The Social War in Spain and South America: 1919-1923

The Social War in Spain and South America
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If this conflict fails to bring about the death of the right to property, the eradication of the principle of authority, and the extinction of religion in the conscience of mankind, then we will have to accept the fact that humanity has become so degenerate that it will still require hundreds of years before it experiences a renewal.

- Antonio de Pio Araujo

The free, robust Americas will be the refuge of European Civilization. Europe itself does not offer a safe haven anymore.

- Jaime Brull

If the imminent peace for the civilized world does not bring with it a fundamental solution to the problems that disturb it today, it will only be a truce, during which the war will continue with other, but no less destructive, means than those of armed conflict, and perhaps lead to even more appalling confrontations.

- Augosto Bunge

The World War not only shocked and transformed Latin America’s economy and politics, but also its thinking and its spirit. The economic impact is not easier to perceive than the spiritual and psychological consequences. Politicians and statesmen might discover a formula and method to deal with the former, but they will certainly not find a suitable theory or practice to surmount the latter.

- Jose Carlos Mariategui

Besides a loss of illusions, the war will have many additional implications…The mental revolutions, which result in new ways of thinking and acting, are already perceptible. Many moral, social, and political values will lose the basis upon which they were formed and be fundamentally changed. Lacking the concepts from which they subsisted, the threatened masses will march forth in search of new principles.

- Otto Prazeres

Prelude: The War’s First Years in Latin America

The various states and statelets of Latin America had no formal alliances with the warring European powers, and each dutifully declared their neutrality in the first few months of the war. Most of these polities were too small and too weak to make any meaningful contribution to the war, and at the beginning of the conflict, traditional elites overwhelmingly believed that mobilization for total war was not in the national interest. Nonetheless, even if the young states of Latin America could or would not fight in the war, they could also not afford to ignore the developments in Europe. In fact, the past thirty years had seen Latin America steadily integrated into the Euroamerican-led capitalist world-system. A tremendous growth in South American export industries, particularly in the “southern cone”, contributed to a rising standard of living and an enlarged middle-class. This expansion was financed by European capital, principally British and French, but also increasingly German. Their social, political, and economic elites had always imagined themselves to be part of a broader, European world-order, but this became far more of a reality than ever before in the two or three decades before the war. Only uneasily did they tolerate the growing encroachment of the American giant; most looked instead to Paris for a sense of cultural orientation. For wealthy young men, it was obligatory to make a visit to the city before embarking on one’s career.

If Latin America could not ignore the war, neither could the main belligerent powers ignore Latin America. Too many vital foodstuffs and raw materials came from the new world. In the newspapers and the streets, a propaganda war was fought between the war’s main belligerent powers for the loyalty of the population. In this, the allies always had something of an upper hand. They benefited not only from the traditional francophilia of Latin American elites, but also from their control of the seas, which allowed them to cut telegraph lines controlled by the Central Powers. Yet despite this, in the first few years of the war, only the most fanatical supporters of the allies advocated entering it outright. Germany waged a savvy influence campaign, employing its emigre communities in Argentina, Chile, and Southern Brazil to disperse its propaganda. Typically speaking, loyalists to the German cause came from the conservative end of the political spectrum: they were lawyers, doctors, military men, clergymen, and other professionals with an appreciation for Prussian order and kultur. Their ranks were bolstered by British blockade measures that outraged businessmen and slowed down trade. Unlike their allied interlocutors, they almost never called for Latin American nations to enter the war outright, and were therefore able to make extensive connections with neutralistas who had quite different motivations. Only in Chile and Paraguay did their newspapers and front groups reach numerical parity with the pro-allied movement.

Somewhere in the middle of the neutralistas, between the pro-german camp and the more tepid supporters of the Allies, sat the Bryanistas and all the other publicists, journalists, and writers who urged a break with the old Europe. The social-reformist Bryanistas attracted moderate socialists, radical liberals, and even some indeginists. Initially, they were a quite small grouping, especially in Colombia and the southern states. Whatever his soaring rhetoric, Bryan was not able to wave away fears of American imperialism, and at first they seemed to be confirmed when the first set of Alexandria agreements excluded South American goods from the exemption to the British blockade. After sustained South American protest, however, Bryan managed to secure much better terms for the Latin American states in the next set of agreements. Many of the socialists and liberals who previously supported the allies now went over to the Bryanistas, especially as the brutality of the war became clear and the American state department poured money into its own propaganda films and newspapers. This process coincided with a loss of British economic power in most of South America as foreign securities were sold off to finance the British war machine. American dollars surged in to replace them in Brazil, the Andean states, and Chile. Increasingly, America also became the export market of choice for South American goods. The unilateral British decision to impose a complete blockade in 1917 only further embittered relations, swinging Chile and Paraguay decisively into the German camp.

Barbaric Europe , Illustration from American-funded Chilean Periodical, 1917.​

The sheer quantity of propaganda and debate contributed to the expansion of the bourgeois public sphere as well as to the rise of a new mass politics. Previously a domain of the elite, politics and political conflict now burst onto the streets. Neutralistas and interventionists alike founded mass organizations which acted as political pressure groups. Newspaper circulations exploded, marketing themselves to a growing middle and working-class readership. In Buenos Aires, newspapers frequently printed three or four different copies a day to furnish their readers with the latest news from the front. In Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, ethnic groups formed “national federations” to defend their business and political interests.

