Santa María de Iquique School Massacre
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The Santa María de Iquique Massacre refers to a massacre which occurred in Iquique,on December 21, 1907. In the massacre, an undetermined number of saltpeter workers were killed in a strike while housed in the Santa María School at the port of Iquique. The events that give rise to the facts occur during the peak of the production of saltpeter in the Chilean Norte Grande, during the parliamentary governments. The strike, provoked by the terrible working conditions and exploitations of the workers, was repressed by means of an indiscriminate use of the army's force by part of the government of former president Pedro Montt. General Roberto Silva Renard, commanding the military units under instructions of the minister of the interior Rafael Sotomayor Gaete, ordered to repress the protests, killing one hundred workers and the survivors were severly treated.
Its historical antecedents are found in the birth of the workers' movement in general, and the syndicalism in particular. Both initiated their development inside the saltpeter miners, at times of profound institutional decadence of their country. The massacre provoked the decelerating of the movement by close to ten years, before the exercised violence by agents of the state. This strike was the end of a series of strikes that began in 1902, chiefs of which being the Strike of Valparaíso in 1903 and that of Santiago in 1905.
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[edit] Antecedents
Geographically, the 'Norte Grande' is composed by the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth. The territories of Tarapacá and Antofagasta were obtained by Chile after the Pacific War (1879-1884), which led to Chile obtaining access to a mineral rich area, composed principally by large deposits of copper and saltpeter. The mining of the latter became the principal driving force of its economy at the end of the nineteenth century, being the exclusive producer of saltpeter on a global level. The tensions provoked by the control of the mines had been one of the greatest causes of the Chilean Civil War of 1891, when forces that supported Congress, thereby protecting Chilean and British interests, triumphed.
The deposits of saltpeter lay in the middle of the pampa, a name given in Chile to an extensive plain located between the Pacific Ocean and the western foothills of the Andes mountains. According to the census of November 28 of that year, the Tarapacá Province held only 110,000 habitants. In this province and in that of Antofagasta worked about 40,000 workers, of those, about 13,000 principally came from Bolivia and Peru. The life in the mines was very grueling. The enterprises exercised a severe control over the lives and works of the people inside the deposits, which provoked a high grade of vulnerability of the workers because of the arbitrarinesses perpetrated by the owners, as clearly this way of control extended beyond the mere work environment. The concentration of powers was immense. On top of being owners of the houses in which the workers lived, the mining owners had their own police force, controlled the grocery stores, known locally as pulperías, and to all those people who did business in the saltpeter towns. Also, they established their own money systems and paid to the workers with local coins termed fichas, which could only be spent in the towns and stores under the ownership of the respective saltpeter deposit owner, and they didn't have doubt in delaying the pays until about two or three months later.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the social question in the region of Tarapacá began to manifest itself in the discomfort of the workers of the saltpeter offices, which, through distinct petitions to the Governor of Santiago, claimed attention and improvements in the living and working conditions of the laborers, which were deplorable. However, the parliamentary governments were reluctant to intervene in the negotiations between the employers and the employees. Despite this, they tended to consider the movements on the grand scale (especially if they went accompanied with massive demonstrations) as incipient rebellions.
[edit] The strike and the massacre
On December 10, 1907, a general strike was unleashed in the saltpeter office of San Lorenzo and the strike grew bigger at the office of Alto San Antonio, initiating the Strike of the 18 pence. This name was due to what the agricultural workers asked the salary pay to this type of change. The numerous column of strikers of Alto San Antonio returned to the port of Iquique, headquarters of the regional government, carrying the flags of Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, staying in the Iquique's Horse racing course. This movement added other saltpeter offices, entering in the strike also almost all the commercial and industrial of the north of the country. The public demands on December 16 in a memorial by the Pampinos (those who originate from the Pampas) were as follows:
