Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, a podcast that comes out every week that talks about cool people who did cool stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is part three of four, so go back and listen. But also I have a guest. It's Mia Hi Miya Hi.
Yeah, Mia Wong. I am back once again to Patagonia. I'm very very excited.
Hell yeah, they totally wrapped up in a plastic fleece. What does the company sell? Is that what they sell? I imagine they'm selling fleeces. Our producer is Sophie, who is not a ghost who died five years ago. Accounts not that no one, No one's ever seen Sophie in person. Sophie does the whole thing with the video often has as long as I've known her, I actually think that you might actually be in early AI voice. Was never a person at.
A long time, but I preferred being called a ghost.
Oh I'm sorry, fucking bought Definitely a ghost, not a ghost in the machine, a ghost outside of the machine. So uh oh. And our producer, so before this, Sophie was like, oh you didn't write your pre amboy, You're going to suck it up, and I was like, I'm not going to suck it up, but I did, and our audio engineers Ian every wants to say, Hi Ian, Hi Ian, Hiene.
Wow, that was a tertle Hien.
Hold on, that's okay. We can't do anything till Sophie says it anyway, So hi Hienne, okay ya are you going to give it another shot?
Oh? You know, yes, yes I will, Hien.
And as we record this, today is Ian's birthday.
Happy Birthday, Happy birthday, Ian, and anyone should flood Ian's social media. Our theme music was written by Unwoman And as I already mentioned, this is part three or four, you could start here. I guess it would make some sense. If you can handle comic books, you can handle it.
So last week we talked about Argentina's anarchist movement. We talked about all the crazy stuff that they got up to from the startup to about nineteen nineteen or up to specifically nineteen nineteen and the Tragic Week, but none of it had to do much with Patagonia. And the whole point was that I promised you Patagonia. So now we're gonna talk about fucking Patagonia. You ready to learn about.
I'm very excited. I'm very excited to Patagonia.
I guess actually the whole fleece thing, it really ties the two together. Patagonia used to be basically just exploited for sheep farming. That was like its economic purpose from a capitalist exploit, primitive accumulation, lens whatever, to be basically just exploited for sheep farming. But mia, don't worry, things have changed. It's now also exploited for oil and gas as well. It was waiting for the petrochemicals to show up.
They always do. I now, that's what they do until it's too hot for anything, and they'll probably continue on after that. So it used to be all wool. Now it's also meat production because refrigeration got better enough that people can kill an animal in one part of the world and then eat it in a different part of
the world, which is cool and good. And sheep farming is slowly desertified in the area it's like already a desert, right, But it's like desertifying doesn't mean just like literally making a desert has to do with like actually changing the way the ecology works. There was a huge sheep farming boom in the late nineteenth century that followed the war against the indigenous people across Patagonia that we talked about
last time. The conquest of the desert and Patagonia was largely controlled by these I don't have another word form besides sheep barons. There are other words, but I like the words sheep baron. They are generally foreign nationals or foreign companies who buy up all the land and had the sheep tended by what was functionally a surf class, essentially a neoliberal form of feudalism. The translation I read
called them mostly mostly called them peons. Sheep shit the literal shit of the sheep, fucked up lagoons, sheep eating, eroded the soil. The serfs and the peons are they're mostly mixed race descendants of indigenous people, or they're foreign born immigrants rather than being native born European Argentinians. Right, and so this is like where like the class and the race stuff of the rural society comes in. A lot of the peons are Chileans, or they're called Chileans.
It's a very complicated thing. I believe these are mostly mixed race or indigenous Chileans, And okay, you know how the US has like the sort of one drop rule around race where if someone is like has one is someone is considered black in our society if they have like one parent or one grandparent or one great grandparent, right, And indigenousity is like often discussed in the same way, and like blood quantum is an evil thing that indigenous folks are very mad at. But that is like largely
how the racialized structure of the United States works. You know, Latin America has different everywhere in Latin America has different ways of creating different racialized categories, so you have a more complex racial caste system rather than like, if you have indigenous ancestry, you're indigenous. Most of the poor rural workers that we'll be talking about would largely be considered indigenous by US racial standards, but not necessarily by Argentinian
racial standards. I don't know how they themselves identified. They seem to the like little bit I know is that they seem to have identified as being descended from the original inhabitants of the land. So I'm going to largely refer to them as indigenous to this land because I think it ties into the fact that they keep being referred to is these like invading immigrants and all this racialized bullshit. So there's wool. World War one sends wool
prices sky high, and the boom gets boomier. The benefits of this boom economy do not trickle down to the workers in a pattern that will be familiar to literally everyone who works for a living instead of anyone who owns shit for a living. The problems of a bust economy do trickle down, So boom nothing good, you know whatever, there's a good thing. It doesn't affect the poor. There's a bad thing. It does affect the poor. During the war,
the rich in Patagonia got even richer. By nineteen twenty, however, the wool market was saturated around the world and Patagonian wool was sitting in port with nowhere to go. This was taken out on the workers. Argentina itself isn't a bit of a funk. The peso's at an all time low versus the dollar. The rich people blame populism instead of you know, their economy being based on exports that aren't worthshit. Now that the war is over, Yeah, who
could have guessed? Yeah, And at the beginning of the crisis. The landowners were like, hey, government, help us out. We're not as rich as we wore a couple of years ago. But the liberal government, you know, we have his new government since nineteen sixteen, the Radical Civic Union. They're like, now, whatever, fuck you, kick rocks. This is about the peak of good the Radical City Union is going to do. In this story, President President Dagoshin is the guy who took
over in nineteen sixteen. He reinstates a customs office in the south of the country, and he starts looking at how all the the ranch owners like did all this shit where they stole all their land, right, But that was like never enough for them, So they also just exaggerated how much land there was there was theirs. They're like, oh no, it's just like it keeps going. That's that's mine too, right, And no one was checking them on it. So they just claimed to own even more land than
they did own. They already owned too much land, but they were steeping where were they getting, Like where was the rest of the land there claimed own? Like coming from it was there? Like was there a bunch of state land there was?