“South America”, an American congressional committee reported, “is today a vast battleground in which a subtle war is being fought for public opinion and commercial supremacy”. Over 1917, it increasingly appeared as if America was on the verge of winning this information war. Bryan’s tirades against the British Empire had finally convinced many previously wary Latin Americans to look past his own imperialist interventions in Central America. South American states - including the three regional powers Brazil, Argentina, and Chile - agreed to participate in a “pan-american” conference sometime in 1918. Four of these had been organized before, primarily at the behest of the Americans. None of the prior conferences had accomplished much, despite the vain hopes of previous presidents to further the cause of pan-american unity. Bryan, however, had somewhat more concrete goals in mind. He hoped that by consolidating the combined economic power of the Americas, enough diplomatic leverage could be applied to Britain to make it drop its blockade of the neutral states. Alas, the best-laid plans rarely bear fruit so easily in times of war…

1918-1919: The Years of Rupture

1918 would forever change the history of Latin America. German submarine warfare reconfigured existing political divisions and scuttled existing plans for Pan-American unity, while the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia radicalized existing social tensions. Bryan showed himself alternately unwilling and unable to pressure the Germans into bringing an end to the submarine campaign. Britain unwittingly worsened the submarine threat to South America by giving convoy priority to cross-channel shipments and dedicating its spare cruiser and destroyer squadrons to protecting the sea lanes of its formal empire. As a consequence, transatlantic trade - particularly from the three great exporters of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile - became extremely vulnerable.

The situation was perhaps most explosive in Argentina. There, the liberal president Hipolito Yrigoyen stuck firmly to a position of neutrality despite growing support for a pro-allied intervention. The large Italian emigrant community was at the forefront of agitating for entry into the war. Honorio Pueyrredon, a prominent member of Yrigoyen’s own Radical Civic Union party, broke with him to declare his support for joining the Entente after Germany refused to offer compensation for sunk merchant ships.

At first, it looked as if Yrigoyen’s position was secure. He had the backing of the trade unions, the pacifist middle-class, and the “patriotic leagues” in the rural hinterland. Both the reformist Argentinian socialists and the syndicalist-influenced trade unions were active amongst the neutralistas. Argentinian intellectuals and writers such as Manuel Ugarte, Alfredo Colmo, and Pedro de Cordoba ran a propaganda offensive on behalf of the president, excoriating the pro-allied camp and accusing it of selling out Argentina to “British imperialism”.

Yet over the spring, as the submarine campaign ramped up, Yrigoyen’s position steadily deteriorated. A shortage of coal slowed down railway transport and led to skyrocketing heating and energy costs. Merchants refused to ship Argentinian wheat to Britain, and sailors went on strike until the government agreed to arm merchant vessels. Britain, which for some time was skeptical of overt Argentinian participation in the war, now swung around as it looked for alternate sources of manpower. The British Ambassador publicly promised that Argentinian entry into the war would be rewarded with a generous new round of loans.

Meanwhile, the ideologically diverse camp of neutralistas began to splinter as working-class agitation picked up. Some previously Germanophilic military officers now favored pro-allied intervention out of a sense of nationalistic outrage. Neutralist farmers in the hinterland started to wonder whether a war might indeed be preferable to the current state of affairs. Pro-allied organizations commenced a propaganda campaign of their own which aimed to associate the neutralist camp with labor subversion. Everywhere, inflation spiked without a corresponding rise in wages, prompting social unrest and criticism of the Argentine government.

The New Map of Europe , Illustration from Neutralista Argentina Magazine, 1918.​

Yrigogen did not cave to the pressure. He was confident that the majority of the country still did not desire war. In the end, however, he was not given a choice. Military officers loyal to Emilio Kinkelin marched into the presidential palace and issued a series of demands to the head of state. These included immediate entry into the war and the introduction of conscription. The de facto hostage situation was only resolved when Honorio Pueyrredon met with the coup plotters and agreed to meet their conditions. He was “appointed” President through somewhat dubious means shortly thereafter, and Yrigoyen went into exile in America.

A wave of nationalistic fervor swept through the population as Pueyrredon declared war on Germany and sent the Argentine Navy out to guard the coast against the u-boat menace. Even La Prensa , a leading newspaper of the neutralistas , applauded the “leading role” that Argentina had chosen to take in “determining the destiny of Latin America”. Editorials were now penned warning of “imperialist-bryanist” attempts to interfere in South American affairs. Bryan did indeed place a range of harsh sanctions upon Argentina and warned Britain that by inducing America’s southern neighbor to join the war, it had violated the Monroe doctrine.

The Argentinian declaration of war also prompted Bryan to restart the previously scuttled Pan-american conference. The neutralist and pro-german Chilean diplomat Galvarino Gallardo was one of the most ardent supporters of this venture: in his words, a new neutral bloc would need to be formed to “protect Latin America from the destructive influences of Europe.” Among the neutralistas, the rhetoric of civilizational crisis was only heightened by the Argentinian declaration of war. Neutralists denounced Argentina’s “descent into the European barbarity” and the “blatant illegality” of the military coup.

Among the ascendant Bryanists, there was an equal distaste for both the allied and the german camps. Each side had wantonly broken international law and violated the sovereignty of Latin American nations. The more astute purveyors of German propaganda shifted into the Bryanist gear after it became clear that the submarine campaign had spoiled Germany’s reputation amongst all but the most fanatic germanophiles. If they could not redeem Germany’s standing, they would at least sully that of the allies.

