Tragic Week (Argentina)
Encyclopedia
Tragic Week was a series of riots and massacres that took place in Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, during the week of January 7, 1919. The riot was led by anarchists
Anarchism in Argentina
The Argentinian anarchist movement was the strongest such movement in South America. It was strongest between 1890 and the start of a series of military governments in 1930. During this period, it was dominated by anarchist communists and anarcho-syndicalists...

 and communists, and was fought by both the police and the army. The riot was defeated by the intervention of the military Luis Dellepiane.

Development

The conflict began as a strike at the Vasena metal works, a British
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...

 owned plant in the suburbs of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

. The strike at first attracted no attention, but on January 3 the picketing workers fired on a group of policemen who were conducting wagonloads of metal to the Vasena works. Two days later a police sergeant died of his wounds. On January 7 an unrelated event took place: the maritime workers of the port of Buenos Aires voted a general strike for better hours and wages. That same day, at Vasena metal works, the police, who had laid a trap of cleverly planned crossfire, fought it out with the striking workers when they tried to stop a load of metal escorted by the police. Five workers were killed and twenty wounded.

The next day, Wednesday, the waterfront strike began: all ship movements, and all loading and unloading, came to a halt. On Thursday, funerals were held for the five workers who had been killed by the police. A procession of 150 mourners, some of them armed, followed the funeral coaches, and as they passed, they attacked property and burned an automobile, before reaching Lacroze, a British-owned tram station, which they attacked. The group then broke into the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at Yatay Street and Corrientes Avenue
Corrientes Avenue
Avenida Corrientes is one of the principal thoroughfares of the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires. The street is intimately tied to the tango and the porteño sense of identity...

, and set the church on fire. As the group were attacking a store the police caught up with them, fired into the procession, and killed and wounded numerous demonstrators.

Mobs went loose all over the city. Groups overturned and burned streetcars and robbed sports shops for the guns inside. In the afternoon, at 3pm, 3,000 people stormed Lacroze Station
Estación Federico Lacroze
Federico Lacroze railway station is a passenger railway terminus in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The station is located in the city's outlying barrio of Chacarita in a predominantly residential area. It is just a short distance north of the Cementerio de la Chacarita, the city's largest cemetery...

. Violence also erupted in the Congress, where members of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies
Argentine Chamber of Deputies
The Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Argentine National Congress. This Chamber holds exclusive rights to create taxes, to draft troops, and to accuse the President, the ministers and the members of the Supreme Court before the Senate....

 reportedly threw notebooks at each other, rather than taking action.

The funeral procession met a suburban train at a railroad crossing and broke every window in the carriages. At Vasena Workshop, angry crowds pushed garbage wagons against the doors to break them down and get at the British directors who were besieged inside. The British Minister appealed to the President Hipólito Yrigoyen
Hipólito Yrigoyen
Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Irigoyen Alem was twice President of Argentina . His activism became the prime impetus behind the obtainment of universal suffrage in Argentina in 1912...

 for help. Yrigoyen gave the order to shoot to kill, but as the toll of dead and wounded mounted, the mobs became more frantic and destructive.

That night the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (Argentine Regional Workers' Federation
Argentine Regional Workers' Federation
The Argentine Regional Workers' Federation , founded in 1901, was Argentina's first national labor confederation...

) met to consider police action and voted for a general strike for 24 hours throughout the city of Buenos Aires. On Friday there were no newspapers; markets, stores, hotels and bars were closed, and transportation and communication networks (including the telephone lines) were stopped.

A new participant in the massacres, the Argentine Patriotic League
Argentine Patriotic League
The Argentine Patriotic League was a Nacionalista paramilitary group, officially created in Buenos Aires on January 16, 1919, during the Tragic week events. Presided over by Manuel Carlés, a professor at the Military College and the Escuela Superior de Guerra, it also counted among its members the...

, emerged. Targeting the city's sizable Jewish population, the right wing League sought pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...

s, and brought an ever growing list of dead and wounded Jews to the newspaper columns. Mobs were running the streets, shouting "death to the Rusos," a reference to Argentine Jews, who were mainly Russian, and identified in the minds of those in the League and the like-minded as anarchists and Bolsheviks. The Russian Jewish sections of Buenos Aires were invaded, and terrified Jews were dragged from their homes, beaten, shot and killed; some escaped by pleading they were Italian
Italian Argentine
An Italian Argentine is a person born in Argentina of Italian ancestry. It is estimated up to 25 million Argentines have some degree of Italian descent...

s.

Food shortages in the city became acute, and eggs that were selling for 90 cents a dozen in the morning reached 3 pesos (US$1.35) by evening. The railroad union voted to stop trains all over the country in a sympathy strike. The union ordered its members back to work, and issued a statement disclaiming all responsibility for Friday's killings.

The Montevideo police had informed the authorities of Buenos Aires that they had uncovered a Communist plot to seize both sides of Río de la Plata
Río de la Plata
The Río de la Plata —sometimes rendered River Plate in British English and the Commonwealth, and occasionally rendered [La] Plata River in other English-speaking countries—is the river and estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River on the border between Argentina and...

 with the taking of the capitals of Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 and Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

. On Sunday the police informed the press that they had broken into a private apartment where 40 persons, all of them Russian Jews, were in session as the "First Soviet of the Federal Republic of Argentine Soviets."

Placing the city under martial law
Martial law
Martial law is the imposition of military rule by military authorities over designated regions on an emergency basis— only temporary—when the civilian government or civilian authorities fail to function effectively , when there are extensive riots and protests, or when the disobedience of the law...

, President Yrigoyen appointed Colonel Luis delle Piane
Luis delle Piane
General Luis J. Dellepiane , born in Buenos Aires, was a civil engineer, militarist and politician of Argentina.With the title of Lieutenant General he participated in the politics linked to the Radical Civic Union following Hipólito Yrigoyen...

 as the commander of riot control forces, after which disturbances subsided. The role of young army lieutenant Juan Doming Peron, future president of Argentina, is disputed by historians. Over 700 deaths were recorded on Tragic Week, as well as around 4,000 injuries; residual violence and ongoing pacification efforts resulted in an estimated 300 more deaths in the subsequent weeks.
The unrests led to over 50,000 people being imprisoned.
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