By IANS
Santiago : One hundred years after the massacre of over 3,000 mainly Peruvian and Bolivian nitrate miners in the deserts of northern Chile, experts are seeking their remains in an act of reparation and recovery of historical memory.
Although precise figures do not exist, popular accounts speak of 3,600 people killed at the hands of soldiers sent by the 1906-10 government of Chilean President Pedro Montt to suppress a strike, the Spanish news agency EFE said.
“Any genocide is terrible and we don’t remain at the margins of that. It really shocks me how the state functioned,” said archaeologist Francisco Tellez, who is in charge of a team of eight experts.
The team has been sent to undertake the arduous task of recovering the skeletal and mummified remains and identifying them.
According to oral accounts, the murdered workers were originally thrown into a common grave near the scene of the slaughter but later exhumed and transferred to a grave close to the coroner’s office in the city of Iquique, 1,857 km north of Santiago.
The “Santa Maria School Massacre” of Dec 21, 1907, became the landmark event in the history of Chilean unionism, marked by massacres that are scarcely noted in the official history of the time.
“Memory is so short and this happened 100 years ago. There’s a lot of myth about what happened here. The accounts say that they were killed by submachine guns… and that they were thrown naked into a common grave in the cemetery,” said the archaeologist.
So far, 1,282 sets of remains have been exhumed, from newborns to quite elderly people, along with shoes, clothing, religious medals, a mirror and other commonly used objects, as well as pages from newspapers of the day and personal documents, Tellez said.
“We have skeletons, mummified, dehydrated corpses and bodies that are completely fragmented,” said Pedro Iriondo, an official with the medical examiner’s office.
“We have not done a report yet, and it would be irresponsible, for now, to say that they are or aren’t victims of the Santa Maria School massacre,” he said.
“We’ve done 75 percent of the work and we still have a quarter left to go, and perhaps in that remaining 25 percent we’ll find the evidence we’re seeking,” he added.
Iriondo said that although the forensic team had found sets of remains with gunshot wounds to the head, they still cannot say that the bodies in the grave are those of the workers who extracted sodium nitrate – used to make gunpowder – from deposits in the desert.
The 1907 strike paralysed most of the 102 sodium nitrate deposits then being exploited in the northern Chilean desert, where the workers worked in subhuman conditions.
The workers did not receive money as pay for their labour but rather chits that they could only exchange for food and other articles in the company store.
Tired of the exploitation and after striking for several days, on Dec 10 the workers marched with their families to Iquique, where the authorities set up the Santa Maria School as a shelter for them.
On Dec 21, however, troops surrounded the school and opened fire on the workers, 60 percent of whom were Peruvians and Bolivians.