Victims into Emblems: Images of the Rnquil Massacre in Chilean National Narratives, 19342004

Florencia E. Mallon

On June 27 and 28, 1934, in the Andean region of Lonquimay, Chile, near the bor-

der with Argentina, four linked attacks targeted the general stores and police post associated with the large estates of Rnquil and Guayal, as well as the main houses on Guayal and the neighboring fundo Contraco. In addition to sacking the contents of the establishments, approximately three hundred attackers killed a total of seven people, including three carabineros (military police). They also held an employee at one of the general stores hostage for several hours. Although they initially were armed with only sticks and knives, by the second day of the uprising the rebels had armed themselves with weapons and ammunition they found along the way, especially at the Guayal police post.1 Word of these violent events reached the police station in Lonquimay in the early morning hours of June 28, when a pair of policemen returned from Rnquil. They had been sent to investigate the origin of subversive proclamations that had
I wish to thank the participants in the Newberry Seminar on Latin American history, especially Christopher Boyer, Margaret Power, and Leon Fink for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. A much earlier version was presented as the 2006 Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture at the University of WisconsinMadison, where I benefited from the comments of Roberta Hill, Francine Hirsch, Tony Michels, Teju Olaniyan, Mary Louise Roberts, and Steve Stern. Peter Winn also commented on another version presented in Spanish at a seminar in Peru. 1. This summary of the first days of the Rnquil uprising is based on the following sources: Jaime E. Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 1934, Rnquil. Una revuelta campesina (masters thesis, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 1993), especially 10416; Informe del Subdelegado de Lonquimay, Augusto Schweitzer M., al Juez del Crimen, Victoria, July 8, 1934, Correspondencia Recibida, Archivo Nacional Miraflores, Santiago, Ramo Intendencia de Cautn, and Informe Confidencial del Intendente de Cautn Alfredo Rodrguez Mac- Iver adjuntando documentacin sobre los sucesos de Lonquimay, July 17, 1934, Temuco, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 25758, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 8, Issue 1 DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-044 2011 by Labor and Working-Class History Association

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been circulating for several days. According to the report submitted later by the prefect of carabineros, his subordinates had been informed by one of the farmers in the Rnquil area that an uprising was under way. Lieutenant Luis Cabrera, the commander of the Lonquimay office, immediately set out for the region with ten men, and by noon of that same day he was able to confirm that the Ackermann store had been attacked. From that moment, the rebels were on the defensive.2 To this day, we do not know exactly how many people participated in the rebellion nor the exact number of those who died during the repression. Estimates in the sources vary from three hundred to fifteen hundred participants, of whom sixty to three hundred fifty were killed. We do know that repression was massive and cruel, targeting the communities and peasant families of the region. Many people escaped by crossing the border into Argentina, struggling through the abundant snow that accumulated at that time of the year. Fifty- six alleged participants were tried and jailed in Temuco, and many families, who no longer had their main breadwinners, suffered additional hunger, illness, and death.3 Though little known outside Chile, even in the Latin American historiography about this period, the uprising and massacre that took place in the Lonquimay region in June 1934 has occupied an important place in Chilean historical narratives of the twentieth century.4 Whether as proof of the repressive power of an expanding state or as an example to show future peasant movements that it was possible for Mapuche and non- Mapuche people to unite under the auspices of the Left to reclaim their usurped lands, Rnquil has been a touchstone for Chilean narratives of modernity. More recently, at the beginning of the twenty- first century, intellectuals politically committed to the Mapuche movement on the one hand and to a resurgence of the Left on the other have also found symbols and lessons in the events surrounding Rnquil. During the ten years that I have been studying the Rnquil case, my own perspective has changed dramatically. As a historian working on Mapuche themes across the twentieth century, from the beginning I was interested in the declarations in both the left- wing and mainstream presses that one of the goals of the uprising had been the establishment of an independent Mapuche republic. After reading Jaime Floress masters thesis, the first work to question the extent of indigenous participation in the
2. Informe del Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautn, Fernando Delano Soruco, sobre los sucesos de Lonquimay, July 15, 1934, Temuco, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 25758, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago. 3. In addition to the sources cited previously, see also El Diario Austral, June 29, 1934, 1; June 30, 1934, 1 and 5; July 23, 1934, 1; and Patricio Manns, Las grandes masacres, Nosotros los chilenos 20 (Santiago: Editorial Quimant, 1972), 5258. 4. One exception to this statement, which has just been published and with a perspective quite distinct from the one I develop in this essay, is Thomas Miller Klabock, Rnquil: Violence and Peasant Politics on Chiles Frontier, in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin Americas Long Cold War, eds., Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 12159.

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rebellion, I wanted to confirm the lack of Mapuche- Pewenche5 participation and to understand why the association of the events with indigenous groups had emerged in the first place. Following the clues offered by Flores, I began to formulate an alternative explanation for the uprising, based on the presence of a group of poor Chilean colonists who had mobilized to claim their rights to land under the terms of the National Colonization Law. At the same time, however, I realized that attempting to prove the absence of the Mapuche- Pewenche people from the movement was neither the most important task nor an entirely viable one. The documents produced by the repressive forces note the presence among the rebels of the Mapuche- Pewenche leader Ignacio Maripe from the community of Ralco, even though we have no direct evidence that he participated in his role as lonko, or leader. On the list of those arrested, moreover, we find a group of individuals with at least one Mapuche last name, most of whom were laborers on the fundo Ralco. According to Floress calculations, they form about 15 percent of the total who were brought to trial.6 In the end, the more that I thought about the topic, the more I became convinced that an alternative narrative about Rnquil involved more than a rebuttal of the previous interpretation. Rather than simply searching for the truth of the events, it became necessary to explain why the uprising and massacre have served, over the years and for such different groups, as such a powerful symbol. The situation became even more complex when a few years ago the Mapuche newspaper AzkintuWE published a short article about Rnquil. Based on familiar interpretations from the most established leftist sources, this article reproduced the image of an alliance between peasants and Mapuches in the struggle for land and social justice.7 As I read this, a new question arose in my mind: how is the idea of unity between poor Chilean peasants and Mapuches represented by this vision of the Rnquil uprising and massacre different at the beginning of the twenty- first century, when the Mapuche movement for cultural and territorial autonomy is already more than twenty years old? I have concluded that the Rnquil uprising and massacre have had a powerful impact on the historical imagination of many diverse groups in Chilean political history precisely because the events can be integrated in multiple, diverse, and equally dramatic ways to extremely different versions of national history. In and of itself,
5. The Mapuche people are subdivided into a series of regionally and landscape- defined subgroups whose names denote the particular region in which they live and the specific subsistence adaptation that is defined by the resources available in that particular microclimate. The name Mapuche designates the whole people, mapu meaning land or world and che meaning people. Pewenche, therefore, is the Mapuche subgroup that inhabits the region of the pewen, or araucaria tree, in the high Andes and whose subsistence adaptation includes seasonal migration into the lower valleys in the winter, the higher regions in the summer, and the collection of the pine nuts produced by the pewen trees. 6. Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 12930; see also the list of those arrested that is included in Informe del Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautn, Fernando Delano Soruco, ibid., 1, and specifically Maripe, 6. 7. Peridico Mapuche AzkintuWE 1, no. 8 (2004): 7. See a more detailed analysis of this article in the last section of this essay, pp. 5253.

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the Rnquil case is a powerful one. In the midst of a cruel winter and after being thrown off their plots, a group of peasants rebelled violently and desperately against the landowners and an oppressive state. The leaders of the movement were killed in the repression along with an unconfirmed number of their followers. Many others escaped through the deep snow toward the border with Argentina or were taken prisoner and forced to march to Temuco under horrible conditions. As has happened many other times in Chilean national history, the government attempted to cover up its excesses, and Rnquil/Lonquimay became part of the litany of dramatic massacres suffered by the Chilean people. These general images are part of a shared history, no matter who tells it: the poor, tired of being abused, rise up and are converted into innocent victims. These elements are common to all narratives of the Rnquil case, but the interpretations of how and why this happened have changed a great deal over time, which in and of itself is an interesting subject for historical analysis. In this essay, I contribute to the analysis of Rnquil in two ways. First, I revisit the events in the context of recent research and in light of new primary sources to rethink the place of the uprising, not only in Chilean history but also transnationally. Second, I place the different interpretations of Rnquil in historical context, not only to show how these have changed over time but also to identify elements that have stayed the same and possible explanations.
Rnquil in Historical and Transnational Context

