by Osvaldo Bayer
Translated by Paul Sharkey and Joshua Neuhouser
AK Press
2016, paperback
SKU: 9781849352215
At the very end of Rebellion in Patagonia, Osvaldo Bayer writes: Time always tears down the curtain that tries to hide the truth. A crime can never be covered up forever.
He demonstrates that principle in this moving and nuanced study of strikes led by the powerful anarcho-syndicalist labor union FORA against the despotic landowners and industrialists of Argentina's Patagonia region in 1921-1922. The tale ends tragically, with thousands slaughtered, but Bayer's detailed descriptions and first-person testimonies capture the beauty and heroism of the struggle. Banned and publicly burned in the 1970s, this is the book's first English translation with a new introduction by Scott Nicholas Nappalos and Joshua Neuhouser.
Reviews:
"The recovery of a historic struggle of the importance of Rebellion in Patagonia by Osvaldo Bayer is a decisive contribution to the social struggles of today. It offers not just a reconstruction of the past, but an example of what we, ordinary people, can do, and what we will continue to do, for our collective dignity." - Raul Zibechi, author of Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements
"Genocide against the militant left in Argentina did not begin in 1975 with Isabel Peron or the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Disappeared people and hidden bodies were the norm even fifty years earlier, when the Argentine army's murder of 1,500 agricultural workers was ordered by democratically elected, pseudo-progressive President Yrigoyen. The scandal was silenced until Osvaldo Bayer, journalist and historian, wrote this courageous investigative work (which also led to a 1974 whistleblowing film) in the middle of another of Argentina's most repressive eras." - Frank Mintz, translator of the French edition, La Patagonie rebelle 1921-1922: Chronique d une revolte des ouvriers agricoles en Argentine
About the Author:
Osvaldo Bayer is an author, journalist, and scriptwriter who was exiled from Argentina during the years of military dictatorship. His works include The Anarchist Expropriators and Anarchism & Violence. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.