"...drawing inspiration from the "Red Summer" of mass labor action in the United States; Argentine laborers determined that if their American counterparts could credibly demand better pay and working conditions, then they could too. Of course, in many ways Argentina's progressive, pro-labor constitutional and legal reforms of the past two decades had created an arguably higher baseline from which to work for Argentine labor, even if pay and standard of living in Argentina was considerably below that of the US (whatever comparisons of per capita gross domestic product may have suggested otherwise); nonetheless, the demands of the railroad strikers who walked off the job in late October 1917 and triggered a fifty-day railroad strike that ground the country's recovering economy to a halt and triggered a wide-ranging recession that furthered President Barroetavena's unpopularity with the masses.
It was not the Great Rail Strike of the summer of 1917-18 that truly revolutionized the postwar years but rather the
Revolucion Universitaria, begun on March 31, 1918 in Cordoba and carrying over across the country in the weeks and months thereafter. The factors that led to this revolution were broad and are still debated today, but mark an inflection point of Argentine history, in particular its long and storied post-1892 history of political radicalism and social movements. The first factor was, of course, the dire economy of 1916-18, in which Argentina struggled to pivot to a postwar market and regain lost export share (particularly to Canada and Australia) after their economy had been badly damaged by first the imposition of Imperial Preference
[1] and then the collapse in exports itself for two full years of war. This had created an atmosphere of radicalism, abetted by the ambitions of Hipolito Yrigoyen, who had come so close to tasting victory in 1916 and whose motivated supporters were only angrier two years later, dominating legislative elections and seeing Barroetavena's Civic Union relegated to third, behind the Radical Party of Yrigoyen and Lisandro de la Torre's conservative-liberal, centrist-colored Democratic Progressive Party, and under Yrigoyen's friend and ideological fellow traveler Jose Camilo Crotto the Radicals had managed to win the governorship of the Province of Buenos Aires. The students who commandeered the campus of the University of Cordoba were thus inspired not only by the successful and militant rail strike that concluded the previous year to kick off Argentina's own
Verano Rojo, but also the success of the political movement that they identified with and an hour of Argentine history that seemed possibly just as revolutionary as the early 1890s that had brought the Civic Union to power in the first place.
That the
Revolucion Universitaria erupted at Cordoba was no accident. Since the foundation of Argentine universities, they had been bastions of the right, only slightly moderated politically in the cultural milieu of a generation of
Alemismo but still strictly controlled in many cases by Jesuit clergy and upper-class alumni. Professors enjoyed lifetime tenure in a shadowy process that stank of patronage and were exclusively in charge of curriculum, admissions standards (which by 1918 were designed to protect the privileges of the "lettered classes") and academic discipline, which often ended in students sanctioned and even expelled for political activism with which they disagreed. While Cordoba, in a deeply Catholic city and with an unusually reactionary administration, was an extreme example, such provisions existed in some form or another across the entirety of Argentina.
That the universities received a fair amount of support and financial subsidy from the government made much of this highly controversial, especially after a law was passed late in 1915 by the outgoing Congress of Deputies to make it harder for veterans of the war to be rejected from attending university in Argentina, and offered a substantial financial incentive to academic departments to accept said veterans. This was a populist measure highly popular amongst the public and amongst well-organized veterans groups in particular, and a newer, more radical group of students began stepping onto campus on March 31, 1916, the traditional first day of school (though not necessarily instruction) in Argentina in that time. Two years later, close to half of the country's university students were veterans of the war, who had considerably different views on the role of the public in decision-making and the role of the Church than students of the cloistered Argentine upper-class that "tolerated" Alemism did. As such, on March 31, 1918, students at Cordoba reported not for convocation but for mass action, seizing control of the administration building, several dormitories and two lecture halls, and lowered the flag of the university over the main hall to instead raise the flag of Argentina, all while singing marching anthems from the front.
The administration called in the police to break up the students but were chased off by men who had often just a few years earlier been fighting Brazilians to the death along the Parana; when Barroetavena asked the national army to march on Cordoba to "keep the peace," he killed whatever goodwill the Civic Union had with left-wing radicalism for good, and for his troubles saw most soldiers who approached the university refuse to break up the occupation even by non-violent means. Sympathy strikes erupted on other campuses, with students listing similar demands for free tuition, academic freedom through secular instruction, competitive appointment of professors, and institutionalization of student government organizations on campus alongside faculty. When troops in Buenos Aires also refused to break up that university's strikes and Yrigoyen appeared on campus to give a stem-winding speech encouraging the students not to surrender, Barroetavena and his chief advisors quickly deduced that it was a very short path from the ongoing protests - which while intimidating to conservative faculty were nonviolent and their demands well within the bounds of Alemist democratic norms - to soldiers crossing over to link arms with the students. Barroetavena was no reactionary, but he was very much an institutionalist, and having observed how quickly things had turned south in Chile in January 1915, he did not want an echo of such events on his watch.
Accordingly, he pledged to support a package of laws that would meet many student demands immediately and more substantive reforms on institutional independence for universities and the secularization of state schools. This was met with an eruption of anger from conservative, Catholic groups, but mollified student protestors long enough for instruction to restart, and the University Reform of 1918 was passed before the end of August. The students had won and Argentina had once again seen mass action deliver results for the populace in short order - the democratic superstructure had not only held, but thrived.
[2]
The
Revolucion Universitaria further inspired other Latin American countries with powerful, clerical university faculty to begin approaching reforms, though the road there without Argentina's well-established progressive and secular mode of radical governance would be much longer and fraught..."
-
The Radical Republic
[1] A common economic theme of the 1910s
[2] Different in that Yrigoyen isn't President here, of course, but much of these university events are much like OTL - this chapter inspired in part by "The American System" by
@TheHedgehog