The new neutralista discourse heartily mixed left-populism, left-nationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-europeanism, indeginism and traditional Latin American racism. Britain, for example, was accused variously of oppressing its Irish and Indian subjects, of employing “savages” on the frontlines against fellow Europeans, and of plotting to turn Latin America into an “informal colony”. Neutralists and interventionists alike deployed the language of nationalism. To join the war was an act of self-strengthening, for it would buy the nation a voice in international politics. To stand aside from it was also an act of nationalistic assertion, for in doing so the nation asserted its right to remain free from the domination of European powers.

A genuine Pan-Americanism often accompanied the new nationalism. This meant, chiefly, a desire for greater pan-latin cooperation in defense against both European and American imperialism. It also involved a new appreciation of what was distinctly American about Latin-American societies. While Manuel Ugarte gave lecture tours denouncing European financial colonialism, artists such as Cavalcanti, Andrede, and Almeida strove to create a new, indigenous art free from European influences. Indegenists in Peru and Bolivia re-evaluated long-held racial assumptions, arguing that it was precisely the “mixture” between different racial elements that lent Latin American societies their distinctiveness and strength. To a lesser extent, the same process occurred in Brazil vis-a-vis its own Afro-Brazilian minority…

Europe’s Death, America’s Life, Illustration from Chilean Magazine, 1917​

The Fifth Pan-American Conference was held in Mexico City in November 1918. It was attended by the South American governments of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay, as well as the American protectorates and quasi-protecterates of Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Guatemala. The decision to host the conference in Carranza’s revolutionary Mexico lent it a more radical edge than many of its previous iterations, as did the large delegations that were permitted to attend from the trade unions and other worker’s organizations. Despite the reservations of more conservative diplomats, the American delegation convinced the conference to move forward with an explicit endorsement of the recently passed Trenton Resolution, which called for political self-determination and the break-up of the British Empire.

The decisions of the conference were weakened by the absence of the three most important regional powers in South America: Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Brazil had determined on a more anti-german and pro-allied course, breaking off relations after the sinking of several of its largest cruisers; to avoid American sanctions, however, it never formally declared war. Nonetheless, it determined that attending such a conference would merely open it up to charges of double-dealing and cynicism. Chile, meanwhile, worried that Peru and Bolivia would attempt to use its attendance to pressure it into border concessions. Argentina was banned outright from participating until it restored Hipolito Yrigoyen to the presidency.

Progress was nonetheless made on several diplomatic fronts. The various members all swore to submit grievances between them to an independent commission, and a new body was also created to coordinate a multilateral process of tariff reform. Several resolutions were passed insisting on the rights of neutrals and condemning the British blockade and German submarine warfare. Finally, in a major win for the neutralistas, all the attending states agreed that they would maintain their neutrality in the present conflict, and an additional commission formed to investigate the best means to punish infringements on neutrality.

Over 1919, the German submarine campaign started to subside as the British convoy system inflicted irrecoverable losses on German u-boats. Argentina won itself some goodwill by protecting the neutral shipping of South American states from German attacks. Yet the domestic situation of South American nations only continued to deteriorate. The world-wide economic downturn that began in 1919 drove down the prices of many key exports goods, particularly in the crucial American market; as a consequence, the resumption of trade with European nations did not result in the expected economic rebound. Much like their European counterparts, labor movements in South America were captured by revolutionary elements - in most cases, by anarchists and syndicalists, not revolutionary socialists. A wave of worker’s unrest spread through Argentina, Chile, and southern brazil. Argentina was forced to dedicate an inordinate share of its newly-drafted army to the task of domestic repression.

The mood across the neutral states slowly shifted from dire concern to open hysteria. Otto Prazeres, a Brazilian politician and journalist, warned that the basis of traditional “moral, social, and political values” was being undermined, and that the “threatened masses” would soon “march forth in search of new principles.” Progressive students went on strike to reform and democratize universities. In response, all manner of reactionary patriotic and defense leagues were created to fortify the nation through struggle against leftist movements.

This was merely the opening act. The various governments of Latin America, whether conservative, liberal, or radical, had no real capacity to suppress news of the November Revolutions. The first messages on record were sent to Santiago, Chile via a German radio station in Mexico city that had been taken over by a coterie of socialist engineers. Telegrams from Britain and America arrived on the 3rd. The burgeoning newspaper industries issued due condemnations of the “wave of subversion”, but the events were too sensational to simply ignore.

While the South American bourgeoisie saw in the European revolutions the final cataclysm of European civilization, the culmination of five years of bloody descent, the burgeoning anarchist and syndicalist worker’s movements read them in precisely the opposite fashion: Europe, seemingly lost to barbarism, had now reawakened from its long spell of slumber and once again lit the way forward for humanity. At last, the time of the general strike had come.

The Social War and the emergence of Neo-Caudillismo

In Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain, the period from November 1919 to 1923 is known as the “Social War”. This four-year interlude was marked by an unprecedented mobilization of civil society, growing ideological polarization, and the proliferation of political violence as rival factions vied for control of the streets. The seemingly permanent state of conflict between capital and labor occupied a place midway between a short-term war of maneuver and a more prolonged battle for position; the struggle for ideological hegemony went hand-in-hand with conflicts over the distribution of social wealth and varied attempts by different groups to seize control of state power.

Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Spain were distinguished by radical labor movements, large agricultural populations, a clerical-religious right initially dominated by landowners, and, perhaps most crucially, weak central states with an only limited capacity to repress worker’s unrest. Typically, their small middle-classes wavered between a panicked fear of an inevitable left-wing coup and a secular-nationalist disgust of the large landowning class and its reactionary counteroffensive against centrist liberalism. Depending on their situation, the larger populations of the rural hinterlands could be convinced both of the imperative for mobilization against the “bolshevik onslaught” and the utility of expropriating the estates of their social betters. Finally, the parliamentary institutions of all four of these nations failed to adequately represent significant sections of the population, and frequently played second-fiddle to powerful executives. Consequently, working-class parties and unions believed the workplace and the streets, not the ballot booth, were the prime arena for politics.

With the exception of Argentina, none of these societies participated in the Great War; Argentina itself only sent a few divisions to the western front. Since none of their militaries participated in the mutinies of 1919, they all initially remained dominated by the conservative officer class, and thus stood as a final bulwark for the forces of order. This made it extremely difficult for the revolutionary left-wing to take power through insurrection or rebellion.

There were, of course, attempts to break the deadlock on both the right and the left. The latter attempted to win over the sizable rural population; the anarchists, for example, had some success in organizing the landless day laborers of Andalusia, and syndicalist sentiment swept the Argentine country-side in 1923. Funds from IntRevMar allowed unionization drives to pick up steam in Chile and Spain. At first, the right found itself outmaneuvered and outgunned in the new realm of mass politics. Only gradually did they learn how to mobilize the conservative masses. The parties and organizations of the right steadily gained ground on their left-wing opposition, but in terms of sheer numbers, they never came to match them outright during the four-year social war. The right was forced to rely, as it often did, on the patrimonial power of traditional social elites and the military power of the armed forces.

In the end, neither side had the means to decisively break the deadlock and achieve social peace. In many instances, the right was beset by internal divisions between secular nationalists and clerical conservatives, and the left lacked the military organization necessary to mount a real challenge to the state. In certain cases, a reformed liberal-democratic political system with broad suffrage may have won over moderate socialists and paved the way for a more stable polity, but the parliamentary politics of radical bourgeois reformers were considerably weakened by the displacement of political power from parliament onto the street.

The reliance on the military to enforce order meant that it ultimately became the decisive power. Only its external intervention could quiet the tempests of the First Revolutionary Era and break the deadlock between workers and employers. Despite the often excessive use of armed force against strikers, the so-called “neo-caudillismo” regimes which emerged in Spain, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile were not uniformly hostile to the place of organized labor. Above all, the military regimes that emerged from the four years of social war were interested in projects of nationalistic, state-directed modernization; this frequently enough brought them into conflict with the bourgeoisie as well as with labor. An examination of two different cases - Argentina and Spain - gives us an idea of the internal diversity of the neo-caudillismo states and their differing developmental pathways.

Argentina: The case of Left-Caudillismo

When the First Revolutionary Era began, panicked South American governments made the same assumption of governments everywhere: Bolshevism was at the doorfront, and all means could be employed to defeat it. The Argentinian government declared a state of siege, a device it had turned to before in the first decade of the 20th century, when labor conflict reached a higher pitch than ever before. In reality, however, the radical leadership of the South American unions and the heated rhetoric of its rank-and-file concealed their moderate goals. The strikes in South America resembled those in Detroit and Milwaukee more than the European insurrections which directly inspired them: they were not a revolutionary bid for power but an attempt to use the present moment of crisis to cement their own position in a capitalist social order. Beyond the typical economic demands for greater wages, reduced working hours, and improved workplace conditions, there were manifestly reformist slogans: an increase of the share of worker’s representatives on state arbitration boards, government subsidies for cooperatives, and an end to state repression of strikes. The most politically oriented strikes took place in Argentina, but even here the main trade union confederation (FORA) did not aim for an insurrection; their most radical demands were for the government to demobilize the army and retract the repressive measures introduced since its entry into the war.

The modest goals of the trade union leadership can be explained in part by the rise of the syndicalists, who had successfully displaced or at least reached parity with many of the leading anarchist unionists by 1919. In their rhetoric and their encouragement of general strike, the syndicalists were scarcely less radical than their ideological rivals, but when it came to the formulation of demands they tended toward an apolitical reformism. It also, however, likely reflected an honest assessment of the actual chance of the worker’s movement in coming to power. Even the Argentinian maximalist Jose Ingenioros, who would eventually convince FORA to affiliate with IntRevMar, admitted that in 1919 there was little real opportunity to overthrow a militarized and paranoid central government.

Perhaps the most serious defect of the Argentine trade unions was their narrow membership base. Even after several decades of organizing work, less than a fifth of the working-class were dues-paying members. In part, this is attributable to the patterns of employment typical of not just Argentina, but many other South American societies: An unusually high proportion of day, seasonal, and migrant laborers made it exceptionally difficult for the unions to reach many workers. In Argentina, (as well, to a lesser extent, Chile and Brazil) linguistic and cultural differences created further barriers to labor solidarity. Further norrth, in states that euroamerican capital had still not thoroughly penetrated, the industrial working-class was too small to serve as the basis of a strong socialist movement.

