Panama to Patagonia

by Charles M. Pepper

Out of the race mixing—the mingling of European blood not always of the best and the Indian stock, with the Araucanian predominating—has come the roto. I studied him in various places and under varied conditions. He is not an individual for parlor-car company, or an agreeable companion as to the physical senses in a journey in a second-class train, nor yet so unpromising as usually he is painted. In the ports he is found as a coast product. He is a longshoreman, stevedore, boatman. The English word roustabout in a measure helps to describe the Chilean roto, but insufficiently. It gives too transitory an idea of the personality. The roto is no wharf rat. He is a permanent quantity, a fixture in the social fabric of the State, and he is a trade unionist.

In the agricultural regions the roto class is peon and is not so marked, but it is the basis of the population. The day laborer in the towns of the North who has more of the Aymará Indian blood than of the Araucanian, and who possesses less instinct of class organization than the longshoreman, also shows discontent. This wanderlust is one of the characteristics of the Chilean laborer. He is born a nomad. Even the most highly paid laborers in the nitrate fields refuse to be content and to stay. They are forever moving on.

The outcome of the events of 1903 was that Chile discovered she had a palpitating social question, and began to seek the horizon which might bound the zone of unrest. Among the social phenomena observed were the disproportion between the deaths and births, the excessive child mortality, the emigration of Chilean peons to Argentina, the constant movement of the migratory mass apparently without aim, and the popular fever for striking. In these phenomena were discovered conditions which showed the actual state of the lower stratum, but the horizon was not complete. The Chilean observers did not note the phenomenon of the roto’s slow perception of his own power, and his dawning conviction that there were classes in the State, and that in some way his class was down in the abyss. He was becoming a proletariat.

The roto has many qualities in common with the higher classes. His patriotism is fully as deep. Heretofore he has been willing to fight at the dictation of the military commander, but the threatened mutiny of the marines was a warning. At that very time the conscription was going on, and an uncommon sullenness was shown by the conscripts in the interior, and a vague resentment against being enlisted to fight their brothers. This was when the necessity of employing the army to break the strike was most openly discussed.

In relation to the nitrate fields the roto fails to see that the high wages at one time prevailing there helped him, and now that the pay is dictated by the trust his resentment grows. He has a vivid grievance in the payment of his wages in scrip. In the early days fortunes were made out of the saltpetre beds by officials and private individuals who already were comparatively rich. English parvenus little better than day laborers also gained riches. But the Chilean laborer developed no successful nitrate operator, no earner of day wages who became a millionaire. He seems to have been treasuring this up until the culmination has come and he is asking the question, How have the nitrates helped me? Though he furnishes the chief revenues of the State and though he is not heavily taxed, the proportion he bears is not in ratio to his wealthy employer. This belief, undoubtedly, is one basis of the discontent. It may be summed up that the roto feels that he is no better off than if Chile did not draw an enormous income from the export tax on saltpetre.

He also cherishes a grievance against the Church. Heretofore his devoutness or his superstition has been one of the bulwarks of the hierarchy. It interfered little with his crude morality, his notions of private vengeance, or his general conduct in the affairs of life. In a certain manner he venerated the priest and the symbols of ecclesiastical authority, and could be depended on to do whatever was put upon him. But this submissiveness has gone. The Church is a very large property-owner, and does not pay taxes in proportion to the burdens of the nation. The proletariat has become imbued with the belief that its aggressions are directed specially against him.

This feeling in part may be due to the spread of socialistic doctrines, though the socialistic propaganda in itself in Chile is weak. So far as it has a standing, this is because the roto in his protest finds the movement the only available vehicle of utterance for his dissatisfaction. He is not socialistic by nature, because what he takes by brute force from his weaker neighbor he expects to keep for himself and not to turn over to the vague entity known as society. The falling away of the roto from the Church is because of its goods and property which escape taxation, because of the feeling that his back is bent to the pack in order that a greedy ecclesiastical power which claims spiritual dominion over him may exist and pamper its ministers in luxurious idleness.

Another cause of dissatisfaction, which a foreign observer may note more quickly than a native one, is the feeling of resentment that there is no opportunity for him in the army and navy. He forever must be of the ranks. He must fight the battles, but always in inferior station. The enlisted man never can be anything else. Both army and navy draw the line as severely as in the most exclusive military organization of Europe. The common soldier or sailor is clay, a mud ball, something to be kicked, but never to be recognized as a human being with aspirations and ambitions. Yet it is the sailors of this class, as much as the daring commanding officers, who by their bravery and endurance have given glory to the Chilean navy. But neither naval commander nor army officer yet realizes that this clay is beginning to think, and to feel that something is wrong in the political organization of the State when he who sustains the State is nothing.

Among the qualities of the roto, whether in the army or the navy or in the mass of the population, is persistence in his prejudices. He is not easily changed from that which is taught him. I was in Santiago during the celebration of the peace pacts with Argentina. The governing classes and the merchants entered heartily into those festivities. They knew that the prevention of war by the treaties had saved the country from bankruptcy, even though war might have brought territorial extension. But it was noticed everywhere that the masses took no part in the demonstrations. They either were surly or indifferent. They had been taught to believe that Argentina was an enemy with whom they would have to make war and from whom they would have a chance to take spoils. They could not readily change about and join in the celebrations of peace.

If the roto in such a persistent manner retains the lesson that has been taught him, how much greater will be his doggedness in adhering to his self-taught lesson that something is wrong in the social order, and that he is the one who is wronged?