a company that would expand and reinvigorate their field of action. José Menéndez and Mauricio Braun merged their respective companies on June 10th, 1908, forming the Patagonia Import and Export Company. The company’s initial stock was 180,000 pounds sterling. The subsidiaries of Braun & Blanchard in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, San Julián, Puerto Madryn, Trelew, and Ñorquinco and Menéndez’s holdings in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, and Comodoro Rivadavia also merged their operations.
Besides the branch offices in these towns, the Patagonia Import and Export Company—popularly known as La Anónima—also incorporated larger ships into its fleet.4 It acquired the Asturiano and the Argentino in 1914, with the Atlántico, the Americano, and the José Menéndez coming later.
But the power of Mauricio Braun was barely one-tenth of that exercised by his father-in-law José Menéndez, the tough, ravenous Asturian who served as the true Tsar of Patagonia until his death. A man who has yet to find his true biographer, who will either describe him as egotistical, brutal, and unscrupulous, dominated by an insatiable desire for wealth, or as a leader who fought for progress without caring who was tramped underfoot along the way.
José Menéndez passed away in 1918, leaving a large part of his fortune to King Alfonso XIII of Spain, which provoked the ire of Argentina’s socialists and anarchists. Control of La Anónima passed into the hands of Mauricio Braun.
We have consulted the publications of the Menéndez-Behetys and Braun-Menéndezes rather than those of their detractors. Here we’re not interested in the origins of their fabulous wealth so much as we are in the political power granted by their economic strength.5 It’s clear that those who had acquired such immense wealth in such a short time would not allow a group of madmen flying the red flag and speaking of concessions to come along and occupy their ranches. Their fellow landowners felt the same.
Through the example of the Braun-Menéndez family, we can understand who controlled the economy in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, as well as the power that this inevitably represented…in the face of so much wealth, to whose interests were the region’s poor civil servants, policemen, judges, governors, etc. going to respond?
Now let’s see the hands into which the rest of the territory of Santa Cruz had fallen. The concession of 2,517,274 hectares of formerly state-owned land granted to Adolfo Grünbein (1893) was then divided among the ranchers Halliday, Scott, Rudd, Wood, Waldron, Grienshield, Hamilton, Saunders, Reynard, Jamieson, MacGeorge, MacClain, Felton, Johnson, Woodman, Redman, Smith, Douglas, and Ness from England; Eberhard, Kark, Osenbrüg, Bitsch, Curtze, Wahlen, Wagner, Curt Mayer, and Tweedie from Germany; Bousquet, Guillaume, Sabatier, and Roux from France; Montes, Rivera, Rodolfo Suárez, Fernández, Noya, and Barreiro from Spain; Clark from the United States; Urbina from Chile; and Riquez from Uruguay. In other words, not a single Argentine.
The Grünbein concession took 2,517,274 hectares of land out of the hands of the public trust. Adolfo Grünbein purchased 400 kilometric leagues at the price of 1,000 gold pesos per league. Of these, 125 leagues were turned over to the Bank of Antwerp.
The turn-of-the-century oligarchic government thus condemned Patagonia to be ruled by large landowners and to be and to the medieval system of primitive methods of exploitation. It condemned Patagonia to sheep farming, the most harmful and injurious form of production. But what was established by the oligarchic regime was later embraced, or at least tolerated, by the Radical and Peronist governments, as well as by all of Argentina’s military dictatorships. In Patagonia, military governors are honored with monuments, banquets, and tasteless poetry for having promoted a handful of public works while leaving the great landed estates intact—and, in the end, these public works were largely carried out to benefit the landowners. None have thought to promote immigration through the construction of ports, irrigation systems, and factories. And, fundamentally, none have thought to promote agriculture among the region’s indigenous inhabitants instead of planning for their total extermination. The only initiatives, rather, have been of a military nature. With warships and barracks, the government attempted to forge a sense of patriotism that can only be felt through shared traditions and a day-to-day commitment to the land. But that would be to speak of wasted opportunities. Reality was and is different.
What invites ridicule is the idea, still being peddled today, that the repression seen during the 1921–1922 strike was carried out in defense of our national heritage and against those who, flying the red flag, wanted to “internationalize” Patagonia. Without any need for a red flag, Patagonia was already internationalized—not just by foreign landowners, but also because all of her raw material wealth was sent overseas.
In other words, the intervention of the Argentine Army did not occur to defend the nation’s interests, but to preserve the status and privileges of foreign companies and to protect an unjust feudal regime that still chokes southern Argentina, slowly turning it into a desert.
And it will be in that desolate landscape where the sparks will fly between the two poles of the region’s rudimentary social structure: the serfs and the great medieval landowners.
CHAPTER TWO: THE WHITES AND THE REDS
“A handful of ranchers were the masters of
Patagonia, paying in scrip or Chilean currency”
Colonel Pedro Viñas Ibarra, who, as a captain, commanded one of the columns repressing
the strikes in Patagonia.
The slaughter of Patagonia’s workers will occur under the watch of President Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first president of Argentina elected by universal, secret, and compulsory voting.1 The leader of a movement with deep popular roots, a caudillo loved by the petite bourgeois and proletarian masses (with the exception of those class-conscious workers who identified as anarchists or socialists), Hipólito Yrigoyen and his Radical Civic Union successfully used constitutional methods to destroy the regime—but not the power—of the landowning and mercantile oligarchy. Though timid, his reformism successfully managed to democratize Argentina and increase the political participation of the masses, while he made genuine attempts at a more independent foreign policy and a fairer redistribution of the country’s wealth. 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