It?
Just like the pushing borders I'm under the impression a lot of it with state land. And then the only one instance that I specifically know of was like a guy died and then rather than like someone coming and assessing the property and giving it to like his descendants or whatever, the nearby rancher was like and mine and just like took over the nearby land because the guy was dead. That's the one instance that I read specifically about. So President Ergoshen is like, all right, we got to
take some of the stuff back. We got to make it state land, either again or for the first time. And I mean Argentina had stolen it in the first place, you know. But like whatever one judge doctor Ismail p. Vignas, he actually starts chant charging landowners with tax evasion, and they're not happy about this, that supposed charge rich people with that come on right, the unreasonable. Yeah, he is woven throughout this story. He's a really interesting character. The
Radical Civic Union, like they do some interesting stuff. You know, interesting is not always the right word for it. But but vin Yas he's actually kind of a he's a pretty upstanding guy. Most of the region that we're gonna be talking about is in the province of Argentina called Santa Cruz and Irrigoshian. Let this other falcon. Remember there's a falcon who got blowed up last time, right, there's another falcon. I don't know if this guy's related or not.
I couldn't find out. I was like googling this falcon related to falcon in the internet. Leave me alone, you know. And I was like, and I would like type in their full names, and it was like, no one knows or cares about this guy, right, And I'm like, I care. So this other falcon, Ellemiro Correa falcon. He stays the governor of the province, even though he's like he's the old right wing party, right, he's not the new radics of a union, which I think makes him a national
autonomist or whatever. And he's also it's totally not a conflict of interest. He's the secretary of the Santa Cruz World Society, which is basically the rich Bastards Union where they like get together and plan how to rule everything.
Ah.
I love it, like that the rich Bastards Union.
They're everywhere like this was like, are they are like wherever the workers rise up, everyone else is like like we did the newsies episode and the ostensibly mad at each other. Big newspapers in New York were like absolutely meeting to fix prices and absolutely meeting to strike, break and do all of that kind of stuff. Right. So you've got this judge Vignats and he's trying to stop the oligarchs in Santa Cruz. And there's this cross class alliance of the middle class and the unionized workers.
For a while.
Because the radical Citvic union represents the middle class primarily and the workers won't help them do it, this alliance doesn't stick around. Push comes to shove. The middle class backs the oligarchs, but for now they're doing good. The rich are organizing too without the government. They have the things like the Rural Society and the Patriotic League. We talked about them last time. They're the right way thugs. They're the Proud Boys of Argentina. The rich are organizing
too without the government. They have things like the Rural Society and they have the Patriotic League we talked about them before. That's like the right wing thug, you know, proud boys, bullshit thing. And this bands together the upper class, in the upper middle class, even though the actual government is more on the side of liberal unions and shit.
The army is firmly held by the oligarchs still, so you start getting this tension between the army and the government, which spoilers that we're not going to talk about this week, leads to all of the horrible military dictatorships of Argentina that come starting about ten years after where we're at now. But here where we are Patagonia, things are gearing up for a showdown. The Patriotic League at this point has militias all over, full of bosses, managers, foreman, cops, retired officers,
and the sellouts among the workers. And I hate to say it, I think this means the diehard Catholics. Whenever a boss has trouble with the world, the militia's there to make sure that the oppressed stay oppressed. They even have a women's auxiliary of the Patriotic League, led by Yeah, these are led by quote respectable Catholic women.
Oh boy. Yeah.
This paramilitary force entirely unregulated by the government. It is ready to put down the anarchists, those immigrants scum. Well they're not actually capable of it, but they want to. Right, they're allowed to carry guns the unions are not allowed to carry guns.
They might they were, they may start getting ideas if you let Tom do armed pickets.
Yeah, and I mean I guess that's happened a couple of times already.
Yeah, we are what this is what like nineteen twenty were seven years out from from the Shanghai Uprising, so like you know, oh, I don't know about that. Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing for another time. But okay, one of the ways that they took the city was they had these massive armed pickets that would just like everyone has to picket, everyone shows up with a gun, and they took the city with it.
Okay, okay, so much more. I love that history is like it's never ending. It's so much from aac because I learn one thing, and I'm but then there's another thing. There's always a new shiny thing. Yeah, and it's all happening at the same time, which is totally it's impossible to keep track of. And then I'm like historians on a hundred years ago had such an easy life because right because they didn't have the whole twentieth century to
think about. It's not true, I mean that part whatever. Anyway, Okay, so on the other side, you got your proud boys on one side. The other side we have our unions. We have the Rio Diegos Workers Society affiliated with FURA, the Cyndicalist Union, and actually I think they're associate with the anarchists, the Anarcho Communist Union the other about the ask yeah, usually when I say synicalis, I mean the anarchists.