Like many prior industrial actions, the November general strike in Argentina successfully mobilized many non-unionized workers. It is estimated that upwards of 45% of manual workers participated in the affected areas (principally, Buenos Aires and Rosario), even though unions represented less than 20% of the total manual workforce. These same non-unionized, frequently itinerant workers were, however, more vulnerable to the inevitable employers counteroffensive; lacking the means to support themselves when locked out of work, they were inevitably the first to re-enter into the labor force.

A wave of both state and popular repression was directed at the general strike. During the so-called Mes Trágico (tragic month) in December, over 4,500 workers in Buenos Aires were killed by demobilized soldiers, right-wing mobs, and police. Whole blocks of worker’s housing were burnt down, and most of the city’s synagogues destroyed. Similar pogroms took place in the other Latin American nations; German, Russian, and Jewish minorities associated with the revolutionary strikes in Europe were a particular target.

Although the labor actions were successfully suppressed, none of the underlying political-economic pathologies which gave rise to them were addressed. In fact, despite the extraordinary violence directed at workers from right-wing hooligans and returning soldiers, there was little indication that this repression substantially weakened the labor movement. Over 1920, worker’s militias organized in Buenos Aires and Rosario lynched several of the most prominent figures associated with the Semana Mes assaults. A counter-propaganda campaign against the “brutalized” and “barbaric” Argentinian soldiers blamed them for the chaos in the capital and won broad sympathy in parts of the countryside skeptical of the nation’s entry into the war.

The presidency of Honorio Pueyrredon suffered setback upon setback from its very beginning: Argentina’s entry into the war brought no immediate resolution of the u-boat issue, and the mobilization of an army prevented the nation from taking advantage of the international situation to achieve a favorable balance-of-trade, necessitating a domestic regime of harsh austerity. The promised British loans deteriorated in value as the pound inflated, rendering the state utterly insolvent.

Yet in 1920, at least a silver lining finally appeared. The demobilization of Argentine soldiers, coupled with Britain’s ravenous need for foodstuffs, revitalized Argentinian agro-export industries and led to double-digit economic growth in an era of global financial malaise. A functioning political system may have employed the windfall of excess profits to establish some measure of welfare to conciliate the worker’s opposition. Argentina, however, was not able to thread this needle. Pueyreddon still faced internal party criticism for his decision to join the war, and the conservatives lambasted any concession to the workers as a surrender to bolshevism. Like his predecessor, Pueyreddon’s labor policy alternated between attempts at mediation and brutal repression. By the 1922 presidential election, he had so alienated the socialists that they were determined to run their own candidate. Two years of economic prosperity were not sufficient to salvage his position. Disillusioned liberals stayed home and disaffected ones moved to the right. The workers in the big cities, once reliable Radical Civic Union voters in presidential elections, swung over to the socialists, handing them a little over a quarter of the vote. By a narrow margin, the conservative candidate Norberto Pinero became President.

Pinero’s victory did not provide conservatives with the means to actually wield power. In their elitist politics and their utter lack of organizational prowess, they still resembled a 19th century party: as a consequence, their victory in the presidential election was not coupled with correspondingly strong results in parliamentary ones. Together, the socialists and radical civic unions won an absolute majority of seats to the lower house. The conservatives refused to call further parliamentary elections in an effort to strengthen their hand, fearing that this would only strengthen the growing socialist bloc .For the time being, Argentine politics were paralyzed.

In 1923, the system entered into terminal crisis when Pinero agreed to a British request to cease trading Argentine grain and beef exports with the socialist powers in Europe. Britain still wielded enough financial control over Argentina for its threats to have teeth, though Pinero himself was already sympathetic to using Argentine agro-power against the socialist tide. The farmers, however, were not as interested in sacrificing their livelihood to this ideological war, especially once the embargo began to send the prices of foodstuffs tumbling. The rural “patriotic leagues” that previously served as neutralist organizations were now resuscitated as organs of “farmer’s syndicalism”. Right-wing paramilitaries were hounded out of the pampas. The prospect of a “worker-farmer’s” alliance against the government, the nightmare of conservatives everywhere, now loomed large.

To confront the rising rural unrest, Pinero granted emergency powers to his minister of war, Augustin Justo. Justo, a right-wing military man of authoritarian instincts, quickly gathered around himself a clique of high-ranking officers who took over most of the civilian ministries. Yet his haphazard attempt to employ raw military force against the socialists ended in disaster when a general strike was called and several hundred thousand rural workers also withheld their labor in sympathy. Not even the catholic, right-wing paramilitaries came to the aid of the government - they worried they would be forcibly conscripted into the ranks of the Argentine military, which by this point had become a quite unpopular institution.

With the country on the verge of revolution, junior officers marched into the presidential palace for the second time in the last half-decade, arrested Justo and his conspirators, and declared that all men - military and civilian alike - who had fought in the skirmishes of the past week would be granted a blanket amnesty if they swore an oath of loyalty to the “new Argentina”. They also announced the end of the food blockade on the socialist powers, as well as their intention to “remove Argentina from the grip of all imperialisms, North American, European, and British”. Relations were immediately renormalized with the socialist powers, and a civilian ministry appointed of politicians from the radical wing of the Civic Union.