The uprising and massacre that occurred in Rnquil and Lonquimay in June 1934 was a local, but not less important, culmination of the usurpations and abuses along Chiles southern frontier that began in the 1880s with the military defeat of the Mapuche people and the territorial expansion of the Chilean state. The resulting land and commercial speculations, as well as the negotiation of the international border with Argentina, divided Chilean national colonists and Mapuches even as both groups were affected negatively. The supposed political unity between Mapuche and nonMapuche peasants that transformed the massacre into a broader symbol of popu lar struggle was not a historical reality but instead the projection of political organizations in the 1930s, both Mapuche and non- Mapuche, that desired social cohesion among all the rural poor. Between 1889 and 1910, the frontier region of Lonquimay witnessed a series of violent conflicts over land and resources between and among frontier entrepreneurs, Pewenche indigenous groups, and economically underprivileged Chilean settlers who wished to acquire plots of land on which to support their families. From the perspective of the Chilean state as well as large landowners and poor colonists, this was a newly opened region where virgin forests, rumors of mineral wealth, and extensive pasturelands all promised prosperity.8 However, the situation of the Pewenche
8. This paragraph is an attempt to summarize a very complex and conflictual situation that can be seen throughout the documentation in the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores between 1890 and 1910, when the Foreign Relations Ministry was still in charge of colonization for the frontier zone. For the case of Lon-

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indigenous communities was different, because their ancestral territory was not recognized by the state and the dramatically reduced lands on which they were to be settled were not confirmed before the first crush of speculation was unleashed in the 1880s. Many Pewenche lineages thus found themselves squatting, without title, on lands now considered property of the state. Even the possession of a legal title, in the context of a distant national government and a local bureaucracy controlled by the rich and powerful, provided little protection. Buffeted among lumber speculators, livestock entrepreneurs renting fiscal lands, and landowners accumulating additional hectares, Pewenche caciques found that their complaints fell on deaf ears. After losing family members in confrontations with local police on the payroll of the large landowners, several Pewenche communities ended up on marginally state-claimed lands while large landowners profited from the lumber, pasture, and other resources that had once been theirs.9 The conditions faced by landless Chileans along the frontier, while also extremely harsh, were different from those confronting indigenous people. In 1901, less than two decades after the final military defeat of the Mapuche, more than twenty- five hundred heads of household signed a petition to the Ministry of Foreign Relations, which at that point still handled land claims on the frontier. The 1898 National Colonization Law to which they referred, through which national colonists were entitled to plots of state- owned land, did not apply to the recently conquered Mapuche or Pewenche peoples. However, despite having a different legal right, the settlers had been unable to make good on their claims. Without the money to participate in the national auctions of state lands going on in Santiago, they wrote, they had been forced to work as inquilinos, or service tenants, on the large estates springing up all over the region.10 Within this group of colonists, there was also a special community of Chileans deported from the Argentine province of Neuqun during the negotiations over the
quimay, I am basing my arguments on, among other documents, the following: Expediente formado en base a la solicitud de Don Manuel A. Rios, entrega de terrenos fiscales en el Alto Bo- Bo, case concluded on September 10, 1904, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1363, Archivo Siglo XX; the documentation surrounding the concession of lands for foreign colonization given to entrepreneur Luis Silva Rivas, 1910, Expediente formado por los conflictos entre la Concesin Silva Rivas y los colonos repatriados de la Argentina, vol. 1364, especially pp. 2129, Archivo Siglo XX; and in the same volume the request made by Luis Silva Rivas on March 21, 1911. 9. The situation of the Pewenche communities in this region was badly documented, because the more powerful individuals who committed the abuses were also the ones who controlled the information. An example of the violence committed against communities that protested the usurpation of their lands can be found in Solicitud de Roque Hernndez R. por los caciques de Lonquimay y el Alto Bo- Bo, 1908, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1359, Archivo Siglo XX, which includes copies of two letters signed by thirteen caciques, one to the governor of the region and the other to the general inspector of lands and colonization. See also Jos Bengoa C., Quinqun: 100 Aos de Historia Pehuenche (Santiago: Ediciones Chile Amrica CESOC, 1992). 10. Solicitud de 2.500 aspirantes a colonos nacionales al Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores pidiendo la reparticin de las hijuelas prometidas, 1901, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 986, Archivo Siglo XX.

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border in the 1880s. Despite having been promised plots of fiscal land, the majority had been unable to negotiate the intricate bureaucratic maze attached to a successful application.11 It was a community of aspiring Chilean colonists very much like these, demanding resources they felt were theirs as citizens of the Chilean nation, who organized an agricultural union in 1928 on the Rnquil and Guayal estates and would constitute the core of the 1934 rebellion.12 The desperation that drove these colonists to armed rebellion was the result of the abusive actions of the large landowners and investors in this frontier zone. It should not surprise us that these powerful speculators were the first to be heard by the government when they arrived in Santiago. They bought the recently demarcated land parcels at national auction and, in exchange for promises to bring colonists from Europewho at the time were considered better prepared and more innovative than Chileansthey received enormous concessions of fiscal land. Although this fever for European colonization raged in many Latin American countries between 1880 and 1920, in the Chilean case we must remember that the recent military victory against a previously autonomous indigenous people had also generated the presence of a special national investor class that had already profited handsomely from contracts to equip the Chilean army during the Pacification campaign.13 The concessions to colonization companies and the establishment of supposedly legal claims over recently demarcated lands ended up forming part of the same strategy of land accumulation for these investors. Especially in the Lonquimay and Alto Bo- Bo regions, these investors were able completely to box out all claims by less powerful groups, both Pewenche communities and poor Chilean colonists. A particularly dramatic example of these tendencies was the family business of Jos Bunster, who had received the exclusive contract to feed the Chilean army during its cam11. The problems facing the Chileans deported from Argentina are detailed in Providencia formada con la solicitud de Manuel Elojio y Salvador 2 y Alfredo Cataln Sez, colonos repatriados de la Argentina, began March 14, 1909, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, vol. 1278, and Solicitud de unos 20 colonos repatriados de la Argentina pidiendo tramitacin de sus ttulos, received in Santiago on April 6, 1910, vol. 1278. 12. Sources on the foundation of the agricultural union include Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 71, 73, who gets his information from the newspaper El Comercio, and documents concerning the union in Intendencia de Cautn, September/October 1929, vol. 279, Archivo Nacional Miraflores, Santiago. See also Harry Fahrenkrog Reinhold, La verdad sobre la revuelta de Rnquil, ed. Edmundo Fahrenkrog B. (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1985), 2833. 13. The process of parcelization, and the central role that entrepreneurs involved in the military campaign against the Mapuche played in it and in the accumulation of lands through national auctions, can be seen in the following documents: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 189495, vol. 604, 23140; Notarios de Temuco, 1899, vol. 21, 881v884v (Bunster and Urrutia families); and, specifically for the Guayal estate, Ministerio de Tierras y Colonizacin, 1930, vol. 64, Decreto 2243, attached document from the Ministerio de la Propiedad Austral, June 12, 1930, where the purchase of the fundo is noted and registered as having occurred between Martin B. Bunster and four Mapuche caciques in 1882, recorded at the office of the Conservador de Bienes Races of La Laja, 32v34v.

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paigns against the Mapuche.14 Among the properties that the Bunster family acquired through speculation was the Guayal estate, one of the centers of the 1934 rebellion, which by 1930 had reached a size of slightly less than sixty thousand hectares.15 Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the promises of frontier prosperity became reality for only a very small part of the regions inhabitants. But not all the excluded reacted in the same way. Between 1929 and 1931, the Lonquimay Agricultural Union was able to take advantage of the political moment in Chile. Under the direction of Juan Segundo Leiva Tapia, a local high school teacher whose family was part of the community of colonists deported from Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, and with the participation of several small businessmen and shopkeepers in the region, this union convinced the then progressive and populist president, Colonel Carlos Ibez del Campo (192931), to parcel out a section of the fundo Guayal among its members.16 Neither the formation of the union nor the promise of parcelization included the Pewenche communities, however, and the amount of land distributed fell far short of that needed to satisfy the requests of those who had applied through the union. This caused a rift within the union organization, between those businessmen and shopkeepers interested in limiting the number of applicants to assure larger plots and the more radical faction led by Juan Leiva Tapia that wanted to allow access to everyone who applied.17 The divisions within the Lonquimay union intensified with the overthrow of Ibez in 1931 and the rise to power of Arturo Alessandri in 1932, as the new government began overturning Ibezs more populist agrarian policies and reneging on all promises of further parcelization. With the backing of Alessandri, local landowners allied with the military police stepped up their evictions and abuse of tenants
14. The presence of Jos Bunster and his family in the frontier region is truly remarkable, much more so than I can detail here. His first center of operations was Traigun, and from there he spread his investments throughout the region of La Araucana. For an introduction to the subject, see Jos Bengoa, Historia del pueblo mapuche, Siglo XIX y XX, 5th ed. (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2000), 25860. Additional details about Bunsters presence in Traigun can be found in an article in the online version of El Diario Austral, April 1, 2004, www.australtemuco.cl/prontus3 (accessed November 24, 2010). Bunsters own purchases of and speculation in land auctions are dramatically summarized in a document in Notarios de Temuco, 1897, vol. 11, 162227, where his legal representative registers slightly more than 17,463 hectares, located in the departments of Angol, Collipulli, Traigun, Mariluan, Imperial, Temuco, and Valdivia, as Bunsters property. 15. Ministerio de Tierras y Colonizacin, 1930, vol. 64, Decreto 2243. 16. This summary of the events is based on Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 6077, and Appendix 1: Carta Abierta de Juan Leiva Tapia al Presidente del Sindicato de la Comuna de Lonquimay, detallando su entrevista con el Presidente Carlos Ibez del Campo, Intendencia Cautn, vol. 279, Expediente sobre el Sindicato Agrcola Lonquimay, AugustOctober 1929, Archivo Nacional Miraflores, Santiago. 17. The divisions inside the union are described by Fahrenkrog, La verdad sobre la revuelta, 3338. Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, notes that the number of union members attending the meetings also went down, perhaps due to these internal problems. See 75 and 135, n. 23.