But now we're talking about different Someone says, I mean the centrist says, like the one of the like three places as ever battered. I know, I know. And so the worker Society has dock workers, cooks, waiters, hotel staff, and farm workers. And as per usual, the left is full of splits, but mostly only in the cities, even in the south. In the cities you've got some of these splits. Right, You've got the two different Fora's you
have the socialist one and the anarchist one. The socialist one is split between the democratic socialists and the authoritarian socialists like basically the Bolsheviks. Then among the anarchists you have a three way split. You have the moderate anarchists like our buddies at La Protesta. You have the leftist wing, and then you have the anarcho Bolsheviks who support the Russian Revolution. This is before. Oh I forgot about that.
Ah yeah, yeah, I forgot about a couple of years.
Split. Yeah. The rural leftists, however, they know what's up. They don't give a shit about any of these splits, or they don't. I don't know what's up, and they are blessed for their ignorance, and they just ignore all the splits because they don't affect them. The overall spirit is anarchism, with people tending in one direction or another within that, but they have bigger fucking issues right. The Rio Diego's Workers Federation started in nineteen ten. It's not
going to survive this week's story. It dies alongside its members in nineteen twenty one, in nineteen twenty two. But we're gonna mention its founder, mostly because I want to mention the name of his kids, because nineteenth century radicals named their kids the coolest shit. Jose Mata was a Spanish anarchist with five kids. Progresso, progress Elisio, Elysium, Allegria, Happiness, Libertario Libertarian, and Bena Venita welcome.
Oh my god, yeah, incredible stuff.
Libertario is just like going around the rest of his live. He becomes like he joins the Patriotic League and he's just like, oh god, or no, no, it becomes a Bolshevik and he's like, it's like, yeah, this is a first guy purge from the Argentinian Communist Party. Yeah, totally. So the rural workers, they want some pretty basic shit. They want their lives to be livable. They wanted to be not be treated like actual garbage, they want to
not be literal serfs. So nineteen fourteen, they have their first strike and their demands are bosses stop charging farm workers for their meals and also stop charging farm workers for tools broken during shearing. Plus, at the time, all the migrant farm workers were subject to mandatory medical examinations, so they wanted those to either be voluntary or to
be paid for by the boss. They were willing to have fucking mandatory medical examinations, which is the early twentieth century, so it probably is really sketchy now when it would still be really sketchy. But they just wanted to like not have to pay for it on their own pocket, right, and they wanted really slightly better pay. This is the wild shit the anarchists struck four and this strike spreads
to a total of three ranches. The right wing government they're like, nah, nah, this isn't going to be the way, so they arrest the leaders under an anti anarchist law. Anarchism is a few strategic weaknesses, but an over reliance on central leadership and authority figures, yeah, is not one of them. So this is gonna this is There's gonna be some patterns that repeat today. The arrest of the organizers doesn't stop the strike, it does not slow it down.
The strike instead spreads across the entire region. Shearing stops basically everywhere as other organizers step in, because as soon as you're a striker, you're an organizer. Forty eight year old Chilean Carpenter took over the official position of like, you know, secretary of the union or whatever the fuck. The bosses shipped in scabs from the north and gave them guns, and the union was defeated in battle. Essentially, this leads to sixty eight arrests. This is heard of
at the time. Mostly arrested were Spanish or Chilean, but a bunch of other immigrants were arrested as well. But you know who else will get you arrested us if you don't buy these things. We are the police, the capitalism police, here to enforce the purchasing of goods and or services. You know what, Actually you don't even have to get them from our advertisers, just any good or service, Like, just find someone selling something on the street and purchase
whatever they're selling. That's good. Here's some stuff, and we're back. And in nineteen fifteen, meat packing anarchists went on strike. Unfortunately that's not the name of a sick porn that's actually just what their job was. And police beat it down and then arrested some of the organizers. And for years they would do these strikes. The Workers Society would do these strikes in both the city and the countryside.
And they didn't win. And this didn't stop anyone. Right, in nineteen seventeen, there's a general strike, a solidarity strike. One of their one demand for this strike, it's really wild, you know, it's nineteen seventeen. They probably want it all, right. Their demand is stop corporal punishment of underrange farm workers. Jesus Christ, that's they're one thing. Look, you can beat the adults, right, you can employ the children. You just
can't beat the children you employ. Ah. Yeah, I wasn't exaggerating when I called the serfdom.
You know.
Yeah, I guess they are allowed to I would say they're allowed to go different places, but fairly often they actually can't go anywhere unless they have papers that are given to them by the right wing government.
So it is just surf too. It's more credible stuff. Yeah, we've reinvented serfdom. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. Whenever Argentinian Patagonia went on a general strike the northern anarchists like rail workers and shit up in Buenos Aires, they supported it, and so did the Chilean labor movement who had solidarity strikes and vice versa. Some of the ones in Chile actually won, and then things really start kicking off, and they start kicking off because of solidarity and because of Simon Radowitski, the Ukrainian Jewish anarchist assassin we talked about last week. It all comes back together.
I'm so excited about how well woven this story. Anyway. Oh hell yeah. Simon is in prison in the south of the country, in the Siberia of Argentina. And remember his escape attempt where he tried to get out by sailboat. The guy the manager of the newspaper La Protesta, the one that everyone everyone who runs this newspaper keeps getting arrested, deported and shit. So the guy who's running it at one point, and this is the voice of the moderate anarchists,
and I suspect this is me. I'm one of these moderate anarchists as long as US moderate anarchists are still down for shit like this. The manager of the paper was appall and Nadio Bedada. He went down to Patagonia and personally helped get Simon onto the boat and accompanied him on what should have been his journey to freedom.