Real power in the country was vested in the “supreme military council”, composed of Gregorio Pomar, Severo Toranzo, Francisco Bosh, and Atilio Cattaneo. These were all, broadly speaking, men of the progressive-reformist left who opposed Argentina’s entry into the Great War. In the past half-decade, however, they had become convinced that Argentina’s political system could not be reformed from within through pure parliamentary proceduralism. They were nonetheless profoundly uncomfortable with both the appearance and the reality of illiberal military rule, and attempted to maintain a facade of civilian leadership. Unlike some of their counterparts in Latin America, they were averse to forms of national corporatism and collectivism, instead preferring to maintain the forms of liberal democracy while employing the “non-partisan” hand of the military to ensure class harmony. This meant, first and foremost, the destruction and disbanding of the most prominent employer’s associations, a year-long war against both catholic integralist and red militias, and the introduction of a punitive income tax on the wealthy that was used to pay for wage dividends on the Scandinavian model (direct supplementary payments to citizens under a certain income line).

An ideology of secular Argentine nationalism was promulgated by the official organs of the state, though this was of a civic rather than a narrowly ethnic variety. The generals regime erected memorials to the Jews and Russians killed during the Mes Trágico and its civilian political collaborators juxtaposed Argentina as a “Single Nation of many races” to the “ethnocidal madness” unfolding in Europe. There was also a dalliance with anti-imperialism, even if in reality the new Argentine state was willing to do business with any comers - British, German, Russian, or American - if they would invest in Argentina and offer the requisite prices for Argentine exports.

Developments in Chile, and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, followed the Argentine pattern. The ascendant political position of the left and the need to avert revolution gave rise to military regimes that made concessions to the working-class while directing military force against its most radical manifestations. Only in the Brazilian case was there a general offensive against trade-union organizations and other organs of worker’s power, but even here it was paired with increased welfarism as well as corporatist settlements of wage disputes. If these were de facto class-collaborationist regimes, the Spanish pattern developed quite differently, into a form of right-caudillismo that in many respects resembled the emerging “fascism” of France.

Spain: The case of Right-Caudillismo

Spain’s social war may have formally begun in 1919, but the long decay of the Spanish political system can be dated to at least 1898, the year of the “great disaster” in which Spain lost its two most important remaining colonies to the rising American power. Calls for reform, renewal, and national regeneration had proliferated since then.

…Spain was not so much a constitutional democracy as it was an oligarchy of land-owners. The anticlerical and centralist liberals alternated power every half-decade or so with the localist and ultra-catholic conservatives in the corrupt turno system. Elections were rigged by local power-brokers, caciques , who resembled Sicilian crime bosses more than they did modern election administrators. All this had to change, of course, but the individuals tasked with reform were unfortunately also the prime beneficiaries of the system. Far from being confronted forthright, cacuismo continued to thrive well into the 20th century.

Yet despite the persistence of Spanish political backwardness, economic development continued apace. The Great War hypercharged Spanish industrialization and turned Catalonia into a vital Mediterranean economic hub. Spanish textiles and iron ore flooded markets in Germany and France. The enriched class of northern merchants, industrialists, and bankers demanded their share of political power. A “democratic assembly” movement in Catalonia gathered steam, but the state responded first with violence and then with a series of concessions that failed to meet the enlarged demands of the Catolonian autonomists.

As 1919 rolled around, the old system appeared to be well and truly on its deathbed. The swelling UGT and CNT, now claiming over one million members, were set to engage in a general strike with a broad-ranging list of demands that included the liberalization of Spanish election law and the replacement of the turno with an “entirely new governing committee”. The powerful business class of Catalonia was torn between condemning the “growing bolshevism” of the working class and forming a tacit alliance with it to democratize the government.

The general strike began on April 12th, 1919. Francesc Macia, once an officer in the Spanish Army, led a catalanist paramilitary group in defense of the strikers. Dozens of business owners pre-emptively shuttered their factories, some simply citing the coming strike action, and other evincing open solidarity with its aims. A provisional assembly met once again: this time, it had a sizable minority delegation of socialists and left-republicans, though it was still dominated by the Catalonian haute-bourgeousie. The liberals wavered on sending in the military to crush what increasingly looked to be an open insurrection on the streets of Barcelona; eventually, the equivocation of Prime Minister Prieto led to his replacement by the regenerationist conservative Antonio Maura, though he was forced to bring Juan de La Cierva into government, a long-time rival for control of the conservative party.

At first, the appointment of Maura only deepened the crisis. The defense juntas, which had been successfully placated by the previous liberal government, rapidly reformed when it became clear that another Maura ministry was likely. The new prime minister had nothing but contempt for these “monstrous creations” which advocated on behalf of the peninsular soldiers. When the home army refused to suppress the strikers unless they were given another inordinate series of pay raises, Maura mooted the prospect of bringing in sections of the African army to suppress the social unrest. This was unacceptable to Cierva, a long-time ally of the juntas.

In the end, the only option remaining for the government was to negotiate with the more moderate catalanists before the “provisional legislative assembly” that had gathered in Barcelona radicalized. Against the advice of his own ultraconservative supporters, this is precisely what Maura did. He reached out to both Macia and the conservative leader of the regionalist league, Francesc Cambo. To strengthen their own negotiating position, each insisted that they could not agree to any compromise solutions from Madrid without the full consent of the more radical provisional assembly. Later that day, the assembly met and issued several demands, including a thorough reform of the election system and the federalization of Spain. Crucially, Alfonso and the question of the monarchy went untouched by the assembly.