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and their families, leading to the further radicalization of union leaders, especially Leiva. In 1933, Leiva sought entry into the Chilean Workers Federation (FOCH), then closely allied with the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh), and was one of the delegates sent by the FOCH and the PCCh to an antiwar conference hosted by the Komintern in Montevideo, Uruguay. By the time he returned to the province of Cautn, having been arrested upon returning to Chilean soil and sent into internal exile for his participation in the conference, it was November 1933.18 Available evidence suggests that, upon his return, Leiva was angry. In a confidential report to the Ministry of the Interior on November 5, 1933, the intendant of Cautn reported that Leiva had addressed the inaugural session of the Second National Convention of the Central Socialista de Colonizacin in Temuco and,
encouraged by the reception he received, he delivered an energetic and daring speech, saying among other things that the governments colonization policy is a sham and a lie, and an attempt by the reactionary bourgeois government to further exploit and enslave the peasants and laborers who work their lands, and that this project does not meet the aspirations of those who work the land, but rather to the contrary turns everything over to foreign capitalists and especially to Chilean landowners, and that before anything else it is necessary to expel international capitalism which has absorbed all our national territory making Chile a foreign colony. He was continually interrupted by longlasting applause and ovations.

Leivas supporters became so impassioned, the intendant reported, that they threw stones at the head table and, when the lights were turned on and off, threw Communist propaganda pamphlets, an example of which you will find enclosed.19 The enclosed eight- page pamphlet, printed in Santiago and entitled IN DEFENSE of the Peasants Goal of Free Access to the Land: United the Peasants and Workers Can Seize the Land from the FEUDAL Landowners, called for an alliance of all poor and middle peasants with sharecroppers, colonists, wage workers, and others against the government, the landowners, and the large merchants. THE COMMUNIST PARTY is the only one that struggles for the true interests of the peasants, the pamphlet proclaimed. The peasants could not achieve their interests alone, it continued. They must do this with the workers in the city and united they will be a force able to annihilate the landowners, the imperialists and the bourgeoisie and establish a government of PEASANTS AND WORKERS that will make the
18. The information in this paragraph is a combination of material found in the following sources: Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 87103, and Appendix 2: Entrevista a Juan Leiva Tapia sobre su opinin de la FOCH y su relegacin a Melinka, 21518; Olga Ulinova, Levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay y la Internacional Comunista, Estudios Pblicos 89 (Summer 2003): 173223, especially 180, where she identifies the first contact between Leiva Tapia and the FOCH as occurring in 1933; and Elas Lafferte, Vida de un comunista (Pginas autobiogrficas) (Santiago: Talleres Grficos Lautaro, 1957), 25567. 19. Informe Confidencial del Intendente de la Provincia de Cautn al Ministro del Interior sobre la Segunda Convencin Nacional de la Central Socialista de Colonizacin, November 14, 1933, Temuco, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8675, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17; 12, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago.

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AGRARIAN AND ANTI- IMPERIALIST revolution, whose objectives are to turn the land over to the peasants and throw out the foreign capitalists who own the main industries, especially nitrates, copper and coal. The pamphlet then detailed the demands for which each rural sector, from sharecroppers to colonists to small and medium landowners, should struggle. It ended with a set of rousing calls to action and a Viva to Soviet Russia and was signed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chilean Section of the Communist International.20 Seven months later, in the midst of a harsh winter and having just suffered eviction from the Guayal estate, a desperate group of ex- tenants from that fundo, along with tenants from several of the other large properties of the area and with the support of Leiva and two other FOCH delegates, initiated the Rnquil uprising. In July 1934, less than a month after the bloody suppression of the uprising, Bandera Roja, the official newspaper of the Chilean Communist Party, published an article claiming that the rebellion had been an alliance of peasants and tenants, Mapuches, and workers from the gold mines in the region. The three groups, the newspaper insisted, had presented a united front around the joint demands of land and the Araucanian Republic. The article continued, The struggle in the south is a practical example of the combative alliance among peasants, tenants, workers, and Mapuches. But what gives this alliance its greatest importance, as a revolutionary manifestation, is that it was built not only with the purpose of immediate economic demands, but also with a profound political goal, which means a REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTION to the present situation through the installation of a government of soviets. The article concluded with the following prediction: We will make the most of the lessons learned, fertilized as they are with the blood of those heroic combatants, and we will take up the call that has been issued from Lonquimay to all the workers of the country.21 In this part of Chiles newly opened southern frontier, between 1880 and 1934, several groups of migrants and refugeesthe Pewenche, among them, homeless in their own landfound themselves caught in the interstices of a project of frontier expansion and national consolidation. As Jaime Flores has demonstrated, they were present, though not in equal numbers, among the individuals who were jailed for their supposed participation in the uprising. According to Floress numbers, these included those with a Mapuche last name (15 percent), agricultural laborers (40 percent), smallholders (30 percent), and miners (16 percent). However, the presence of these groups among those arrested does not necessarily prove a high degree of con20. POR LA DEFENSA de la Aspiracin de los Campesinos al goce libre de la TIERRA: Unido [sic] los Campesinos y los Obreros pueden arrebatar la tierra a los terratenientes FEUDALES (Santiago: Imprenta La Crnica, n.d.), included in Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17. 21. Por el Gobierno de los Soviets y la Repblica Araucana se han pronunciado los sublevados de Lonquimay, Bandera Roja 10, no. 14 (July 28, 1934): 1, clipping found in Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8680, Providencias Confidenciales, Archivo Siglo XX.

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Bandera Roja, 10, no. 14 (July 28, 1934): 1, clipping, Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8680, Providencias Condenciales, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago, Chile

sciousness or political coordination among them. In addition, as Olga Ulinova has clearly demonstrated and the confidential intendants report confirmed, the first contacts between the Lonquimay union and the Communist Party occurred through Juan Leiva Tapia during the second half of 1933. Ulinovas research has also shown that two additional communist union activists had traveled to the region by early 1934 and most likely became involved in organizing and propaganda activities, especially an extensive leafleting campaign, in an attempt to connect with the emerging rural movement. These three leaders played a central role in the rebellion but did not represent the deep or enduring presence of the Communist Party.22 Why, then, did the PCCh take this position? Recent research suggests that this position was neither a conscious fabrication nor a representation of the facts. Instead it was an answer to, and result of, a series of political tendencies and changes for which Rnquilas image of a united and heroic peopleserved as dramatic symbol. That the Chilean Communist Party turned the presence in the uprising of three activists close to the PCCh into the heroic precursor of a national proletarian
22. Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 12930, and Ulinova, Levantamiento Campesino.