But they were caught by the Chilean navy like we talked about, and so for their boldness, the pair spent twelve days shackled to an iron bar on deck, and Benda was sent to the same horrible Yeah it didn't go gray for him, I gotta admit, yeah, but like nothing ventured, nothing gained, you know, like and actually it
leads to some wild shit. He gets sent to the same horrible death prison as Simon, and as well as his other anarchist who helped organize a general strike in Chile that we don't even have time to get into, because that's how much shit happened during this time, right even though there was a whole general strike where the organizers were arrested, but people kept rioting until all the organizers won put one were freed anyway, So now there's
even more anarchists in Argentinian death jail, and our Rural Workers Federation has a meeting and they're like, should we just do a general strike until all of our anarchists get let out, like until we have make them let them go? And the cops are like, actually, you're not even allowed to consider that. So they storm the union hall and arrest basically all of the organizers, which, again, not a very good way to stop anarchists.
Yeah, how do you think this is gonna go?
Like, I know, what is your plan here? I will say the one thing that's said about twentieth century history is that eventually governments learn, oh, if you arrest and kill the organizers doesn't stop anarchists. You have to arrest and kill all of them. Yeah, but that's several years from now in this part of the story. So they arrest all the organizers and then another group of workers just immediately steps up into that role, right, like all of the you know, Okay, I'm third secretary of blah
blah blah or whatever. You know, Because if you are irreplaceable in your radical movement, you have failed at one of your core responsibilities. You need to train others, like otherwise you create a weak movement. This isn't even just an anarchist ethos thing. This is just a way to have a strong resistance. Yeah, you cannot be irreplaceable. Yeah,
your job is to organize yourself out of a job. Yeah, totally. Anyway, while the anarchists men are off to jail, the anarchists women are like, well whatever, we're here too, So they take over. The anarchists women organize a we'll call it a protest, but it's a riot. They take over two streets, They throw rocks at the chief of police, they jump another cop from behind the woman who's accused of organizing it.
The cops arrest her, and during the arrest she kicks him so hard in the nuts that he couldn't go
to work for two days. And there was like, yeah, there's so many newspaper articles about this in the time from both sides, right, because the anarchist papers are like, hell, yeah, we if I get that cop in the nuts they are, and then the other ones are like quite unfortunately due to the irresponsible behavior of these women one officer that is, you know whatever, anyway, And now I want to reference the single most frustrating thing I've ever written a history book.
It is not the fault of the history book that I'm reading. So much shit was happening in the southern half of the southern chunk of in Patagonia. So much shit is happening that the following is only a single sentence. The anarchist workers of the Chilean province of maggiyanis quote occupied the city and administered it through workers' councils. That is one sentence in a four hundred and seventy five page book. If this had happened in Europe, we'd be
singing songs about it. I would know the name of the city where it happened instead of just the province. What that is wild? Yeah, I don't know how long it was for. All I know is that the worker took over an entire city and ran it through workers councils in Chile in nineteen I think I'm in nineteen
nineteen or so at this point, I'm not sure. So all this wild shit leads to the temporary suspension of the Rio Diegos Worker Society, but new folks are going to step up, including the main guy who becomes the sort of big man of history style credit. He gets the credit for this whole rebellion, and he's fucking cool. He deserves credit. He didn't run the thing. But people always pick a guy, right, Yeah, and the guy they pick is Antonio Soto. And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, Margaret, how come there's only been one theater kid so far in this week's episodes. Well, I've got you, don't worry. Second theater kid has hit the towers about aging. You just can't fucking handle theater kids, That's what I'm saying. Antonio Soto was born in Spain in eighteen ninety sive and he was born porous.
Fuck.
His family made its way to Buenos Aires when he was thirteen years old. His parents tried to put him in school whenever they could, but they couldn't really afford it, right, he needed to be working, so soon enough, He's an narcosyndicalist, and then even worse, he becomes a theater kid. A when he's twenty two, he joins a Spanish operetta company. I had to look this up operettas I just assumed they were short operas, but nothing that I was like reading it as if an operetta was a short opera.
Do you know what an operetta is?
Not the little opa?
So I guess not right, It's like sort of it is technically it comes from the category of things called opera, and it is shorter. They're more lighthearted. They are shorter, and they have spoken parts and singing and dancing. They're fucking musicals. Oh god, is that kind of theater kid?
Eh?
Oh No. And he's a techie because he's like joins the company and he's in charge of like setting up the stage, the background.
Nothing has nothing about anarchism has ever changed.
No, st the same people. No. We did an episode about Chicago nineteen twenty around almost the exact same time and the Dill Pickle Club where the guy who ran it was the guy who painted the set scenery for musicals.
It's just every I know, like twelve of this guy.
Yeah, and he's great. He rules like no notes, Antonio Soda like he's fucking straight edged vegan. Okay, we talk about that part. Oh my god, nothing ever change notes And he does the most theater kid anarchist thing ever. They're traveling through the small town in January nineteen twenty and some of the retail workers go on strike and
almost the entire city backs the workers. Why does the almost the entire city back the workers because the stage hand of the traveling feeder company is up there giving fucking baller speeches and rallying everybody like he's in newsies. He's just like.
Incredible.
This naturally gets him arrested and the entire troop kicked out of town when they he doesn't stay in jail for very long. When they make it to Rio Gee Goos, the which is the capital of the province of Santa Cruz, folks are like, hey, you should stay here and be an organizer. You're kind of good at this thing. And he's like, I guess I do give pretty good speeches. So he stays and he gets a new job. His new job is beach. Yes, I made a pop culture reference.
