Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of carrying out a pro-labor policy hostile to capital; they do not see
that . . . this is the wisest course in view of the phenomena which
are now transforming the social and political structure of the world”
(Wright 1974, 123). Workers reacted to government overtures by
voting for the Radicals over the Socialists in the 1918 congressional
elections.
However, the middle class shared some of the oligarchy's misgivings
about the new influence of labor. So did the army. The January 1919
workers' strike led to a breach in the Radical-labor coalition during a
week of violence in Buenos Aires remembered as the Semana Trágica,
or “Tragic Week.” The police had moved in to quell a metal workers'
strike, and a three-day melee resulted in the deaths of one police officer
and five workers. Gangs of secondary-school youths then descended on
the city from the middle-class suburbs. The mobs looted and burned
the Jewish quarter of Plaza Once, blaming local shopkeepers and tailors
for labor agitation. The police simply stood by. Hundreds of working-
class residents, particularly those who “looked like” immigrants, died
in the right-wing violence. The U.S. embassy reported that 1,500 people
had been killed and 4,000 wounded, “mostly Russians and generally
Jews.” Many women had been raped.
Radical government policies toward labor changed overnight. Yrigoyen
gave in to the newly energized right wing of the middle classes, which
organized the Argentine Patriotic League. This new organization expressed
some of the antilabor and anti-immigrant sentiments of the emerging
middle class, notwithstanding its immigrant and artisan antecedents. The
Patriotic League also found members and support among army officers.
Yrigoyen now turned to listen to his military and middle-class constitu-
ents. When the port workers and the shepherds of Patagonia launched
a series of strikes in 1921 and 1922, Yrigoyen handed over the problem
to the army. Troop commanders crushed “rebellious Patagonia” and exe-
cuted countless workers and labor leaders. They said that the strike had
posed a threat to national sovereignty, inasmuch as many of the workers
in Patagonia were Chilean migrants.
The Radical government turned decidedly conservative in the 1920s,
heralded by the 1922 election of Yrigoyen's handpicked successor, the
landowner Marcelo T. de Alvear. Yet there was no turning back to the
unabashedly liberal policies of the 1880s. The disparate Radical con-
stituencies, after all, were able to overcome their internal contradictions
when dealing with the foreign interests.