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revolution must be understood in the context of the dramatic changes going on in both the Chilean party and the Komintern between 1928 and 1935. As Olga Ulinovas recent work has demonstrated, the Chilean Communist Party negotiated a difficult contradiction between its own history of mass mobilization and electoral participation, on the one hand, and the conflicting calls for radical action and increasing political centralization in the world communist movement in the second half of the 1920s with the Kominterns strategy of class against class, on the other hand.23 This strategy was initially adopted at the sixth congress of the Communist International in 1928, which was also the first congress at which Latin America was systematically discussed, and it was based on the notion that capitalism was entering its final crisis. This gave rise to the third period of communist struggle, during which the revolution was considered to be right around the corner. Communist parties throughout the world were urged to push the strategy of revolutionary soviets of peasants and workers. This notion of revolutionary soviets helped inspire Communist parties in various Latin American countries, including El Salvador (1932) and Cuba (1933), to participate in popular uprisings.24 In 1931, the failure of an uprising by Chilean sailors that was compared, within communist circles, to the Potemkin incident in Odessa was also interpreted and debated within the context of the third period. It is the same language of revolutionary soviets that we find in the Bandera Roja article cited previously.25 An additional factor in the Chilean case was the generalization, also at the sixth congress, of a debate on the treatment of oppressed races as nationalities with a
23. See especially Olga Ulinova, El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibez (19271931): Primera clandestinidad y Bolchevizacin Estaliniana, Boletn de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 67, no. 111 (2003): 385436, and Crisis e ilusin revolucionaria. Partido Comunista de Chile y Comintern, 19311934, in El comunismo: otras miradas desde Amrica Latina, ed. Elvira Concheiro Brquez, Massimo Modonesi, and Horacio Crespo (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2007), 277322. 24. For El Salvador, see two very different interpretations of how memory operated around the question of the massacre: Jeffrey Gould and Aldo Lauria- Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 19201932 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Hector LindoFuentes, Erik Ching, and Rafael A. Lara- Martinez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). For Cuba in 1933, and the connection between the Kominterns position of class against class and the soviets created, see Caridad Massn Sena, La izquierda cubana en los aos treinta, Cuadernos Americanos 109 (2005): 4357. 25. For a more in- depth discussion of the context in which the Communist Party interpreted the Chilean 1931 sailors uprising, and its placement in the various mobilizations between 1931 and 1934, see Ulinova, Crisis el ilusin revolucionaria. According to Boris Yopo, between the PCChs two congresses of 1933, divided between the partys Stalinist and Trotskyist factions, the second congress stands out because it was there that the identity and subordination of the PCCH to the Third International was confirmed. Thus, the politics of the third period and the class against class strategy had an important effect on the internal politics of the PCCH, especially in the period between 1931 and 1934. Boris Yopo H., Las relaciones internacionales del Partido Comunista, in El Partido Comunista en Chile: estudio multidisciplinario, ed. Augusto Varas (Santiago: CESOC/FLACSO, 1988), 37399; direct quotations, 376.

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right to national self- determination. This debate, which arose at the same time that the Soviet government was in effect creating new nationalities through census taking and territorial mapping, took on meaning through Komintern discussions on the role of Afro- descendant people in the Communist parties of South Africa and the United States. By the sixth congress (1928), however, when the Komintern turned its attention to Latin America for the first time, discussions about national minorities and self- determination had become generalized. Indeed, one of the resolutions at the sixth congress in Moscow was precisely about the national question and the colonial problem, emphasizing the complete equality of all races and nations, the need to improve conditions in all colonies and frontier zones, and the recognition of any nations right, regardless of race, to self- determination.26 Interestingly, this debate emerged in the Communist International at precisely the same time that the complex and intricate process of drawing boundaries between nationalities within the Soviet Union was in full swing. As Francine Hirsch has recently demonstrated, Leninist notions of national self- determination coexisted uneasily, in this process, with the exigencies of state consolidation. The Russian ethnographers called in to define and survey the diverse peoples of the empire, Hirsch additionally shows, had previously served the imperial regime and the provisional government and were thus deeply committed to European evolutionist principles.27 However, in the radicalized context of 1929, when the first congress of Latin American Communist parties took place in Buenos Aires, it was the insurrectional implications of national self- determination policy that dominated the conversations. According to Marc Becker, Victorio Codovilla, leader of the Kominterns South American Secretariat, commissioned Jos Carlos Maritegui to write a reaction to the proposal made by the Komintern to carve an Indian Republic out of the Quechua and Aymara peoples in the mountainous Andean Region of South America.28 At this first congress in Buenos Aires in June 1929to which many delegates arrived directly from the founding congress for the Latin American Trade Union Confederation held in Montevideo the month beforeChileans were not represented, in large measure because the fierce repression of the Ibez dictatorship had reduced their ranks and gravely weakened their party over the previous two years.29 As Becker makes clear, moreover, Mariteguis extremely critical reaction to the idea of an indigenous republic, as presented by Dr. Hugo Pesce, vindicated the importance of class struggle and of the indigenous problem as essentially a land problem.
26. Resolution F, regarding the national and colonial questions, is reproduced in The Communist International, 19191943: Documents, ed. Jane Degrab (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), II:497. For an overview of what was going on at this point, see especially Marc Becker, Maritegui y el problema de las razas en Amrica Latina, Revista Andina 35 (July 2002): 191220. 27. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 28. Marc Becker, Maritegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America, Science and Society 70, no. 4 (2006): 45079; direct quotation on p. 451. 29. Ulinova, El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibez, 435.

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Although there was intense debate around the issue of race in Latin America, and specifically on the idea of creating indigenous republics as a form of communist struggle in the region, no agreement was reached concerning a general policy on selfdetermination. Rather than reach a final conclusion, delegates left open the possibility that each national group could make the right decision at the local level.30 Chilean communists would soon loudly and dramatically proclaim their progress in the application of the policy of indigenous self- determination, in part because it was between 1929 and 1933 that their party underwent what Ulinova calls bolchevikization and was brought more fully under the control of the South American Secretariat. As a result of the internal divisions and repression it faced during the Ibez dictatorship, Ulinova suggests, the Chilean Communist Party, despite its strong tradition of autonomy and mass mobilization, ended up toeing the Komintern line. The South American Secretariat, she writes, becomes the only mediator of the Chilean CPs relationship with the Komintern, promoting a new generation of leaders on the basis of their unconditional support for the political line of the SAS.31 Indeed, by late 1933, before the beginning of the Rnquil uprising, the pamphlet distributed by Leivas supporters at the Temuco congress was signed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chilean Section of the Communist International. However, to conclude that it was only adherence to the Komintern line that yielded a notion of an indigenous republic in Lonquimay would not give us a complete picture. The final ingredient in the complex alchemy that produced the heroic version of Rnquil came from the Mapuche movement itself. Between 1911 and the end of the 1920s, three Mapuche political organizations had formed with the purpose of defending indigenous lands and culture. Two of the three had the goal of integrating the Mapuche into Chilean society through education and eventually privatizing indigenous lands. The third organization, led by Manuel Aburto Panguilef, was the only one to unconditionally oppose the division of Mapuche lands.32 Throughout the 1920s, Aburto and his Federacin Araucana confronted the land problem from the perspective of cultural and territorial autonomy. Criticized by other more integrationist Mapuche leaders, Aburto sought out alliances that might help him find a solution to the Mapuche problem that privileged self- determination. A possible alternative that he explored systematically in the 1920s was a political coalition with the emerging popular movement, especially with the unions supported by the newly emerging leftist parties. In 1924, for example, the Federacin Araucana supported Francisco Melivilu, a Mapuche leftist who successfully ran for Congress
30. Becker, Maritegui y el problema de las razas en Amrica Latina, 20012. On Maritegui, see also Alberto Flores Galindo, La agona de Maritegui: La polmica con la Komintern (Lima: DESCO, 1980). 31. Ulinova, El Partido Comunista Chileno durante la dictadura de Carlos Ibez, 43536. 32. On Manuel Aburto Panguilef and the Federacin Araucana, see also Florencia E. Mallon, El Siglo XX Mapuche: Esferas pblicas, sueos de autodeterminacin y articulaciones internacionales, in Las disputas por la etnicidad en Amrica Latina: Movilizaciones indgenas en Chiapas y Araucana, ed. Christian Martnez Neira and Marco Estrada Saavedra (Santiago, Chile: Catalonia/USACH, 2009), 15590.

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on the Partido Demcrata ticket. FOCH delegates participated in several of the Federacin Araucanas congresses, and a delegation from the Federacin that traveled to Santiago in October 1929 to protest the division of Mapuche lands asked for support from the working- class movement. It was precisely between 1929 and 1931, during the bolchevikization period, that the combination of an internationalist vision of revolutionary soviets, an anticolonial policy of self- determination for oppressed nationalities, and the possibility of an alliance with the visionary Mapuche leader Manuel Aburto Panguilef yielded what must have looked like a winning revolutionary combination. In December 1931, the eleventh congress of the Federacin Araucana resolved to push forward with a project for Mapuche autonomy linked to an emerging vision of leftist popular government. Indeed, the declarations concerning the Indigenous Republic were quite dramatic:
The 11th Congreso Araucano resolves: That its most deeply held aspiration is the creation of the Indigenous Republic where the Araucanian race can live according to its own psychology, customs, and rituals; own its own land, occupying the provinces where its one hundred and fifty thousand members can live (taking into account reserves for the growth of the population); develop an education system oriented toward its own welfare; and engage in self- government, creating its own progress and culture. This aspiration of our race will only be possible through an effective alliance among Natives, peasants and workers, the day that the Chilean working class in fraternal union with all of us conquers power and puts into effect its program of social justice. This Congress recommends to the Araucanian people that this aspiration be felt by all the Native people of Chile, teaching it to our children as a sacred cult so that in the not so distant future we are able to reach our own greatness and welfare.33

To this declaration we must also add the previous statement in the same resolutions of the congress, concerning a new form of political organization for the Mapuche region, or Araucana:
The 11th Congreso Araucano resolves: Foment the total Unification of our race in a single institution that should have within it all the current organizations, under the direction of an executive committee and that will have groups in all the different cities and throughout the countryside; give the institution the character of a class party, a revolutionary line of struggle and connect the indigenous social movement with the worker and peasant social movement.34

In addition, the 11th Congreso Araucano, considering that the problems of land and education facing the Araucanian race are a real social problem that have a close rela33. Resoluciones del XI Congreso Araucano de Raguintuleufu, diciembre de 1931, reproduced in La derrota del rea cultural no. 1/2005, vol. 1 of Anales de Desclasificacin (Santiago de Chile: Laboratorio de Desclasificacin Comparada), 102103. Translation mine. The term Araucanian rather than Mapuche was in general use in Chile at this time, including among educated Mapuche. 34. Ibid., 102.

