By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Dec 8 2007 (IPS)

Dec. 21 will be the 100th anniversary of a massacre of thousands of striking workers of the then-flourishing saltpetre industry in northern Chile, carried out by military troops on the order of the government, an event known as the massacre of the Santa María de Iquique school.

“The mass killing was a shameful thing which Chile covered up for a very long time,” Juan Manuel Díaz, international relations officer for the United Federation of Workers (CUT), the country’s largest trade union, told IPS.

The event became widely known in Chile and abroad thanks to the well-known Cantata of Santa María de Iquique, composed in 1969 by the late Luis Advis and recorded in 1970 by Quilapayún, a folk music group belonging to the Chilean New Song movement.

“Today, what happened there is part of our national, archetypal, collective memory,” Chilean historian Sergio Grez, the author of many books and articles on Chilean social history, told IPS.

In early December 1907, thousands of dockhands in the northern port of Iquique, who were mainly handling saltpetre, went on strike to demand better working conditions.

Over the next few days, thousands of workers for the saltpetre companies in the Atacama desert flats, controlled by Chilean and foreign (mainly British) capital, came down to Iquique to join the strike.

The government of then President Pedro Montt initially acted as a mediator in the conflict. But as the workers’ strike grew, the authorities decided that the 5,000 workers occupying the Santa María school and the further 2,000 who had taken over the Manuel Montt plaza, posed a threat to public security and public health.

When the workers refused to move elsewhere, Mayor Carlos Eastman, the local government representative, was urged by Interior Minister Rafael Sotomayor to order their removal from the premises by any means necessary.

On Dec. 21, 1907, at 3:45 pm, General Roberto Silva Renard gave the order to open fire with machine guns on the Chilean, Bolivian, Peruvian and Argentine strikers occupying the Santa María school.

In his cantata, Advis refers to 3,600 dead, but Grez said there is no documentary evidence for this figure. “It is estimated that there may have been 1,000 people killed or wounded. The maximum possible number of dead would have been 2,000,” the historian said.

The Iquique strike was less of a threat in itself than a latent danger, that of setting a bad example, in which the government and employers would look weak, said Grez in an article titled “La guerra preventiva. Escuela Santa María de Iquique. Las razones del poder” (roughly, Pre-Emptive War: The Santa María de Iquique School – The Rationale of the Powerful).

“The massacre of unarmed civilians perpetrated at the Santa María school in Iquique was a pre-emptive act of war against an internal enemy,” said Grez. In the view of the authorities, the strikers were dangerous, “not because of what they had done, but because of what they might do.”

The Iquique killings came at the height of a spiral of massacres of workers unleashed by the Chilean state in 1903. Their result was to accelerate the design and implementation of policies to improve workers’ living and working conditions.

Grez and trade unionist Díaz see a number of shared characteristics between the Chile of 1907, and that of today.

“Both are periods of economic boom. Now, as 100 years ago, the state and the ruling class have enormous wealth – then, because of the saltpetre exports, and today because of exports of copper and other natural resources,” Díaz said.

“The gap between rich and poor is huge, in both cases,” he said.

Then there is “the revival of the trade union movement,” which has held several strikes and demonstrations for better employment conditions this year, in the context of its rejection of the inequality of income distribution in the country.

In order to deal with these demands, President Michelle Bachelet formed a think-tank in August comprising 48 members, most of them technical experts, which is to report its proposals on “work and equity” to her in March 2008.

“Yesterday’s struggles are the same as today’s,” added the CUT leader.

To prepare for the commemoration of the Iquique massacre, a national coordinating committee made up of more than 70 public figures and institutions was created in January 2007.

According to Díaz, over the course of this year more than 300 initiatives related to the massacre, including exhibitions, trade union meetings and academic conferences, have taken place in Chile and in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal and Spain.

The coordinating committee members are the CUT, the municipal government of Iquique, the Tarapacá regional government, the Teachers’ Association, the Writers’ Association and the University of Chile Students’ Federation.

The four political parties belonging to the centre-left coalition that has governed the country since 1990 – the Socialist Party, Christian Democratic Party, Party For Democracy and Social Democratic Radical Party – and the opposition Communist Party, also joined the coordinating committee.

On Monday Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, an arts festival will be held in the centre of the capital to mark the departure of a CUT convoy heading for Iquique to participate in the official commemoration week, Dec. 14-21.

Iquique, 1,860 kilometres north of Santiago, will be hosting photo exhibits, recitals, round table discussions, meetings between the descendants of the original workers, screenings of documentary films, book launches, radio plays, and marches.

Internationally renowned Chilean folk music groups like Quilapayún and Inti Illimani will be actively participating. Countries such as Ecuador, Greece, Nicaragua, Sweden, Switzerland and Venezuela will also hold ceremonies in remembrance of the massacre, Díaz said.

The second conference of historians who have researched the massacre will be held Dec. 17-20. The first conference took place in 1997.

Seven trade union federations in South America and Europe will participate in a meeting, “100 Years after the Tarapacá Strike, we have the same struggles and the same dreams”, on Dec. 18.

The closing event on Dec. 21 will be attended by local authorities and other members of the coordinating committee.

It is hoped that the residents of Iquique will stop their normal activities to remember the massacre at the exact time it happened. The idea is that at 3:45 pm, cars will sound their horns, ambulances and fire trucks will turn on their sirens, and the bells will ring out in churches…and in schools.

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