The Industrial Workers of the World (Chile) (IWW-C), also known as the Chilean IWW or Chilean Wobblies, was a Chilean trade union center. Established in the late 1910s by dockworkers in Valparaíso, the tenets of industrial unionism were quickly adopted by maritime workers throughout the country. The IWW organised strike actions to demand of the eight-hour day and the implementation of workplace safety standards. Before long, its membership spread to industrial workers in Santiago, gaining particular strength among construction workers.
The Chilean government was alarmed by the rise of the IWW, which it believed to be a front for foreign agitators and violent terrorists, despite the organization being led by Chilean nationals and being staunchly nonviolent. In July 1920, the state launched a massive crackdown against the organisation, arresting hundreds of people on charges of sedition, without any substantial evidence. The arrested workers were crammed into overcrowded prisons, where disease spread quickly and abuse was rife. The death of the poet José Domingo Gómez Rojas in prison caused a public outcry, which by December 1920, led to the release of every arrested worker without charge.
The union quickly returned to organizing, affiliating itself with the International Workers' Association (IWA) and forming links with maritime workers throughout South America. By the late 1920s, the IWW was eclipsed by left-wing political parties, which had gained dominance within trade unions in the country. In 1927, the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo dissolved the IWW and deported its leadership. After the fall of the Ibáñez dictatorship, Chilean anarcho-syndicalists reorganised into the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), which abandoned the old model of industrial unionism in favor of a federalist organisation.
Background Since the establishment of Chile as an independent nation state in the early 19th century, the country has maintained over 4,000 kilometers of coastline. Of its 59 ports, by 1848, the port city of Valparaíso became its most important, as the center of vast amounts of imports and exports, linking it with port cities in Europe, Asia and North America. During the late 19th century, Valparaíso also became a center for the circulation of radical new ideas, with the city's dockworkers and sailors being attracted towards anarcho-syndicalism.
From the beginning of the organized labor movement in Chile, anarchism found the most widespread acceptance among workers. During the 1870s, anarchists established a branch of the International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) in Chile, where it distributed propaganda within existing benefit societies and left-wing publications. Anarchist principles of direct action, autonomy and federalism were soon taken up by the Chilean labor movement. The main divergence in the anarcho-syndicalist movement was over whether to accept the programme of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a North American labor union which some Latin American anarchists criticised for centralisation. In Chile, local anarcho-syndicalists patterned their own organizations after the model of the IWW.
By the turn of the 20th century, the anarchist movement had gained a substantial following in Chile, as anarcho-syndicalists organised a number of trade unions and led a series of strike actions in the country. Anarchist trade unions were established in Santiago and Valparaíso, where they organised bakers, carpenters, dockworkers, printers and shoemakers; they also organised coalminers in the northern regions and in Biobío. Anarchists participated in the and the 1905 Santiago meat riots, which they believed to have failed due to the lack of a general strike to support it.
In 1906, anarchist trade unions unified into the Workers' Federation of Chile (; FTCH), which became the main force in the country's labor movement. The following year, during an anarchist-led strike of 30,000 nitrate workers, the Chilean Army killed 4,000 people in the repression of the strike. In response, the anarchist Antonio Ramón attempted to assassinate Roberto Silva Renard, the military commander responsible for the massacre. The FTCH was subsequently reorganised into the (; FOCH), which gained a substantial influence in the Chilean labor movement, although it failed to grow into a truly nationwide organization. Anarchists grew increasingly critical of the FOCh after it came under the control of the Communist Party of Chile (CPC) and affiliated with the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), which they argued to have caused division within the labor movement.
Establishment During the 1910s, dockworkers and sailors based in the port of Valparaíso began forming their own trade unions and organising strike actions, demanding the eight-hour day, a limit on overtime and a reduction in the cargo weight limit from 105 to 92 kilograms. During this period, dockworkers and sailors also made contact with other maritime workers from across the Pacific, with contacts extending as far north as San Francisco. As Chilean maritime workers increasingly gravitated towards anarcho-syndicalism, in 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) established itself in the port of Valparaíso. The IWW soon organised a series of strike actions against the rising cost of living and food shortages in Chile. Following mobilizations by the National Food Workers' Assembly (AOAN) in 1918, stevedores affiliated with the IWW refused to load foodstuffs onto ships for export. Following the negotiated end to the strike in September 1919, the AOAN lost a substantial number of its more militant members, many of whom joined the IWW.