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tionship with the aspirations of the national proletariat, resolves: to keep a cordial and close relationship with the Federacin Obrera de Chile, in its campaign to liberate the exploited classes.35 This enthusiasm for an alliance with the Left continued after the Rnquil massacre. Although the confidential report from the intendant of Cautn province concerning the Second National Convention of the Central Socialista de Colonizacin named Aburto Panguilef as one of its leaders and described Juan Leiva Tapias impassioned speech at the same convention,36 there is no direct evidence of the participation of Aburto Panguilef or the Federacin Araucana in the Lonquimay uprising. Aburto Panguilef and the Federacin clearly expressed their solidarity with the prisoners in the Temuco jail, not only in the declarations of the Federacins congress in PlomMaquehue37 but also in the new publication being put out by the Federacins youth wing, the Federacin Juvenil Araucana. In the December 1935 publication of Juventud Araucana, written by hand, we find among diverse references to class struggle and the need for ethnic militancy two pages specifically dedicated to the Lonquimay situation. One of these is a poem by the proletarian poet Mario Beltrn about the struggle in Lonquimay and the unity among Mapuche, workers, and peasants in their efforts to regain usurped lands. However, it is the second page that stands out. Under the question, What is the International Red Aid (Socorro Rojo Internacional)? we read:
International Red Aid provides help to the men who are taken prisoner, to those who are injured, deported, or sent into internal exile (relegados) as punishment for defending their bread, land, and rights. It helps the prisoner and his family and the families of those killed by the rich huincas (non- Mapuche) in these struggles. For example: it helps our persecuted and massacred brothers in Lonquimay. International Red Aid has taken the orphans of Lonquimay to Santiago, where they are going to school. International Red Aid will send 4 of these children to Russia. When you join Red Aid, you receive moral and material aid if you fall in the struggle. Mapuche brothers, form Red Aid groups that can defend those who fall victim to the persecutions of the bourgeoisie.38

International Red Aid was founded in 1922 as a broad humanitarian aid organization associated with and funded by the Komintern whose principal purpose was consciousness raising through solidarity and providing assistance to political prisoners and their families. As an organization, it carried out some international solidarity campaigns in especially notorious cases of repression. Sometimes it participated in popular mobilizations, such as in the case of the 1932 uprising in El Salvador that
35. Ibid. 36. Ministerio del Interior, 1933, vol. 8675, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 17, 1, Archivo Siglo XX. 37. This reference was kindly provided by Thomas Klubock from his research notes on the fourteenth congress of the Federacin Araucana, Plom- Maquehue, at the end of 1934. 38. Juventud Araucana: Diario de la Federacin Juvenil Araucana, Trai Traico (Nueva Imperial), December 27, 1935, in La derrota del rea cultural/2005, 11121; especially 11718 for discussion of Lonquimay.

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ended in massacre. The organization had affiliates in a number of Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico.39 In Chile, Hernn Ramrez Necochea points out that during the dictatorship of Carlos Ibez, a large group of communist women, defying police actions and in the most rigorous clandestinity, played a major role in the collection of resources for International Red Aid and their distribution among political prisoners, those in internal exile, and their families.40 The existence of International Red Aid in Chile, and its participation in helping the prisoners from Lonquimay and their families,41 is therefore quite important. Although the organization had a connection with the communist movement, its members did not have to be affiliated with the Communist Party. International Red Aid struggles to unify members of revolutionary organizations with the unorganized, explained a pamphlet from El Salvador in 1932, without taking into account the political or social affiliation or the race of the persecuted individual. In fact, the same pamphlet emphasized that International Red Aid struggles against the racial oppression suffered by Black, Native, and Chinese workers, as well as by members of other oppressed nationalities.42 When placed in an international context, it is apparent that the June 1934 events in Lonquimay and the debates surrounding their meaning over the next several years occurred at a time of dramatic changes in the Chilean Communist Party and the international communist movement. In such a context, we can better comprehend the origins of the communist narrative about Rnquil, even as its content may not have been entirely correct from an empirical standpoint. To understand why this heroic narrative had such a long life in Chile, however, we must also understand the conflicts of the subsequent period, for this was the moment of transition from a class against class strategy to a politics of popular front. During these years, popular insurrection gave way to a search for an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. Within the Soviet Union, the popular front position emerged at the same time as
39. For the case of El Salvador, I base my arguments on Gould and Lauria- Santiago, To Rise in Darkness, and Jorge Schlesinger, Revolucin Comunista (Guatemala: Editorial Unin Tipogrfica Castaeda, Avila y Cia., 1946), especially 95115. For Brazil, see John W. F. Dulles, Brazilian Communism, 19351945: Repression during World Upheaval (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). For the rest of the cases, see Robert J. Alexander, Communism in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957). I am grateful to Jeffrey Gould for first alerting me to International Red Aid. 40. Hernn Ramrez Necochea, Origen y formacin del Partido Comunista de Chile (Ensayo de historia del Partido) (Santiago: Editora Austral, 1965), 220. 41. An additional reference to International Red Aid appears in a memorandum from the Chilean Investigative Police concerning a meeting of the teachers union in Santiago on December 13, 1934, where delegate Cleofe Arriagada, who had made it to Lonquimay after the massacre, presented a report. Among the resolutions of the meeting is the following: Bring at least fifty children, so that the Union, in coordination with International Red Aid and the FOCH, can provide them with clothes and education, Ministerio del Interior, 1934, vol. 8677, Providencias Confidenciales, no. 550, 2, Archivo Siglo XX. 42. Fines del Socorro Rojo Internacional, pamphlet reproduced by Schlesinger in Revolucin Comunista, 211.

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Stalins policy of socialism in one country, a policy that won out against a broader vision of revolution that had been debated, according to Ricardo Melgar Bao, in the Komintern in the 1920s.43 In Chile, the change of policy occurred within the PCCh beginning in 1935. As Olga Ulinova and the Komintern documents about Chile have shown, the eighteen months following the Rnquil massacre were especially conflictual, not only within the Chilean Communist Party but also in the international movement. According to Ulinova, even though the transition was fairly clear and quick at the level of the Komintern, in Chile there was a longer and deeper confrontation between the party faction supporting popular insurrection, on the one hand, and those who were calling for a policy of long- term political and trade- union organization, on the other. The conflict was so strong that a new international delegate was forced to intervene.44 For the purposes of our argument, it is important to emphasize that both factions in the internal conflict could, from a logical point of view, use the Rnquil case to support their own position. Those in favor of popular insurrection could find in the uprising the proof they needed of the revolutionary potential of the Chilean popular classes, a potential that would be wasted without an immediate call to revolution. From the opposing perspective, the easy defeat and repression of the Rnquil uprising could be attributed to the lack of a deeper process of organization, suggesting that it was necessary to continue organizing from a long- term perspective and wait for a more promising moment. Seen in this light, the heroic narrative of Rnquil as an example for the Chilean proletariat could be a weapon for either side in these internal conflicts, because the lessons of Lonquimay, as seen in the documents for 1935, were used as proof by both factions.45 There is an additional irony if we look at these debates from a postcolonial perspective. By constructing a narrative of the uprising that emphasized the unity among peasants, service tenants, workers, and Mapuches, the Chilean Communist Party was complicit with the landowners, the police, and the national government. Of course, while the landowners and the state constructed this unity as a justification for the repression of groups that were supposedly barbaric, the Left used the same narrative of unity, blood, and violence to elaborate a romantic vision of an alternative national community that, through heroic sacrifice, would finally be able to bring to power a socialist government. In both cases, and in a contradictory manner, these linear narratives of national progress promoted a false image of unity among all the oppressed that marked the desire for but also the fear of revolution in Chile until 1973. In fact, in the context of social mobilization and the electoral victory of the Popular Unity coalition in 1970, a new narrative of popular heroism emerged that
43. Ricardo Melgar Bao, La recepcin del orientalismo antiimperialista en Amrica Latina, 19241929, Cuadernos Americanos 109 (JanuaryFebruary 2005): 1141. 44. Yopo, Las relaciones internacionales del Partido Comunista, in Varas, El Partido Comunista en Chile, 378, and Ulinova, Levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay, 21112. 45. These documents, which concern Chile, are in the Komintern archive and are reproduced in Ulinova, Levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay, 21322.

