Beyond the Vanguard by Schlotterbeck

Author:Schlotterbeck [Schlotterbeck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520298064
Amazon: 0520298063
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2018-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

5

“Building Their Own Power”

Grassroots Response to the October Bosses’ Lockout

On the morning of January 13, 1973, a group of angry workers, housewives, and students marched across Coronel’s central plaza. Their objective lay just beyond: Panadería El Progreso, the town’s largest bakery. In recent weeks, the quality of bread sold at the establishment had precipitously declined. Local authorities knew about the situation but did nothing.1 Rumors circulated that the owner, Antonio Sánchez, made two kinds of bread: a high-quality white bread for sale in the provincial capital, Concepción, and a dark bread of lesser quality for coal miners and their families. Some said he undercooked the daily bread to make it weigh more; others claimed he altered the recipe to hoard flour and profit on the black market.2 Among the group that day was nineteen-year old Hugo Monsalves, a coal miner’s son and a medical student, the only one of his eleven siblings to study at the University of Concepción. At 11:00 that morning, Monsalves joined other members of the MIR and its Revolutionary Workers Front (FTR), as well as members of the Socialist Party. They were not full-time political activists, outside agitators, or even the parties’ local leaders but grassroots activists and residents of Coronel’s sprawling working-class neighborhoods like Villa Mora and Camilo Olavarría. Monsalves explained years later, “Our objective was to commandeer the bakery truck going to Concepción to sell the high-quality bread. We planned to distribute [the bread] throughout Coronel.”3

The bakery owner, however, had learned of the plot and took the precaution of sending a police officer in the truck’s cab. With the plan foiled, Monsalves explained, “we continued marching into Coronel and decided then and there to take over the bakery.”4 Another mirista present that day, Aníbal Cáceres, remembered that it was “señora Luz Madariaga who said, ‘Let’s go for the bread!,’ and so we left. The old ladies seized the chance and went to take the bakery.”5 For some participants, perhaps the memory lingered of the owner’s broken promise to let women bake bread in his clay ovens.6 For Cáceres, it was, above all, an action carried out by local people: “They say it was the MIR who did it, but it wasn’t. It was a group of people from Camilo Olavarría, [who] marching into town took over the bakery. Afterwards the MIR along with the Socialists ran the bakery, but they arrived after it was already taken.”7 As a collective action by local people the bakery takeover illustrates the extent to which revolutionary fervor came from below, fueled in part by women as consumers.8

By noon, the takeover was complete. Panadería El Progreso had been rechristened Panadería El Pueblo—the People’s Bakery.9 The posters that plastered the outside walls announced the action as “a corrective measure” applied to force the owner into improving the quality of bread for popular consumption.10 A reporter from Concepción’s conservative daily, El Sur, interviewed one of the occupants, who like pobladores after a land takeover deployed a gendered defense, declaring, “We are all fathers of families or single men with responsibilities at home.

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