Over the following year, the IWW gained a significant influence among Chilean dockworkers and sailors. Its industrial union of Maritime Transport Workers (MTW) came to dominate the port of Valparaíso, and was also particularly strong in the ports of Iquique and Antofagasta. Although its largest base was among maritime workers in port cities, the IWW also established industrial unions in the capital of Santiago; they organised construction workers, shoemakers, bakers, printers, munition workers, and workers of various other trades. The Santiago construction workers' union became the second largest industrial union in Chile, after the Valparaíso maritime workers' union. Although some unions were skeptical of the IWW's more centralised organisational structure and preferred to maintain their autonomy, they still considered the IWW to be a "natural ally". The IWW received a considerable amount of support from schoolteachers' and students' unions.
By 1919, itinerant workers had expanded the reach of the IWW throughout Chile. A Chilean branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-C) was established, becoming the first national trade union center in Chile. At the first congress of the IWW-C, held in December 1919, it adopted syndicalist tactics including strike actions, boycotts and sabotage. The IWW-C proclaimed itself to be a revolutionary organization, which would oppose capitalism, the state and the clergy. The IWW's primary aim was the abolition of wage labor, which it aimed to accomplish through "revolutionary syndicalism in the street, the workshop, and the family". It intended to establish "One Big Union", which would include all Chilean workers, and which would aim to establish workers' control of the means of production. It had no paid official positions, except for that of the secretary general, who called meetings of the executive committee.
Founded with 200 members, it soon grew to count 9,000 members; by 1920, it counted 25,000 members. In 1921, Chilean anarcho-syndicalists left the FOCH and merged into the IWW-C. Despite the ideological and organisational overlap, many members of the IWW-C were not anarchists and many Chilean anarchists were not members of the IWW-C. Although influenced by anarcho-syndicalism, the IWW-C never claimed to be an anarchist organization, arguing instead that industrial unionism constituted an update of syndicalism that avoided both the disorganization of anarchism and the bureaucracy of authoritarian socialism.
Reaction to growing influence In the years following the establishment of the IWW-C, a number of unions and federations were established in various industries throughout Chile, while existing unions saw a substantial growth in membership. The Chilean government first became aware of the IWW-C in 1919, after it held a political demonstration in Santiago. By this time, the Australian government had ordered the deportation of numerous IWW members, of various different nationalities, to Valparaíso. One of the deportees was the Australian IWW leader Tom Barker. This caused a diplomatic incident with the Chilean government, which passed a Residency Law that prohibited "undesirable elements" from enetering the country. For years afterwards, the Chilean government continued to suspect that other states were intentionally deporting radicals to their country. Officials of the United States consulate in Valparaíso disagreed over the role that foreign workers played in the rise of the IWW-C: according to some, "foreign agitators" of the IWW gained a strong influence over Chilean coal miners, nitrate workers and dockworkers; others thought that Chilean officials concerned with the IWW had "deceive[d] themselves into believing that the trouble [was] imported from abroad by foreigners". Despite preoccupations with the presence of "foreign agitators" in the IWW, the union was largely led by Chilean nationals.
The antimilitarism of the IWW had alarmed the government of Juan Luis Sanfuentes, which increasingly received police reports of the IWW violently denouncing the Chilean Armed Forces, encouraging draft evasion and campaigning for the abolition of conscription. As a sustained wave of successful strike actions, union organising and antimilitarist agitation strengthened the power of the labor movement, the IWW became a target for political repression and its members were denounced by officials as "bomb-throwers and nihilists". Despite this portrayal of their members as violent terrorists, the IWW and other anarcho-syndicalist organisations opposed the use of violence and repeatedly rejected the association of direct action with violence.
When the conservative senator Carlos Aldunate Solar acquired a copy of Paul Brissenden's study of the IWW, he fixated on the US government's charges of subversion and treason against the IWW, as well as its attempts to deport "foreign agitators" among the IWW leadership. In the Senate of Chile, Brissenden's book (itself a defense of the IWW) was presented as evidence in a proposal for the political repression of the IWW-C. In April 1920, the Chilean government began to investigate the influence of the IWW in the Chilean labor movement, and by the winter of that year, it moved to proscribe it as a subversive organisation.
Process of the subversives