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could also be reorganized and appropriated by a government interested in representing itself as both the result and the facilitator of mass struggle. This was clearly the message of President Salvador Allendes May Day speech in 1972, when he associated the struggle and suffering of the Chilean people with his coalitions victory at the polls:
The historical process of the peoples struggle ... was marked with the sacrifice of thousands of Chileans in Ranquil [sic], in San Gregorio, in the Escuela de Santa Mara, in the Magallanes Workers Federation, in Puente Alto, in Jos Mara Caro. In other words, it has been this peoples struggle that has made possible the unity and within this a unified concept: to make possible the instrument necessary for the conquest of the Government and to advance to the conquest of power.46

Two of the examples provided by Allende in his speech had already been popularized in the literary and cultural production that emphasized the heroic importance of massacres: Rnquil and the massacre of nitrate workers at the Santa Mara school in Iquique. The second had been immortalized in the Cantata de Santa Mara de Iquique, composed in 1969 by the musician Luis Advis and premiered in 1970 by the musical group Quilapayn.47 The Rnquil case would also be the subject of several works during the Popular Unity years, including a historical essay, an in- depth journalistic report, and a play. Although they present the case from diverse perspectives, all of them share one important element: in a time of revolutionary mobilizations based on social class, they do not mention the question of Mapuche autonomy that was so important in earlier narratives. In 1972, the Chilean magazine Ramona, associated with the Communist Party, which formed part of the government coalition, published a special report on the uprising and massacre entitled Rnquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza (Rnquil, between Blood and Hope). Based on interviews with three survivors of the massacre, Ismael Carter and Emelina and Clementina Sagredo, the essay did not mention Pewenche participation, calling it a massacre of peasants. The survivors told a story of hardship and poverty, of not having enough land or enough to eat. A voice from the other side of the grave, belonging to one of the deceased victims, Rocart Hermosilla, was said to have remembered Juan Leiva Tapia as educated and part of a rich family with many sheep, but a communist. The testimonies also empha46. Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation- State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), translation, 13536, 311, n. 61; and my translation of additional phrases from the original Spanish version in La Nacin (Frazier, Salt in the Sand, 311, n. 61). 47. The Santa Mara de Iquique massacre is analyzed in Manuel A. Fernndez, Proletariado y salitre en Chile, 18101910, Monografas de Nueva Historia, no. 2 (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1988), especially 6465, where the author provides a carefully reasoned revision of existing estimates of the number of dead, and in Frazier, Salt in the Sand, especially 11757, where she addresses the ways in which the memory of this massacre has been structured. She includes an analysis of how the cantata commemorating the massacre was composed and also traces its popularity in the form sang by the radical folk group Quilapayn during the Popular Unity government.

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sized the abuses committed by the military police, the amazing stories of survival amid blood and gore, and ultimately the article concluded that peoples suffering, the memories of the survivors, and the next generation would all now be vindicated by agrarian reform.48 In many ways, it was a tragic story; as the introduction to the article explained, Today the Agrarian Reform arrives at this place, when the mountain winds have long since blown away the sound of the bullets and the dead will not see the land distributed, the land for which they fought.49 Emelina Sagredo blamed Gonzalo Bunster, the son of Jos Bunster, for having such envy and a hunger for land that he could not simply sit by and let the smallholders and colonists prosper. He was the guilty one, she said, He owned the whole region. He couldnt stand by and leave those little pieces of new land in our hands. It was landowner greed, supported by President Arturo Alessandri, whom Sagredo calls the Butcher of the Moneda (Presidential Palace), that led to the death of more than one hundred rebels.50 At its core, this version of the Rnquil events is a story of reconciliation between classes through the good offices of a democratic socialist government. After the gruesome details of survivalin Carters case, with five bullets in his body yet able to hold onto his horse until he got home; in Sagredos case, escaping through the snow to Argentina, pregnant, and nearly dying of hunger and exposure51the new era of the Popular Unity coalition brings redemption. A play about the Sagredo family, with the title of The Ones Left along the Way (Los que van quedando en el Camino), is being performed in Santiago and Emelina Sagredo is its star character. The role of Sagredo is being played by the actress Carmen Bunster, the granddaughter of Gonzalo Bunster, the landowner responsible for the massacre. Meanwhile, concludes the piece, the Agrarian Reform Corporation is getting ready to expropriate the fundos Huallal, El Barco, and Los Guindos. Thirty- four years after the massacre, justice is beginning to arrive in Rnquil.52 These two versions of Rnquil, the journalistic and the theatrical, share a triumphalist theme of victory and redemptionof the vindication of popular demands by a sympathetic government that finally had listened to its citizensthat fits well with the Popular Unity project. A historical essay published by leftist writer and musician Patricio Manns in his book Las grandes masacres (1972) takes a much different approach. Manns wrote that Rnquil was an attempt at popular autonomy, a precursor of the guerrilla movements and revolutions of the 1960s. He also put Rnquil in a triumphalist narrative about the Chilean popular movement:
48. Rnquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza, Crnica Especial de Lucho Abarca, Ramona, no. 23 (1972), 2428. I am grateful to Fernanda Villarroel for providing me with a photocopy of this article. 49. Ibid., 24. 50. Ibid., 26. 51. Ibid. See also Carter and Sagredos stories of survival, 28. 52. Ibid.

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The events in the Alto Bo- Bo, Ranquil [sic] and Lonquimay ... mark the awakening of the peasantry, and of their real incorporation into the active struggle. From that moment on [the peasantry] battles as equals and side by side with other proletarian sectors. Today, the battle for our final liberation, for the recovery of the land that was lost through blood, fire, and law, has incorporated the Mapuche element that can give us real lessons about organization and dedication in all corners of the peasantry.... Thus history teaches us that for each murder, for each expropriation, for each offense, ten men are awakened every day. And they awake with clenched fists, ready to fight.53

It is important to point out as well that Patricio Manns, though first and foremost a musician and artist, an innovator in the famous new song movement in Chile and one of the founders of the Pea de los Parra in Santiago, was also associated politically with the left wing of the Popular Unity government. When in exile in 1974, he formed the musical group Karaxu, two of whose albums, Chile: Cantos para la resistencia (New York, 1975) and Karaxu Live (recorded in the German Democratic Republic in 1975), featured the logo of the more radical Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). In contrast with the article in Ramona, which envisions popular victory through a connection with the government, in his 1972 piece on Lonquimay Manns presents a vision of popular agrarian mobilization and the incorporation of the Mapuche into a radical class struggle that corresponds quite closely to the perspective on the countryside developed by the MIR.54 With the 1973 military coup and the subsequent Pinochet dictatorship, the Lefts triumphalist class narrative was badly battered. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 1980s, both in Chile and internationally, an identity- based indigenous movement strongly criticized the Left for its lack of attention to the specific demands of colonized peoples. In the 1990s, Mapuche leaders reclaimed the figure of Manuel Aburto Panguilef as the first visionary to have proclaimed the necessity of an autonomous movement, though they strategically overlooked his years of coalition with the Left. In such a context, Rnquil lost its emblematic role as a symbol of class unity. In 1993, historian Jaime Flores minimized Mapuche- Pewenche participation, suggesting that from the perspective of the Mapuche, both landowners and Chilean colonists had occupied their lands; therefore, their struggle was against the huinca, that is, against the foreigner whatever the origin or social condition.55 Ironically, the indigenous theme in the massacre also got a new life in the 1980s as a contradictory symbol within new left- wing and right- wing narratives about the significance of the military dictatorship. In the first half of the decade, when resis53. Manns, Las grandes masacres, 58. 54. For more on this element, see Florencia E. Mallon, Land, Morality, and Exploitation in Southern Chile: Rural Conflict and Discourses of Agrarian Reform in Cautn, 19281974, Political Power and Social Theory 14 (2001): 14193, and Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicols Ailio and the Chilean State, 19062001 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), especially chapters 1, 4, and 5. 55. Flores Chvez, Un episodio en la historia social de Chile, 131.