He referred to it as beach worker. He was a Steve Ador, but for some reason he made a thing where he was like, I'm not a Steve Adoor, I'm a beach worker. And I think it was like a I think it was like a proletarian thing, right. I think he was like, Steve Door sounds fancy. I'm a beach work. We'll just want to get Steve Doors is not a fancy job, right, No, but his job is
beach He loads and unloads ships. And I like it because he's a six foot tall, blonde, blonde haired, blue eyed guy, so he's just kind of ken.
Oh my god.
He does have dirty blonde hair and one of his eyes is lazy, which makes him even cooler. By May, he is Secretary General of the Workers Society, which is like, not like haha, I'm so good I got promoted. This is a sucker's job, right, You're in charge, you're the figurehead, You're the person with your head on the chopping block. But somebody's got to do it. And if not Antonio's Ken Soto, that's what people call him, then who. It
is a time of strange bedfellows. The Anarchist Union is hanging out with that judge I mentioned earlier vignats As they figure out a way to break the power of the oligarchs right and Vignas starts selling off the assets of one of the rich assholes who claimed land he didn't own. But the right wing governor arrests the auctioneer and a bunch of other people. So you have the government fighting itself at this point, and the landowners they're
getting worried. They're freaked out because an anarchist pamphlet called is a really scary name, social justice. Oh, a pamphlet called social justice has been going around the farm hands. In April nineteen twenty, the anarchist workers take over a ranch. The governor swiftly puts it down, cracking heads and deporting three organizers. Meanwhile, Antonio can Soto is organizing the city. Meanwhile Antonio can Soto is organizing in the city. The beach workers and the hotel workers go on strike and
they get a partial victory. The beach workers lose, but the hotel workers. The hotels agree to better pay for them. Two hotels hold out and hire scabs and are like, nah, fuck the workers, we don't give a shit. So Antonio Soto and one other guy I'll quote from the historian Oswaldo Bayer so Soto and a compatriot enter one of the hotels and use their fis to try to convince
the holdouts to stop work. This shockingly ends in his arrest, but he's friends at the liberal judge who's trying to destroy the oligarchs, So who hates the governor, so Vigna sets him free.
That's that's incredibly funny.
Yeah. Yeah, like you're just trying to beat up scabs. Nothing wrong with that. I'm the government. The rest of the workers boycott these hotels, and honestly, the boycotts that these that the this union organizes are some of the most effective things that they do. Taxis won't take passengers there, guests are informed about their political the political choice they were making by accident, and so many go to other hotels. I have no idea whether this involves fisticufs or not.
The end of this, the end of this boycott is that the two hotel owners, the two who were like holding out, who specifically hate the union, and the anarchists, they have to go personally to the anarchist union hall, hat literally in their hands, and beg forgiveness. They had to rehire and organize.
Yeah.
Yeah, they had to rehire fired organizers, and one of them had to pay. The one who was like worse somehow or something had to pay a hefty fine in person to Antonio Soto, who then just he just counts the money in front of a cheering crowd. Yeah. So the anarchists they buy a printing press and they start sending organizers out to more of the ranches. So the cops realized that the strike is about to go general,
so they buy a bunch of machine guns. Anarchists call for a day of mourning on the eleventh anniversary of previous hero of the pod, Francisco Ferrere, who's a Spanish anarchist who revolutionized education. They went to the cops to ask for a permit, because these are the moderate anarchists. They usually come in like they want a society with no state, no capitalism, right, but usually their demand is
like stop beating children, were not serfs, you know. So the moderate anarchists they want to have this this protests, so they go to the cops and ask for a permit. The cops say no, So the anarchists call a general strike. The cops throw out the pretense of law and made everyone in the city stay in their homes and like paraded around with rifles. The judge Vignas is.
Like, what are you fucking doing? You can't just.
Suspend these what? No, and he grants workers the right to gather. Soon, the right wing bosses union is boycotting newspapers sympathetic to the strike. So the workers then boycott the businesses that are against whatever. It's all fucking every Yeah, So the chief of police personally raids the union hall and files all the organized off at bayonet point to jail. Yeah. They confiscate all the flyers calling for people to boycott businesses.
This is what makes them angry. Boycotts right, because the police existed to protect business and capital. Fortunately those days are long gone. But Vignas, the federal judge orders the governor to release all the organizers. The governor refuses, and it's like, I don't care that the federal judge told
me I have to do this. So for the third or fourth time in the past thirty minutes of me reading a script, the government has failed to learn the lesson that you cannot stop anarchists by arresting their leaders. The strike spreads, and ironically, the strike was going to stop. It was just going to be these boycotts. But since they arrested ten people, yeah yeah, and now the rural workers are getting in on it. They pour into the city.
Cops start beating up anyone they suspect of being Chilean, which is to say, they start beating up all the brown people. Twenty seven people are arrested. Now the government blinks, the governor, sorry, the government. It's like, the government is the federal government, then the governor is the rural government.
They're mad at each other, you know. So the governor blinks and he's scared, so he freeze fifteen of the twenty seven, and so the strike is like, what, there's still twelve people in jail.
Yeah, it's like oh you it's like, well you've you've proven that this works.
So yeah, so he freees all but two. Like he's like, nah, but these two. So the strike is like yeah, no, those two two, and the strike continues. The demand is that all workers are set free, not some workers. So by November one, nineteen twenty, the remaining workers are freed, and so once again the workers are like, oh we we like kind of got this right, Like, our boycotts are working, our strikes are working. So November three, Antonio, Sorry,
the state just tries to murder Antonio Soto. They send some one with a knife at him in the street, but sorry, you can't keep this man down. He gets cut up a little bit, but the fatal blow is supposedly stopped by a pocket watch. Right, incredible.