The Ciervists in the cabinet resisted any deal, and conspired with the defense juntas to force Maura out of the government. When this plot was uncovered, Maura finally received permission from the King to dismiss Cierva and his allies from the government. Maura now signalled his readiness to accept federalization in return for a compromise on the election issue. A proposal was made that would bring the Spanish election system, if not into the 20th century, then at least into the 19th - funds would be set aside to combat the power of the caciques and a secret ballot instituted. The power of the landowning class would be preserved through gerrymandering, plural suffrage, and wealth and literacy requirements, though the northern bourgeousie would also receive its share of representation in parliament. The provisional assembly voted to accept the compromise and duly rechristened itself the Regional Assembly of Catalonia.

The final crises to confront was the resurgence of the defense juntas and the striking powers. With Cierva dismissed, Maura now moved to bring home three divisions of the Africanist army to arrest the mutinying soldiers. Dejected and outmanuevered, most of the juntas quickly disbanded of their own accord. The striking workers, however, fought a much more prolonged and bitter battle. Not unreasonably, they felt betrayed by their middle-class allies as well as their own leaders, who had signalled a willingness to accept the reform measures even though they fell far short of what was initially demanded.

Maura was widely hailed by both the conservative and liberal press as Spain’s long-awaited reformer. The project of regeneracion had finally been achieved. Elections in August returned a majority for the new conservative-regionalist alliance. Sanguine voices declared the “crisis of the old system over”. In truth, it was just beginning. The “old system” had successfully incorporated the rising bourgeoisie class, but only as junior partners. Property relations and social inequality in the Spanish agricultural heartland were left unchanged. The plight of workers and businesses alike worsened as export prices fell and the domestic consumption of Spain’s main trading partners collapsed. And then, November arrived.

Like in Latin America, the initial worker’s action had little chance of immediately seizing the reins of state power. Most workers were still discouraged by the failed general strike in April; their bargaining power was further weakened by mass lay-offs in Barcelona and the Asturias mining region. When it did occur, activism was turned inward, against the moderate leadership of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, the CGT (Its allied union), and the CNT (an independent radical union). In early 1920, Pablo Iglesias, the 70 year-old “father of Spanish socialism” was forced to step down as leader after a spirited challenge from a left-wing maximalist faction led by Largo Callabero and Daniel Anguiano, while the CNT held an emergency congress in which the anarchists regained ascendancy after several years out of power.

Maura’s “popular” government continued to reel from the economic crisis. German and British demobilization reduced the need for Spanish goods; the resurgence of British manufacturing in the first few years of the First Revolutionary Era was particularly injurious for the Spanish export industry. Waves of French refugees placed an additional burden upon an already overtaxed state and pushed down the wages of Catalonian industrial workers even further.

However, the worst disaster for Maura’s government was almost certainly the deteriorating Spanish position in the ongoing Rif War. Ever since the humiliation of the Spanish-American war, the public - and above all, the Spanish elite - had a particular investment in colonial affairs. Regenaraction would be achieved not merely through internal reform, but also through a concerted campaign of overseas conquest and colonization. In 1912, some progress toward this goal was achieved with the Treaty of Fez, which awarded Spain a zone of influence in the Rif area of Morocco. Since then, however, tens of thousands of Spanish troops had been necessary to garrison the area, which was roiled by an insurgency of Berber tribesmen led by the brilliant guerilla strategist Abd el-Krim. A large swathe of nominally Spanish territory was under the de facto control of the Republic of the Rif, a sui generis tribal confederation.

In urgent need of a victory to shore up his flagging domestic support, Maura instructed the Spanish general in the area, Manuel Fernandez Silvestre, to proceed west from the main Spanish base in Melilla into Moroccan territory. He reached the town of Annual in August, and proceeded to set up fortified points. Though this assault successfully doubled the amount of Spanish-held territory, it also strung out his logistics and dispersed his poorly-trained army. A numerically inferior force of Rif tribesmen surrounded the Spanish base on August 19th. Panicked junior officers quickly ordered a retreat, but poor communication turned it into a rout. The Berber Rif army surged eastwards, overrunning poorly defended Spanish blockhouses and killing over 7,000 Spanish soldiers. The scale of the disaster became clear when an additional 1,500 Spanish soldiers were slaughtered before they could evacuate from the coastal city of Afrau. Reinforcements sent in to Melilla did not arrive in time to reinforce Spanish soldiers in the town of Monte Arruit, which fell in September. There now appeared to be a real risk of losing Melilla, and with it the entirety of Spain’s enclave in eastern Morocco. Only three towns stood between it and Monte Arruit: inland Zeluan, and semi-coastal Nador and El Ataloyon. The “Morocco disaster” quickly reached the press, and parliament demanded an inquiry. But the disaster, far from a settled and dusted affair, was still very much unfolding.

Previously, the Spanish Army had relied on their better-supplied and better-trained French counterparts to repel more ambitious riffian attacks. By this point, however, the great majority of the French African Army had returned home to the metropole to fight its own war. There would be no benevolent intervention to save the fate of the Spanish Army. Although 8,500 Spanish troops were sent to reinforce the city of Mellilla, only a fraction of these arrived to participate in the doomed defense of Zeluan. The disaster at Annual had seemingly drilled retreat into the core psychology of the demoralized Spanish Army. Both Nador and El Ataloyon fell in January, opening the path to the last Spanish stronghold in Melilla.

Riffian fighters under the command of Abd El-Krim began the assault on the city during the first days of 1921. They were, as usual, fighting a larger and much more well-entrenched Spanish force. With their backs against the wall, the underpaid and unmotivated Spanish soldiers showed more elan and backbone than in the previous battles, but this did not stop a mood of panic from spreading across the city. Much of the citizenry was evacuated by the end of the month, and in early February, the city itself finally fell to the control of El-Krim’s fighters. Spain had now lost control of the entirety of Eastern Morocco to a largely preindustrial army of Muslim tribesmen.