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tance to the dictatorship was beginning to pick up, two books were published representing completely opposite points of view: Actas del Bo- Bo, by exiled musician and writer Patricio Manns, who had also written the earlier Grandes masacres, and La verdad sobre la revuelta de Rnquil, by the eyewitness Harry Fahrenkrog Reinhold, who at the time of the events was a very young Canadian colonist.56 In both cases, the indigenous presence served as background for and point of origin of the narrative. In Actas del Bo- Bo, the narrator travels to the mountain region, to the house of an ancient Mapuche cacique by the name of Angol Mamalcahuello, to hear the truth about the events of 1934 and about the figure of Jos [sic] Segundo Leiva Tapia. In La verdad sobre la revuelta, Fahrenkrog begins his narrative with the happy and innocent solidarity of the Andean population, an innocence and solidarity broken by the usurpations and politicization of the new twentieth century. Let us analyze each text in a bit more detail. Harry Fahrenkrogs memoirs were written at the beginning of the 1960s, before the agrarian reform arrived to disturb Chiles landowner- dominated balance of power but were not published until 1985 by his son, after the authors death. In this sense, they contain an interesting double perspective. On one side, when the author wrote, he was a successful landowner, having bought several landed properties in the very region of the massacre. On the other side, at the moment of publication, the text presented an object lesson concerning what could happen again if the political conflict supposedly extirpated by the dictatorship were to return. La verdad sobre la revuelta, therefore, not only looks back nostalgically on a time of lost innocence but also sounds the alarm about international communism. For Chile, they are times that will not return, writes Fahrenkrog.
The land has been divided up, the population has been politicized, and today the thirst for money and power dominates; the hatred of those left behind for those who have gotten ahead, revenge, and violence, contrast dramatically with the feelings that used to predominate in those days, when in those isolated Andean valleys everyone, including those who felt defeated, still maintained a spirit of getting ahead and of healthy competition, combined with admiration for those who stood out.57

This remembered utopia was broken with the arrival of Juan Leiva Tapia, tool of the Communist Party and thus responsible for all the problems that ensued:
In this way we will demonstrate the radical change that was produced with the arrival in the valley of Juan Leiva Tapia, who destroyed all the moral values of the past, sowing class hatred and political ideas in the minds of the inhabitants who, until that point had lived as children, with the virtues and defects of all human beings,
56. Actas means recorded minutes or recorded act or certificate. The best translation of Mannss title would probably be Recorded Eyewitness Testimony from the Bo Bo region. Fahrenkrogs title is much easier to translate, simply The Truth about the Rnquil Uprising. 57. Fahrenkrog, La verdad sobre la revuelta, 2526.

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but who, given the dominant environment, worked hard to improve themselves, emphasizing their merits and minimizing their shortcomings.58

How were these utopian values of the past destroyed? Through an international communist conspiracy, with Leiva Tapia as its local representative. In addition to circulating false information to members of the Lonquimay agricultural union, according to Fahrenkrog, to make sure they were discontented, Leiva supposedly attended the meetings of the Communist Party in Montevideo where June 24, 1934 was declared the date for an international Communist uprising, valid for all of South America. At the last minute, the author explains, the coordinated uprisings failed, but Leiva Tapia, who had come to personally lead the uprising in Lonquimay, did not receive in a timely manner the message to suspend the uprising until further notice, and for this reason, loyal to the international program, sent his men to take over the Lonquimay Valley, from where they would continue to Lautaro and Victoria, finally to meet up with the other rebel groups and conquer Chile for the Communist cause.59 The contrast between Fahrenkrogwho narrates the lost innocence of the poor at the hands of international communismand Manns, who attempts to excavate popular heroism and associate it with the history of the Mapuche people, cannot be greater. Published when its author was in exile, at a time of renewed hope with the increasing protests against the dictatorship, Actas del Bo- Bo aims to reawaken the memory of popular resistance.60 The story opens slowly toward the uprising and massacre of 1934, as the narrator is taken into the confidence of Mapuche cacique Angol Mamalcahuello and his wife Anima Luz Boroa. Jos Segundo, the name they give Leiva Tapia, had lived in the house of the couple, and they ultimately witnessed his death. They were also witness to the abuses of the military police or carabineros, abuses that included the rape of Anima Luz Boroa by the wounded officer she herself had nursed back to health.61 What most stands out in this narrative, however, is the connection between the historical resistance of the Mapuche people and the Rnquil massacre. When Angol Mamalcahuello was arrested by the military police, his wife defended him, saying, He has done all this because he is the cacique.... He could not overlook his
58. Ibid., 26. 59. Ibid., 49, 5051. 60. Between 1981 and 1983, precisely when Actas del Alto Bo- Bo was written and published, MIR attempted to reenter the country by crossing the Andes clandestinely at Neltume, in the province of Valdivia, quite a bit south of Lonquimay. In December 1983, moreover, the Communist Party announced the creation of its own armed movement, the Manuel Rodrguez Patriotic Front, and generalized street protests began against the dictatorship. For all of these events, see Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochets Chile, 19731988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 61. Patricio Manns, Actas del Alto Bo- Bo (Madrid: Ediciones Michay, S.A., 1985), especially 12934, Anima Luz Boroas story of her rape.

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obligations at a time of war.62 The most dramatic example of this connection occurs in a conversation between Mamalcahuello and the narrator in which the former ends up telling the story of Lautaro and connecting it to the figure of Leiva Tapia. The narrator reacts in the following way:
Descending toward the riverbed, Angol Mamalcuahuello [sic] for an instant forgets Jos Segundo Leiva Tapia. Or is he telling me the same story, repeated under the cover of other names, under the secret sign of a dusty palimpsest from another time? This is the most probable explanation. His latent obsession does not permit him to take much distance from Jos- Lautaro. ... Rodolfo Lenz, the German philologist, already at the beginning of the twentieth century spoke of Araucanian memory, of their exceptional narrative capacity and, above all, of their ability to recreate events that were very distant in time that, in Indian recounting, seemed to have happened the day before. And what is even more surprising: these deeds, centuries old, undergo very few modifications in their difficult journey from generation to generation.63

In identifying Leiva Tapia with the figure of the legendary Mapuche hero Lautaro, also narrated in Alonso de Ercillas epic poem La Araucana, and placing the identification in the mouth of the wise cacique Mamalcahuello, Manns is creating his own palimpsest in which the heroic national resistance of the Mapuche people against the Spanish is identified with the struggle of leftist heroes such as Leiva. The idea is to create a long chain of heroic resistance to oppressionpreserved and reproduced through Mapuche memorythat will ultimately culminate in justice for the Chilean people as a whole. In this context, it is interesting to note the differences between Mannss short 1972 essay on Rnquil and this longer 1984 text. If in 1972 Rnquil, as liberated territory, was a precursor to the guerrillas of the AmericasAt that point Che was only seven years old,64 writes Mannswhen the Actas are published, the ancestral struggle and memory of the Mapuche people have become the precursors of the Alto Bo- Bo conflict. It is tempting to suggest that between 1972 and the mid- 1980s, the emergence of a Mapuche movement vindicating the presence of the Mapuche people in Chilean politics and in the resistance to the dictatorship had influenced Manns. In such a context, perhaps he was attracted to the association of popular struggle, newly ascendant in this second period, to a long memory and tradition of indigenous resistance. The problem with such an interpretation becomes clear in the concluding scene of the text, when Angol Mamalcahuello and Anima Luz Boroa, sitting together by the side of the river, begin to see the bodies of the massacres victims pass by as they float down the river. We counted them the same way our young warriors count sheep when they cant sleep, says Mamalcahuello. He continues: Later the day began to disap62. Ibid., 142. 63. Ibid., 1034. 64. Manns, Las grandes masacres, 54 and 55.