I know.
It's also like not a great like not an incredible murder, Like you'd think it's the state. They'd give him a gun at.
Least, you know, I know, maybe they like didn't want to make a scene. I have no fucking clue.
But even even the assassins, you're getting affected by budget cuts, I guess.
Yeah. So what Soto does is he pretends to reach for a gun, and that scares the attacker off. So didn't have a gun. He's just like what you want some of this, you know, like reaches for his waistband and the guy's like, never mind, it runs away.
Long, long and glorious history of anarchists threatening people will suff it doesn't exist.
Hell yeah. So now the workers they decided they're like, all right, we've won the last couple things. We should go on the offensive. We should start actually trying to get more people, more rights and freedoms. And they already know what the urban workers want, right they want a living wage, but they don't know what the rural workers want. And they're not a vanguard party, which is cool. So they send delegates around the country to figure out what
the rural workers want before they make demands. They go and ask people, what demands are you willing to fight for? And then the two groups go on strike together. The rural workers have already thrown down for the urban workers. It's time for the urban workers to throw down for the rural workers. The city is shut down, ranches are shutting down. Two and this one. This is the big strike. This is the reason we have this whole episode. Right wing militias try to shut it down. They can't there's
not enough of them. Ay, within three days, the ranch owners are at the negotiating table and they're willing to concede to all of the demands except one. They were used to recognize the union. They want to negotiate directly with their own workers in the future. So the union's like, nah, it's not gonna fucking work. Yes, no, and finally, at the top of all of this, last Monday, I promised you a man with a number for a name. But first, but first, oh, well, you know what else cares about numbers?
And you know what else? Do you know who else breaks their promises and things they're gonna tell you quickly.
Yeah, here's some ads and we're back and we are about to meet Elsa Santa Yoto. Sixty eight, so fucking cool.
But yeah, cool, fucking name.
I should do. It was gonna be a low number, No, No, sixty eight. Soon, it's gonna be like eleven nine. No.
I once met when I was like a street kid, I once met this guy in Tucson. And in Tucson at the time, I don't know the laws. Now, you were allowed to like just carry any weapon you wanted, as long as it wasn't like a gun. You probably all to carry guns too, But so the street kids all carried like swords at the time. And so I met this guy. His name was like fifty two or something like that, and he had like a brace of throwing knives across his chest, and he lived by the
train tracks. And I think of him every time I read about sixty eight and he hung out with a guy named Diesel Daisy.
Oh my gosh, yeah, incredible.
Anyway, sixty eight he's an Italian bandit who spent years in the horrid death prison that we've been talking about, whose name I keep not writing because I'm not actually one hundred percent sure about the pronunciation and it's very complicated to spell, so I keep writing death prison instead, which I'm now recognizing is not the way that I should have written the script. So sixty eight he goes there, and that's his inmate number, And why would he his
sick new name just because he's free now? So he's sixty eight, you.
Know, reasonable?
And not only would I say he is free, I would say he is one of the freest people who ever lived. The rural organizers, they are hard riding, hard fighting motherfuckers. They go ranch to ranch evading bosses, handing out union cards and teaching people that together, collectively, workers can have self determination. And while they're there they rob the ranch owners. Ay, before these guys were anarchists, they
were regular outlaws. I don't know what sixty eight did, but one of his compatriots is referred to as a brawler who spent five years in prison for stabbing a guy. Another is most notable because all of his teeth are gold.
What.
Yeah, that's like the character when it's like listing all of the guys right and you're like, ah, this guy's from Russia and it's like, oh, and this guy has all gold teeth, you know, does he just like take them from people? Well, it's the cheaper way to get a crown, right, Like a cheaper gold tooth is a longer lasting, cheaper crown than an enamel one. So it's like, I don't know, I find it interesting. So work stops at all the ranches within two weeks. The ranch owners
have given up. They will talk directly to the union. They make a serious counteroffer. The demands that the workers are making are reasonable. The one that they're like going to war for and like robbing everyone over and shit. These are their demands that they will stop doing this over. They want no more than three men in a four square meter room. They want cots or beds instead of bunks. They want ventilation and disinfection of their bedrooms. They want
a fucking bathroom. They want the workers to not have to pay for their own lighting. They want three meals a day with actual variety. They want once a week laundry. They're even, I think, willing to fucking pay for the laundry. But I'm not sure workers will buy their own clothes, but owners must buy the beds. They want to not have to work and shit weather unless there's an exception.
