Subversive Historian - 12/21/09
Published 21 Dec 2009, 10:35 am -
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The Santa Maria de Iquique Massacre
Back in the day on December 21st, 1907, the bloody Santa Maria de Iquique Massacre took the lives of hundreds if not thousands of workers in Chile. Earlier that month, nitrate miners on strike descended on the northern port city of Iquique to demand better working conditions and higher salaries. Local authorities placed the strikers and its supporters at the city’s Santa Maria school. An estimated 5,000 workers occupied the facility while the government of then President Pedro Montt initially attempted to facilitate talks between workers and the owners of the nitrate mines. Reversing policy, President Montt and Interior Minister Rafael Sotomayo, who had strong business connections to the nitrate company owners, ordered General Roberto Silva-Renard to disperse the striking workers from the city of Iquique by any means necessary. On December 21st, defiant nitrate workers and their families continued to refuse to leave the school grounds of Santa Maria.
In the early afternoon of that fateful day, General Silva-Renard gave orders to four hundred soldiers to fire indiscriminately on the workers occupying the Santa Maria school whose labor in the mines, in a sad irony, extracted sodium nitrate used to make gunpowder.
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