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pear downhill, the sunset bloomed first and then the night, and we could see nothing, we no longer could count, and then we held hands, leaned up against the tree, and we fell asleep. Asleep until today, sir.65 This image of perpetual sleep contradicts the notion of an awakening Mapuche resistance. Another possible hypothesis is that when Manns wrote this text in the early 1980s, he had not yet completely understood the importance of the Mapuche movement. The problem with this theory is that when he published a modified version of the same text under the title of Memorial de la Noche in Chile in 1998,66 the concluding section reads as follows:
We counted our dead warriors like children count sheep when they cannot sleep, because they dont like the night, because the day is full of miracles, because the prodigal events occur during the day. ... Then the remains of the day began to fall, the sunset bloomed like a bright orange poppy, and then the night, like a black poppy, and we could see nothing, we could not go on counting. So we held hands over the water to help them down the river, so that one day they would know the ocean. Then we leaned against the tree once more, closed our dried out eyes, and we slowly fellasleep. Asleep until today, sir.67

The first thing we notice is the slight differences between the two texts. In the first, the dead are not identified as Mapuche but are instead generic victims, whereas in the second, the dead are Mapuche warriors. Another difference in the second text is that the goal of holding hands is solidarity with the dead, to help them down the river to the sea, which is also not the case in the first version. Given these differences, the impact of the same last line is even more dramatic: the Mapuche are asleep until today. For Manns, as a writer of the Left, the political connection between the Left and the indigenous movement remains the most important message until the present day, because neither can prosper without the other. A very different perspective on the Rnquil events emerges from the writings of Mapuche intellectuals. In July 2004, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Rnquil uprising, a large headline appeared on the first page of the Mapuche newspaper AzkintuWe: Up in the Cordillera (Arriba en la Cordillera), an unmistakable reference to a hit song by Patricio Manns of the same title that was released in 1965. The introduction to the special report read: Seventy years after the Rnquil massacre, Pewenche communities in Lonquimay continue to face off against landowners and the government in their struggle for the land.68 Turning to the continuation of the story inside the issue, we find an article about the situation of several Pewenche com65. Manns, Actas del Alto Bo- Bo, 14950. 66. Translated as Memorial of the Night or Memorial to the Night. 67. Patricio Manns, Memorial de la Noche (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998), 164. 68. Peridico Mapuche AzkintuWE 1, no. 8 (2004): 1.

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munities located near the town of Lonquimay that, in an effort to recover lands they considered theirs, confronted landowners and police. The article concluded with a quotation from the werken (spokesman) Nibaldo Romero Caumir, representing the Pewenche organization: In the Lonquimay region the situation has become unsustainable. They have us cornered like rabbits, they have us all in the hills, pushing us further up all the time. Thats why we are going to continue struggling, we will not lower our arms, because we know whose land it is that we stand on: this land belongs to our people, it is Mapuche land.69 On the next page of the same issue, the same reporter, Renato Reyes Matus, has an additional article on the Rnquil uprising and what he calls seventy years of forgetting. If we analyze this article in relationship to the rest of the issues content, several elements stand out. One of these is the emphasis placed on the historical continuity of state repression and the dispossession of Mapuche lands. Reyess description of the situation at the beginning of the twentieth centurythey were cornered ever higher up into the mountainspowerfully echoes the words of the werken Romero. Equally interesting, however, is Reyess introduction to his article, where he writes that the Rnquil uprising was perhaps the one and only time that Mapuche- Pewenche and poor Chilean peasants were unified in a single movement.70 This contrasts dramatically with leftist versions that have seen the unity between poor peasants and Pewenche people in the Rnquil uprising as the beginning of the organized popular movement in the countryside. Instead, Reyes presents this moment as the only one in which such unity was achieved, leaving aside the entire rural social movement during the agrarian reform of Salvador Allendes Popular Unity government. Another important element in Reyess article, which also echoes other writings on the same events, has to do with the charges of torture against the participants. Ignacio Maripe, writes Reyes, lonko or leader of the community of Maripe, supported the rebels. As a result, when he was arrested he was savagely tortured while still alive, his eyes gouged out, his tongue cut off along with his ears, until he died. More than five hundred participants, Reyes continues, were killed; the women left in the improvised camps were raped and eradicated forever, along with their children, from the region, and many of those arrested never made it to Temuco.71 The rape of women is also part of Mannss narrative in Actas del Alto BoBo. The torture and physical mutilation is a more general theme as well. In the 1972 Ramona article, Clementina Sagredo, Emelinas sister, says that their brother Jos Rosario also had his ears, nose, and testicles cut off.72 In Fahrenkrogs text, the admin69. Ibid., 56; direct quotation on p. 6. 70. Ibid., 7. 71. Ibid. In his report about the escape of prisonersone understands that, in fact they have been shot while escapingLieutenant Colonel Fernando Delano Soluco mentions Ignacio Maripe, who supposedly escaped on July 5, 1934: Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencia Confidencial, no. 25758, Parte no. 1492. 72. Rnquil, entre la sangre y la esperanza, 28.

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istrator of the fundo Guayal, taken prisoner by the rebels, suffers this fate: they took out his eyes, cut off his nose and tongue, and finally castrated him before killing him.73 In a powerful mirror image of Reyess account, a police document recounts that it is the same cacique Ignacio Maripe who mutilated the dead body of Luciano Gainza, who had been renting the fundo Contraco.74 Though there is no further empirical confirmation of these forms of torture by either side, and we cannot equate the forms of violence committed by the rebels with those committed by the repressive forces, the repetition of the same images speaks to the horror the events caused to both groups. Especially because of the generalization of these accusations, it is particularly important to reflect on the role such images of abuse have played in all the existing narratives about these events.
Conclusions: Images of Torture, Abuse, and Innocent Victims in Chilean National Narratives

As we have seen, the Rnquil uprising and massacre has served as a touchstone for many stories about what the Chilean nation has or should have been. For the Left, it has served as a symbol of the Chilean peoples revolutionary spirit, beginning as an emblem of the revolutionary soviet and the indigenous republic during the Kominterns third period and later serving as a precursor to the peasant movement during the years of agrarian reform and the Popular Unity government. For the Right, it became a symbol of state consolidation and the loss of popular innocence caused by international communism.75 More recently, for Mapuche intellectuals and activists, Rnquil has served as a metaphor for the enduring usurpation and resistance of the Pewenche people. In recent years, and as part of a new academic interest in the topic, the Web page of the leftist Centro de Estudios Miguel Enrquez- Archivo Chile has brought together different analyses of Rnquil from historical and social- movement perspectives.76 Despite their many differences, I suggest that, with the exception of the rightwing perspective, all these narratives share a very important characteristic: in the same story of resistance by and abuse of the poorMapuche and non- Mapuche peasants, in different combinationsthey seek an origins myth, or the mise- en- scne, of a desired national unity. As symbol of a profound political desire, whether from the
73. Fahrenkrog, La verdad, 53. 74. Prefecto de Carabineros de Cautn al Ministro en visita, dando cuenta de los eventos de Lonquimay, no. 25758, parte no. 1490 (July 15, 1934), Temuco, 6, Ministerio del Interior, vol. 8676, Providencias Confidenciales, Archivo Siglo XX, Santiago. 75. In addition to Fahrenkrogs memoir, see Gonzalo Vial Correa, De la Repblica Socialista al Frente Popular (19311938), vol. 5 of Historia de Chile (18911973) (Santiago: Empresa Editora Zig- Zag, S.A., 2001), 36875. 76. The Web site can be accessed at archivochile.com. Miguel Enrquez was the legendary founder and leader of MIR, the most radical of the leftist organizations in Chile during the Popular Unity government, and died in battle against the Chilean military police during a raid on his safe house after the September 1973 coup.

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Left or from the Mapuche movement, for an alternative national community, Rnquil still has great political purchase. In this sense, the Rnquil massacre takes its place in Chilean history alongside the other massacres of the twentieth century. As already suggested, the presence of these in history, especially Rnquil and the Santa Mara de Iquique school, became especially important during the Popular Unity years as part of a national narrative articulated by the Left. The two cases share many elements: the poor rising up against injustice; the violent reaction of the powerful and the resulting abuse of the innocent, including women and children; the attempted government cover- up; and finally, the many different estimates and debates concerning the number of deaths. In addition, both cases inspired artistic works that narrated heroism and tragedy from a popular perspective, helping to tell a story of popular sacrifice in the formulation of a unitary leftist national project that finally would take state power. If the role of massacre as emblem in twentieth- century Chilean history is indeed powerful, we may also wish to reflect on how the remembrance of victims, and debates over the meaning of incidents and patterns of collective victimization more generally, have been potent ingredients in many narratives of political and cultural identity and of national belonging across the world. It is beyond the confines of this essay to delve deeply into this complicated and painful history, but suffice it to say that the debates and conflicts are often as much about the meaning attached to the events as they are about the empirical facts of the events. As the work of Alessandro Portelli has shown, misremembering and debates over memory are often productive entry points or clues into the deeper conflicts and anxieties attached to historical memory in a particular society.77 This is clearly so in the case of the Rnquil massacre. The location of Rnquil along the frontier, in the region historically belonging to the Mapuche- Pewenche people, gives it a unique quality that makes it stand out in the twentieth century and into the contemporary period. Even though the character and degree of MapuchePewenche participation has been increasingly debated, along with the nature of Com munist Party participation, Rnquil continues to occupy a privileged place in the Chilean imaginary. It is here where the dreams of unity among all the poor and marginalized can be realized, beyond the abusive presence of an expansionary state, beyond the barriers created by the Pacification of the Mapuche people. Every time the poor rise upbe they peasants demanding land during the agrarian reform or more recently Pewenche communities demanding the restitution of their ancestral territoryonce again, up in the cordillera, we witness a recreation of that powerful drama that unfolded one snowy June nearly eighty years ago.

77.Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).