There's an exception for emergencies. They're like, oh, if this thing doesn't happen to day, will never happen, right, because they're like not being unreasonable. They want a first aid kit available, and they want anyone who is fired or let go to be driven back to where they were hired from rather than just like, oh, sorry, you're fired and you are in the middle of nowhere with no money and they want decent pay. They're like not even asking for a lot of money. Yeah, this is like
these are all just like incredible. This isn't even this is like we what like, the thing we are striking for is conditions that are like we want a really really shitty dorm room. Yeah totally, but we want a bathroom attached to our dorm room, you know. Yeah. They didn't even demand closed shops, which is to say they didn't demand that all workers at the ranch be unionized. They only demanded that workers have the right to be unionized and that bosses cannot prevent workers from unionizing. This
is a this was this is a moderate position. This is less than what the centrist unions in the US ask for. And the owners are like, you know what, we're willing to go to war over bunks. So they don't. They're like, nope, we're not going to do it. We we our counteroffer included that we get to people put people in bunks. So the owners bring in scabs who are unionized into a right wing union. There's like these like right wing unions that are like the Good Workers
Faction or whatever the fuck bullshit. But there's a there's a problem with bringing in scabs. That problem is named el sciente Yojo. He is a fucking bandit. He's not a moderate anarchist in a city who picks moderate demands. And again he's getting the big man of history thing he's got like there's like two hundred or six hundred or the numbers change wildly, like month to month as
you read the history books. But like there's a lot of other people with him, and they are actually all democratic and we'll talk about some other they like literally, when there's like a big thing that they're deciding what to do, they like sit down and vote. You know. He just has the cool name. So he's the one
I'm writing about. When the scabs from the who get shipped in from the north, When they head into the hills towards the ranches, men on horseback with guns block their path, firing into the air, appearing and then disappearing out of the hills. The strike breakers and their police
escorts turn tail and just run. When the army shows up, there's no trace of them because they're fucking mantles in the It's incredible, and like most of them have been there for a thousand like from cultures that have been there for thousands of years.
You know, oh yeah, we know, we know how to get gone when these assholes show up here.
Yeah, So they run off into the hills like they're cutting fences on the ranches. They're setting sheep free. Probably not for animal rights reasons, but that is a nice headcanon that I like to have. I think they're killing a lot of ranch animals. I think that is a thing that rural uprisings do, is that they're like, oh, I'm going to fuck up the owner's property. So I'm going to kill all these like sheep and shit we talked about in some of the Irish Irish Rebel episode
a lot while back, the Molly Maguire episode. Do you want to hear about more otherwise cool people killing animals? I don't know why you would want to hear that. What's wrong with you? So the owners come back to the table and their counteroffer is rejected, and the strike continues, and a minority of the less radical organizers are starting to get pretty mad at the like more radical organizers. They're like, we kind of want to accept the offer and the strike. Now, we got a lot of what
we want. But the strike continues. In cities, hotel owners are personally serving their guests because they have no waiters. They have no workers. Right right wing militia guys are having their houses bombed. In small towns where no one has printing presses, people are just handwriting the flyers and posters.
Oh my god.
Small business owners are mostly on the side of the workers, and they offer striking workers goods on credit. One anarchist business owner who I guess owned several stores. He offers good on credit, and he goes beyond that. He's like, you strike until the last man every time workers, and
he gives them something on credit. So cops are just going around shutting down all the businesses that are extending credit to workers, because again, no one is acting within the comp No one is considering law when they're making decisions right now, no one on any side. You know, this is the hour of the class war, in which the law just sort of vanishes mysteriously to like reappear at the next full moon. Yeah, totally. And it's not hypocritical for anarchists to about the law, but it is
hypocritical for statists. It's never stopped them, but it always annoys.
No, not a single time.
No, No Vignas is like the only guy who cares about law, and even he's likes just setting people free. So are like lawful neutral judge is And so there's no legal justification for shutting down the businesses that extend credit. It's just about power and control. The army is beating up shopkeepers and quote requisitioning liquor and shit from them,
aka just like running around stealing shit. Sometimes the marauding cops are driven off with gunfire by sympathetic hotels and like like they'll like show up to try and do one of these things and then the workers will be like fuck you and shoot at the cops and drive
them away. Arrested workers are tortured and told they will be killed if they don't work for nothing for the landowners, because like I'm not exaggerating, they're like, you better go actually admit that you're worth nothing, otherwise we're gonna kill you. L sixty eight and his crew of two hundred anarchist bandits are chasing cars on horseback and driving off the
marauders at gunpoint. At one point, they're so fucking mad that they're also taking ranchers hostage and that they release the ranchers once the ranchers promised they'll give into the workers demands, which is not a fair way to extract a promise from anyone. I will concede that point. Well, I mean, I think the tactical problem is okay, So you have to threaten to kidnap them a second time, because they could just say that and then go back
and then not given to the promises. So you have to keep this is not it seems like not a great way to do a hostage situation. Yeah, in one small town. One small town is mostly immigrants and or Chileans who are presented as immigrants, the tiny Argentinian population, the Europeans, the whites, the Native whites. They open fire on a demonstration, killing one person, wounding many. Both sides are actively comparing the whole thing to the Indian Wars, well,
the Conquest of Desert. I'm using Indian Wars for the American way of phrasing it. You know, the government and owners are like, oh, they're evil bandits, just like the Indians, and the workers are like, there are a bunch of marauding thieves stealing from us, just like they stole the place from the Indians. Finally, the ostensibly liberal liberal government decides to act in the name of law and order. Ostensibly they're on neither the owner's side nor the worker's side,
and they this time that's sort of true. On December thirtieth, nineteen twenty sixty of Irrigotian soldiers arrive to find a city in flames, actually, because by January third, the strikers in the city have just set fire to a warehouse full of gasoline and oil tanks, which like I hate to be like a place is asking for it based on what it decides to store, but it is a warehouse full of gasoline and oil tanks. The arsonists fire off guns to wake people up and warn them of
the fire. The owning class once again realizes that half Argentina is about to go full on fucking communists if they don't do something, and it would have been sick because it would have been libertarian communists with workers council democracy instead of Vanguard Party rule. So it's put down. The liberal president is like, actually, we can't have this happening, right.
