Semana Trágica
Argentine security forces and armed civilian gangs killed hundreds of people in Buenos Aires in January 1919. The strike that began it was small: metalworkers at the Vasena foundry demanding an eight-hour day, better pay and the reinstatement of dismissed men, running since December. Police fired on strikers on 7 January and killed several, and the funeral procession two days later was fired on again, at which point the anarchist and socialist federations called a general strike and the city stopped. Buenos Aires at that moment was a city of immigrants — roughly a third of its population was foreign-born, largely Italian and Spanish, with a substantial Jewish community from the Russian empire — and the labour movement was led by anarchists whose politics had come with them. The Russian revolution was fifteen months old and the propertied classes read the strike through it. What followed was not only state repression. The Argentine Patriotic League, formed of young men of good family with police and army cooperation, attacked the Jewish quarter of Once for three days in the belief that Jews were Bolsheviks, beating people in the street, burning books and libraries. It is generally described as the only pogrom in the Americas. Deaths are estimated between 150 and 700, with thousands wounded and arrested. President Yrigoyen, a radical elected on the first secret universal male ballot in 1916, had campaigned as a friend of labour and sent the army. The Patriotic League survived the week and operated for years afterwards as a strikebreaking organisation with official tolerance. Argentina's next general strike, in Patagonia in 1921, was suppressed by the army with some 1,500 shot.
- Year: 1919 CE
- Category: Political