This unprecedented humiliation shook the Maura ministry to its core. Maura relieved Silvestre of his command and attempted to pawn off responsibility to the generals, but this was accepted neither by the parliamentarians nor the public. While the socialists attacked both the colonial project itself and the bumbling, incompetent government, the nationalist right demanded the reconquest of the territory. Republicans argued that the military defeats punctured the “lie of regenaracion”, and the Catalan legislature, ostensibly an ally of Maura, threatened to withhold funds from the government until final responsibility was assigned for the disaster.

Once again, a change in government was called for. Juan de la Cierva now finally got his chance as the mauristas in parliament soured on their leader. The replacement of one aristocratic conservative with another hardly sated the left-wing critics of the monarchy, but La Cierva did have his own program of social and military revitalization. Over 1921, he began putting this into place. With the assistance of generous American loans and aid, he built up the Spanish military, using it as a sponge to absorb urban unemployment. The reformed Army of Africa won several battles against Rif rebels in western Morocco, even advancing around 40 km into Rif-controlled territory and setting up new chains of blockhouses. La Cierva tried - often unevenly - to mobilize the masses with a doctrine of right-wing, catholic nationalism, but he remained too much a creature of restoration politics to ever carry this program through to its natural conclusions and mimic the organizational forms of the left. When the Spanish Socialist Worker’s party formally committed itself to the program of IntRevMar - even renaming itself the Spanish Union of Revolutionary Marxists - the right demanded that the party and its unions be banned. Mere months into his ministry, Cierva had arrived at his first full-blown crisis.

Cierva worried that placing an outright ban on the worker’s organizations would lead to an interminable cycle of social unrest and repression, but this was not an opinion that could be voiced openly in parliament, especially among his right-wing supporters. Parliamentary procedure was used to delay a vote on the matter for several weeks, but this entire effort was spoiled when an impetuous King Alfonso spoke publicly in defense of the proposal to ban “extremist” parties. An exasperated Cierva used his bargaining power to ensure that the language of the law solely targeted the socialist parliamentary delegation, rather than the entire party-structure. In truth, this may have been an even worse solution than an outright ban, for it successfully enraged the socialists and precipitated another general strike while allowing the organization itself to remain legal.

Throughout 1922, La Cierva settled on employing the military as an all-purpose tool for repressing social unrest. Dissidents were forcibly conscripted into it, and labor agitation broken with it. Propaganda depicted the military as the “school of the nation”, and military rule was introduced into restive provinces. However, by the end of the year the Americans had tired of funding Spain’s colonial adventurism, especially once it became clear that monies earmarked for the care of French refugees were pouring into the armed forces instead. An attempt to introduce sharp tax hikes to pay for the cost of the military was met with uniform opposition from both liberals and the traditional centre-right, necessitating a budget of “military austerity”.

This proved unacceptable to the swelling African Army and hard-right nationalists. Faced with a vote of no confidence, Cierva offered his resignation to King Alfonso in February of 1923 and resolved to retire from politics. By this point, there were no further civilian conservative politicians who had the credibility to rule, but their continued domination of the parliament meant that a republican - or even liberal - ministry was almost unthinkable. King Alfonso, who had been radicalized by the events of the previous four years, determined that some form of transitional military rule was necessary. The Army of Africa had been secretly plotting a coup since the prospect of military cuts first arose, but now this was pre-empted by Alfonso, who straightforwardly appointed the leader of this conspiracy, Jose Sanjurjo, as Prime Minister.

Sanjurjo was given extraordinary powers to “finish the project of reganaracion ”. Parliament was dissolved and decrees raised income and consumption taxes. A new tax was also introduced on “super-profits” in businesses. Most of this money went into an ambitious programme of military expansion, but some was paid out to catholic agricultural syndicates and unemployment insurance. Over the fall, amphibious assaults were launched in eastern Morocco, retaking major coastal cities, including Melilla. By the end of the year, all of the lost Spanish territory had been retaken. Spain’s new caudillo was thereby bequeathed a hefty grant of political capital.

Sanjurjo represented much more of a clear break with elite conservative restoration politics than either Maura or De La Cierva. Concerted and systematic efforts were made to include lower-class Spaniards - particularly rural ones - in national politics. Typically, this meant enlisting them in the activities of the new “Spanish National Party” and its affiliated leagues. In its extent of civic mobilization and in its thoroughgoing militarization of civilian life, the Sanjurjo regime came close to many of the practices of French and Turkish fascism, though many scholars prefer classing it as a “hybrid regime” that sat somewhere between the dynamic new conservatism of Mussolini and De La Rocque and the traditionalist, elitist politics of the pre-war right. While Sanjurjo initially cultivated a non-ideological image, trying to depict himself as a mostly transitional leader, this mirage had fallen by the end of his first year of rule. An avowedly corporatist political order was implemented, which represented a marked contrast to the more liberal, “non-partisan” caudillismo in South America. In reality, however, the grand national-collectivist pretensions of Sanjurjo masked the reality of a feeble state struggling to survive in a rapidly changing international order. The severity of repression and the willing consent given to the white terror by the bourgeousie were marks of weakness, not strength.