Rich British landowners are like, aren't you going to protect our private property which we will use to extract the wealth of your country and have all the profits go to England, And the President's like, sir, yes, sir, that's my impression of their conversation. So they arrest the leaders. They try to burn the printing presses, a curfew is put in place, and the urban side of the strike
is successfully shut down. Soto Antonio Soto, he travels up to Buenos Aires and he's trying to get the syndicalist FA, the more liberal one to actually fucking support this strike, right, And he's like, if we had better support nationwide, we'd be able to do this. And his journey is harrowing. The government keeps trying to arrest him en route, but each time they do this twice, each time hundreds of
dock workers and sailors off the cops. Wow, and they escort him all the way up the coast of Gwenne Sarah's. But the liberal fa he gets there and the liberal foura is like, how dare you criticize us? We are great and perfect, and so it's for nothing and he goes back empty handed. H The rural workers they're not done. They are harder repress. They've got horses and guns, and a fuck ton of them have lived there for thousands
of years. There's now six hundred bandits in the hills waging war on the bosses and the cops, slipping past police cordons to network with their comrades in the city. Like literally they'll be like parts where like thirty bandits on horses like sneak their way into the city somehow, which is amazing.
This whole thing just sounds like it. This whole thing just sounds like the absolute wildest Western. Yeah, well, actually there is one. There's a movie based on this that is the Wildest Western, but it's not long enough.
I want like a four season i want West World level quality. But just this, they're taking cops hostage left and right, ambush every military force that tries to stop them. Slowly the federal forces ramp up, and so enters our main villain of the day, the quote unquote radical Lieutenant Colonel Hector Benigo Verella. He's sent to the South with the vague orders of do your duty.
That's not good.
No, No, he's the kind of guy who's so into being a military guy that he's learning German. This is like nineteen twenty, right, So it's not like I'm a Nazi, but it's like I'm sketchy. You know. The Germans were seen as the best militarists in the world. And a new governor of Santa Cruz is actually appointed to It's no longer the conservative, it's now a radical. This doesn't really make any difference to our story. More to the
people who are acting within it. Ranches all across the country are entirely controlled by their armed workers, with bosses and cops hostage, and the ranchers are finally like, we give up no bunk beds. So they're like all right, and the strike ends.
Oh my god.
The workers win, and Virella, the lieutenant colonel, the militarys guy, he actually oversees this, and he oversees the signing of the thing, and like he he like doesn't he's actually okay this time around, kinda we'll talk about him more. It is not entirely uncontested on either side. The workers agree to give up their hostages. The government agrees to give up theirs like let the imprison people out. The workers agree to give up their weapons. The government, of course,
agrees to no such thing. You know who else won't give up their weapons.
Else?
No, no, no, no, it's not amazing. It's Saneojo and two hundred other bandits that's to say, sixty eight. Yeah, sixty eight doesn't give it up his fucking guns. No, he is a cold, dead hands motherfucker. And because it's an anarchist union, it's kind of fine. Most of it gives up, right, But then the bandits are like, okay, well, we'll take most of the weapons and disappear into the hills. And then the like moderates are like, okay, that's fine,
you do you know. So the more moderate anarchists show up and they turn over all their weapons and Virella like the government's like, wait, this is all your weapons. This is like three rusty revolvers, and they're like, yeah, there's totally all our weapons. This is definitely it. All demands are met and they have until then, like and basically it's like will they be complied with? They're waiting for the next shearing season, which is like September or
October or something. Total fucking victory for the workers, if only the owners and government weren't a bunch of lying, fucking shit bags, which we'll talk about on Wednesday, Part four. Yeah, you gotta wait for the part four.
Go ahead one day, Well, one day we'll have a part sixty eight.
And he's gonna be somebody. He's going to be the money so good.
Yeah, it'll be somebody so good that we need sixty eight parts.
Mala testa one day whenever earned all of y'all's trust, I'm gonna take a year and a half. Oh no, wait, half a year. I do two a week more sewing machines, but If you also want something that happens every day, you should listen to me A's podcast.
Yeah, yeah, it could happen here. It's the podcast that happens five days a week about the world falling apart and how you can put it back? How you sorry, Jesus Christ. I say this tagline literally, you're like, not every episode, but like a lot of episodes. It's the world for Jesus Christ's falling apart. Put it back together again, that's the I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure I came up with that too, which makes it even more embarrassing.
Gus.
Somehow, hell yeah, somehow, in my hour of indeed, my ability to say it has vanished.
I wish y'all could see the way that Mia gesticulates when she talks. One day, Mia, you gotta do a YouTube.
Oh gosh, I can't think of anything Mia would hate more.
It's okay, because you still have the gesticulations. It'd be worth it. I'm not trying to make your self conscious. I genuinely find it good.
Anyway. It would be funny. But yeah, my middle name is face does not appear on camera.
So what else do we have to plug? Well, on both of our feeds, my feed and MIA's feed, you can find the Cool Zone Media book Club, which we have finally come up with an official title. It's Cool Zone Media book Club. I can't believe you all have been calling it cool Zone book Club. That is incorrect. And next time you hear someone say cool Zone book Club, you should just hit them. Wait. No, that teams a
bit much that you should say. I too like the show Cool Zone Media book Club and like passive aggressively correct the way they say it, So you should do. Sophie, what do you have.
To I want to plug a really amazing episode that our very own Shrien Lana Units did on It could happen here, I dropped on today. So that's October nineteenth, nineteenth technically, I think it'll be eighteenth if you're depending on your time zone. And it's called discussing Palestine in Israel, and it's it's it's long and worth it.
Okay, see y'all Wednesday.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts,