Semana Trágica
In January 1919, a metalworkers' strike at the Vasena ironworks in Buenos Aires escalated into a general strike that paralysed the Argentine capital for a week — the most severe urban class conflict in Argentine history to that date. The Radical government of Hipólito Yrigoyen, elected in 1916 on a reformist mandate, called in the army to restore order. The army and the right-wing paramilitary Liga Patriótica Argentina — formed by landowners, conservative Catholics, and British commercial interests — responded with lethal repression that killed roughly 700 people and injured thousands. The violence turned into systematic pogroms against the Jewish community of the Once district of Buenos Aires, who were falsely cast as Bolshevik agitators behind the strike — an accusation with no basis but with the visceral logic that Jewish immigrants from Russia were presumed Bolsheviks by definition. The Semana Trágica ('Tragic Week') fused anti-labour repression with state-tolerated antisemitic violence at a moment when Bolshevik revolution was the ruling class's paramount fear. It exposed the structural limits of Argentine reformism: Yrigoyen's Radicals were willing to extend political democracy but not to restrain the violence of property against labour.
- Year: 1919 CE
- Category: Political
